Many people are passionate about games. Last friday I posted an update in which I attacked any game title put in my path and even though I fully explained why I was doing this I received tons of angry e-mails. Fallout fans in particular seem to wish violence on anyone who dislikes anything about their beloved franchise and they have a lot of difficulty expressing themselves coherently. One reader from Russia invited me to "suck [his] legs moron", an insult so painful I hesitated to continue with the second part of my series. Others put a frightening (and pathetic) amount of effort into dissecting every single thing I said about every single game. For those people I have decided to forge ahead with part two of "Your Favorite Games Suck".

Absolute hellion Cramer tried to take me down with a one-two punch from Pacman and Mortal KombatFrighteningly putrid.Pacman was fun when it was the only game to play. Pacman was fun compared to Pong. Pacman was dull, almost shockingly repetitive, and had a vague concept that preempted any use of your imagination to improve on the extremely simplistic graphics.

Mortal Kombat was a choppy pornographic gore fest intended to appeal to teenage boys with more body weight devoted to testosterone production than control of their central nervous system. The only thing more pathetic than the popularity of Mortal Kombat was the bloodless SNES version born of Nintendo's petty morality play.

Not only did forum goon toby hit me with PC classic Quake, but he also stipulated that I could not mock it for being outdated compared to modern games.

As someone who actually did dislike Quake when it first came out I think I'm more than qualified to explain to you exactly how fucking bad it sucked. In fact, not only did I hate Quake, I hated both Quake II and III. I think the only enjoyment I ever received from the entirety of the Quake franchise was a single LAN game of Quake II that was fun because I WAS HIGH.

In my misguided youth I loved Doom, so reading that in lieu of Doom 3 they were making this game called "Quake" was a bit disappointing. Then I read that it would be a fantasy setting with realistic physics and magical axes I was intrigued. Then it came out and it was a pedestrian FPS game with uninspired and sometimes stupid weapons, an already-boring goth/industrial atmosphere, and OH WOW FULL 3D. Too bad the original Quake shouldn't have even bothered with 3D. Too bad it looked like shit AT THE TIME and left me wondering why Rise of the Triad looked about a thousand times better. By the time later installments came along 3D had caught on and had reached a point where it actually worked and looked good. Luckily other companies actually made decent games.

A little aside, after hating Quake and Quake II I downloaded the demo for Quake III when it first became available. On install it wouldn't load. I didn't even try to run it twice or reboot. I immediately uninstalled it because I fucking KNOW like I know that the earth circles the sun that Quake III was a dull and stupid piece of shit.

Pyros could hear the Imperial March playing when he requested Tie Fighter

What's this, another escort mission? HOORAY! Oh, look a capital ship I have to blow up surrounded by a mine field that constantly launches advanced missiles! That's a logical scenario to send one guy in an assault gunboat into, no wonder you fucking lost to the rebels Darth. Speaking of you Darth, I like your condescending radio comments to me even though I have blown up more ships than you've even seen. I could fucking wipe the floor with your piece of shit Tie-Magically-Unkillable in a fucking regular Tie Fighter if the stupid game would let me.

Letter switcher Dum Cumpster tried to put it in all holes with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade Game, Top Gear, and Excitebike

DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!
DUH, WHO PUT THE LIGHTS OUT?!

I FUCKING DID LEONARDO YOU STUPID COCKSUCKER.

I don't know what the fuck Top Gear is but I assume it's a shitty console racer, which I find about as fun a prospect as reading the dictionary underwater while piranha chew their way to my heart. Excitebike, on the other hand, is one of the most horridly disappointing games I've ever had the misfortune to play. I really had my mind fucking blown by spending an entire race watching my sluggish racer amble back to his overturned bike like he didn't have a care in the world. No, take your time dude, it's not like we have a chance to win anyway! And what's with all the unfinished tracks with gigantic deadly gaps? Did they decide to hold the annual "Walk Slowly Back to Overturned Bike" competition inside a half-finished stadium? Don't even get me started on the laughable track creator. Yay, I can finally realize my dream of putting a thousand speed strips and one hill. Then the fun is exhausted.

Tossed_Salad_Man had a soft spot in his bowl for Starcraft.

Also known as "The game of chess" in Korea, the only thing Starcraft brought to the table was another oddball female character for game nerds to jack off over. For the rest of us who don't spew every time they hear Kerrigan's voice Starcraft was a half-assed rip-off of other, better, science fiction with totally forgettable resource management and gameplay. What makes it an abomination is its continued popularity. Competitive players have boiled Starcraft down to its essentials, namely the joys of build orders, speed clicking, and many other rote memorizations that are about as attractive in a game as a severed penis in a cup of strawberry pudding.

Huck C. suggested I could not grapple with Full Throttle.

I blinked and missed the entirety of the game.

Not that brevity should really be a criticism of a game with a motorcycle combat simulation nearly as fun as having your save game corrupted in Vice City. But oh, the main character is a badass biker so the lame jokes, idiotic plot, and unfun-but-still-too-easy puzzles are completely forgiven. What are you fucking pussies afraid the guy is going to come kick your ass for admitting that this game was utter trash?

Meaning of Life likes Guilty Gear XX a bit too much.

Totally blows.Oh a brand new 2D fighter, how completely retro! I'm so amazed by the way they drawed pitchures and made them move around like magic. News break chumpchange, there are like 5 billion people in Japan who spend their entire lives drawing large breasted witches with guitars and women who fight with their hair. They have 50 volume sets of books devoted to dickgirls, so don't cop a turd on your futon when some game incorporates a cross dressing nun. It really isn't the coolest thing ever and getting all excited about it makes you look like an even bigger dumbass than you really are.

Zoctan felt that Lord British and the makers of Ultima 7 could do no wrong.

I'm sorry, I can't offer any criticism because my computer has never had and will never have enough extended memory for Ultima 7.

Closet pedophile an00bis suggested I try to insult Mary-Kate and Ashley Sweet 16 Licensed to Drive.

I am totally stumped. There is no way I could possibly say anything bad about "Olsen Twins Assembly Line Game Number 5,833".

WarMonger is in love with Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec.

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be trapped in a recursive time loop? Try playing one of the 200 lap races in Gran Turismo 3.

While extremely fun and intense, the 200 lap races aren't the real punch of GT3, that's definitely the license exams. I have spent countless joy-filled hours laughing with my friends as we shared the relaxing and liberating experience of passing all of the exams with an A rating. I honestly can't say enough good things about Polyphony and their decision to include such easy and breathtakingly fun license exams in their game.

Final Fantasy Tactics is pretty big around the Fight Test household.

When I first saw Final Fantasy Tactics sitting on the shelf I had just recently finished Final Fantasy 7 and thought to myself; "wow, those idiots thought they could get away with basing a whole game on that boring mountain defense mini-game in FF7". This perception of the game was incorrect, as I later learned no thanks to the Something Awful Forums. Somehow my sense completely escaped me and I went out and bought a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics based on the rave reviews of the games forum. Naturally as soon as I came to my senses I realized I might as well have burned money and then forced myself to stare at a wall for hours.

Final Fantasy Tactics is what a preschooler thinks war is like. The combat somehow manages to be even less realistic and entertaining than in previous Final Fantasy games. The characters are all one-dimensional archetypes in a plot as gripping as the latest Peanuts Comic in a setting as fascinating and believable as if it was conceived by Scientific Creationists. The game is ploddingly dull, the graphics are so childish that if someone sees you playing it you should probably feel ashamed, and the movie "Extreme Ops" has got nothing on the ridiculously serious storyline.

Montez is almost as into spearmen as he is Civilization II.

Eats shit.Finally, a game that takes spearmen seriously. I mean shit, I'm used to reading all these books and watching all these movies where spearmen aren't even in the same setting as tanks. Then Civ comes along and tells it like it is; an army of spearmen in a city can destroy a tank corps. Thank you for the incredible realism Sid Meier! Nothing immerses me in the reality of the game like watching two squares banging into each other. Nothing makes me believe in the genius that went into this title like seeing the square representing a sweaty mass of spearmen tearing apart a pile of attack helicopters. What did they fucking do jam their rotors with their corpses? Did they form together like Voltron and turn into a thousand foot tall spear and a huge robotic arm? Answer me Meier, you worthless sow!

Posting machine and idiot savant Kenspy thought I could find no flaw in Hero's Quest I.

Sierra single handedly championed and destroyed the genre of Adventure games. They championed them in that they popularized them by making a lot of them. They destroyed them in that every single adventure game Sierra has ever made has been a horrible piece of shit. I don't care whether it's the unfunny puns of Hero's quest or the even less funny puns of the beastly Roberta Williams' Kings Quest. All of the games suck.

Probably the "raddest" thing about the Hero's Quest titles was how you could die without any effort. They amounted to "painful demise" simulators where you got to see what creative and unlikely ways the title would murder your character and then you had to attempt to avoid each way after having perished. Who doesn't love trial and error gameplay?!

Plus it's another game with furries.

The_Cack took it easy on me with a request for Daikatana.

Daikatana is the kind of game you play in hell to relax after having red-hot javelins impaled through your genitals. It's intended to make you want to return to the agony pits the next day to have red-hot javelins impaled through your genitals.

If I wanted to kill a bunch of bugs and frogs with my trash-talking black friend I'd watch Reading Rainbow and spray Off at the butterfly in the sky.

The concisely named J suggested I explain what was wrong with Master of Orion 2.

The thing I think I enjoyed the most about Master of Orion 2 was playing it and suddenly have an ant-man fleet appear in my home system and having to sit there and shoot through 50,000 fighters with 4 advanced technology destroyers. The computer played like it had no goal other than to build as many spacecraft as possible with no regard to quality or strategy. "We have located the human system. Their technology is far more advanced" "Quickly, we must crush them with our 1 million tiny ships, Begin research on the second wave that will actually have weapons."

Diplomacy was also a joke. No matter how polite and how welcoming you were the other aliens always thought their empire of rusted scout vessels could conquer you. Then when it came time for the galactic United Nations to vote on supreme king they'd always pick some faggot who sat back and mined pumpkins for the entire game just because they didn't hate him for destroying their worthless fleets of conquest. Thanks for the nomination! I accept! Oh, wait, you picked Lord Pumpkin Farmer of Xanulax IV, well I'll just move a planet-killer into each of your home systems and let you talk things over with those.

Never a fan of less-is-more, forum poster erosion demanded I skewer Total Annihilation.

Cavedog's recipe for Brownies

  • Add one cup of chocolate
  • One cup flour
  • Two eggs
  • One cup sugar
  • A pinch of salt
Taste batter before baking. If it is not sweet enough just keep adding tons and tons of random ingredients until you confuse people into thinking your brownies are good.

With TA it's like Cavedog looked at the game, realized it was lackluster and said "hey, what we need are a shitload more random units with no respect to play balance or even usefulness of the units". Great, now I can play Starcraft with fifty slightly different tanks and a helicopter that flies around picking up blocks of metal and setting them down somewhere else. What a fantastic game!

Baldur's Gate 2 was frequently requested by locdogg among others on the forums and via e-mail.

I hate all of the Infinity Engine D&D games equally. The engine is stupid and totally unsuited for a "tactical RPG" where you're supposed to be stroking your beard and determining the best way to take a kobold's virginity with your magic missile. The fucking GOLD BOX D&D GAMES DID IT BETTER. Yeah, I was fighting a room full of 80 identical Beholders but the combat actually worked better. With the Infinity Engine games you've got a couple worthless magic users who cast one, maybe two, spells per combat while your mighty warriors flail confusingly at the enemy. Basically spell casters fill the role that they do in shitty MMORPGS like Everquest; they're just fighter buffing stations.

As for the plot who knows? It was so long and convoluted with so many "step 'n fetch-it" Fedex quests that I was half expecting to see racist statues of jockeys devoted to my party outside the bad guy's chamber of evil.

Twitch wanted to hear my opinion of Star Ocean 2.

Fucking sucks.Oh Jesus Christ. You know, prior to me writing for SA I had totally outgrown playing cutesy Japanese shit like Star Ocean 2. Then I start reading the games forum and you retards are always soiling your panties over the latest installment of one Japanese RPG or another. Guess what? They all fucking suck. Every single one of them, and the goddamn voice acting doesn't have anything to do with it. They're all the same, their stories are all equally devoid of any sense and intelligence, they almost all have shitty graphics, their protagonists are all fucking IDENTICAL. ENOUGH! I hope you people grow up some day and look back on how much you shot off in a Kleenex over Wild Arms 5 or whatever has you so wet and you just cry. You just slide down to the floor with your back against a wall and sob over the life you've thrown willingly into the garbage for apathetic profit committees in Japan.

Potus requested Deus Ex - runner up for the most requested game of all.

For a game with such a ridiculous plot it's pretty sad that it lacks even an ounce of humor beyond the unintentional laughs supplied by Tlacel Tong. I rike Tracer Tong, but the rest of the game can take a flying leap off a bridge. From the twists and turns of the story ripped directly off a Geocities conspiracy website, to the stupid missions you have to go on like "run into the base and stab people who are cutting up aliens" or "fumble around underwater because we needed an excuse for a boring and annoying underwater mission", I hate it all. I hate the stupid weapons, the skills, the cybernetics, it's all like a nerd enthusiastically describing "Neuromancer" to a girl he just met on the bus and then getting maced by her.

Scotty_Vicks attempted to blindside me with a request for the critically acclaimed Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord.

It takes skill these days to make a World War II game that isn't gulped up by the cow-eyed masses, and somehow Battlefront has succeeded. The battles in the game take place on a rectangular area floating above a single dull texture that's supposed to represent the surrounding region. The computer has the strategic planning of Wily Coyote and absolutely ignores obvious ambushes, fields of fire, and all of the other good stuff that makes it child's play to completely crush the computer opponent. There is absolutely no campaign game despite what the menu might trick you into believing, and the multiplayer is awkward in rare instances and more often completely dull.

At least Beyond Overlord didn't prepackage any scenarios that the engine simply could not handle like the hilariously inept Stalingrad scenario in Barbarossa to Berlin. On a 2.5 Ghz P4 the computer turn on that map takes upwards of TEN MINUTES to process. No exaggeration folks, ten fucking minutes of staring at a progress bar. AMAZING!!!

DLane offered up another heavily requested game by the name of Diablo II.

Horrid.About the only positive thing I have to say about Diablo II is that it's marginally better than the first Diablo. You're still exploring extremely limited areas of either wide open fields or maze-like dungeons populated with color-coded monsters that absolutely reek of "our sprite budget ran out of money". The combat boils down to pointing and clicking, meaning that the faster small monsters are inherently tougher than the large slow monsters. The inventory system is limiting shit that's even worse because your only place to store collected items is a chest that holds about as much as the third pocket on blue jeans. The companion AI is a spastic mess that likes to run off and open doors and then come running back to you with a train of monsters from halfway across the map. The save system is sub-console RPG in quality, probably because of the hideous online component of the game that somehow keeps idiots and the hopeless glued to their computer hoping to get a better "Meph Drop". The skill system is pathetic and encourages you to ignore the majority of skills completely. The magic system is basically non-existent.

Put simply, Diablo II is a fucking abomination.

JohnnyHildo requested my opinion on Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

The only surprising thing about Return to Castle Wolfenstein is that it somehow did not feature a female Nazi zombie in skin-tight vinyl with giant breasts. How id could develop a sequel to a game with a story as ridiculous as the original FPS Wolfenstein and make it completely devoid of humor is incomprehensible. The Wolfenstein franchise was begging for a giant zombie Hitler or Nazi blimps piloted by robot rocket men, instead we get Day of the Dead 1942 and a fagtastically self-serious evil Nazi magic plot. The enemy AI is scarier than the creatures, many of the missions are dumb and have nothing to do with the idiotic main story, your character is even more generic than he was in the first Wolfenstein, and the bosses make chaingun Hitler look like a stroke of mad genius.

Once you've enjoyed all of the fun you can have in the single player campaign by changing the screen resolution, changing it back, and then exiting back to the menu, you can play the multiplayer component! Amazingly id has released a grand total of ONE fun map, and foolishly released it prior to the game itself as a multiplayer demo. The rest of the maps are overly large, nonsensical, and unfun with obtuse victory objectives that frequently made me quit servers about thirty seconds into a round.

The second installment of the failed Freespace franchise gets a lot of love from ForbiddenWonder among others on the forums.

Freespace and Freespace 2 were both absolutely generic space flight sims. About the only concrete good thing I've ever heard anyone say in all of the irrationally slavish dicksucking posts about Freespace 2 is that the beam weapons look cool. Yeah, great beam weapons. Forget about the uninspired ship designs, the carbon copy plot, the one dimensional characters you'll grow to love about as much as the microscopic dust mite crawling on your eye, the obviously scripted missions, and the other missions that are just painful to complete. Yeah, but dude, the BEAAAAAAM WEAAAAAPONS.

EternallyWithin was a big fan of Halo.

Ooooooh, cars!Halo is hands down the best console first person shooter. In a wholly unrelated story Pete Douglas is hands down the best pants shitting retard in Cornly County.

Everything about the game says "dumbed down for console". As long as you are facing an enemy your gun hits them. You can only carry two weapons because finding a cycle button would be impossible on the monolithic Xbox controller. The joystick sensitivity is akin to the penis of a corpse that just had Novocain injected into it, possibly to prevent the slightest movement from flinging the view away from the enemies. Speaking of enemies there are about three different enemies in this game. The verisimilitude of miscreants you will face makes the anemic clutch of spacespawn in Unreal 2 look like the New Brooklyn Space Zoo.

Oh, but you can drive a futurejeep around! Whhheeeeee! All of the vehicles may handle like you're a drunk driver, but fuck, cars in a shooty game I think I done found Nirvana!

Basil Fawlty takes a break from hotel management to wonder what could possibly be wrong with Freelancer.

1998, Chris Roberts Rumpus Room

"Hey guys, let's make a new Privateer game"

"Awesome Chris, but we can't, we don't have the rights!"

"That's okay, we'll change little details and give it a different name, but the fans will know!"

"Okay, like what details?"

"Oh, I don't know, like everything that made Privateer fun. Yeah, let's take all of that out. The dynamic economy, the setting, hiring escorts, the freedom to spend as long as you want just flying around and doing shit, a reason to get better and better ships. Hell, I'm so high from huffing paint thinner I think we should just go ahead and have people control their ship with a mouse!"

"YOU TRULY ARE A VISIONARY."

Ysa considers himself something of a Rollercoaster Tycoon.

The most - no, the ONLY - fun to be had in Rollercoaster Tycoon is with designing coasters that kill the people riding it in an exciting or hilarious way. The rest of the game is a boring theme park management sim where you have to try to keep your patrons from puking too much and pissing their pants. It's like the Sims on a grand scale with a haunted house and bumper cars instead of a TV and a toy train. If you liked micro-managing the infantile sadsacks in the The Sims then you'll probably love Rollercoaster Tycoon. If, like me, you just enjoy sending the complaining bitches to a fiery grave then you can expect to have fun with this title for almost ten seconds.

KrYpTiC likes Pong and has an annoying name.

Beyond dull.Pong isn't a game, it's a screen malfunction attached to a controller.

Reader Keith McLeod suggested I take a long hard look at Battlefield: 1942.

Loading up Battlefield 1942's single player campaign you'll find a shitty throng of bots waiting to run around like a bunch of decapitated chickens, jump in and out of vehicles, manage to practically drive tanks in circles for no apparent reason, and generally be worthless. If you can't breeze through the single player campaign in about 4 hours then you should probably uninstall the game because you're going to get slaughtered by the experts online. The ONLY thing the computer is good at is bombing with aircraft, and for some reason it is incredibly good at that. I have been in sniping position before and have had the computer drop bombs ON MY SCOPE.

Once you've had your fill of butchering the AI it's time to patch the game about ten times and fire up the internal server browser. Get ready for a wonderful experience of more time spent watching the game loading than actually playing, repeatedly getting disconnected from servers for no apparent reason, and inadvertently jumping into friendly fire servers where your team mates run around team-killing like ingrates. If the capricious gods of Battlefield 1942 have blessed you, you might stay connected to a server for long enough to play three or four rounds of a game. During this time you will see players plane camping, players destroying their own team's planes with tanks and rockets, idiots unable to even take off of an aircraft carrier, jackasses who stop moving to fire with a tank, and a shitload of medics who only picked the medic class so they could heal themselves.

War is hell.

CBM Prez, Ronnie Cummings, and several other readers suggested I gear up for a frontal assault on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Stunningly bad.Star Wars: Sensitivity Training of the Old Republic is a moral crisis simulator for liberals. You are presented with encounter after encounter where it is your job to solve the crisis by using "The Force" (aka liberalism) or "killing them" (aka conservativism). Naturally the game doesn't present you with any realistic conservative options because it's yet more propaganda from the liberal media. You'll encounter some kids picking on an alien and your only options will be something like "hey you guys Fgnurd are people too, now leave him alone or I'm calling your mom" and "alien scum, prepare to die." There's no compassionate conservative option like "back off kids, let me take him back to Fgnurdia where he belongs." Instead the conservatives are castigated as the "Dark Side", a bunch of evil warlike bullies waging a (justifiable) war against the corrupt leadership of the communist Jedi Council.

Fifthace literally dared me to make fun of Goldeneye. I think someone owes me a Coke.

I fucking love whiny Nintendo fan boys who dry hump Goldeneye and then turn around and act like Halo is shitty or bitch about the controls. Goldeneye was fucking WORTHLESS. The hideous Nintendo64 controller afforded the first person shooter experience of trying to remote control a drunkard using a handful of knives. The enemy AI was fucking worthless, coming at you in bumbling (not to mention sometimes respawning) swarms. Multiplayer was choppy and hard to see on anything but a wall-sized screen, with colors blending together into a blurry clump that made shooting an opponent at anything other than point blank range impossible.

I could not play Goldeneye for more than five minutes without nearly going blind from eyestrain. The N64 was an awful console to try to introduce the world to 3D FPS games. The controller was, as mentioned, a painful contraption designed by hateful cave midgets in Japan with all of the fine tuning of a Ford escort that's been sitting in the rain for 10 years. The processor lacked the ability to do 4-player split screen regardless of what any number of entertainment starved idiots will tell you. And the graphics were passable in singleplayer and a sad mess in multiplayer.

Schmendrick and others on the forums encouraged me to buy F-Zero GX. They get my review in return.

Super cuntastic.I watched the videos, I looked at the screenshots, and for some reason my common sense didn't kick in and I thought to myself "hey, Nintendo can't produce JUST idiotic and juvenile games. A futuristic racer has a pretty good shot of escaping the Nintendo curse and hell, the graphics look amazing."

I was completely wrong on every count and more. I bought F-Zero and to date I have played about fifteen races and I doubt I will ever play more. Every single character in the game makes me want to rip my Gamecube out of the TV stand and hurl it out a window followed closely by saliva and curses. They're not just dumb, they make me feel literally gay. Like they're sapping my heterosexuality every time they appear on screen.

The characters aside the screenshots and videos LIE. The graphics are not good, they fucking suck. A bunch of Gee-Whiz neon signs and flashing lights totally fail to hide the low quality textures of the tracks and the fact that you're driving at a billion miles an hour doesn't conceal the fucking HORRID car models. They are seriously maybe 100 polygons each, and the textures are beyond bland. Modding your cars requires you to unlock about five billion components by completing hideously unfun race circuits.

Did I mention that the core of the game - the racing itself - is unbelievably bad? No? Let me count the ways.

1) You are racing against about 100 cars that all look identical when you're driving fast. The only time you ever even notice a distinction among them is if there's a red arrow telling you to kill one.

2) The attacks in the game are worthless and stupid. Yeah, let me spin really fast in the middle of a race. Watch me never even make contact with anything other than a wall.

3) You win races based entirely on boosting and hitting speed strips. Every single opponent is racing "best path" without ever fucking up or slamming into a wall. You on the other hand spend 9/10ths of the game with sparks shooting out of the side of your car closest to a wall and then rely on boosting and speed strips rather than anything approximating skill to win each race.

Now let me go into the games forum and share my disappointment with - oh wait, what's this?! THEY ALL LOVE IT! What a surprise, five hundred idiots are all licking Nintendo's greasy asshole over another total shitbox of a title. WELL I FUCKING NEVER.

Finally, the single most requested game on both the forums and via e-mail was Xenogears.

Curse Japan.Xenogears is the hip new underground band that people start liking when their predecessor "sells out" to the public. When Final Fantasy 7 became main stream all of the trendy game nerds flocked to Xenogears like each copy came with free Sailor Moon pillows and Doritos. It didn't hurt that the game was framed around enough anime to titillate the least greasy fan boy in the bunch and featured the perennial nerd-staple of giant battle robots.

The story was simultaneously confusing, boring, and idiotic, a trifecta of storytelling that would be a footnote if the game didn't revolve so heavily around the painfully dull plot. The combat was exactly what you would expect from an RPG made by Squaresoft, which is to say it was unrealistic, slow-moving, and about as enjoyable as painting your legs blue with a metal whip. The graphics were above average for the Playstation but still exhibited the same chunky and under-detailed 3D graphics we all know and love from many CD-generation Square games as well as horribly pixellated sprites.

The game really strutted its stuff on the second disc, where the developer's budget ran dry and they were forced to recount literally thousands of words of story through text bubbles. If you thought the second disc of Xenogears was good then you should probably punch cops on the street until some judge somewhere agrees to have you sterilized.

If you feel your blood boiling with rage after reading any part of this update I encourage you to e-mail me and let me know just how angry you are. If you're mad because I didn't get around to explaining why your favorite game is utter shit then I suggest you to direct all of your e-mails here, so that Livestock can read them and carefully reply to each.

Radiohead Fans, Prepare to Get Angry

It is my honor to introduce Something Awful's new resident music critic Dr. David Thorpe. Dr. Thorpe has a long and illustrious career teaching music culture or something at some college in New York, I don't know, I don't keep track of our writer's biographies. Wherever we found him begging for change he's now here to put the torch to the feet of every musician under the sun with his new column Your Band Sucks.



Kid A and Amnesiac replaced the inarticulate poetry and weird-for-the-sake-of-weird musicianship of OK Computer with a brand of synthesized rambling usually associated with the crazy, bearded, compulsively-masturbating auteurs of “IDM,” which is an imaginary sub-genre of electronic music (the "I" stands for "Intelligent" which stands for "pretentious and meaningless"). One would think that such wild-eyed, obstreperous garbage would have no choice but to be interesting, but Radiohead once again defied expectations by making the albums as boring as a tea-party with grandma. Not even your own grandma, with whom you had an emotional connection. This was like a tea party with your neighbor’s grandma. The decidedly lukewarm reaction from the music press only added to the die-hard fans’ mistaken impression that these albums were deep and mysterious.

I suggest you go and read this column immediately. Your music education may depend on it!

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)

More Front Page News

This Week on Something Awful...

  • Pardon Our Dust

    Pardon Our Dust

    Something Awful is in the process of changing hands to a new owner. In the meantime we're pausing all updates and halting production on our propaganda comic partnership with Northrop Grumman.

  • DEAR FURRIES: WE WERE WRONG

    DEAR FURRIES: WE WERE WRONG

    Dear god this was an embarrassment to not only this site, but to all mankind

Copyright ©2024 Jeffrey "of" YOSPOS & Something Awful