Sleepless Knight

I remember quite enjoying Sleepless Knight the first time I played it. Oh yes, I do like more than four games on the internet, and Sleepless Knight (or more accurately, Sleepless Knight Part 1 - a sequel has been released that's actually a big improvement) was one of them. Sure, it was challenging and at times frustrating, but that was OK, because it just made me more determined to complete the game.



You play Knight Lucy, the GI Jane of Medieval England except with less coarse language and more acting talent. It's February 14th and you have received a Valentine's Day card!

(Don't worry, there's violence soon.)



Turns out it's not a Valentine's card after all, but a request for help from the kidnapped princess. Talk about getting a girl's hopes up. Still, that is really nice scented pink notepaper.



Lucy decides to go and do what all knights in platform games do - go off alone to fight a horde of evil monsters.

So, lesbian knight goes off to save distressed but flirtatious princess - got that? Good. Unfortunately I don't know where the "sleepless" part comes in. Sure, it was a nice play on words, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the context of the game.



What follows is your standard platform adventure game, as you guide Lucy through tunnels and caverns in search of the princess. Along the way you battle such fierce creatures as rats, bats and... that's it. The question of why I wasn't fighting kidnappers gets answered in the final cutscene and in the sequel, but at the time I was feeling a little confused.



The controls are as simple as Ted Nugent's politics (man, there's an obscure reference.) Cursor keys to move left and right, A button to jump and S button to attack. Keep tapping S for combos, culminating in this cool Final Fantasy-style energy blast.



The Space button pauses the game and brings up the shop menu, from which you can make purchases using the gold coins you collect through the game. Aside from the armour, which increases your health, these upgrades don't seem to do much, other than look cool. But hey, at least you look really cool.



Gotta say, Lucy - I love the Xena get-up. But this screenshot provides a good example of a major flaw in Sleepless Knight; there are times when you need to drop down to a lower level, but it's impossible to see where you're going until it's too late. Lucy may have sartorial style, but apparently they don't teach you how to look down at Knight School.



The game has its fair share of puzzles, usually just locating buttons to unlock doors. The two are usually some distance from each other, so you then need to high tail it back to the door before the lock resets and you have go through the process all over again. Suffice to say, this is not one of Sleepless Knight's better qualities.



The bats pissed me off to no end. At least the rats were manageable; these flying fuckers swooped in, took away some of my health, and swooped back out again before I had a chance to do anything. The bats also have an annoying tendency to knock you off ledges if you're close to the edge of one, which sucks in the situation above since that's a moving ledge and there are spikes underneath it. The best strategy I found was to jump up and down and time it so I could stab at the bats until they died. And surely bats can't take as many hits as these sons of bitches did?



At times I felt like the developer was just being spiteful, like here, when you have to jump from one spring to the next to complete the level. Underneath you are spikes, covered only by conveyor belts that will send you flying off as soon as you land on them. It's designed with the sole intention of robbing you of half your health - there is no other explanation.



Chapter 2, The Secret Cave, doesn't seek to make things any easier. Here we are again at another blind jump. Now, of course, the idea is to follow the coins down so you land in the correct spot. But what if you don't follow them down? What if you time the jump wrong?



But at least you only have a rat to deal with in the first pit. Right after it, there's a pit of spikes. That's right - you have to make a blind jump into a pit of spikes and land directly on this spring. It's the sort of ridiculous challenge that only hardcore gamers and vindictive software developers enjoy.

You better make sure you land exactly on the spring, too. I lost count of the number of times I fell through a spring, all because I didn't hit the absolute middle.

The entire Cave section is a hotbed of frustrating puzzles, hidden enemies and death after death after death. The only reason I even made it to the third chapter, The Foothills, was because of some glitch in the game that sent me there after going through an incongruous door in the Secret Cave (and if the cave is so secret, why are there doors? Why are there doors in a cave in the first place?



Single block platforms. I've already given my opinion of single block platforms in a previous review, so I won't waste time explaining my utter contempt for them. But what annoys me more are single block platforms that disappear when you walk on them.

I mean... God damn it, cut me some slack here!

The ultimate kick in the balls is when you die, or worse, get caught in some glitch and have to restart the level.



All the upgrades you worked so hard to obtain are gone. All of them. There's nothing left. Even the number of beasts you've killed goes back down to zero. So having hacked and slashed and energy blasted your way this far, you now have to go all the way back to a wooden sword and shield. Now, that, my friends, is what we call "bullshit."

The good news is, Sleepless Knight 2 rectifies most, though not all, of these problems. At the very least, it doesn't take all of your upgrades when you die. May advice, if you must play one of these games, is to go with the sequel. You won't really be missing much if you bypass Sleepless Knight Part 1.

Neolla

The more observant among you will notice this review is a good 24 hours late. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint my dozens of fans worldwide, but I have an important match this week in my e-fed and wanted to spend the time on a roleplay. That's right - I'm an even bigger geek than you previously imagined.

Unfortunately I must disappoint you again, because having played Neolla I've come to the conclusion that it's... not bad.

Yes, I'm very aware that reviewing a game I don't absolutely hate is pretty much anathema to the point of this blog's existence, but you'll just have to bear with me. While I didn't hate Neolla, I certainly found enough that pissed me off to warrant a review.



The goal of Neolla is simple - escape from the planet. What's not so simple is everything else. At no point in the game are you given any clue as to what to do next. That Neolla is actually an incredibly short game only increases one's frustration. Having nowhere else to go, I entered the spaceship.



GASP! What happened here? OK, it's obvious what happened here, but still...

Anyway, all the dead body tells you is that someone died a very painful death, and I was left to click randomly again.



I tried clicking on the ship's control panel, but there was no power. OK, let's try the other room (strange how the door to the other room opens despite there being no power.)



Well he certainly doesn't look pleasant. And he wasn't - he ate me.

And that was it. Game over. I'd been playing for ninety seconds.

The problem with these "Escape the Room/Planet/Closet" games is that to complete them requires you to follow a resolutely linear path and possess telepathic powers so that one can enter the mind of the programmer and determine what the fuck you're supposed to do next. Of course, the same can be said about any puzzle or adventure game, but since "Escape" titles are puzzle and adventure games, it makes things doubly frustrating.



In the end, I completed the game by using a walkthrough. Yes, I cheated, which is only less shameful than knowing I needed a walkthrough to complete a game with a grand total of four puzzles. The first step is to click a spot somewhere in the middle of the (admittedly beautiful) landscape, revealing a canyon with a headless corpse in it. I can only assume this guy got his head bitten off before our friend in the spaceship lost his leg. Near the corpse is a computer chip, which you'll need if you want to start the ship up. Which leads me to my next question - why do crew members always take essential pieces of the ship's engine with them every time they step outside to explore a hostile new environment?

It doesn't make sense, is all I'm saying.



Underneath the body in the ship is a gun. Hold on, I was certain I passed my mouse all over that corpse the first time and never uncovered a gun. Are you trying to tell me I could only reach under the body and pull out the weapon after climbing into and out of a canyon, checking out a headless spaceman along the way? All of a sudden, the protagonist is looking decidedly less wholesome. He (or she - hey, I won't discriminate) doesn't do his/her image any favours by incinerating the alien in the next room.



This is why you have to kill the alien (other than the obvious reason of not wanting it to kill you.) To restore the power you need to rotate the discs so that the correct coloured circle matches the correct hole. What's the code? Well, it's the three planets in the top left hand corner of the first screen.

While I don't want to tell space agencies how to do their job, might I make one suggestion? Interstellar spacecraft are a lot more versatile if the ignition code isn't three moons from one specific planet, positioned in very exact spots. What would have happened if the spacecraft hadn't crashed at that precise time on that exact day?

Wait - why do you even need to search for the ignition code? Weren't you on this ship? There's no other explanation for being stranded here, unless you've been doing a Robinson Crusoe act, waiting around for some random ship to crash - a ship whose ignition code is the exact position of the planet's three moons on that particular day.

Talk about good luck, eh?



So you restore power and enter the ship's ID into the control panel (the ID is painted on the front of the spaceship), then away you go!

Hurray!

And that's it. Once you know exactly how to do everything and in what order to do them the game is over in three minutes. Just to force that point home, here's the Game Over screen:



"This is the end, OK? I'm not screwing with ya. The game is actually that short."

You know, now that I think about it, Neolla is a pretty bad game. Great visuals aside, it's incredibly short, frustratingly linear and the few puzzles there are will leave you swearing more often than a Tourette's sufferer at a Slipknot gig. Just in case some of your brain is still functioning, there's a sequel, Neolla 2, which is a lot more accessible and which I enjoyed quite a bit until I stepped outside and got drenched in acid rain.

Fuck this; I'm off to play Shift.

Mafia Driver

I would have liked to review an Easter-themed game for today's post, but the first one I came across, Easter Rampage, made me feel so good about the holiday that I couldn't bring myself to do it. Besides, I found a game that's awful every day of the year in Mafia Driver.

Imagine if you were to take Grand Theft Auto and remove everything fun about it. Take out all the high speed chases, gun battles and random acts of violence, and you'd probably be left with something that looks very similar to Mafia Driver. The plot of the game is that you're an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the Mob as a driver.



So far this sounds like it's going to be a pretty cool game. But the truth is apparent from Level 1.



Now maybe my vision of the Mafia has been skewed somewhat by Hollywood, but I never imagined parking skills were the first thing mobsters looked for in a driver. I would have imagined one's ability to drive really fast would have been more important, but I was clearly wrong.



And it keeps going on like that. This is it. This is the game. The point of this level isn't so you get used to the controls - parking is all you do. Drive to a spot, park there, drive to another spot, repeat.

And there are at least seven levels of this crap.



At least it looks nice; at least I can say that about the game. There's no point driving faster than ten mile per hour, but at least I look good. If I have any complaint here it's with the camera's annoying habit of shaking back and forth whenever I'm between two areas of the level.



Some areas are remarkably frustrating, like on Level 3 when I have to get around one vehicle while avoiding cars coming in the opposite direction. Crashing is far too easy as the car is incredibly sensitive, and you'll total it regardless of how fast or slow you were driving. I barely nudged the car in the screenshot above, yet suddenly the whole right side of my vehicle is crumpled up into a burning heap.



I am trying here; I'm just having a little bad luck. But then maybe if the Mafia invested in some cars that weren't weak pieces of crap, I'd do better.



God damn! So I'm crashing everywhere and on top of that I remember that I'm playing a parking game. It's not even a real game! Why are parking games so popular? Parking is the least enjoyable part of driving. Unless you're a valet who really, really loves his job, what pleasure can be taken from a parking game?



As the game goes on and we seem no nearer to wherever the hell it is I'm supposed to be taking the Mob bosses, things start to get a little tricky. First I'm required to snake around other cars, and then I'm faced with some maniac who slides back and forth across the street at high speed.

OK, so how come he's allowed to drive like crazy while I take the most dangerous driver's ed class in history?



OK, that was totally not my fault, and I expect to share insurance information with that son of a bitch, right after Big Vito and Donny are finished breaking my legs with iron bars.



It should come as no surprise that the nutjob prevented me from getting much further, and in the end it doesn't matter because at no point in Mafia Driver did it appear I would get to do any actual driving. I commend Baller Arcade (oh my God) for putting a new spin on the parking game, but that doesn't hide the fact that it's still a parking game, and parking games will never be cool or fun, no matter how many cranky Sicilian back seat drivers you include.

Oh, and Happy Easter, and shit.

Deep Creatures

The full title for this platform adventure is Deep Creatures in Mayan Caves, but if that's too hard to remember, you can also call it "Another Shit Logic Collision Game."

I have something of a history with Logic Collision Games. They make very pretty games that I ultimately hate and rant about. Deep Creatures is no different - it looks as nice as any 2D platform game on the internet, but it was clearly programmed by a hermetic Russian who hates everyone.



I'm adding the introduction simply to point out that this game is poor from the start. I hate to be a Grammar Nazi (actually, that's a lie) and for all I know English may not be the developers' first language, but it doesn't take long to proofread stuff, guys, and a little effort goes a long way.



ROAR!! I may as well note that you play a character called Crawler, which I found strange since not once in the short time I spent with him did Crawler actually crawl. Inappropriate names aside, I wonder about Crawler's mental wellbeing when he lives in an active volcano and uses treasure as a pillow, but let's move on to the actual game.



As I previously noted, Logic Collision games always look great, and Deep Creatures is no exception. OK, so it's all greens and browns, but they're nice greens and browns. And besides, you're in a jungle - what do you expect? Naturally, there are Mayan caves at some point, but I never saw them for the simple reason that this game is hard as hell.



Here I am getting a warthog tusk up the ass. If I wanted to get gangbanged by jungle creatures I'd... actually, I would never want that.

But why are there so many of them? At any time the screen can be full of these bastards, and if they're on both sides of you you're pretty screwed.



The enemies usually jump out of the background, which I'll admit was a lot more interesting than the usual "walk back and forth across this platform until the hero jumps on you" approach so many computer game bad guys take. Of course, this is only cool for as long as it takes you to realise you're often standing on the most indefensible spot in the level when those warthogs come leaping out at you.



So, there are hundreds of them, and they leap at you when you're at your most vulnerable - what else can the developers do to make the first level just that little bit harder? How about making sure you have no idea how many times you have to hit them in order to kill the buggers? Or maybe they could not let you know how hurt you are (like it matters)? This information and more is kept from you, leaving you to constantly jump and kick while the ten lives you started with get cut down to four.

And just so we're clear - that was Level 1.



The only thing more annoying than an enemy that takes forever to kill is an an enemy that you can't kill. The only thing more annoying than that is an enemy you can't kill bumping you off ledges and into pungee pits.

The game has the annoying tendency of stopping you from moving further until you've either killed or dodged all the animals. Not only are you prevented from making a quick getaway, you can't beat a hasty retreat. All you can do is move forward, high kicking wave after wave of jungle creatures and hoping you don't get knocked off the platforms and into oblivion.



Level design isn't all that bad, though the order in which you face enemies is slightly strange. Take this point near the end of Level 3, I believe. You face off against two giant warthogs and several smaller ones. With the jungle creatures dispatched, you head forward towards the exit...



...Only to get cut off by more of the little bastards. It's something of an anticlimax, considering the fight I've just been through, and on top of that it cost me yet another life.

But take a wild guess as to what little creature added that last straw to my straining back?



That's right - little birds. They're not even hard to kill - one kick and they're gone. What pisses me off is how they appear from out of nowhere - or more accurately, the top of the screen, which is usually no more than an inch or two from Crawler's head.

With only one attack to your name, a kick, you have to be situated above a bad guy to kill him. So you see what the problem is here. You're required to jump through the birds, taking damage all the way, and hope that you stamp their skulls on the way down. Well that's just great.



Pardon the pun, but Deep Creatures is a case of too much collision and not enough logic. What we have here is a platform game that could be great, but the learning curve is so steep that it's practically a vertical line. Lives are too easily lost and not replenished with nearly enough regularity, and the constant barrage of enemies is fun at first but ultimately draining. The fact that there isn't a Pause button doesn't help matters.

So it seems like the status quo remains. Logic Collisions make another great-looking game, and I call it for the polished turd that it is. Some things never change.

Shamrock Streamer

Since it's St. Patrick's Day tomorrow, and I am an Irish man, I thought I would do what everybody else is going to do and review an Irish-themed game.

I never said I was a trailblazer.

So, Shamrock Streamer. It's one of those games that require you to follow a set path with your mouse without deviating, thereby discriminating against all those with poorly developed motor skills. But we won't let that ruin our fun when there are other things about this game that can do it just as well.



The goal of Shamrock Streamer is to follow a rainbow path until you reach a pot of gold, which is strange considering one of the characters you can play as is a pot of gold. Surely you should be able to pick that one and immediately get sent to the "You Win!" screen, but alas that isn't the case. The other choices are a range of stock Irish caricatures. We get not one but two leprechauns, a shamrock, a snake (you know, the things St. Patrick drove out of Ireland - despite Ireland never having the climate to sustain snakes) and a trumpet, which I suppose isn't really Irish, but it is green.



Everything is brightly coloured, Shamrock Streamers coming across as a cheap and cheerful little time waster. But it doesn't take 20/20 vision to see that this game has a dark side. I don't know about you, but I find there's something unnerving about a flying leprechaun that eats rainbows and shits out multicoloured shamrocks.

Maybe it's just me.



Obviously, as you fly along, the rainbow path becomes increasingly more difficult to follow. Along the bottom of the screen is an Accuracy gauge that decreases every time your cursor veers off the path. Once it reaches zero the game ends. It's nice to see that the difficulty curve doesn't suddenly explode upwards at any point, allowing you to get a pretty decent score, as long as your reactions are quick and you don't suffer from Parkinson's Disease. I do find it strange, however, that the raindow gets wider as you get further. Usually it's the other way round, but I suppose if you're playing a flying, shitting leprechaun, you want to break with convention.



There's no difference between how any of the characters play, so regardless of who you pick, you'll still be playing the same game, following the same path. The other leprechaun grabs the rainbow with one hand and shamrocks fly out of the other, like some weird Irish stigmata.



I had imagined that the snake would be like the first leprechaun, chewing up rainbows and crapping out shamrocks, but I was wrong - very wrong. The snake actually shoves the rainbow up its ass, then vomits shamrocks all over the screen.

And yes, this is a game for children.



The shamrock isn't quite as bad, but as it's spewing other, smaller shamrocks in its wake, I can only assume this is some sort of asexual shamrock that self-reproduces, releasing its multicoloured spores across the sky. Only in Shamrock Streamer is this concept not incredibly disturbing.



The trumpet I can deal with, though traditionally one would expect notes coming out of it, not shamrocks. But since it's not involved in defecation, religious mutilation or self-reproduction, I'll let it slide.

All in all, Shamrock Streamer isn't an especially bad game, but there's nothing about it that demands you play. Unless you really, really like Ireland or you have a thing for scatology, I'd advise you avoid it.

Happy St. Patrick's Day. I won't be drinking, so keep that in mind as you spout off stereotypes all day.

Paint Wars

Before I start, I want to make it perfectly clear that I realise I am not the target audience for Paint Wars. I engage in neither painting nor war, but the idea of combining the two does appeal to me.

The object of Paint Wars is simple - every level contains a number of shapes which you must draw (or more accurately paint) by clicking and dragging the mouse across the screen. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it sounds, as an army of brightly coloured assault vehicles want to stop you from painting your pinko freethinking shapes. It's a bit like East Germany except a lot more explicit and with even worse music.



Things start off easily enough. Just draw the shapes that you see on screen. Simple, right? I played this on a laptop, meaning I didn't have a proper mouse. But one would assume having a touchpad allows for greatly flexibility and faster drawing, which is a big advantage when the enemies start appearing. One would assume wrong.



In Level 2, all hell broke loose. Talk about a learning curve - I went from simple geometric shapes to hummers blitzkrieging across the screen. If they happen to drive over any of the shapes you've already done, you have to draw the shape again. The only way to get rid of the enemies is to click on them, but they're quickly replaced by more. So now you have to draw a bunch of shapes and destroy an army of fast moving Humvees. You'd think Humvees would be easier to squash, what with the low gas mileage and everything, but that's not the case at all.



The resulting mess looks kind of cool, but it's hard to appreciate it when you're trying to, you know, complete the level. Looking at these shots, I never realised just how frigging harsh that colour scheme is. Flourescent pinks and greens are not what you want to see when you're running on five hours' sleep and tea sugary enough to bring John Cadbury back from the dead.



Planes are a whole heap of fun, because they don't just cut through your painting; they drop bombs that explode in a hail of yellow and that are impossible to stop. So let's recap: your heart rate rises exponentially due to stress, your retinas are burned away by the glaring colours and you want to burst your own eardrums rather than listen to the annoying trance beat that loops ad nauseum throughout the game.

War is hell.



The only thing more annoying than planes? Tanks. Tanks that require two clicks to destroy them. I get the strange feeling that not only am I not the target audience for Paint Wars, the developer Coolio actually hates people like me, and this game is his revenge. Well, I'm sorry if I didn't spend my adolescence drinking Dutch Gold and listening to DJ Tiesto. The fact is, I grew a beard and stayed in my room listening to Nirvana and The Smiths, and if you think I'm changing now, you're greatly mistaken!



I was wrong - there is something more annoying than tanks. it's planes and tanks, together, in a never ending cavalcade of malice. I wanted to play this game - I must be punished.

At some point I realised that I didn't actually have to draw a perfect shape; all I had to do was cover everything with paint. So I started taking the easy way out and covered the entire screen with bright pink emulsion. Unfortunately this approach only works for so long, and it was only a matter of time before it backfired on me.



I am three years old again. And there is paint everywhere except where it most needs to be. Unfortunately there's no button that gets your mum to come along and colour in near the lines for you, so I was pretty much stuck at Level 7. To be honest I was surprised I got even that far without putting my foot through a wall (yes, a wall.) Paint Wars is the sort of game that's good in small amounts, which is pretty much what most people require in an online game. But I don't expect it will garner many fans or obsessives. I could be wrong though - fill the room with enough people off their heads on Ecstacy and you might just have the most bangin' rave this year.

New Super Mario World 3

I'm not even going to try to crack jokes at this game's expense. Now I know what you're thinking - why would I have a problem with a Flash Mario game? Mario is a gaming institution, a superstar of the platform genre. And I actually like a lot of the online Mario games that I've played. But New Super Mario World 3 takes a big steaming dump on everything the Mario franchise is known and loved for.



First of all, it's a good thing this is just a simple Mario game, because there are no instructions. It's up to you to discover that you run and jump by pressing the directional buttons. There's no equivalent to the B-button, but you're not going to need it anyway.



At first this looked like any Mario game and the design was as good as what you might have pleyed on an old Nintendo. I was a little surprised to find this hallway of man-eating plants, however. It seems a bit much for the first level, don't you think?



I mean, damn, there's a lot of these plants to get past. Having never played Super Mario 3, I can only hope this is not a faithful representation of what the first level in that game must be like. If someone had handed me this game as a kid and I had to get through a hallway full of man eating plants in the first level, my still-developing hand-eye coordination failing me on a regular basis, I would have been pissed off.

Hell, I'm pissed off now.



The point of all this is to collect power-ups that will create platforms elsewhere in the level, so that you can reach the exit. And I must say, as far as power-ups go, I'm disappointed. I've played plenty of online Mario knock-offs and each one has included the classic yellow blocks from the original. All except this one. Whether it was down to inexperience or laziness, I don't know, but it just looks poor. Plus, the mushrooms don't do anything but replenish your health, which is handy, I suppose, since you'll need to go back through the hall of plants to get the last power-up for this level.

OK, going back and forth across a level is fine. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is having to go through the same obstacles three times just to give the illusion that the level is far longer than it actually is.



But for all the faults of Level 1, they pale in comparison to the shit sandwich that is Level 2. It starts off reasonably enough. The exit is blocked and the only way to unblock it is to collect eight red coins. How hard can it be, right? let's just say I still have a fucking migraine.



If you want to make a gamer hate you and the game you've designed, include platforms made from single blocks. I have rarely, if ever, seen these in anything other than Mario games, and there's a good fucking reason for that. You need to have perfect aim if you want to land on these things. It's not just a case of jumping as high as possible and moving to the right position, either - you're so damn close to the ceiling that if you bump it you lose all your momentum and come up short over and over again. It's ridiculous, but I spent anywhere up to five minutes trying to reach some of these coins, and it was all because of those God damn single block platforms.



Eventually I just said, "Fuck it" and moved to the next coin, which unsurprisingly is also only reachable by single block platforms. What sucks more than anything is that you can't just forget about these coins, either. You have to collect all eight coins to unblock the exit, meaning that no matter how long it takes, if you want to reach Level 3 you've got no choice but to try again and again and again.

When the game isn't laughing at your inability to jump from one tiny platform to another, it's testing your patient with how incredibly slow it is. Two of the coins are located at the end of long halls. But why? There are no monsters on this level, no bad guys to stop you from reaching the coins. Why do they have to be spaced out so far? The reason, clearly, is because if they weren't distributed far apart or located on almost unreachable areas, you'd be finished this level in two minutes and the developer would have to explain why they didn't make a more interesting game.



OK, this is just unfair. I know I keep harping on about this, but seriously, do you really want to have to make the same jumps again and again because you were a few millimetres out, or because the controls weren't responding fast enough, leaving you to fall off the platform and look like an idiot? It's a terrible idea, and if I ever meet the developer of this game I will hand them the bill for the stress-induced heart attack their shitty game gave me.



OK, I'm close. I just have to jump to the next platform, which is easy enough, then land on the coin. All right, here goes...
















You've got to be fucking kidding me. You've got to be fucking kidding me! Jesus God damn it!

Why, God? Why do you punish your snarky game-playing servant so!?

But you know how it is. You can only push a gamer so far. I wasn't going to let it get me. I wasn't going to give up. I'm better than that! I was not going to let these fucking platforms stop me!

And you know what? I didn't. I got those coins. I beat those platforms. I did it! I DID IT!



VICTORY!!

It almost cost me my sanity, but I did it. I must have been hallucinating, though, because this is what I found in Level 3:



You see them too, right? The pipes? The pipes that are there for absoultely no reason whatsoever? They don't anywhere. If plants are supposed to pop out of them, I didn't see any. So what's going on?



Oh, great, invisible platforms. They, like the pipes, are pointless, and I'm sure they were only included so that the developer could show off. "Hey, look guys!" they might say. "I can do invisible platforms!"

To which the general gaming public replies, "Big deal, make a good fucking game" before returning to more stimulating activities like masturbating or flaming noobs on message boards.



At the end of the pipes I found these black and white boxes, as well as a gap in the floor. Hell, I'll admit it, I just wanted it to be over, so I jumped in the hole, expecting death or a lower level.

I was not expecting this:



Oh. My. God.

That's it? That's the entire game? Three short, boring, infuriating, crappy levels? You can't be serious? That was the most anti-climactic ending to a game that I've ever seen.

I'm sorry, but come on! After all the bullshit, I would have appreciated something a little more than just a blank white screen with some text on it! God damn it! I wasted my time for this!? I want those tenty minutes of my life back! Dear God...

I need a drink.

Elk's Revenge

Notice how my reviews are going up later than usual these days? There are two resons. The first is because I'm no longer a jobless bum, able to review pointless Flash games at two in the afternoon. The second is the dearth of shitty games right now. I know there are bad games, but I'm talking about real garbage here. You know, I might even have to start reviewing games I like.

HA! No chance of that when they keep making crap like Elk's Revenge.



No prizes for guessing what Elk's Revenge is about, but I'll break it down anyway. You're an elk, all right? And there's this bear. Well, the bear regularly gets shitfaced and starts kicking you around. this time, however, he has the hiccups, which means you can get your revenge!

I don't know, if it was about elks jumping around collecting coins I'd say it was unoriginal, so either way this game loses in terms of plot. But the goal is simple enough: ram into the bear. OK, I like watching animals fight for my own amusement - let's play this thing!



There's just one catch: you can only hit the bear when he hiccups. And this is where things get annoying. First of all, there's no way of knowing when the bear will hiccup. Secondly, there's no way of knowing how long you'll have to ram the bear. It could be a few seconds, it could be none. If he's not hiccupping and you happen to be anywhere near him, he kicks you twenty feet in the air.



I must admit, I do like the cartoonish artwork, but the novelty of your face being left behind by your body wears off after the seventh or eight kicking.

Oh, and by the way - see how the screenshots all seem to have been taken from the same spot in the playing area? That's because that is the playing area - all of it. You've got 552 pixels from end to end in which to outmaneouvre a fucking bear. Of course, the developers have cut us lowly gamers some slack by giving the moose the ability to jump!



Wow! You can expect to jump a lot in this game, which is great until the bear hiccups only when you are in mid-air, giving you even less time to headbutt his ass (sometimes literally.)



Why would the elk run away, anyway? Why is he such a pushover? OK, I understand, the bear is drunk, but so what? It's an Elk, God damn it! Elks are badasses. They do all sorts of crazy stuff like start shit with bisons. Any animal willing to butt heads with a bison can deal with a friggin' bear.

But seriously, if you're going to make a game based around animal conflict, you could at least make it a little more gamer-friendly. Sure, you don't just have to ram the drunk bastard; once you make it past level 1 you can obtain the "Death Hoof", which is basically a mule kick. Yeah, I wasn't really planning on getting that close to the bear, but thanks. There's a certain amount of promise to Elk's Revenge, and if they make a sequel I'll give it a shot, but as it stands the game blows chunks. You'd have much more fun getting a real bear and elk to fight. But then, that's more fun than a lot of things.

Moral Kombat

No, that's not a typo. Besides, I'd never review Mortal Kombat. For one thing, it's not an online game. Secondly, it doesn't suck. Moral Kombat, on the other hand, checks all the boxes.

As you may or may not know, Moral Kombat is a faithful homage to a Japanese game called Rose & Cammelia, in which you play a young widow who assumes control of her departed husband's house by slapping her mean sisters- and mother-in-law.

Yes, I'm aware that makes little sense, but I did mention that it was Japanese, right? Anyway, in Moral kombat you play another young woman, this time disgusted by the horrible state of the world we live in. She takes it upon herself to show people the error of their ways by... um... smacking them upside the head.



Your first port of call is the local bully, who one can assume, from the manner of her dress, doubles as the local floozey. The game uses a mouse based controls system, where the player is required to hold down the left mouse button and swing the cursor along a predefined path, so that our heroine's palm can securely meet badguy cheek. This is interesting in theory but infuriating in practice. It's no good just aiming for your opponent's face; you have to get as close to the curve of the path as possible or else you'll miss. And if you miss, they'll get to slap back.



This happened to me a lot. Another thing I found annoying was that sometimes the swing wouldn't even register. Whether I had swung too early or too late, I have no idea, but regardless my character (who we'll just call Shirley Mc Frownsalot) would oftentimes just stand there and end up eating a palm sandwich. At least the original allowed you to track the movement of your pointer with a line that followed you across the screen. Moral Kombat offers you no help whatsoever.



Through luck and experience, I was able to at least avoid some of her shots while landing a few of my own. And look at that bully - she is fucked up! Shirley's got smacking power that goes through the roof! If this was real life, she'd be making big money in underground pit fighting contests.



BOOM! And Mrs Kimbo Slice takes down the bully. Surprisingly, this does not end the immoral behaviour of the planet's inhabitants, so she finds someone else to lay the smackdown upon.

OK, working towards a more moral society is a noble quest, but I question our heroine's methods. Surely by bitchslapping everyone she meets, she is making the world even more immoral, not less? But hey, I'm not going to argue with her. That right hand is dynamite.



Opponent number 2 is a purse thief. We know this because she just tried to steal Shirley's purse. Let's show this bitch who's boss!



Ah. Never mind. Again, the same problems plague this fight, and every fight in the game. I appreciate innovation (even if it was someone else's to begin with) but the control system is flawed. This game would work better on something like the Wii or Nintendo DS. But since Nintendo don't have the balls/aren't stupid enough (delete as appropriate) to sell a game based around female street fights, I guess we'll never know how it could have worked out.



With a little more luck, I managed to take the thief down to Chinatown. So who will our heroine's moral compass point her to next?



OK, this is where it starts getting weird(er). I hate to promote racial stereotypes, but who in their right mind would take on a rapper in a bitchslapping contest? But then, this chick is running around hitting people - she's hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer.

She's also pretty boring. I mean, read that text in the last screenshot. Shirley is the sort of fun-hating prude that most of us wouldn't want to spend time with in real life. Way to create a sympathetic character, Orb.



Unsurprisingly, things don't go well. But then a strange thing happened. I started to get good. I dodged more slaps and hit more of my own. Things were going remarkably well, all of a sudden. And my pimp hand was mighty!



Don't ask me where all the diamonds keep coming from. It should also be noted that if something like a hat or sunglasses flies off the opponent as you lay down the law, it magically reappears after every slap.

Yes, I'm aware that's only a minor niggle and really of no importance to the overall game. I acknowledge that I'm being anal, but this is my blog so... whatever.



With his last breath (Jesus, you killed him with a slap!) the gangsta gives Shirley the name of the Don. So she goes and smacks the Don.

How did we get from a schoolyard bully to a Mafioso in four levels? And how did Shirley get past the Don's bodyguards and smack him without them gunning her down in cold blood?



I guess we know the answer to that. You don't become the head of a Mafia clan without smacking a few faces here and there. But the Don has never met a girl like Shirley McFrownsalot!



You've got to love how money just flies out of all the Don's pockets, such is the power of Shirley's right hand. Thankfully, we've just got one more level to go. And by this point I was so good at the game I no longer found it ridiculously challenging. Now it was having the opposite effect, and just starting to bore me.



But hey, who can be bored when you've got a web spammer dressed up like Satan? I'll give the guys at Orb credit - I've never faced an end of game boss like this.



But like I've already mentioned, I was getting pretty good at making sure Shirley hit her target. So, while the Spam King may be fearsome on the Internets, the guy is a fucking sissy when it comes to physical confrontations.



Well, what do you know? All that tough love finally had a positive effect on someone. Sure, you maimed and killed plenty of people in the process, but at least the Spam King has mended his evil ways.

How ironic that a game called Moral Kombat should be based on the rather immoral exercise of beating people unconscious. Still, it does provide food for thought. Maybe what the "War on Terror" needs is a few less invasions of sovereign countries and a few more prissy teenage girls with an overhand right that would make Chuck Liddell proud.