Ugh. Hologram Time Traveler sports what has to be some of the worst live-action game footage I’ve ever encountered, even worse than those ‘interactive adventures’ that came out by the droves when CD-ROM technology was first taking off. The blood looks like paint, the characters are highly overacted, and the non-human menaces are downright silly. A floating, speaking brain was the last straw for me, although the little robots that I had to jump in the near future were damned close. The game simply oozes bad production values. And once you see the Trader that comes straight from some bad 80s teeny-bopper epic, you’ll hurt yourself with laughter.

The 3D mode is worse, not better, since instead of being a hologram, the mode is simulated with red-blue 3D glasses. The shimmer effect hurts my eyes, and the few things in 3D (the shapes and the background) don’t make it worth the eyestrain.

The same things can be said about the sound in this game -- horribly overdrawn. The voice actors sound like they were picked up off the streets; you’ll want to shoot that damned wizard by the third time you hear him, if not earlier. The women’s voices aren’t quite as annoying as the Princess in Dragon’s Lair, but they come pitifully close. The sound effects, such as they are, are weak and muddy.

With such problems in both the graphical and aural departments, one would hope for redeeming gameplay.

One would be sorely disappointed. Hologram Time Traveler takes what little fun can be had with the Dragon’s Lair-style game and dashes it on the ground, ending up an unplayable mess that’ll have you reaching for the Eject button in about five minutes. You play a cowboy from the Wild West, pulled through time to save the world... or something. The plot is weak, the characterization is weak, and the game basically has you shooting things and dodging obstacles. You may have to duck a pitched ball, or shoot a zombie, or leap over little robots that roll along the ground.

These are accomplished by the arrow buttons on your DVD remote or PS2, and the enter button (X on the PS2) shoots. A little icon appears in the corner, informing you when the game expects input. Pressing the wrong buttons, or not pressing them fast enough, ends up killing you. You can use a Time Reversal Cube to play a sequence over, or simply lose a life. There are limited numbers of both, so you’ve got to conserve them.

There are a number of time periods that you can pick from, although you’ve got to beat some before others open up. And the order of events in each time period is randomized, meaning that you won’t see the same things every time you play.

The problem is that the game itself is atrocious. The things that happen in the different times make no sense -- why are there zombies in 1998? Was that expected to happen in the future? And what’s up with the robots you must leap in the future? Do people usually have killer death robots less than a foot tall? The game is just silly.

It doesn’t help that your PS2 or DVD player will pause between every sequence. And sometimes the pause happens when the game expects an input, causing you to miss an action through no fault of your own.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

This game is damn near impossible, since you can’t put more quarters in to keep playing. Chances are you won’t try to beat it, however, as after playing for more than a few lives everyone I’ve ever seen has thrown the controller down in disgust. You can get more Time Reversal Cubes after every level, but you can’t get more lives by that method, and the game itself is pretty unforgiving when it comes to timing.

Once again: up, down, left, right, attack. Whee. This time, you’re often expected to press two of them in quick sequence. And the sequence of the game itself is randomized, unlike Dragon’s Lair. There are still the annoying pauses and cheap deaths, and now you can’t continue. Not that you’d want to.

Hologram Time Traveler is, hands down, the worst game I have ever played. Horrible production values, trite gameplay that doesn’t work half the time, and lame character designs and control all contrive to make something not worth the foil it’s printed on. While Digital Leisure should not stop on their quest to bring back the classic games, they need to switch to classics that we didn’t try to forget. Hologram Time Traveler is useful to break out at parties, showing others just how bad games can get, and the 3D glasses are useful if you’ve lost the two that came with your Nightmare on Elm Street DVD set, but those two features only garner a measly ten percent. The game itself... well, how about this as a summary? AVOID.