Immortall

Well, here we are once again, and observant readers will know that this week I look at a game that sucks. As per usual, I spent my evening frantically searching for something sufficiently awful to rip into. But on my journey into the heart of mediocrity I found something far more intriguing - the second most depressing game I've ever played.

The most depressing game (if you can call it that) was developed by Nifflas and had you take on the role of an executioner killing a man by firing squad. If you shot the man, every time the game loaded you would be presented with his corpse, still blindfolded and tied to a post. The game's message was that all actions had long-lasting consequences and made me examine the fragility and importance of life in a new way. It also left me utterly despondent.

So congratulations to Evan Miller and Armor Games; with Immortall you almost made me feel just as much despair.



Immortall starts off with a pretty simple premise: small alien crash lands on Earth and meets a little girl. The little girl introduces the alien to her big brother who's too cool for school, but not too cool for apple picking. They kind of hang out and walk to their house, where the alien meets the children's parents.



The parents kind of freak out at first, but they're OK after a minute. So everyone is chillaxing and you all decide to just go for a walk. So far, so good; the alien has ingratiated himself to a bunch of cool humans and is getting a taste for Earth and all it has to offer. That's about the time our group walk into a war zone and start getting shot at.



Woah, woah! What the hell just happened!? Did this family not notice the fucking war happening right next to their house? How is that possible? And why are all the soldiers so desperate to kill them? Did the alien befriend the Von Trapp family? Jesus!

With no other way to defend themselves, you have to use your body to shield them. And there's a lot to shield them from! Twenty seconds ago you were strolling through an orchard. Now you're riddled with so many holes you look like Martian Swiss cheese!

You spurt green blood everywhere as soldiers, tanks and bombers blow the crap out of you and the family huddle together, shaking in fear. This is an emotional 180 the likes of which I've rarely seen. It's like watching Big Bird cut himself or Bugs Bunny get the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of rednecks outside a truck stop.



Naturally, the more you get shot, the weaker you become. As you get weaker, you move slower. You move too slowly and members of the family start to die. A shell took out the father and son; the little girl got taken down with machine gun fire. And still you walk on like a retard, knowing that everyone is dead and it's all your fault.



And then you die. And it begins to snow. And the snow covers your corpse as women cry. That is how the game ends. Regardless of how many people you save, you always die at the end. The music slows to a crawl until the player is left watching a scene of death and destruction in total silence. But it's not over yet, because then you get the message, the raison d'etre for this game's existence:



"Live." Live? How am I supposed to live when I stroll into a battleground and no one thinks, "Maybe we shouldn't shoot at the ten foot tall alien?" God damn this game! I know I should make the most of my life - you didn't have to blow children up to tell me that!

I can't complain about the graphics; it looks great. I can't complain about the gameplay or controls; they're perfectly adequate. But such is the soul-crushing despair and hopelessness of the game that I'm left emotionally numb by it. I honestly don't know whether to recommend you play Immortall or avoid it completely. All I do know is, I want a hug.

Box Office

It's almost 1:00AM as I write this and I'm still up for a reason that only baby Jesus knows, but since I am awake and as lucid as I ever get, here is this week's Big Mean Flash Gamer. The target of my never ending rage this week is a title from our buddies at Free World Group. Now, usually I'm a fan of FWG; their games are never overly complicated, well-designed, and generally entertaining. They don't produce many games that I'd call all-time favourites of mine, but I have enjoyed a lot of their stuff. However, it seems that on an almost weekly basis Free World Group release a game like Box Office: a title that perfectly captures the soul-sucking, mind-numbing reality of life in the retail industry.



Box Office puts you behind the counter at the refreshments stand of a cinema - pretty much the worst job outside of chasing away the bums who sleep in the screening rooms. As customers step up to the counter it's your job to put together their orders, clicking on icons around the stand to collect popcorn, drinks and tickets. The goal of each level is to earn a certain amount while pleasing as many customers as possible. Naturally, this is done by getting orders as quickly as you can before pocketing the cash.



On a related note, while I'm well aware that cinemas charge an exorbitant amount for refreshments, this place is just taking the piss. $560 from maybe a dozen customers? That better be some damn good popcorn! Every level is the same monotonous pattern of jumping from one corner of the box office to another, only with more customers and shorter time periods as the game progresses.



As soon as you start raking in the dough you'll be able to buy upgrades such as different movies, new and more varied snacks and special items such as VIP tickets. You'll need to buy a few of these things as it means more money from customers, but it's not like it grossly raises the difficulty. And one thing I've never been able to figure out about games like Box Office - how come you can buy all sorts of crap to sell, but you can't hire some staff? I'm making all this money; are you trying to tell me there aren't any acne-riddled sixteen-year-olds I can have come in on Saturdays? I guess not - even though I'm investing in this one box office, I'm still clearly so low on the ladder of power that I can't even hire a part-time assistant. Either that or my character is paranoid that any new employee might steal his job. I'm pretty sure a committed lemur could do this gig, given the right training.



And so on it goes, with each level marginally more complicated than the last. There's no real puzzle or strategy involved; it's all just based on reaction and your speed with the mouse. It's one long, continuous chain of repetitive, pointless effort. If Box Office is supposed to entertain, it fails miserably. Indeed, the only thing it did do was remind me how much I hate working in retail.



I mean, look at that facial expression. Anyone who's ever worked in customer service will instantly recognise it as the rictus grin of a man who is dead inside. This is a character who's one difficult customer away from pulling out a shotgun and hitting back at a cold, oppressive world. Why would I want to play a person like that? Hell, there have been occasions when I was a person like that, and it sucks balls. So not only is Box Office a tedious waste of time, it also perfectly captures the feeling of helplessness experienced by anyone wearing a name tag and hairnet. Thanks for opening old wounds, Free World Group. Thanks a whole lot!

Go Go Diet

As some of you may know, my Big Mean Flash Gamer reviews are also available on the Way of The Geek website. A few months back, while I was celebrating 100 reviews here, I posted a special WoTG exclusive review for a woeful game called Mall Flirting. The game was technically sound, but the concept - run around a mall firing lightning bolts at boys to make them fall in love with you - was so repugnant that nothing could salvage the game in my eyes. (Incidentally, I recently came across the Japanese version of Mall Flirting, which is even more messed up, as you actually kill the boys and have their ghosts mindlessly follow you through a school.)

To make a long story even longer, fellow Geek scribe Devin de Gruyl mentioned finding another game on the girlsgames123.com website called Go Go Diet. Running this way from the Far East, it proves to be just as offensive as Mall Flirting ever was. I was reminded about it today by my fiancée, and since it's a quiet enough week for crappy games, I thought it was time to go back and call out this piece of garbage.



Go Go Diet puts you in the running shoes of a cute little girl on a treadmill. By tapping the left and right arrow keys you can make the girl run, and the goal is to stay on the treadmill for as long as possible. Nothing too worrying about that, right?

Well, the problem begins when sushi and Coke starts rolling down the treadmill towards you. You have to avoid the food at all costs, and apparently sushi is ridiculously fattening, because if the little girl ends up eating just one piece, her body weight seemingly doubles.



I can imagine a meeting between the developers probably went something like this...

Programmer #1: "So, what sort of game should we make now?"
Programmer #2: "How about something that preys on female insecurities about weight and body shape, and market it towards young girls?"
Programmer #1: "Sounds great! Man, I love being evil!"

Let's not beat around the bush here - you have to be a real asshole to make a game like this. Seriously, just a total dick. The type of guy who kicks puppies or tells women he loves them just so they'll have short, unsatisfying sex with him before he never calls them again. That guy apparently now knows Flash and is using it to make even more women feel bad about themselves.

Wonderful.



There's hope for fat chicks, though! All they've got to do is wolf down some magic weight loss medicine from a cute blue bottle! Because, you know, why stop at making young girls feel fat when you can also push the idea of diet pills and other garbage on them? I mean, if you're going to tear down their confidence, you might as well go all the way and make them mindless consumers of useless drugs that make them poop fat.



I'm really not sure what the goal of this game is. If you're trying to bring attention to childhood obesity, this is a pretty ham fisted way to do so. If the idea is to get more girls exercising, there has to be a more effective message than, "Exercise and never eat, or you'll get faaaaaaaat!!" And to be quite honest, the game isn't even all that well-made. The alternating button mashing I can deal with, but then you have to worry about moving up and down across the treadmill too, and as you play for longer more and more food comes tumbling towards you. It reaches a point where you have no choice but to take a hit and eat some food, leaving yourself open to the derogatory prodding of the mean girls at school.

All the cute artwork might appeal to little girls but it's just vomit-inducing to the rest of us. And the fact that the sweet outer shell contains such a potentially harmful message just makes it worse.



This game is just awful; there isn't a damn thing about it that I could recommend. The message it conveys can only damage the self-image of any young girl, and it lacks any interesting gameplay elements. Its only saving grace is that it's very small, less than 1.5MB of memory. But that's 1.5MB that could have gone to a game that wasn't a shallow, pointless borefest.

Potty Racers

On those occasions when it's a slow week for crappy games, I often find myself looking for something a little off the wall that I can rant about for 700 words. This isn't always easy - it took me quite some time to track down a game woeful and/or stupid enough to review. But then it hit me like a shit-powered slap in the face: Potty Racers.

I don't know what it is about Flash developers, but previous evidence points towards a huge interest with faeces among this community. I suppose I should take solace in knowing that the closest anyone has come to a game concerned primarily with crap (as far as I can tell, and I hope to God I'm right) is Pigeon Revenge, and at least that involves bird crap.

But anyway, Potty Racers. The name is something of a misnomer as there are no actual races. The goal of the game is simply to kit your portable toilet with some nifty wheels, push it down a steep slope and then zoom off the end of a ramp, trying to soar as high and as far as possible.

So let's go through that again. First, you put some wheels on a Portaloo and push it down a hill:



Then you fly said Portaloo through the air:



Before making a smooth landing, whereupon you are given a score and the chance to buy upgrades to improve performance.



I...

I've got nothing. I honestly have no idea what to write. I just... wow.

Can you stop for a second and imagine how anyone - anyone - came up with this concept? I'm not reviewing this game because it's bad (which it isn't); I'm reviewing this game because the developer of Potty Racers has balls of granite and the mind of Karl Childers from Sling Blade. This is such a fantastically ridiculous idea for a game that one can only stare slackjawed at the link to it, only to click said link and find that, yes, a game is loading and it is called Potty Racers.

Oh, and you can do tricks!



Handstands and loops and all sorts of crazy tricks! You're driving a portable toilet through the air and you're doing a handstand on it. I am having serious trouble forming sentences to express how I feel right now.

I mean, the game is no different to many other similar titles, except IT'S A FUCKING PORTALOO! How!? How did they reach that point!? How did they get there!?



If you saw this in real life your brain would not know how to interpret the messages your eyes were sending it and immediately shut down. There is a stick man driving a portable toilet down a street, with crap and toilet paper flowing out behind it. And this Portaloo is tricked out! If you score enough points you can make this portable toilet look like Xzibit got his hands on it.



I usually end a review by writing, "Try it if you want, don't say I didn't warn you." But not this time. You need to play Potty Racers. This game should be in your life, scorching its name into your very soul for all eternity. Because when in life are you going to get to fly a portable toilet into space? I rest my case.

Luis Launch

You've got to give credit to anyone who fills half their title screen with an advertisement for another game. Wow, that shows confidence. All snark aside, Luis Launch comes to us from those good, good people at Newgrounds, the home of the equally talented and depraved. Because so many members of Newgrounds are actually really good at programming Flash games, it makes reviewing one of their titles a bit difficult. After all, their crap is many other websites' gold. But hey, I'm not the Big Mean Flash Gamer for nothing, so let's jump head first into the inevitable shit storm!



Before I write anything else, I must admit I enjoyed playing Luis Launch. I enjoyed it more when it was called Hedgehog Launch and had a lot more features to it, but then that's just me. In all seriousness, no one who regularly plays games like this could miss the huge similarities between the Armor Games favourite and this knock-off.

You play Luis (based on the creator himself, which makes me worry) and your goal is to get into space to celebrate Luis Day. That's right, Luis has such a huge ego that he dedicated a day to himself. Anyway, most people would consider astronaut training if they wanted to visit space, but not Luis! No, he's going to propel himself into the heavens through the use of one giant elastic band.



Oh, and the the power of his own farts. hey, I'm a guy - I understand that farts are funny. But it seems like flatulence occupies way too much of the average Flash developers' minds. Luis powers his gaseous discharge by eating beans, because there's absolutely nothing stereotypical about a flatulent, bean eating Hispanic man.

I can't really write too much about the gameplay. It's pretty solid, using either the arrow or A and D keys to control Luis' movement and setting off farts with the left mouse button or space bar. And hey, that works perfectly fine.



What I don't understand is why Luis explodes in a mass of blood and bones every time he hits the ground, then reappears without a scratch on him. Does Luis possess advanced regenerative powers? Does he reincarnate? Are these merely Luis clones, forced by the original Luis to play this horrifying game of death? These questions are never answered.



There are, of course, upgrades you can purchase to make space flight a little easier (a Saturn V rocket is not among them.) My problem here is that everything costs exactly the same, whether it be a stronger rubber band or extra beans. Strategy goes out the window in cases like this, and to be honest there isn't a whole lot of strategy involved to begin with. Each level is technically a crap shoot where you might get a string of beans that send you sky high in one level, then barely any in the next.



I can't find any fault with the art, which is simple but effective, and it might raise a smile as you whiz past aliens and Superman through the power of your intestinal gases.



I've also got to admit that the ending appeals to my sense of humour. But again, this is too similar to the end of Hedgehog Launch, just like so much else in this game. Even the titles are almost the same! I know derivativeness makes the Flash game world go round, but you do have to draw the line somewhere. Use your influences, but don't ape them. Luis Launch isn't a bad game - maybe a little boring after a while, but by no means awful. Its problem is that a far superior game in this same vein already exists, and if they want to take that particular crown the developers are going to have to try harder.

Warriors

I was originally going to review a game that puts you in the cockpit of a Russian bomber and then asks you to apply the same skill required to fly the actual thing in order to play for more than ten seconds. But I've forgotten the name of it (if you know what it is, please do tell) so I've had to resort to plan B. Warriors is one of those games that straddles the middle ground of my own personal tastes - it's not awful, it's not great, it's a little weird and is overall largely irrelevant.

By the way, I know what you're thinking. This is either a Flash version of the Warriors video game, which itself was inspired by the Seventies cult classic movie, or - if the fantasy-style lettering of the title is anything to go by - some kind of medieval hack 'n' slash epic. But I'm afraid unless your answer was "A game about cats," you are greatly mistaken.



Yeah, that's right, cats. Why? God knows - I certainly didn't. But here's what I did learn from the instructions: each cat belongs to a different clan. Your goal is to go through each clan's territory and catch a certain amount of prey there before the timer runs out. Pressing down on the right arrow key will make you run faster, while pressing the up arrow key will naturally make you jump. While in the air, press the Space bar to attack and hopefully catch a tasty treat.

It's all very simple and it doesn't take a cat lover to get the hang of it. You get to decide what clan you want to join, though I doubt it really makes much of a difference. I went with the River Clan, because once you go black you never go back.



So here we are, running across the level, chasing down rabbits. It all looks pretty nice, though the animation is either clunky or non-existent. You have to hop over dogs who are out to maul your ass while also trying to grab rabbits from the air. This isn't very hard - as long as the prey is in your general area, you can catch it. What annoys me is how often these animals will wait until you're right on top of them before they make a move. Because they're so close, you can't react fast enough to catch them before they're gone, which can start to grate after the fifth or sixth time in a row.



Anyway, from there we move on to the next level, where you have to catch... frogs while avoiding... badgers.

What?

Why is the cat trying to catch frogs? Cats wouldn't want to eat frogs! And what did they do to piss off the badgers? Regardless, stay out of their way, because those little buggers are tough!



OK, fish. Yeah, I can understand fish. And trying to avoid rivers, since cats hate water. Sorry, I'm still trying to get my head around frogs and badgers. Those two things just don't go together!



The final level is the territory of the Thunder Clan, which reminded me of Thundercats. Man, I loved that show. I even had a Lion-O action figure with swiping action. That thing was badass! Pretty much the opposite of this game!

But at least I'm hunting birds, which means jumping is a necessity. The main enemies here are foxes, which I admit are probably the meanest of the bunch. But to be quite honest, no hazard is any more dangerous than the others. You have a five lives in every level and infinite continues, which is pretty nice of the developers. I think if you didn't have the option of continuing from your last level I'd hate this game a whole lot more.



As it stands, the game is somewhat boring, but with only four levels to play it doesn't outstay its welcome. There's no real reason to play Warriors, unless you really love cats or you really have to know what the point of a game like this is.

And, crazy as it may be to believe, there is a point. Warriors is an "advergame" (a new word I discovered today) designed to promote a series of books about several clans of wild cats and the numerous goings-on within their intricately-structured society. There are eighteen books, six Mangas, one "Deluxe Edition" and two guides.

As former pro wrestler Ron Simmons would say, "Damn!"

I Made This

It took me a couple of hours to finally decide on what game I should review this week. There were certainly a few potential candidates, but the problem was that I'd already reviewed games that were quite similar in the last month. I wanted something different, and in the end found a game more different than anything I could have imagined: I Made This, or to use its full title, I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies.



Consider the possibilities of a game with a title like that. Consider the artwork, both crude and wonderful at the same time, a mix up of sketches, collage and digital drawings. I Made This is an art game with a big capital (pretentious f)ART. The developer is either an idiot savant or a stone cold artistic genius, capable of making a game both utterly frustrating and totally alluring at the same time. Boil it down to basics and it's a platform game, but it's unlike any platform game you've ever played. Your character is some kind of wheel or ball or messed up eye - it's hard to tell because it blends so easily into the background. You roll around, jumping on platforms and collecting... things. Lots of things, off all shapes and sizes. And every time you do so, the screen goes BATSHIT INSANE!!!



Stuff just piles up on top of stuff, scouring demented images into your memory forever. And there are ten levels of this (or eleven; even the game itself isn't sure.)



Occasionally you get the opportunity to watch videos spread across the game - you know, just in case you were still able to deal with this bad acid trip in Flash form. I'm sure there's something being said here, but I'm not culturally tuned in to whatever that is. All I know is, the more I played the more I felt this would be the kind of thing Dick Cheney would like, because it causes pain and suffering to his fellow man.



Things just get more bizarre and more bizarre, though if the point of this game is to leave me asking profound philosophical questions it worked to a certain degree. The phrase "Why do I do this to myself?" crossed my mind more than once.

We're not even half way through when the tigers show up. We still have to pass through the level that promises "Death by Dalmatian!" - then delivers. And I haven't even mentioned the mid-game intermission, where the developer talks about his powerful ice cubes from Australia and adds credence to the "idiot savant" theory.



The second half actually plays a little more like a proper game and not just an excuse to prod your frontal lobe with a metaphorical ice pick. It's still crazy, of course, but at least the platform elements get to come out, for a few levels anyway.



The truth is, you'll probably have gotten used to the random imagery and ridiculous sound effects by this point, and if you can block them out and focus on the gameplay, you might actually enjoy yourself. Of course, you might also be in the middle of a total brain shutdown, but either way you won't care anymore.



I Made This has received a lot of bad feedback by the majority of online gamers. And while I know the point of this blog is to rant about terrible games... I just can't hate this. Part of me wants to hate it, but another part of me can't help but applaud anyone with the balls to make something this completely mental, then stand back and watch the sparks fly. And if nothing else, you can at least concede that it's different.

So, I Made This - strange. Scary. Weirdly compelling.

Butt-Ski Lift

What is wrong with you people?

I don't like to complain (lie) but this is really getting out of hand. Just when I think the internet can't throw any more stupid games at me, another one comes screaming ass first towards me, pummelling me with the audacity of its ridiculousness. Before I can write any more about Butt-Ski Lift I have to don my Grammar Nazi hat and trenchcoat and ask why exactly is that hyphen between the words "Butt" and "Ski"? I could understand ski-lift, but butt-ski? What does that mean? Am I going to strap a snowboard to each cheek and slip down the slopes, hoping that I don't suffer a nasty heat rash?



I'm going to try to explain the goal of Butt-Ski Lift, but don't get annoyed with me when this paragraph ends and you're still as dumbfounded as you were the very second you first saw the words "butt", "ski" and "lift" together in the same title. Skiing, as all but most of the quadriplegics among us know, is a lot of fun. But riding up the ski lift isn't.

Hold on a second - since when was riding twenty feet above the ground on a rickety park bench, held aloft by a corroded metal cable which has warped due to the extreme cold, not been fun?

But I digress. The only way to make a ski lift ride fun, apparently, is to get your pants stuck in the chair and dangle upside down, revealing your plump, dimpled arse cheeks for all the world to see. I'm not sure how risking frostbite in one of the most sensitive and important areas of my body is supposed to be fun, but I'll go along with it, just for this review.



At least they try not to make it too difficult. All you need to do is tap the Space bar at the right moment to jump, and if your timing is correct, you'll fly through the air with the greatest of ease, wind blowing through your pubic hair. However, mistiming your jump costs you points, so if you feel like you left it too late, you're better off not risking it and just waiting for the next chair.



And huzzah! Here I am, hanging from my ankles, two cheeks to the wind. Once you figure out the right moment to jump, though, there's no more challenge. All you can do at that point is score as often as you can and see what ranking you get at the end.



The first time I saw this, I thought it said "furries" and I said to myself, "God, when I thought this game couldn't get any stranger..." But I quickly realised that the ranking system has a snow theme, with blizzards doing better than flurries, and the Flash version of Mirror's Edge doing better at entertaining me than this game could ever hope to.

Because at the end of the day, all we're doing is repeating the same bum joke over and over again. Hey, naked butts were hilarious when I was ten. But I'm twenty-four now, and I expect far more sophisticated comedy, like a naked butt with a moustache, or something. Or a spaceship shaped like a naked butt. Or maybe-

Sorry, I went off-topic there. So, Butt-Ski Lift - pretty crap, but very short, so at least it won't take up all your time. And hey, at least it isn't a messed-up freak fest like Nuclear Fart Bear, so that's something.