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.

Achilles

I feel sort of bad for this game, because when I first saw Achilles I couldn't help but be reminded of Romanius, a swords and sandals action game from about a year ago. This was unfortunate as it had me comparing the two, which wasn't fair. For one thing, Romanius could be challenging, sometimes infuriatingly so, but it looked great, the animation was fluid, and it was a lot of fun. Achilles looks great and that's about it.

As the title would suggest, you play the mythical Greek hero, battling your way singlehandedly through five levels and fifteen stages of soldiers from all over the planet. Strangely, despite the variety of enemies, from your bog standard Greeks to Romans and even Saracens, you fight them all on the same piece of rocky beach, which at least means you can go home every evening after a hard day's hacking and slashing for tea.



Controls are simple, with A and D to move left and right, W to jump, S to defend yourself and the attack buttons are T (slash) and Y (kick.) The controls are also slow to respond, so you could easily be getting sliced up by a barbarian with a bad temper before you manage to leap away. You start off every level with a spear, and as you can see in the previous screenshot, I put it to good use. In fact, throwing the spear at an oncoming bad guy is the only way to make it useful. You would assume that the extra reach advantage would make killing Greeks a doddle, but you'd be wrong.



You face the usual array of swordsmen, spearmen and archers, but the archers are the only ones who give you any real grief in the first two levels. This is because they have the wonderful ability to fire at you from off screen. And because the arrows are usually flying too fast for you to react in time, the result is you've already taken damage before the enemy is even visible. Great. On the bright side, your health bar is refilled before the start of the next level, but if you're already low on health and an archer is taking potshots at you from somewhere off behind a rock that's not going to be much consolation.



To say I was disappointed by the first level boss would be an understatement. First you go through several of his underlings before you face the big bad guy himself. I was so busy concentrating on not getting another arrow in the ass that I failed to notice this was the boss. As he jumped around I thought, "Wow, this guy's a little more difficult than the other spearmen. I hope I have enough health left to defeat the boss." Imagine my surprise when the level ended once I'd rammed my sword down his throat. Since there was nothing to visually differentiate him from the grunts, it felt like something of an empty victory, like I hadn't killed the boss, just the assistant boss, as the big guy himself was on a late holiday with the family in Marbeya.



Another annoying aspect of the enemies was their variable difficulty. While one swordsman could be defeated by a single swing of your blade, the next one that comes along could take four or five hits before going down. This probelm persists throughout the game, with only the speed with which the enemies move making any real difference. Really, that just compounds the problem - get stuck facing two bad guys and you're guaranteed a good arse-kicking, if not death.

I want to take a moment here to write about one of the fundamental rules of side scrolling action games. Like any good rule it can be bent, but the general consensus is if the hero begins a level on the left-hand side of the playing area then their goal, whether it be a checkpoint or a boss, should be on the right. It makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, you would never have seen Sonic the Hedgehog bounce across Green Hill Zone only for him to have to backtrack to find Dr Robotnik. So with this in mind, and with only the Level 2 boss left to defeat, I marched bravely to the right.

And I kept marching, for about three or four minutes. I was starting to get a little pissed off. Where was the boss? Evil and tardy - Jesus! After an age, I decided I would try my chances and move left. Even though it went against the basic rule of side scrollers, even though Achilles can't even face left unless an enemy is there, I walked back to the start. And sure enough, after another minute of walking:



There the fucker was. Suffice to say, I took great pleasure in treating him like a life-size voodoo doll, throwing spears into his neck until he finally fell back and died.



I relished that victory while I could, because after him the bosses become hard as nails, and you are guaranteed to die at least once, no matter what you do. The Level 3 boss kept kicking me in the nuts and then hacking at my neck, handing me my ass in record time. The problem is that you have very few effective attacks. Yeah, you can jump and swing your sword in the air, but you have to time it perfectly, or you just leave yourself open to more punishment. Often dying is the best approach, as you become temporarily invincible after a regeneration. I must admit the regeneration is cool, as a pool of blood collects around your head, only for it to flow back into your body as you leap to your feet.



Quite often the main problem stems from that old friend, hit detection. Once you start meeting a bunch of enemies you'll inevitably end up standing right on top of them (or from the player's perspective, right in front of them.) You end up swinging into air. You can't move, because if you do you'll be open to attack, and the bad guy isn't about to do anything except repeatedly stab in front of him until he hits something. In other words, you're pretty fucked.



To the developers' credit, they don't hold back on the gore. Time a strike just right and you can cleave an enemy's head clean off, watching as it flies through the air. Legs get broken and hacked apart, spears run through eyesockets and blood flows everywhere. Plus leaving a swordsman with a spear through his chest, his limp body perched on the wood, gives you the chance to crack witty one-liners like, "Stick around." Or something.

(Because you see, it's a spear, but it's made of wood, so it could also be a stick. So, "Stick around." Get it?


Fuck you.)



The last boss is this big mofo, and if you don't have three lives at this point, then I'm sorry, you're already dead. This son of a bitch is bigger than you, he's faster and he has more than twice the reach that you do, meaning that you really have to die, just so you can be invincible for a few seconds and do as much damage as possible before you go jumping off and hoping you can get close enough to at least nip him from time to time.

And your reward for finally defeating this monster?



Well, that figures. I've wasted far too much time on this slow, lumbering, infuriating game, and I would ask that you don't make the same mistake I did. If you must play a Greek hero slashing away at baddies, play Romanius. Or if that's too difficult, play its sequel. But if you end up playing the games I review anyway just to see if you agree with my assessment, or if you're thick, then go play Achilles.

Little Boy Adventure

And we are back! Yes, after my PC died on me, I was sadly unable to post reviews of shitty games. I know my fans, both of them, were sad to hear that. But cry no more, for the Big Mean Flash gamer is back with a vengeance, and my God what a crappy game do I have for you today.

Little Boy Adventure fucking sucks. Really hard. I mean, take a giant jar of honey, pour it over your penis and then stick it down a hole full of fire ants. That will be more fun than playing Little Boy Adventure.

So yeah, it sucks. First of all, what the fuck is this!?



Man, if you thought Bomb's gratuitous display of naked boy ass was bad, this blows it right out of the water. You've got to assume that's the little boy of the title, right? So why is he naked? And why are balls so fucking big?



Oh, for the love of God...

Anyway, the little boy finds clothes just in time to start the game. And what a game - a perpetually moving side scroller with no end. You just run from left to right killing bad guys and collecting coins. There is no end of level boss, as far as I'm aware. In fact, there's not even a story to give you any reason for attacking a never ending horde of Vikings with hammers.



This picture could be taken from any point in the game. Nothing changes - not the background, not the enemies, nothing. The controls suck, too. It doesn't help that the collision detection is almost non-existant. Hell, maybe that's not the problem. Maybe the problem is you don't know if you're standing in front of an enemy or off to one side of him, meaning you'll miss your strike, and then he'll knock you on your ass.



Something I didn't discover until I'd played a couple of times was a bug that made you invincible but which also completely froze any and all movement:



I should be dead, but it seems all enemies simply pass through me now. Or I pass through them. Oh, who the fuck cares? One way or another, I'm still sitting there, watching a little retarded kid who likes to take his clothes off lugging around a sword that's bigger than him, and stealing money from Vikings. That's how you know this kid's a moron - no one in their right mind would fuck with a Viking.

Thinking about it, that naked picture in the menu could be seen as a metaphor for the the game that follows - stripped of gameplay, stripped of motivation, so that we're left with nothing but balls. It sucks so badly I don't even have the words. It's an abomination and an insult to good taste and decency (I have neither taste nor decency, and even I'm offended.)

But you know what the worst thing is? Worse than this shitty game, its shitty premise and its shitty programming?

Its shitty sequel!



Not content with raping our eyes once, the developer saw fit to force a sequel to this awful game upon us. On the bright side, the little boy keeps his clothes on this time. Oh, and there's an end of level boss - that you can't beat!

Bravo to whoever came up with that. Just when I thought you couldn't fuck up any more, you outdo yourself. These games are so bad I feel physically ill, so I better step away before I vomit all over my new laptop.