A smaller driving based mission was one where you round up a certain kind of citizen depending on your branch or service. Police pick up criminals, ambulances pick up escaped patients, and Fire trucks pick up monkeys. Why monkeys? I don’t know. I do know that the method of collection seems morally questionable, and by method of collection I obviously mean you run them over. This is probably why the Child Protective Services branch was taken out of the game.

All other missions are mini-games based off your branch of service. This is, for the most part, not going to cause significant difference in your activity. Each one generally just makes use of a Wii function. Flat tire? Pump the remote! Leaking fire hydrant? Stir the remote! Dying person? Pump the remote at intervals! In one mini-game I was told that a man in an afro had swallowed a fly, which I immediately assumed was some kind of euphemism for hardcore narcotic given that he was dressed like a 70’s disco king.

Unfortunately he had apparently swallowed an actual fly and I was to help it crawl back out. Swallowing my natural predisposition to just let him die, I went in. Using the tilt on the controller you control the fly and try to get it out of his digestive tract via his throat. As far as I’m concerned Huggy Bear must have been eating lubricant all day (which is probably how the fly got in there) because one false move and the fly goes screaming into the lining of his stomach which is apparently a bad thing or it killed him because it ended the mini-game and I get berated by the radio operator again.

Eventually the mini-games favor us with a few gallery shooters, but those fall flat as well.

Emergency Mayhem attempts a sad amount of humor and then just gives up and whips out the monkeys. At one point, as a fireman, I was told to subdue escaped monkeys with a gun. That was fine by me, nothing like taking a shotgun to your genetic predecessor and blowing him into paste. Instead I was handed a banana gun. I felt no joy firing the little phallic projectiles at the simian terrorists. What would a banana gun do to a monkey? Feed it into a relaxed coma? I wanted to walk over to the police department and raid their gun locker for an MP5 and a bandolier of tear gas.

The most embarrassing part of Emergency Mayhem is the graphics. Normally I’m not one to tout graphics as being terribly important. I tend to think good art can substitute for graphics any day of the week, but Emergency Mayhem has neither. This isn’t surprising, because the game was meant to be on the Playstation 2 and Xbox four years ago.

Acclaim went belly-up, tossed the game to Warner Bros. who tried to think of someone would develop anything no matter its quality and ended up with Codemasters. Even then the Playstation 2 is overshooting the actual graphical quality by an entire Playstation.

You’re going to see this in a bargain bin somewhere, someday, and it will be something akin to $19.99 American. Resist the urge to purchase it on a whim or for your nephew, and go spend you money on something worthwhile like nineteen burritos or something. Better yet go buy a used Playstation and Crazy Taxi.