Jackass - The Game

Most games punish damage. This one pays for it. Sidhe Interactive's 2007 adaptation of MTV's stunt show inverts the basic contract of video game feedback, handing out points for the severity of the wreck rather than the cleanliness of the run, and for a few minutes that inversion is genuinely funny to play with. Then the novelty settles and you are left with the mini-game collection underneath.

The structure is a career strung between skits, each one a short scenario lifted or adapted from the show's grammar of shopping carts, ramps, hardware store props and bodily indignity. Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Wee Man, Pontius and the rest are all present, with cast likenesses and voice work, which was the whole selling point of a licence like this in 2007. Presentation leans hard on the source: grainy filters, handheld camera framing, the punk soundtrack blare. It does a reasonable impression of a Jackass segment right up until you have to control one.

That is where it thins out. The individual events are mostly one-idea affairs built on a single input trick — timing a launch, wiggling a stick, holding a meter in a zone — and the game rotates through them faster than it deepens any of them. Physics carry a lot of the comedy, and physics in a budget PS2 title released the year the console was already being quietly retired are not reliable comedians. A ragdoll that folds the wrong way is funny once. The scoring, which wants you to read a crash for its component impacts, asks for more precision than the simulation can actually resolve.

It arrived late, too, past the cultural peak of the brand and after the second film had already done the theatrical version of the same joke better. Critics were unkind, and the harshest reading — that the show's appeal was watching real people take real risk, and that a controller removes the only thing that made it work — is hard to argue against. But there is something honest about a tie-in that understood its subject well enough to build its entire reward system around failure.

Worth a look as an artefact of how the licensed-game economy handled a property with no natural mechanical shape. The developers found an angle. They just did not have the budget, or the physics engine, to land it.