It IS Supposed to Be Stick Dudes

Imagine you regularly visit a gaming portal where other people post their home-made video games for the world to rate. You’ve been doing these reviews for a while, and have even contributed to getting some really pathetic games kicked off of the site (a.k.a. “blammed”).

One day, you stumble across an RPG game that has a moderate score, so you decide to check it out. Turns out that the game is absolutely pathetic. The controls don’t let you do much, the progression of the game is pedestrian, and yet many people give it a high rating.

You can’t understand why, so you decide to expend the effort to give this so-called “game” a bad review. The unsuspecting should be forewarned.

But, people object to your review. In fact, people start to ridicule your review.

On the defensive, you add to your review. Perhaps people just don’t realize the extent of the problems with this game, and if they had more detail they would appreciate the review more.

To your surprise, the negative reaction gets more vehement. Partly it’s your spelling, but mostly its your observations of the game.

And then it hits you.

The game is a joke. It was designed to be pedestrian and silly and really easy. The game sums up the similar gameplay points from several different role-playing games—the kinds of things most RPG players would recognize—and presents them as an easy, tutorial-style gameplay; just press the spacebar to advance through each step of the game.

So what do you do?

You remove your review and crawl away with your tail between your legs, hoping that will be the end of it.

Only the mockery doesn’t stop there. The key voice actor in the game has already copied your review and performed a dramatic reading, including mispronunciations of each of your misspelled words!

And then, a year later, some enterprising individual takes that dramatic reading, and the original text of the review, and produces a flash typography animation of the review’s text with the voiceover. And it becomes a YouTube hit!

So what do you do, then?

Add to the rant-fest? Try to clear your name? Curl up in everlasting shame and give up writing game reviews for the rest of eternity?

No, you watch the video. Laugh. And then write a gracious, forgiving, albeit spelling-challenged review of the animated text.

Classy.

Yes, I’m talking about axman13 over at www.newgrounds.com. First, you should play the “Super PSTW Action RPG” game (otherwise some of axman13’s comments do not make sense). You might even read the author’s comments just below and to the right, but you do not need to in order to appreciate the game. Second, watch the animated typography flash. (Be careful. It is addictive.) Finally, you should read axman13’s gracious review.

Note: Other than repeating one small sentence and skipping a separate sentence—for dramatic effect—there is one mistake in the voiceover, and consequently in the typography animation; a spelling error was not read correctly. The original review’s text is available in the author’s comments below the flash video, and also on YouTube (expand the description below the video).