By Alec Meer on May 26th, 2008 at 5:33 pm.
Already rendered fragile by a bank holiday weekend during which I didn’t leave the house once and only conversed with one other human being, this was quite probably the worst game I could have played. Found via TIGSource, it’s half art experiment, half game and all punishment. It’s a sequence of aesthetically torturous and fairly difficult mini-games, peppered with clashing colours, unforgiving controls and angular, metallic noises aimed dead-centre at the brain’s pain-spots.
That said, I haven’t in fact been beyond the opening GTA-esque bus-driving stage, in which the controls keep changing on me, cars spontaneously explode into rainbow-clouds of pain and collisions can randomly turn me around – and getting myself back on course is a horrific endeavour based mostly on chance. I actually hate it. I really, really hate it. But, at the same time, I also find it very funny. Really, it’s impossible not to have at least a little love for any game whose introduction involves the protagonist announcing he’s ‘drugged up on drugs’. Unfortunately, I now feel sick and tired and confused and I can’t hack it long enough to reach the other mini-games, though I hear they’re better. Is there a point to it? You tell me.
26/05/2008 at 17:54 Alex says:
I’m not telling..
26/05/2008 at 18:58 Greger says:
Thanks RPS! I played this game and… it made me very, very scared. Don’t play this game unless you find steering an octopus made of baby-bodyparts towards floating baby heads extremely amusing.
26/05/2008 at 19:11 Skurmedel says:
Kind of the feeling I have after a sluggish work day.
26/05/2008 at 19:21 Gurrah says:
Try to finish it, it’s definately worth it, and by worth it I mean you will go to bed with your head spinning around slightly and very, very confused – but in a good way.
26/05/2008 at 19:58 Nuyan says:
Awesome..
But I stopped playing after the clock through sky part, I already feel a head ache. Games aren’t worth head aches. (At least this one isn’t.)
26/05/2008 at 20:13 Okami says:
I.. my brain.. I’m sick now. I’ve got a headeache. I’m scared.
This is the first time a game has caused me physical discomfort.
26/05/2008 at 20:21 Oddbob says:
I dunno, did nothing for me at all. I found having the controls change nowt but a cheap trick, the mini games each trying far too hard to be weird and all that would be fine were it not so terminally boring to sit through.
It’s trying desperately hard to be odd, but fails for me simply *because* it tries so hard. I didn’t get a headache, didn’t get effected beyond just wanting my ten minutes I’d wasted back.
26/05/2008 at 20:34 Five says:
What..but..huh…what?
3rd level spoiler:
Trying to jump off baby faces towards those glowy things, but im not sure what im supposed to do with them.
26/05/2008 at 20:36 Ohle says:
My brain is dying, I think. I got past the tentacled-baby mini-game to where the title shows up again… is there more beyond that? Other than a pack of aspirin, that is.
26/05/2008 at 20:37 Okami says:
For the record: I’m still suffering from mild nausea. Thanks, Mr. Meer, thank you so much…
26/05/2008 at 20:52 Alec Meer says:
Me too, if it’s any consolation. I made the dread mistake of having another go at it.
26/05/2008 at 21:47 Sum0 says:
I am reminded of another game in the “batshit crazy” genre, but I can’t for the life of me remember the name. The graphical style was something along the lines of random MS Paint scribbles, the soundtrack was random noise, the controls were all over the shop but at its core the damn thing actually made some sense. Aarggh, wish I could remember…
26/05/2008 at 22:08 Al3xand3r says:
Clean Asia
27/05/2008 at 01:33 Ixtab says:
I feel slightly odd having sat and watched the pretty flashing lights at the end wondering if anything else was going to happen. But for the majority of it I found it fairly dull and not really that amusing. The bus driving bit, the sounds when you crash… I had the volume maybe a bit too high for that bit.
27/05/2008 at 01:55 Cycle says:
SPOILERS
Level 2: You’re Big Ben rocketing through clouds, smashing into satellites and such. It can make you a little dizzy when you occasionally spin uncontrollably.
Level 3: You’re jumping around a low gravity space station filled with floating baby heads, trying to jump on floating orbs around the station. Easier said than done, thanks to the environment, camera and gravity all out to disorientate you.
Level 4: You’re a mutated giant baby head with the eyes of God and mouths for tentacles. Dance music pumps furiously out of your speakers and the background, a cluster of colours, spins wildly and frantically as you hunt down other baby heads and destroy (DEVOUR? MERGE? FREE?) them.
Someone should make a video playthrough.
27/05/2008 at 02:01 Jonathan says:
Now, admittedly I’m not a regular flight sim player, Starwing and Crimson Skies is as far as I’ve gone, but the clock in space part is the best simulation of disorientation and nose dive terror I’ve ever played. I had no idea which way was up, I was vanishing into my own exhausts and losing control for a split second was death.
Apart from that section the game was just really annoying.
27/05/2008 at 13:31 El Stevo says:
The only reason you reported this is because you didn’t have to think of anything for the title of the post. Admit it.
31/05/2008 at 03:41 z says:
Quality.
03/06/2008 at 13:28 Fashigady says:
I enjoyed it, but maybe I’m just a masochist.