Bad Day L.A.

American McGee presents: Bad Day L.A. (simply known as Bad Day L.A.) is a third-person action-adventure game produced by American McGee, developed by Enlight Software in collaboration with The Mauretania Import Export Company. The game was released in 2006 for mh:awesomegames:Microsoft Windows. The mh:awesomegames:Xbox version of the game was announced, but was never released.

Plot
The game follows Anthony Willams, a former Hollywood agent turned homeless man in Los Angeles. During this time, the city is ravaged by both natural and man-made disasters. Anthony only wishes to save himself, though through the course of the story he becomes an unwilling savior.

Why It's Really a Bad Day

 * 1) It's filled to the brim with uncomfortable and poorly-executed jokes.
 * 2) It tries to provide parodies, social commentary and satire on American society, politics, culture and even some events that were popular topics of various discussions back in the time (such as terrorist attacks), but just makes a mishmash, which is kind of difficult to swallow, not helped by the poor humor.
 * 3) Stupid plot that just gets more ridiculous as it goes on, even for a game made in a non-serious tone.
 * 4) The graphics looks bland and poorly-polished.
 * 5) Terrible and stereotypical voice acting.
 * 6) The game's protagonist, Anthony, is a laughably bad carbon copy of Dave Chappelle who spews cheesy one-liners. The game is supposed to be about him shedding his cynical worldview and becoming a better person, but he makes such an awful first impression in the early part of the game that it's extremely hard for the player to get invested in his story.
 * 7) There is no challenge whatsoever. After you and your friends die, you all just respawn and continue on with barely any penalties.
 * 8) Speaking of your friends. Except for the Mexican guy Juan who wields a powerful chainsaw, other three are pretty useless. Sick Kid's vomit does little damage to enemies and he dies pretty quickly, Beverly is also useless in combat and dies fast, and The Sergeant, who uses grenades, often kills himself, Anthony and the other two by accident!
 * 9) The game has a karma system. If you do good deeds (killing enemies, healing wounded people, extinguishing people on fire etc), civilian NPCs are supposed to be more friendly towards you, while the lower your karma is, the more hostile they will be. It sounds good on paper, but there are plenty of problems that make it really annoying and broken:
 * 10) * Civilians can still become hostile towards the player and partner NPCs if they will be killing enemies, and there are a lot of civilian NPCs who will be hostile anyway, because their AI is broken. There are some types of NPCs that are programmed to be violent anyway, but they do not count as enemies for some odd reason, thus killing them will give negative karma, even if you kill them in self-defense or to protect the other people (though luckily, your friends can take care of them for you, same also goes for civilians who turn on you).
 * 11) * You can also lose karma if you will ignore people who are on fire or bleeding, or if you will be too late to help when you notice them, which can be pretty frustrating, since they can spawn everywhere, including situations when you will be busy fighting enemies or doing other things.
 * 12) * Besides, due to their broken AI, civilians can often end up in the middle of the firefights, which can cause you to accidentally kill some of them and lose karma.
 * 13) * And when your karma level is too low, the game will force you to go and gain enough positive karma points.
 * 14) Even on lower difficulty options, it is pretty easy to get killed (specially when attacking the terrorists), due to imbalanced and really chaotic gameplay. Which may also explain why you or your friends can't actually die.
 * 15) The bosses are bullet-sponges due to having some sort of protective field that can block some of the hits, and some of them even have attacks that are nearly impossible to avoid.
 * 16) One of the bosses, we kid you not by the way, is literally a fat black woman . To add the insult to injury, she is literally named  HUGE BLACK MOMMA .
 * 17) The PC version, even though it runs alright even on a low-end computer, is completely bare-bones and lacks any video/control options which is completeley unacceptable.
 * 18) You will often be forced to do really generic and boring tasks, like "Killing X bad guys, healing/extinguishing X people, yada yada".
 * 19) Has really lame attempt at zombies. They are just people with their heads surrounded by the clouds of poisonous gas that makes them go cannibalistic and mindless. Presumably, it was done so, so it could explain why player can cure them by blowing the gas away with the extinguisher, but its still done really poorly, plus you can receive good karma if you kill them anyway.
 * 20) Really short. It can be completed in less than three hours.
 * 21) THE JUMPING SOUND. Basically almost every time Anthony jumps he makes a stupid grunting sorta sound and it gets annoying really fast.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The concept itself is cool, but extremely poorly executed.
 * 2) Has a nice variety of situations and characters.
 * 3) Nice soundtrack such as the Intro theme.
 * 4) Decent art style that gives the game a comic book feel, despite the bland graphics.

Reception
Bad Day L.A. was panned by critics and players, with Metacritic giving the game a 28/100. Reviewers criticizing its gameplay, visuals, voice acting, characters, offensive and crass humor, and poor attempts at satire. It is now seen as the worst American McGee game.

G4's X-Play gave it their lowest rating, a 1 out of 5, and also gave it a "Golden Mullet Award" for the year of 2006. GameSpy also "awarded" the title the "Coaster of the Year" award for 2006.

GamesRadar ranked it as the 25th worst game ever made.

Trivia

 * While the game was set for a worldwide release on September 6, 2006, it first saw the light of day as part of the 9/2006 issue (released at the end of August 2006) of the Polish video game magazine CD-Action.

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