Back in 2016, I played Nora Reed's Twine "Game" for my ongoing Kiwi Farms vidya review series. It was bad. It was very bad, in fact, to the point where I had to play a Touhou Fangame and pretend that was the game I had actually played, such was the game's complete incapacity to be entertaining. By all accounts, it was nothing more than a Powerpoint presentation done in Twine, worthwhile as nothing but a deranged bit of insight into Nora Reed's warped psyche.
At the time, I considered it the single worst game to grace JPATG, since while many other games I covered were outright shit, most of them were at least trying to accomplish something with the medium of interactive entertainment. ReGiCiDe may have been the most agonizing experience I've had to sit through for the series thus far, but at least there was a game under it. Depression Quest may have been an experience I liken to smashing my head repeatedly into my desk but at least it had some options to explore.
For a solid 2 years, Nora's shitty game was the front-runner, the worst game I'd covered, and I was fairly certain that such would remain the case until hyper-sentient mole crabs conquered the Earth and put everyone with a hypenated name to the sword. "Surely," I thought to myself, "If someone were to try to outdo Nora, they would fail, because surely, that shit is madness."
....I need to learn to stop opening myself up to that shit. @Wärring Ornac linked me to a work by infamously corrupt game journalist Laura Kate Dale, who apparently decided that she was going to not only outdo Nora, but slingshot past her hard - not only creating something less interactive, and using an engine dozens of times more powerful to do so, but having the balls to fucking charge money for this shit. You fucking wish I was kidding.
Let's begin.
This is your main game screen. This "game" is programmed in fucking Unity. With art assets that make Hackers vs Banksters and I Get This Call Every Day look like fucking masterclasses in art design, this is what you will be looking at for this entire affair.
With the game started, I wound up staring at this for several minutes, as no controls seemed to do anything. Couldn't move, couldn't do anything despite the game having controls you could customize in the options menu. Finally, after several moments of fucking around, I discovered that the game typed a single letter on the keyboard - at a one-to-one rate - every time I pressed something. Meaning I had to spam the keys to get through this. Here we fucking go.
Right out the gate, LKD decides to show both self awareness and a complete lack thereof, making fun of individuals who actually put creativity and care into their game reviews and ultimately coming across as infinitely more pretentious than some dipshit asshat like me could ever hope to be. This is going to get worse as things go on, of course, so let's hit the Enter key a few hundred more times and get on with the next screen.
Again, with showing some self-awareness, yet none at all, LKD bitches about FPS games being too male-dominated and dominated by whites, while simultaneously forgetting that games have had both minority and female protagonists for a long-as-fuck time, even in the FPS genre. She chooses to do this, of course, with this fucking Unity-powered abortion of a linear experience with zero interactivity, and it's only halfway through the second paragraph of this screen that I choose to note, with some dismay, that this cancerous gallbladder has managed to disable most of Unity's shortcut keybindings to prevent you from quitting out or skipping text.
That's a good sign.
With a third page showing that LKD is entirely representative of what she hates about video game reviewing, she thenm proceeds to bitch about this hypothetical game's short length, and then make some kind of argument in favor of ludonarrative dissonance, I think, which would probably ring more true if LKD showed any actual thought going into this whatsoever instead of using this to take pot-shots at her profession and the likes of Call of Duty alike.
A few hundred more key presses later, and we're on the next page.
More potshots at anyone stupid enough to hire this troon, and if she writes like this for them it's no wonder she writes for fucking Kotaku, the same website that posted an article involving Luke Plunkett fantasizing about Donald Trump's penis. I wonder of Kotaku is aware of the level of seething fucking contempt she shows for her own employers in this article, or the tacit admission that her publication is openly corrupt and guilty of collusion?
Probably not, she's not shown any self-awareness thus far.
RENDER THIS EXISTENCE FALLIBLE.
The joke was never funny and I want this fucking thing to end. You're making me miss the dulcet narrative capabilities of James Corbett, LKD. Fucking where are you even going with this?
All right, so let's break this down. LKD complains about sequels overdone ideas, and incrementalization, again, all shots at Call of Duty. Apparently LKD was just unable to press F to pay respects.
Finally, after fucking 300 more enter key presses, this thing fucking wraps up with the same sort of idiotic bullshit that shows LKD has no idea why people were critical of her coverage and that of her buddies in the first place. After more of this shit and bitching about gamer culture and blastback with the same lack of self-awareness, the thing just unceremoniously ends.
That was five minutes of "gameplay" and I feel like I've been up for three days.
Look, Kiwis, I'll give it to you straight. Gaming is an interactive medium. I've made this clear a few times, covering shit for JPATG, but I'll repeat it for the sake of newcomers: If you don't take advantage, you are, by definition, doing it wrong. If you make a video game without interactivity, you are stripping out the single most important element a video game offers, which is why works like Nora's Patriarchy Simulator 2000, and now, this fucking thing dominate my worst games list.
And the irony is: They really aren't games. They aren't entertaining, they aren't clever, and they aren't at all interactive. They're completely linear storytelling apparatuses. Do you know what also is?
These fucking things. Except making a successful one of those would take actual fucking effort and not let you fap yourself raw over how cool and nonconformist you are for using an insanely powerful engine to create a shitty, non-interactive powerpoint presentation. That someone had the fucking audacity to not only make this, not only bash their employers in it, but to try to fucking charge for it is the work of someone completely divorced from even pretending to give a single, solitary fuck about anyone but themselves.
Nora's game was shit, but there was a core of genuine suffering in it - and at least Nora was trying to tell her own tale in it. This fucking thing is so much more cynical, so much more egomaniacal, and so much more fucking hubristic that it makes Nora's previous shithead masterpiece seem subdued by contrast.
In conclusion, LKD is an untalented hack who makes every single other slipshod hack covered by JPATG look better in contrast. Nora? Kimberly Crawley? From Fire Games? Mark Boyd? Hold your heads high, because as fucking gigantic as your egoes were, you have fucking nothing on Laura Kate Dale.
At the time, I considered it the single worst game to grace JPATG, since while many other games I covered were outright shit, most of them were at least trying to accomplish something with the medium of interactive entertainment. ReGiCiDe may have been the most agonizing experience I've had to sit through for the series thus far, but at least there was a game under it. Depression Quest may have been an experience I liken to smashing my head repeatedly into my desk but at least it had some options to explore.
For a solid 2 years, Nora's shitty game was the front-runner, the worst game I'd covered, and I was fairly certain that such would remain the case until hyper-sentient mole crabs conquered the Earth and put everyone with a hypenated name to the sword. "Surely," I thought to myself, "If someone were to try to outdo Nora, they would fail, because surely, that shit is madness."
....I need to learn to stop opening myself up to that shit. @Wärring Ornac linked me to a work by infamously corrupt game journalist Laura Kate Dale, who apparently decided that she was going to not only outdo Nora, but slingshot past her hard - not only creating something less interactive, and using an engine dozens of times more powerful to do so, but having the balls to fucking charge money for this shit. You fucking wish I was kidding.
Let's begin.
This is your main game screen. This "game" is programmed in fucking Unity. With art assets that make Hackers vs Banksters and I Get This Call Every Day look like fucking masterclasses in art design, this is what you will be looking at for this entire affair.
With the game started, I wound up staring at this for several minutes, as no controls seemed to do anything. Couldn't move, couldn't do anything despite the game having controls you could customize in the options menu. Finally, after several moments of fucking around, I discovered that the game typed a single letter on the keyboard - at a one-to-one rate - every time I pressed something. Meaning I had to spam the keys to get through this. Here we fucking go.
Right out the gate, LKD decides to show both self awareness and a complete lack thereof, making fun of individuals who actually put creativity and care into their game reviews and ultimately coming across as infinitely more pretentious than some dipshit asshat like me could ever hope to be. This is going to get worse as things go on, of course, so let's hit the Enter key a few hundred more times and get on with the next screen.
Again, with showing some self-awareness, yet none at all, LKD bitches about FPS games being too male-dominated and dominated by whites, while simultaneously forgetting that games have had both minority and female protagonists for a long-as-fuck time, even in the FPS genre. She chooses to do this, of course, with this fucking Unity-powered abortion of a linear experience with zero interactivity, and it's only halfway through the second paragraph of this screen that I choose to note, with some dismay, that this cancerous gallbladder has managed to disable most of Unity's shortcut keybindings to prevent you from quitting out or skipping text.
That's a good sign.
With a third page showing that LKD is entirely representative of what she hates about video game reviewing, she thenm proceeds to bitch about this hypothetical game's short length, and then make some kind of argument in favor of ludonarrative dissonance, I think, which would probably ring more true if LKD showed any actual thought going into this whatsoever instead of using this to take pot-shots at her profession and the likes of Call of Duty alike.
A few hundred more key presses later, and we're on the next page.
More potshots at anyone stupid enough to hire this troon, and if she writes like this for them it's no wonder she writes for fucking Kotaku, the same website that posted an article involving Luke Plunkett fantasizing about Donald Trump's penis. I wonder of Kotaku is aware of the level of seething fucking contempt she shows for her own employers in this article, or the tacit admission that her publication is openly corrupt and guilty of collusion?
Probably not, she's not shown any self-awareness thus far.
RENDER THIS EXISTENCE FALLIBLE.
The joke was never funny and I want this fucking thing to end. You're making me miss the dulcet narrative capabilities of James Corbett, LKD. Fucking where are you even going with this?
All right, so let's break this down. LKD complains about sequels overdone ideas, and incrementalization, again, all shots at Call of Duty. Apparently LKD was just unable to press F to pay respects.
Finally, after fucking 300 more enter key presses, this thing fucking wraps up with the same sort of idiotic bullshit that shows LKD has no idea why people were critical of her coverage and that of her buddies in the first place. After more of this shit and bitching about gamer culture and blastback with the same lack of self-awareness, the thing just unceremoniously ends.
That was five minutes of "gameplay" and I feel like I've been up for three days.
Look, Kiwis, I'll give it to you straight. Gaming is an interactive medium. I've made this clear a few times, covering shit for JPATG, but I'll repeat it for the sake of newcomers: If you don't take advantage, you are, by definition, doing it wrong. If you make a video game without interactivity, you are stripping out the single most important element a video game offers, which is why works like Nora's Patriarchy Simulator 2000, and now, this fucking thing dominate my worst games list.
And the irony is: They really aren't games. They aren't entertaining, they aren't clever, and they aren't at all interactive. They're completely linear storytelling apparatuses. Do you know what also is?
These fucking things. Except making a successful one of those would take actual fucking effort and not let you fap yourself raw over how cool and nonconformist you are for using an insanely powerful engine to create a shitty, non-interactive powerpoint presentation. That someone had the fucking audacity to not only make this, not only bash their employers in it, but to try to fucking charge for it is the work of someone completely divorced from even pretending to give a single, solitary fuck about anyone but themselves.
Nora's game was shit, but there was a core of genuine suffering in it - and at least Nora was trying to tell her own tale in it. This fucking thing is so much more cynical, so much more egomaniacal, and so much more fucking hubristic that it makes Nora's previous shithead masterpiece seem subdued by contrast.
In conclusion, LKD is an untalented hack who makes every single other slipshod hack covered by JPATG look better in contrast. Nora? Kimberly Crawley? From Fire Games? Mark Boyd? Hold your heads high, because as fucking gigantic as your egoes were, you have fucking nothing on Laura Kate Dale.
