Time for more fun with awful videogames courtesy of me.
A game so awful, so absolutely horrible, that none have played it, and lived to tell the tale.
Actually, noone's played it, cuz it seems it finally got cancelled, thereby preventing me from fulfilling my lifelong dream of murdering my family in response to this clear evidence that Satan indeed existed, and was working for Sega.
Picture it, if you will. I was miserably happily going through my first year of highschool. You all, were not. Or most of you. Hell, I don't know when you went to highschool, so just shut up, I wasn't talking to you. Between dates I had some time to fill, and rather than actually do any assigned work, I turned to videogames.
Despite appearances to the contrary, this box does not, in fact, exist.
Sega, in their genius, realized that a 64-colour game system clearly needed more space than was available in ROM form, on account of the huge amount of storage space needed to store "Black" or "Black #2" or "Black #2 horribly dithered with Black". Besides, being the visionaries that they've always been, Sega could see the writing on the wall. New technologies were coming down the pipe that would forever transform the videogaming experience. No, not the Interactor ("You too can look like an absolute fuckwit and have your ass handed to you Street Fighter because this is the absolute worst controller that will ever be invented -- at least until the XBox ships") but the one great technology that still completely dominates videogames now, and will forever.
64-colour, 15fps, 180*150 pixel FULL MOTION VIDEO.1
I can think of at least three and a half million people who Absolute Entertainment should have made videogames about before these two.
So, being the lonely, pathetic, snivelling worm popular guy that I was, I dreamed of the amazing possibilities of this new medium. I could play games where I didn't actually have any say in how things went! I could splice random footage of completely INSANE CRAP together, and set it all to Kris Kross tracks! I could waste $300 I didn't have on an expansion for a dying system that was almost certainly going to fail! So instead I got laid and stoned read about it instead.
Now, few would argue that more than a handful of not-horrible games came out for SegaCD. Lunar was one of them. Lunar 2 was the other one.
But I'm not here to mock good games. I'm here to mock the oh-so-much-more-fun-to-mock bad games. And though the Kris Kross, C&C Music Factory and (Sweet god why are they on this list?) Depeche Mode 'video editor' 'games' weren't 'fun', they aren't the target of ridicule today.
No sir, today I'm going to make fun of Penn & Teller: Smoke and Mirrors.
The premise of the game, as far as I've been able to determine, was to make you never want to play a game again. Consisting of nothing more than a series of mini-games, each sounded more painful than the last. There was a crappy platformer. With "actual voice samples of Penn & Teller". Actual...voice...samples...of Penn...and Teller? Now, I'll admit to being a Penn & Teller fan...readily and willingly. But I don't want to hear Penn grunt every time I jump over a rat (after all, this was at a time when every game had rats in it)...and if I'm playing as Teller...
HOW CAN A GAME HAVE ACTUAL VOICE SAMPLES OF A MUTE????? FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, WHO IS FACED WITH A NEW TECHNOLOGY LIKE DIGITAL AUDIO SAMPLING AND RUNS OUT TO SIGN A DEAL WITH A GODDAMNED MUTE? Did Rick Dyer, faced with the possibilities of LaserDiscs, rush out and make a text adventure?
One particular mini-game sounded especially painful.
The Bus.
Google decided that this picture pertained to my search for Penn & Teller. Luckily these Kitties were ADOPTED, not ABORTED, which was how I first read it.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to drive a bus from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. On a completely and utterly straight highway. Through a desert. With no scenery. And the same telephone poles 'scrolling' past every 80 feet. And it actually takes 6 hours to make this drive. And just to make sure noone got smart and just taped down the B button, the bus ever so slightly veered to the right. So you'd have to correct the steering every minute or two. And the big pay off for this misery? At some random time (Say, 4 hours, 37 minutes into the drive) a bug splattered on the screen. And when you reached Vegas, it said "You drove to Vegas".
Now, this is all what I've been able to gather from previews I read way back when. The game never actually came out (or at least it seems that way). But since it's now quite late, and I'm out of sad tales of my first year of highschool (at least for now) and it's cold in my room, and I'm tired, and this sentence is running on forever, and it started with the word but, and I forget why that's wrong grammatically, but I do know that it is wrong, just like if it had started with because, and my feet are itchy, and my eyes are dry, and i'm not a happy camper, and i'm worried that I might accidently end this run-on sentence with a preposition, because noone ever really taught me grammar, or whatever prepositions are, so it's hard to avoid using them, just like it's hard to avoid using pot when everyone tells you how great oregano is to smoke, only you don't know what oregano is, and so for all those reasons I think I'll end this awful article.
