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The Curse of the MMOs

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is an MMO designed for just one thing: Taking your money, and lowering your IQ. Okay, that’s two things. See? I’m getting stupider by the minute. No matter what you’re doing in WOW you’re going to be constantly pelted with requests to do things that you don’t want to do. If FFXI was about complete jerks with 15 dollars a month of disposable income and an internet connection, then WOW is about a secret government project to make everyone who plays it as mature as the plot to a Power Rangers episode. And it’s working.

My Story Begins

I started off playing as a female Night Elf. Anyone who has played the game already knows where this is going, so feel free to skip on to the next section. Everyone else, read on.

I spent most of my time denying requests to remove my clothes and dance. Which, if you have any life outside of videogames you will realize that this is not only a waste of time, but kind of sick. One person even went so far as to follow me all the way across one of the continents demanding that I remove my clothes, and even offered me a few silver if I did. I finally gave in and that’s the story of how I bought my first set of Druidic robes. THE END.

I wish. I figured that the higher I rose in level the more this kind of thing would taper off so I did my quests, built up an ignore list of perverts, and continued on with my pretend life. It seems though, that I just traded one type of harassment for another. One day, I shit you not, someone requested that I have sex with their character. Naturally I turned them down because I have a girlfriend and that is kind of like cheating even though there’s no real sex involved and its not me doing it anyway. Of course this is all just rationalization for the fact that having sex in a game is probably the saddest thing I can think of this side of Beanie Baby collecting. I can only determine that WOW breeds polygon molesters. They’re freaking everywhere.

Stay Away From Me

The worst thing about partying with anyone on WOW is that you have to put up with people who try to make their characters do things that they’re not supposed to do. I’m all for customizing characters, but a Rogue (think Thief) is NOT a healer. I don’t care how many Goblin Jumper Cables (an item that revives a fallen character) you have, or how high your First Aid skill is, you are not “TeH HeelR!!1!” You are “TeH imbecile!” If WOW were a benefits package then Druids, Paladins, and Priests would be Full Coverage, and a Rogue with Cables and First Aid would be an HMO. A bad HMO. There is at least one of these people in every Town, and usually two in any decent guild.

If you’re not in a guild, prepare to be harassed until you join one. Once you’re in a Guild, prepare to be harassed by duel requests. Actually, just prepare to be harassed. Everyone seemed to want to fight my Healing Druid. Why the hell would you want to fight me? What am I going to do? Heal you to death? That would be like a Tank Battalion challenging a MASH unit to some war games.

How To Take A Game Too Seriously

WOW also has different types of servers, such as PVP (Player vs. Player), Normal (ummm… Normal), and RP (Roll Playing). My favorite is RP. These people take the game far too seriously, but since its an RP server they don’t feel so bad about it.

More often than not, in an RP server, you are greeted by someone in the following fashion “I am Cabados of Stormwind, warrior of our King”. No. You are Greg of Ohio, maker of Slushies. I respect the fact that your life sucks and you want to be someone else, but please don’t go around telling other people that someone “insulted your honor”. You’re sitting in front of your computer on a Friday night playing a videogame, and you’re not having sex. Anything that anyone says to you, you probably deserve. I can’t really blame you though. It’s far more interesting to be ‘Cabados, the warrior of Stormwind” than “Greg, Manager of 711″.

But to all the Gregs out there, listen to me. When we’re having our imaginary characters fight a pretend dragon in a fantasy world, it is NOT the time to RP. I highly doubt that in Feudal times, if they were fighting a Dragon they would have used a phrase like “Tis a fine fireball hurtling towards you me lady. Would you care to step out of the way?”. More than likely they would have said something along the lines of “Get out of the way! FUCKING FIREBAAAAALLL!!”.

Where are people getting some of these accents and language from? In any given sentence from any Greg, there’s usually a bit of Olde English, a few modern English words, Scottish word or two, or some French mixed in. You don’t sound like a Medieval warrior, you sound like some backwoods British retard. Take an Olde English literature class, then try to play along. As it stands, there’s not a single European from any century that would have a fucking clue what you’re saying.

AC: 30% If they’re not pestering you to take off your clothes, then they’re harassing you to duel them. If they’re not doing either of those, then they’re either trying to get you to join their guild, or get you to quit your guild and join theirs. There are of course, some that are just plain assholes.

LLA: 70%-80% No one in WOW could type a complete sentence if they were reading out of the manual and they received electrical shocks to their groin every time they hit a wrong key. I think that this is partly due to the fact that almost everyone who plays WOW is 13.

LSR: “Horny Uncle Jim” The only reason to play WOW for longer than a month is if you like hanging around little kids. There’s only three types of people that like to hang out with children: Other children, serial killers, and child molesters. If you’re over 16 and you haven’t killed anyone, then my advice to you would be to stay the hell away.

My Character: I played a female Night Elf primarily, among many others. My favorite race were the Jamaican Trolls. Being a Troll is about as close as most people will ever come to being cool.

Conclusion

By the time you’ve played WOW enough to get your character to a level that isn’t laughable, you’ve effectively dropped two years off your maturity. To compensate you’ll try to talk like your from the 1300s, but you’ll just end up sounding like you learned European English from reading the copyright information in fantasy novels. I want to leave you with this thought: If you are not part of a class that is designed to fill a certain role in a party, please don’t try, and whatever you do, don’t talk like you’re from Feudal Times. You’ll just make yourself look like a fool, and even the Gregs will laugh at you.

The Curse of MMOs

Final Fantasy XI

I would like to start off by stating that if you are considering purchasing FFXI (Final Fantasy 11) I would advise that you take your keyboard, and beat yourself senseless with it. Not only will it be less painful, and far less time consuming, you’ll have an excuse to spend $50 on something that you will actually have fun using. Frequently your activities in FFXI will degrade to spending hours making numbers pop out of creatures until you level. For the uninitiated, leveling is where you gain abilities and increase stats. The higher the level, the better the character. Do not confuse level with maturity, they usually have little to do with each other.

Trying Very Hard to Get This Party Started

In order to do ANYTHING in FFXI you have to be in a party. Which means that you’ll get a group that will consist of a warrior type character who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “wait”, a twelve year old male playing a female character, a thief who will steal all of the good equipment (aka a “ninja looter”), a 65 year-old who plays like they’ve never seen a keyboard in their life, a total dick (required), and you. If you notice the dick missing from your party, that means that you’re probably it.

Also it is required that at least one person be on dial-up in any given party. This allows the party to catch a rest every 30-45 minutes while they wait for the player to come back.

A Job That You Aren’t Paid For and The Love You Get

Grinding is where you run around and kill things for experience (which is required to level). The experience is similar to building a tower out of playing cards, except the typical response to the results of grinding are “You Loser” rather than “Cool Card Tower”. FFXI does everything but force you to Grind. Be Cool. Don’t do Grinding, kids.

When you aren’t wasting your time trying to get that last bit for your next level, you’re usually attempting to socialize. Whenever you ask any question, no matter what the subject, you will get at least one, sometimes up to 10, people who will decide that its their duty to keep new players away. Usually, roaming in packs of three, because they have a third of brain each, they’ll attack you for anything ranging from “What level do I have to be to get X job” to “Who here likes kittens?”. Typical responses also range from “DOOd youz stoopid!!11″ to “Uz TEh suk” and sometimes the ever poetic “shut up noob”. Most, if not all responses are far from winning any literary awards.

Playing Something More Fun, Like Solitaire

If you’re still playing after 15 minutes, then you are one of the following: A loser, a loser with nothing else better to do, someone reviewing the game, a masochist, an idiot or an idiot game reviewing masochist loser with nothing else better to do. I recommend that you buy a back up game such as one of the other Final Fantasy games that was actually good (Final Fantasy 10 would be a good choice). If you have a really good imagination you can pretend that you’re playing an online version of FFX. The only tip off would be that the players would be helpful and speak in complete sentences.

But really, FFXI has nothing to do with the other games in the series, does it? It seems to me that if you’re going to make a sequel, the game should be SOMETHING like its predecessors.  Imagine that they came out with a Die Hard 4, but they made it a romantic comedy. Now pretend that they charged you $50 to watch it and the entire time you’re in the theatre, people all around you are telling you how much you suck. That’s a pretty good idea of how it feels to play FFXI.

Lastly, I’m obligated to mention the job system. Jobs are like classes. They define what kinds of abilities that your character will have, like swordsmanship, dancing, and the highly coveted super happy fun fun teriyaki eating ability. Some of the jobs you can become include: Monk, Paladin, and Ninja. That’s right, Ninja. I hate to break this to the developers, but Ninja isn’t a job. Pizza Delivery Boy is a job. Breast massager for Lacey Chabert is a job (no, that’s a dream come true, but I think that you get the point). Just think, if you work hard in ninja high-school, graduate from a good ninja college, and get a good ninja internship, you too can be considered fucking insane for thinking that Ninja is a job.

Scorecard:

AC: 60-110% FFXI is probably the most unfriendly community I’ve had the displeasure of playing in. I figure that most people that are assholes on the game are actually enough of an asshole to count for a few more people. So the ratio of actual assholes to perceived assholes is probably around 60%, while it feels damn near 110%.

LLA: 30% once you filter out the 20 or 30 people that type like they learned English from a shorted out Speak-N-Spell, you’re left with people who probably speak English pretty well, but can’t be bothered to type out all 4 letters in a word. If you’re (notice its not ‘ur’) to lazy to type out all the letters in a word, don’t bother. No matter what you say, you sound like a goddamn idiot.

LSR: “Public Masturbator” Grinding and Public Masturbating are very similar in that they both waste time, are frowned upon by most of society, and nobody really wants to watch you do it.

My Character: I played a monk, which is about as exciting as it sounds.

Conclusion
If you lie awake at night wishing that someone out there was making you arrange their toenail clippings in order of size while shouting obscenities at you, then this is the game for you. Otherwise, simulate the game by multiplying 2x2x2x2… for 2 hours a day 30 days consecutively and burn $50 in the fireplace (or flush it down the toilet). Trust me, given a choice, anyone would rather listen to a string of Pythagorean numbers than hear your FFXI story. No really, we don’t care. Shut Up Noob.

The Curse of MMOs

Introduction

I know what some of you are thinking: What is an MMORPG*? Well, aside from the sound a choking cow makes, it is a piece of software created by game companies to get you to pay 20 times the price of a game for the pleasure of playing it with 14 year olds all around the world. But of course their primary function is to waste much, much of your time.

In order to play MMOs, you have to meet certain requirements, usually outlined in the TOS (Terms of Service). Here are just a few of the many many rules that you’ll bypass when you hit the “I Accept” button in the 1834 game Ultima Online:
1) You must have the vocabulary/mental coherence of a 12-14 year old male.
2) Under no circumstances are you to help a new person learn how to play the game. You may only play the game after you are an expert.
3) The player must not know how to type or have a third grade understanding of the English language.
4) Your soul now belongs to [INSERT GAME COMPANY HERE]

For your mere 10-15 dollars a month you will get to play a pretend character in a made up world who has a more interesting life than you ever will. You’ll get to be a wizard, a warrior, a super hero, a Naked Dancing Guy, or some other badass that we all wish we could be. Also, you’ll get the euphoria of how cool it is to be said character, which will last until you realize that everyone else in the world is just as powerful, if not more powerful, than you.

In order to help you (and that’s what I’m here to do: help you), I’ve devised a rating system that will make sense out of what to expect from any MMO.

AC: Asshole Content. This is a ratio of cool people to assholes walking around in the game. Given as a percentage that I make up.
LLA: Lack of Literary Ability. This is a ratio of the number of people that couldn’t even type a coherent word if they were spelling their name.
LSR: Loser. This is how much of a loser you would have to be in order to level your character up to a point that they might be interesting enough to show your cat. These are ranked by type of loser from “Geek” to “Hardcore Loser” and all the way up to “Farscape Fan”

Also, I’ll mention what kind of character I played, but for the record I was usually Naked Dancing Guy.

*technically MMO or MMO-RPG stands for (Massively Multiplayer Online Roll Playing Game). The name MMORPG was decided by T-SOP-WUAFFE (The Society Of People Who Use Acronyms For Fucking Everything). Some of the societies other accomplishments include: IMHO, ESRB, and TTYL. To which I can only respond: FU.

I just saw this movie and I must say I am duly impressed.

The movie switches gears quite frequently, giving you part documentary/part Hollywood Blockbuster in different shifts. Not only does it keep one style of cinematography from dominating the whole film, you actually get a feel for what is a news broadcast versus what is the omniscient director-cam. But no matter what type of camera work is being used the CGI characters and machines look top-notch: polished and clean. The special effects are not there to give anyone with the maturity of a nine year-old an erection, they’re included because they mean something. Action sequences feel well-paced and important, not just flash in the pan to look cool.

But as Transshitters 2 and GI Suck show, you can’t keep an audience with an IQ over 100 interested with just explosions and good CGI; you need substance. This is where District 9 really stands out. Not only does the magnificent acting, excellent storytelling and realistic characters bring depth not to be found in the two aforementioned films, these make, nay LET you actually care about the main characters. You don’t want them to be hurt, and you feel real empathy for their predicaments. But mostly, when the bad guys finally meet their maker, you feel satisfied.

This satisfaction is further solidified by the intricate narrative of District 9. No matter how thick the action gets, no matter how many explosions are on the screen, no matter how many bodies are exploding D9 never forgets that it has a thick, intelligent story to tell. A story that looks at humans in an alien/human interaction not in as oppressed, but as the oppressors. Using analogies from real life in the way of apartheid, slavery, and segregation, this narrative asks us “If we can do this to our own race based simply on skin colour, then what would we do to an alien race that looks, talks, and acts nothing like us?”

In the end, District 9 is a smart, cerebral, entertaining experience that shows us a side of ourselves that we don’t want to see. A part of ourselves that we must see: Our moral self righteousness is undeserved, because we were and are capable of terrible terrible things.

Rating:
10/10
The Point:
“Everyone must see this film, as it is destined to be a Sci-Fi classic up there with such movies as ‘Soylent Green’, ‘Blade Runner’ and ’2001: A Space Odyssey’. Like those films, you will want to be able to tell your kids and grand-kids that you saw this movie came out in theatres.”

Disclaimer: If you find harsh language offensive please do not read the following article unless you are illiterate.

Hydlide

The first thing that comes to mind when I play games like Hydlide isn’t “What a horrible game this is.” or even “What the heck is this piece of crap doing with a Nintendo Seal of Quality on it?” in fact, it isn’t even “I’d like to burn this game in the flames of Hades where it was forged.” Usually, my first thought is simply “Who thought this would be a good idea?”. Who thought that there was a serious deficiency of Nintendo games with purple elves running around attacking different colored blobs with white nightsticks? These questions then usually result in the second thought that comes into my mind “How much acid would you have to drop to make this game seem fun?”** and of course the logical third thought “Is there that much acid in the universe?”.

Previously Hot-L (Heroes of the Lance) held the record for fastest way to die. I could easily kill my characters in 30 seconds by running to the nearest cliff and jumping off. Hydlide has taken that honor away from Hot-L and set a new 3 second death time from start of the game till game over screen, and you don’t have to do anything. If I gave you a live grenade and placed you in the middle of a warehouse full of TNT I could still kill my unnamed Hydlide character faster, more easily, and with worse background music. Oh and with purple stuff, lots and lots of boring poorly-animated purple things.

The game opens with some purple stuff that looks like a dragon shooting a girl and turning her into three fairies. At first I thought it was a pretty neat menu animation, but its not. That 4 seconds of uninformative mind-blistering back-story is the entire intro and plot for the game. Who is the dragon? What does he want? What is my characters name? Why did he turn the girl into fairies? Why am I asking you? After giving the game far too much credit by attempting to define philosophical dimensions to the dragon as just a metaphor for modern man and the fairies merely representing his struggle against an over-abundance of information in an ever-changing technology-driven world I gave up and decided to do what I do best. I called a few of my friends and we just pulled something out of our collective asses.

Movie: An Aggregation of Death (3.2 MB)

After this research with my colleagues (We watched reruns of the Twilight Zone and ate Fritos), we’ve managed to piece together the story from the 4 second “intro”:
Gilgamar the dragon owned a small butt-plug manufacturing plant when one day a princess.. umm… Zelda (We’re smart, not creative) passed legislation to outlaw all anal toys in the whole of the land. After having several appeals turned down, Gilgamar started a secret underground butt-plug factory and turned Zelda into a bunch of fairies that flew away instead of doing something useful like seeking help. You as Rastafar the Fabulous must find and infiltrate the plant by collecting various knick-knacks and three additional fairies. Also, you must rebuild the princess and deliver a cease-and-desist order to the wicked Gilgamar so you can save the world from his evil anal insertions. Truly an epic quest if I ever heard one.

Apparently Gilgamar, with his multitude of butt-plugs and fairies, wants to make the world a lot gayer than it was, but unfortunately the developers beat him to it. First of all, the interface is purple. And we’re not talking an ambiguous deep-blue-couldbe-maroon purple, this is a vibrant eye-burning Barney purple. Plus, your main character who isn’t ever really named (I called him Rastafar the Fabulous)* is an elf that dons purple armor, runs around and pokes things with an Old Spice Deodorant bar until he (usually) dies.

And dieing you will do. Your average life expectancy in Hydlide is somewhere between 6-13 seconds rounding up to the nearest 6-13 seconds. Whether it’s because of a blue Shatner toupee, a tree, or a rock (yes trees and rocks can kill you) you will die. If the real life volatility of forests were based on this game, Canada would be the second most dangerous place in the world, right after the Amazon. But, on the plus side all environmentalists would be dead.

Usually you’ll die because of the way you fight, or don’t rather. Similar to Fatal Labyrinth, you run up to an enemy and slam into them until one of you wins. The only twist is that in Hydlide you have to press the A button to attack and the B button to use magic/defend. This is about as complex as the game can get since most battles only last a few seconds. After you engage an enemy hold the button and press towards them until one of you dies. You have to make sure that you are directly in front of and facing the enemy that you wish to fight. If you are even slightly off you will take damage but be unable to deal damage. This interesting feature makes the battle system a little less fun than sticking your genitals in a juicer.

A large number of the enemies you will face, at least initially, will be much more powerful than you, enhancing the battle system so that even if you just brush up against them you’ll hear a couple of “BLOOP!” sounds and die. Dieing is a graceful venture where you do a retarded version of the Mexican hat dance to the tune of someone’s cell phone ringing, fall down and go back to the main menu to watch Gilgamar make more fairies.

Movie: Like Pac Man (1.8 MB)

Of course the death music is a welcome addition to the vast library of music available in Hydlide which consists of a massive two songs. These tunes are, give or take, 11 notes each. You will hear them over and over and over and over. There’s no dungeon music, world music, or city music. Just two songs: The one you will quickly hate and the one you will completely despise. Just to bring you to the level of craptacularness that is the soundtrack here’s a visual representation of the music: “do-te-do-do-do-tedo”. I guarantee that whatever you think that sounds like is 250 times better than the two songs that are in Hydlide.

The sound effects are stellar as well, in the same way that cow s*** is stellar fertilizer. There are about seven sound effects six of which are the same ones either played backwards or at a different pitch. Every time you interact with one of the game’s amorphous blobs be prepared to be assaulted by a “boop” a “beep” or a “Doodley-do”. Because as everyone knows, that’s the sound that swords make.

Amorphous blobs would be just about the only way to describe some of the creatures in Hydlide. The only way I know that a Kobold just wiped the floor with my purple suited guy is that the game tells me. Believe me, if on my own I had to take a crack at what the heck I was actually fighting, Kobold would be somewhere around guess number 239, right after “Evil Hershey Man with Baton”.
Movie: A Quick Death (1.2 MB)

Conclusion
And all in all you’ll probably hate this game from its “I found something that looked like this at the bottom of my trashcan”-inspired visuals, to the music that seems to be designed to make your bowels release. The only redeeming value of this game is that it’s a great way to make yourself feel better. No matter who you are, what you’ve done, how bad your life is, or what putrid existence you lead, just take the time to play it (don’t really) and in between the ugly characters, the horrid music, and the stupid plotline just remind yourself “At least I didn’t make this crap.” and the world will turn right as rain.

 
Pain-O-Meter: 14 Valium and a fifth of Jack.

Most Confusing: Who names their software company Pony Canyon?

Least Confusing: Why I was able to pick up the game for 15 cents.

Most like: My first experience with LSD. There were weird sounds, odd colors, disorienting images and I’ll never ever do it again.
 
 
 
 
 

Because You Should Do What Celebrities Tell You

1. Melt it
2. Melt it some more
3. Pour it into a cross-shaped paper-mache box blessed by a priest of the sacred order
4. Put that into a gasoline soaked cardboard box
5. Put that into a bigger gasoline soaked cardboard box
6. Throw that into the sun
7. Blow up the sun

If you wish to be even more sure of its destruction, you can destroy the universe. A petition is available online for just such a cause. (Votes for customers outside the Milky Way may be voided. Check with your local galaxy’s division for assistance.)

Petition to Destroy the Universe

* I called him Rastafar the Fabulous because I wanted a funny gay sounding name. After doing some research on the game I found that his name is indeed “Sir Jim”. The game out-gayed me.

** The answer is 122 gallons and 4 ounces. Which is exactly the same amount of acid consumed by Aerosmith between Oct of 1992 and Nov of 1992.

Disclaimer: There are words in this article that may make your parents not let you come to this site anymore. Are you going to let them come between us?

Heroes of the Lance

I normally start out these articles with “Heroes of the Lance” is a game about _____.” But unfortunately I don’t have much to put in that blank. Heroes of the Lance (Hereafter referred to as Hot-L) isn’t really about anything. If however, by some chance I’m wrong (and honestly what are the chances of THAT?) and it does have a story, then it’s a thrilling narrative about eight warriors wandering around dungeons getting kicked in the knees by blue-underweared midgets.

For the most part games that include midgets in underwear immediately go to the top of my “Holy Sh*t That’s Awesome” list. In fact a good dwarf punching simulator could easily top number 4 in the list: “Exploding Cows”. In this case, unfortunately, I feel that even masochists will have a hard time finding something to like in this game.

 

Up to this point every game has had a story to it. Whether it’s been Fatal Labyrinth’s 3 sentence epic about laundry and a dragon, or Unlimited Saga’s story about Kurt and his unbelievable gayness; Every game has had some kind of plot. Granted that not any of them were good plots, they were plots none the less. Hot-L is about, and I quote, “Prepare to enter Xax Isogath”… or Xak tsargoth or Xishiszitmaddkdkd or whatever. I can’t read the writing. What the heck that is, or why you would want to go there to begin with wasn’t explained in the 37 minutes I spent playing Hot-L, and I would put money down that it wouldn’t have been explained if I played it for another 37 minutes.

Movie: Kicked 2 Death (2.7 MB)

You start the game with 8 warriors including: Flint, a dwarf who has the superpower of being too short for any attacks to hit him; Goldmoon, a human fighter who runs like she stuck a curling iron up her butt and plugged it in; Strum, your average D&D, long haired, I-don’t-care-how -stupid-this-hat- makes-me- look-it-gives- me-plus-one- protection-from- Normal-Meatballs human fighter; Riverwind, an elf (I guess) who looks like the bastard child of Hercules and Aquaman; Tanis, an archer of some sort who was rejected from ZZ Top; Tasslehoff seems to be a human wizard who is expertly skilled at being unable to hit anything smaller than the Moon; Caramon another human fighter who looks just like Strum, seriously, this guy is totally cramping Strum’s style; and finally Raistlin another absolutely worthless wizard, except he has blue cuffs and a magic broom. And when their powers combine they form a team worthy of the Special Olympics.

With these eight warriors, of whom you’ll remember maybe one of their names, you set off into the dungeon to explore, fight, and more than likely, die. A lot.

Movie: The Only Bit of Fun in Town (3.6 MB)

You’ll die almost always due to the combat system or lack thereof. The battle “system” involves running up to an enemy and pressing the B button till either you or your opponent dies. Usually you’ll be the one to die since every fight is based entirely on chance. Meaning that if in some other dimensional plane you manage to play the game exactly as it’s meant to be played getting every spell, potion and weapon there’s still a 50% chance that a dwarf is going to shin-kick you to death.

You could attempt to jump over said dwarf but you have to get a running start first. Not that there’s really anything that you can jump over to begin with since the holes in the ground are too big, the midgets are too tall, and you can’t jump through the green lizard men. Every use of the jump will get you killed.
 
 

That is of course if the sound effects don’t kill you first. There are, and I counted, 3 sound effects in the game. Two of which involve hitting stuff and the remaining one for the menus. The soundtrack for Hot-L consists of two songs, one that sucks and one that blows. The Skytel that I’m wearing has six ring tones, which means that my pager has 300% more music than this game. Also the Caller ID function is more fun and maybe even educational.

Movie: No Fair! You’re Bi-Locating! (2.4 MB)

If you’re anything like me (meaning that you totally rock) you’ll give up trying to kill anything and attempt running through the levels. This works pretty well until you realize that nothing leads anywhere. Most of the doors are for aesthetic purposes only, and the doors that you can open don’t lead in the direction that they say they will.

For example: If I’m in a room and I go North, logic would dictate that if I went through a south door I’d return to the same room. Well that is wrong. You’ll probably end up three rooms away. Any room that you’re trying to get to will be impossible to reach. In fact, trying to get away from a room is the most sure way of finding it. In Hot-L if you go south, east, east, east, north, and then south again, you’ll end up on the set of Shaun of the Dead 2.

Speaking of really boring things that involve nerds, Heroes of the Lance is apparently based on a D&D book of dubious quality as well. I used multiple sources (Amazon and EBay) to complete a thorough (3 minute) search for this title. I found that “The Legend of Huma” mentioned a Hero of the Lance. I don’t think that this is the correct book though, judging from the lack of midgets on the cover.

What the hell does the “Lance” part of Heroes of the Lance have to do with anything? No one in the game is named Lance, or even uses a Lance. There is a serious deficiency of lancing going on. If you know the answer feel free to tell me, but don’t expect me to pretend I care. I’m sorry but I’m not going to hunt down and read a novel to understand a crappy-ass game. It isn’t happening.

And because of my love for my own time I’m never going to know how they became the Heroes of the Lance either. What kind of rigourous training did they have to go through to learn how to get beat up by bald pygmies? If you can break a matchstick with two bricks without killing yourself – you’re in. They’re like a retarded version of the A-Team.
 
 
 

Pain-O-Meter: 3 Valium, 2 Shots of Morphine, and a sledgehammer to the head – repeatedly.

What I learned: Just because a mage can use a spell doesn’t mean that said spell will do any more damage than throwing an empty three-ring binder.

What I Also Learned: What to do when I see a midget in blue underwear: run.

What I Need to Learn: How to write reviews with out having to actually subject myself to the game.

Grocery List: Eggs, butter, milk, bread…

Conclusion
I’m sure that at the end of the game there’s a girl to save or some weapon that kills little people in a single blow, but frankly I don’t really give a crap. No matter how much I try to find something to like in this game, I can’t. Hot-L has reached a point in gaming horribleness that I never thought possible: It’s so bad that even half-naked midgets can’t save it.

Disclaimer: Anyone who bought a Phillips CD-i new will not be offended by the swearing in the following article.

Blaze and Blade

Blaze and Blade : Eternal Quest is a thrilling epic about some people who go somewhere to do some stuff. I can’t tell who made the games since THQ, Southpeak, T&Esoft, and Conspiracy Entertainment are all listed on the box, and luckily I don’t care. It is a good thing that they worked together on this project, since individually they would have released 4 games of lesser caliber than Blaze and Blade. I don’t think that there’s enough Pepto-Bismol in the universe.

The first thing you’ll actually be able to do in Blaze and Blade is make it crash. This is probably the easiest and least confusing thing that you can do in this game. Just try to back out of the character selection screen. Go ahead. I dare you. After that, you can spend time customizing your party of complete idiots (more on that later), which, if you’re anything like me, will consist of a few Warriors named after onomatopoeia’s, a Wizard with too many consonants in his name, and 6 foot tall fairy named Bertha. With each character you can customize their look, name and personality. All of which, near as I can tell, affect gameplay about as much as the color of my underwear.

Once you get your party together, you will be set to venture out into the mystical land of the hotel, where you will spend the next 30 minutes talking to everyone in a vain attempt to get out. This isn’t near as easy as it sounds since every time you walk into, brush up against, or touch anybody you immediately start talking to them. There’s a very good chance that you’ll end up speaking to someone just by trying to walk away from them after a conversation is over. If you manage to find yourself in the middle of a crowded room, you should probably cancel all of your afternoon appointments.

Movie: Glitch Me Dead (1.6 MB)

After you’ve talked to everyone, some twelve or thirteen times, you learn that after leaving the hotel you must venture with your friends to a place far away and do some things. The more astute of you will notice that this is the same plot as Yahoo! Maps. There’s a place called the Forbidden Land, to which you must go for no other reason than the intro said so. There’s no real explanation as to what the Forbidden Land is, why you’re going, or who the h*ll is talking, but as any horror film will teach you, it’s usually bad to argue with disembodied voices.

Hallucinations aside, you probably will spend more time fighting the game engine than you will fighting anything else. Gameplay issues can be broken down into four distinct categories: Frustrating, Obscure, Confusing and Unfriendly. This is also known as the FOC-U system of game design.

First of all, let me give you a brief tutorial on the confusing camera controls which I have more aptly named “Drunk Simulator”. When you press the up key on your keyboard, the camera will go to the left. When you press the down key on your keyboard the camera will go to the right, and when you press the left key on your keyboard the camera will sign you up for frequent flier miles.

In time, you will give up trying to control the camera and get on with playing the game. This brings up some pretty frustrating problems, not the least of which is the inventory system. Let’s imagine for a bit that you pick up an item. Let’s say it’s a penny, and let’s also imagine that you’re not broke as h*ll and you don’t need a penny. Your friend comes up and says “Hey! I have MASTERY OF PENNIES +9. I could use that!” You would say something to the effect of “Here’s the penny.” or “You’re a freak.” Either way, the other person would get the penny because you don’t need it. Right?

Wrong. In Blaze and Blade, in its bid to be as unfriendly as possible, once a character picks up an item, they cannot trade it with another character. So if your Warrior picks up WAND OF FUNKY LOVIN they can’t give it to the Wizard*. This makes sense though. If your characters go trading stuff with each other they’ll get confused over whose item is whose and then a big fight will erupt and they’ll all be mad at each other for the rest of the trip. The crappy inventory system is designed to keep the peace.

Movie: Smile for the Camera (1.6 MB)

Then the frustration is compounded even further since your characters only have a limited amount of space. Continuing with our example, if the warrior has no room left and an enemy drops AXE OF MENTOS he can’t pick it up. The wizard may have to. So now everyone has items they can’t use because the developers didn’t take Economics 101 and don’t know how to trade.

All of this might be forgivable if the AI controlled characters were even a LITTLE smarter than a pile of cucumbers. About a third of the way into your first battle you’ll realize that most, if not all, of the NPCs have the combined tactical genius of a yield sign. Unless an enemy comes up and pokes an AI controlled member of your party, they won’t fight. And if by some miracle they decide to hit back, they won’t cast any spells. Instead, your Wizards, in all of their vast knowledge, will opt to run up and whack the enemy with their stick. If you’ve ever played any RPG for longer than twelve seconds then you know that a Wizard fighting an Orc with a stick is equal to a janitor fighting King Kong with a Road Cone. It isn’t pretty.

This is rendered even more aggravating because the key layout for Blaze and Blade has most of the buttons that you’ll use on the left side of the keyboard as well as two hidden on the right side. This is a useful set up for those of you who play most of your games without running, opening doors, or saving. Most of the time you’ll be making a trip across the keyboard pressing buttons just to find out how the h*ll to activate some functions.

And don’t bother trying to figure out this confusing mess because you never will, and also don’t bother trying to reassign the keys to where up is up and down is down. You can’t do it because having keys in a logical order is for pansies.

Movie: Dumbest Friends on Earth (1.73 MB)

If by some happenstance you manage to find yourself in a Middle Eastern Torture Camp without any Pepto-Bismol on hand and they make you choose between playing this game and having your feet chopped off, opt for the feet. Not only will you not have to play this stupid game, but you’ll save a bundle on shoes.

Pain-O-Meter: 2 Valium, a shot of morphine, and a tube sock. I’m not sure why they gave me a tube sock, but after the Valium and morphine I didn’t seem to care.

What I Learned: Trees are actually small, green pyramids. This fits well with my theory that the first trees were built by Egyptians.

What I Didn’t Learn: How to cast spells.

Favorite Key: The Spacebar. Its the only button that did the same thing every time I pushed it. It made my characters jump. Thank you Spacebar.

Conclusion
When you make a game that has AI that could be out-maneuvered by a foot massager and your story makes Rob Zombie look like a Shakespearian author it’s a sign that you should become an accountant. But for you, the unwary consumer, I have just this bit of advice: When it comes right down to it you’ll probably hate Blaze and Blade. I don’t mean in the “I hate Raymond” kind of way. I mean in the “I’d hate to have four pine cones shoved up my a**” kind of way.

*The Wizard would have to be a Pimp Specialist to wield WAND OF FUNKY LOVIN, but lets not get caught up in the details.

Disclaimer: If your morals won’t let you read this article because of its harsh languge, please borrow someone else’s until you can find a replacement set.

Fatal Labyrinth

In Fatal Labyrinth, a game made by People Who Hate You(tm), the object is to guide your character, Trykaar, to the end of a maze and defeat a dragon that is terrorizing your hometown. Most of you will recognize this as RPG storyline B-384, substituting an Evil Dragon for an Evil Mage.

Unlike most bad games, in Fatal Labyrinth its the tiny things that bother me. Like the fact that I can’t walk on grass, or that the everyone looks to be made of pudding. Also, your character maintains a stiff upper body while his feet wildly flap underneath him. This would normally be alright except that in 16-bit it looks like Trykaar is River-dancing.

Tiny things, like how the town that I’m defending sent me into the FATAL LABYRINTH with no armor and a d*ldo. A d*ldo that I use to slowly poke baddies until they collapse. “Ah-HA! Fear my 3 speed vibrate function!”

Fatal Labyrinth has my vote for Best Dild* Poking Simulator Ever. Well, short of American Idol. How are you going to compete with an entire cast of dild*s? To the game’s credit, it does try real hard to convince me it’s a knife. I’m sorry FL, I know a sex toy when I see one.

Movie: Dancing with the Enemy (1.7 MB)

If you’ve ever read the Engrish (sic) on the back of a Hong Kong VCD you’ll appreciate the script for Fatal Labyrinth. No two sentences that are put together make any sense. Take for example exhibit A from a villager: “I HEARD THAT A BRAVE SWORDSMAN DEFEATED THE DRAGON A LONG TIME AGO.”, followed immediately by “I WONDER IF I HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL TOMORROW.”

Those of you who aren’t complete retards will recognize that this isn’t the way anyone who speaks English talks. In fact, I know like 2.43 languages and that isn’t the way anybody talks. Usually, humans sort things so we have like items together. That’s the reason why all the skinny women are on TV and all the fat ones are Goths.

If humanity didn’t have the combined ability to sort out our sentences into logical groups then we’d have cops pulling us over and yelling “DO YOU KNOW HOW FAST YOU WERE GOING? I HAVE GERBILS IN MY PANTS.”

You’d waste about 12 seconds contemplating whether you should save the gerbils before you put your pedal to the floor and hope that you get at least number 9 in 10 Wildest Police Chases Ever.

Movie: A Story of Epic Proportions (733 KB)

Even if we didn’t have the human sorting ability, this would still put our verbal skills one notch on the Stupid-o-meter above the AI for the enemies in Fatal Labyrinth. In fact if you attempt to get into a brawl with one, there’s a very good chance that you’ll just end up dancing around each other like idiots until you back them into a wall or corner. Bad guys in this game just don’t grasp the concept of walls on two sides of them.

Once you get said enemy into a corner, just slam yourself into him until he dies. You do this by holding the pad down in the direction of the enemy. Don’t press any buttons. Just hold down the D-pad until you kill them, or you die from boredom. Either way it’s the most rewarding experience this side of drowning in a Latrine.

Considering that you fight enemies by, quite literally, running into them repeatedly while poking them with your vibrator (or in later levels, a florescent light-bulb) combat gets tiring. In most cases, it becomes down-right excruciating. If you don’t have a Sega Genesis, or can’t get your hands on a copy of this game, you can simulate the FL battle system by watching a single episode of The View twelve times in a row or seeing how many times you can hit yourself with a hammer before you wake up on the floor.*

The enemies in Fatal Labyrinth don’t help the situation much either. The first few enemies that you’ll come across include a Rolly-Pollie, a pile of snot, and a Demon/Wizard. The Demon is probably the most annoying of them, seeing as his only spell is SLEEP which he will use EVERY ROUND. This makes your character fall asleep while he beats the pi** out of you. Then, you’ll wake up long enough to attack once, have that attack blocked, and then be put back to sleep. Its not really hard, it just takes up time that you could be using to do more important things, like downloading porn.

Movie: Randomization Gone Wrong (788 KB)

After you’ve backed several baddies into a corner and beaten them into submission with your toy of destruction, you’ll eventually level. The first level you’ll gain will be “Valet” which is, according to my underground sources, a parking attendant. The next level after that is a “Ranger”. That is probably short for “Park Ranger”. It seems clear to me that the leveling system is based on jobs that require little to no training. This can only lead you to the conclusion that level 98 and 99 are probably “Street Sweeper” and “Denny’s Manager” respectively.

The bats are the ones that get the bum rap. Every creature has an attack of some sort, the Demons put you to sleep, the Rolly-Pollies barf on you, the snot touches your shoe, etc. The bats don’t do anything. They don’t swoop down and bite you, hit you with a whiffle ball, or crap on your head. Just by flying next to you they drain your life force. Unbeknownst to science, bats have some sort of psychic powers and/or really bad BO.

But since you can make your character fat, maybe there’s a way that you can ward off the BO of the bats by creating some of your own. Oh, and yes, you can get your character fat. The developers felt that creating a system by which to gauge your characters obesity was more important than say, a better River-dance animation. When your character gets fat, it’s really more aggravating than anything as Tyraak will creep along at a snail’s pace. This would be annoying all on its own, but the bad guys aren’t to swift either. You’ll spend most of your time waddling your fat a** across the room to kill the one baddie that was foiled by a doorway.

Movie: Wake the )(@#(T% UP! (1.43 MB)

Conclusion:
In the end, Fatal Labyrinth is just an item collecting game with about as much plot as a classified ad. It’s time consuming, boring and requires so much patience that Mother Theresa would have thrown her controller down, swearing. Take all that and add in a River-dancing main character who fights barfing insects, and you have the makings for a world-class d*ldo-poking simulator. Bar none.

* I don’t recommend either of those choices.

Pain-O-Meter: 3 Valium, a glass of wine, and a Tylenol to take the edge off.

Most Heard Phrase: “Did I just get killed by a snail?”

Least Favorite Enemy: The freakin wizard guys who use SLEEP over and over again. Magic is like a stock portfolio. Diversify. Diversify. Diversify.

Least Favorite Weapon: The bow and arrow. I never did figure out how to shoot arrows. When I would select THROW Tykaar would hurl the bow at them. Not a very strategic move.
 
 
 

[Click Here for Solution]

Disclaimer: The harsh language used in this article is soley for a cheap laugh and should not be taken seriously.

Ephemeral Fantasia

You know, I feel kind of bad putting two PS2 RPGs in a row on this list.

No I don’t. Ephemeral Fantasia was originally slated to be released as a Rhythm/RPG game for Sega Dreamcast, and even as an N64 game before that. Those of you following along at home will draw the same conclusion as I did; EF started as a monkey crapping simulator for Sega CD.

Ephemeral Fantasia almost lets you play the part of a lost cabbage patch kid who travels the world playing his friend, a 500 year old guitar. The game opens with a cut scene that you can’t skip (always a good sign), that tells the near-interesting tale of our hero, Mouse, traveling to an island where he is to perform at a wedding. Nothing like the excitement of a traveling musician, short of a root canal.

The first thing that you’ll notice in this game are the graphics. The visuals in this game are, as Sigmund Freud once said: “Bad.” One of the major things that stick out is that everyone in EF seems to be hastily put together, like the developers based the structure of the human body on popsicle sticks and play-doh. This creates the strange feeling that you’re playing the entire game in a funhouse mirror. Everyone has short arms, long legs, and no visible noses. Noses are forbidden.

It would be nice if the graphical problems ended with the lack of olfactory devices and a wrong-side-of-the-telescope view of human anatomy. Unfortunately it doesn’t. The physical world in EF is, well, physic-less. Every object either has an invisible force-field around it, or is a hologram. You’ll constantly be getting stuck on things that you’re a good foot away from, or passing right through objects that probably should be solid. Rumor has it that brick walls are hard, whereas air is not. The developers of Ephemeral Fantasia beg to differ.

Movie: Ninja Steve and I play The Loadscreen Game
In This Movie Find:
1 Clipping Problem
1 Double Load
3 Wells
1 Bed of Pink Roses
Waldo

Bonus: Which one of us was Drunk?
Hint: Me
However, just when you think that you were studying physics for nothing, there is one facet of reality that was not forgotten. The “Bounce” is still alive and well. I really don’t feel like I have to explain what the “Bounce” is.

Of course boobs are just about as mature as this game gets. The story in Ephemeral Fantasia is just a series of sex related jokes from start to finish. Under normal circumstances I’d be all for a bunch of sex jokes but none of them are funny. Not even slightly. In fact, most of the jokes in EF don’t make any damn sense. If you take the joke part out of a “sex joke” your just left with sex. Sex where no one gets naked. Like a lap dance where the stripper wears a spacesuit. Not any fun, and a waste of a good 50 dollars.

To give you an idea of the caliber of fourth grader that Konami used to write all of their dialog, I give you the following REAL LIFE example:
[Something about someone getting married]
“What did you eat to make your breasts so big?”
“What?”
[Continues on with Conversation like nothing has happened]

..what? Comedy is not just randomly yelling things about boobs. That’s Tourette’s.

Boobies are Round!

Tourette’s is a good way of describing most of the dialogue you’ll stumble over in Ephemeral Fantasia. I say stumble over because most of the script for this game was translated by people who hate it when sentences gel into coherent paragraphs.

Which brings me to my next question that not only deals with this turd, but with most foreign movies I’ve seen: Do these people EVER read back over a script once they’ve translated it? Ever? Really, you don’t even need to know much about our culture at all to figure out that something is wrong when one battle hardened warrior looks at another and says: “I am happy to feel you with me.” Maybe if we rub their noses in it or hit them with a rolled up newspaper they’ll stop doing it. No. Bad Translator.

Movie: Meaningless Decisions

Or we could just force them to listen to EF’s background music. If ever an accolade was to be presented to a game soundtrack for being “Most Like Elevator Music”, this game would put everyone into a coma before the award could be handed out. Everything from the wonderfully monotonous SNES music with Quaalude-inspired reverb, to the Light Jazz from hell would make anyone that bought the album a f***ing retard.

You’d have to be a retard to begin with just to deal with the in-game timer anyway. The timer does a pretty good job of controlling day and night, what day of the week it is, and also how little fun you’re going to have waiting for things to happen. Plot events, such as getting a new character, or furthering the dumba** plot happen at certain times and only at those times. If you miss something like picking up Granny Olphemire’s Basket of Happiness +2 from the store on Monday at 2PM you’ll have to wait an entire game based week to try again. God help your controller if you miss the deadline a second time.

The Battle System for EF however, suffers from the exact opposite problem. Somehow during the making of the battle system, the developers completely forgot that people have to read words in order to comprehend them. If you spend any time at all trying to formulate a strategy or play the “What The Hell Does That Menu Say?” minigame while in a battle, be prepared to be hit repeatedly and without mercy. EF waits for no man.

But even if the game did give you ample time to examine the menus you’d probably have no luck reading them. The font used in the menus is what is known as “Crap. Coffee Spilled On Our Script and the Game Ships Tomorrow – Italic”. In fact, I’d place a wager that you have a better chance of correctly translating the Nutrition Facts on a box of Cheez-its into Klingon than being able to read all of the menus in Ephemeral Fantasia.

If you do fumble your way through the menu system and manage to get some good attacks in, you’ll quickly realize that your fighting some of the most unthreatening enemies ever. In my first battle I fought some cute little bunnies and a few girls. I beat them to death with part of my ukulele. I felt bad. Not because I had just committed murder in the first degree with my talking banjo, but because I didn’t have to do drugs in order to see it. I cheated my dealer out of a good 75 dollars. That’s like a buck apiece for each of his kids.

Movie: The Triangle Button and You

Beyond just the ukulele that aggravates you for most of the game, you also have several secondary characters which are just as close to being drug inspired as well. Such as the dominatrix who not only fights with a whip, she also sucks at it. Oh, and she works on watches. A combination that makes sense if you’re completely insane. Also, there’s Captain Old Joke, a sea captain that fights with a fish. He doesn’t fight the fish. He uses it like a sword. Clearly both winners.

And of course I can’t forget to mention the Guitar-Freaks minigame that pops up every once in a while to not alter the game in any significant way. No matter how well you play the minigame it won’t advance the story any differently than if you just taped a vibrator to the controller and went to get a Meatball Sub. However, it is more fun to play than the entire rest of Ephemeral Fantasia.

Pain-O-Meter:
2 Valium, 1 Excedrin. Just enough to make the guitar nightmares go away.
Best Attack:
Where the Captain beats the ever-loving crap out of an enemy with a Salmon.
Worst Attack:
All the rest of them.

Conclusion
The poor graphics, the stupid jokes, the boring story. The dumb characters, the bad music, the stupid timer. The poor translation, the sentence fragments, the unreadable menus. What did you eat to make your game so bad?

Disclaimer: If your religion forbids reading harsh language,
please convert to a better religion before reading the following article.

Unlimited Saga

Let’s play pretend. Let’s pretend that you’re 10, and Disney is about to release another one of its blockbuster animated films. Now, let’s pretend that when you go to see this movie you find out that only 1 in 7 sentences are voice acted and that the entire movie was animated in Flash. You’d be pissed, and you’d have a pretty good idea what it felt like to all the people who were hyped over Unlimited Saga, bought it new, and brought it home to play.

Unlimited Saga was touted as the RPG for hardcore game players. I think the developers confused hardcore with retarded. The game is simply not fun to play. It does come in a nice box though. See, I CAN say nice things.

At the beginning of the game you can choose from several different people, each with their own little saying when you select them. My favorites were Armic, the squirrel with a cranial birth defect, and Kurt “Let’s Go On an Adventure Together!” Burgundy. Kurt’s dialogue by Big Bird. Given the choice between Chernobyl Squirrel and Gay-bo, I had to go with the human.

Immediately I was taken into a battle with a ninja bug who I had to defeat with kicks, punches, throws and a spinning wheel of peanuts. Since there was no tutorial, and I’m way to lazy to read the manual, I killed the samurai insect by pressing the X button until the game declared me the winner. I truly felt a sense of accomplishment.

When the battle was over I was taken to what apparently passes for a cut scene in this game. Three unmoving, talking heads roller-skated on and off the screen for 40 lines of dialogue about how nothing has changed. Really. The entire opening was just spent confirming that no one has done anything. Which is good. You don’t want stuff happening in your story. It’ll just make plot devices that you’ll have to explain later.

After this exciting piece of dialogue I was taken to the city. Well, I was taken to a picture of a city and a menu, where I selected which building I wanted to go to with a FABULOUS purple cursor. I selected the inn, which took me to yet another picture and a menu where I selected an adventure that involved a giant leprechaun impersonator named Ventus.

Movie: My First Unlimited Saga Battle

I started my adventure with the ever-smiling leprechaun, and was treated to what I am guessing was a musical number done on rollerblades. Kurt, Ventus, and some guards rollerbladed on and off the screen saying something about guarding and how Kurt wanted to help everyone, that guards were despicable, and that you should eat your vegetables.

After that I was taken to a map where I spent five minutes trying to figure out how to move my character over a snot stain. Saga’s map system can be best described as a chessboard. A chessboard where there’s only one side, all the pieces are pawns, and it’s covered in puke.

From there I hopped along the board to a place where I was given the option to look at a waterfall. I figured “Hey! Short video of a waterfall! Cool!”, but no. I had to fumble through the menu system to find the “Action” command logically filed under my “Skills” menu option. Apparently “Look at Waterfall” is a trainable skill along with “Scratch Ear” and “Tie Own Shoes”.

So, feeling the first bit of accomplishment since I started playing this game, I prepared for my video about the waterfall. I got the popcorn, the Dr. Pepper, and the Gummi Worms. I also got gypped. They take the little picture of the waterfall that is on the map and zoom in until it is so pixilated that it looks like a Magic Eye¹. Confirming that you have a 50 dollar game that has the same graphical prowess as MS Paint. Lucky you.

Next I was attacked by what was labeled as a Vegeplast. It looks like a tree with an eyeball and a bunch of roses sticking out of the top. When I actually got into battle though, it had morphed into a floating green crab. Fantastic! My first real battle was off to a psychotic start.

The battle system in Saga is, at best, infuriating. The reel system is slightly less fun than being kicked in the nuts and just about as useful. This wheel, sometimes filled with peanuts, sometimes filled with swords, is designed to give you different ways of hitting the enemy. This is so whatever crab/plant thing you’re fighting doesn’t get bored while they tear you a new one. Unfortunately, this wheel spins at about 9 billion kilometers an hour which makes it impossible for you to do anything but pray that you land on the one you want. If they wanted something to be random they should have just randomly picked what the characters did. Don’t tease us with a spinney wheel thingy. That just makes us think we have some control over the battle when we don’t. And that’s just mean.

When you get hit, you lose HP, LP, and probably seven other stats I can’t figure out how to get to. I have yet to figure out how the HP/LP thing works. HP seems to act as kind of a buffer for LP, but it’s inconsistent. I can do 320 HP damage to an enemy and do no LP damage, yet they can do 80 HP damage to me and 2 LP damage. So from what I gather, the strategy for fighting an enemy seems to be: Hit them. Hit them a lot.

When you’ve finished a few battles in Saga, you’ll come to a horrifying revelation. You don’t get anything for winning battles. You don’t get XP. You don’t get money. You don’t get gratification. You don’t get a butt massage or a coupon for a free 20 oz drink at Taco John’s. You don’t get anything. Every once in a while you may get an equippable item, but it will probably break after a few battles anyway. This means that if you decide to go kill some enemies for… why-ever you would do that I don’t know since you get no XP for fighting.. but if you DO, then you’ll eventually be walking around in a loincloth and fighting with a toothpick. That is until the toothpick’s durability reaches zero and it breaks.

Movie: Putting the Wheel System To Good Use

If you live long enough to level up your character’s stats you’ll want to know how it works. So here’s a breakdown of the system:

HP/LP – As I’ve already stated, I don’t have any idea how this works. Probably involves fairy dust and a note from your mother.

Abilities – It’s completely random. Don’t bother.

Skills – Sometimes you’ll get a skill. There’s no way to predict what skills you’ll get or when. You’ll get them when you get them and you should be damn grateful. Don’t worry if you fail to get any new skills for a while, your next skill will probably be just as useless as the last. This system was created to show that games aren’t defined in terms of skills, graphics, gameplay, story, or artwork. No, games are defined by the copyright notice on the back of the box. And in that respect, Unlimited Saga meets and exceeds.

Pain-O-Meter: 1 Valium. The game was just slightly boring up until I had to fight. I use the term fight loosely because battles usually just degraded into me hitting buttons and watching what happened.

Best Attack: Any of the melee attacks that involved the spinning wheel of confusion. It just looked like I was playing The Price is Right – Circus Peanut Edition.

Fact of Life: Everything breaks – usually right in the middle of a boss battle.

Unlimited Saga plays like a pop-up picture book, minus the good story about what sound a cow makes. The storylines run the gambit from mildly boring all the way up to entirely uninteresting, and the battle system violates several sections of the Geneva Convention. After playing for only a few hours you’ll probably end up hurting small animals just to let the pain out. This game isn’t hardcore, it’s just bad.

Oh, and if you have a choice, hurt a Chihuahua. I fucking hate Chihuahuas.

¹cjdaweasel is not affiliated with Magic Eye, unless I’ll get free stuff out of it. In that case I highly endorse it.