Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Politics: First Person non-Shooter, from the Brady Bunch..

The bedwetters at The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence have launched their *ahem* way cool online FP(n)S game to teach kids that guns are bad, h'mkay?

This cutting edge video game, with its hip and in-touch text and edgy graphics, was obviously designed by socially maladroit types, who left it oozing with an odd mix of Leave It To Beaver-type obsequiousness towards adults not seen in real kids in living memory, and a gawky attempt at modern coolness: By making "right decisions" every time you are confronted with a gun in the story, you get a token to use in the virtual video games at the mall. Said virtual video games compare unfavorably with Pong in the entertainment and sophistication departments, which is a sad way to reward the few kids (or masochistic bloggers) with attention spans long enough to slog through all the improbable situations it takes to get to the arcade in the first place.

At least they didn't force my first-person avatar to be some faintly-homoerotic, square-jawed guy with a craggy chin and Polish surname. Oh, no, I got to pick from a whole rainbow of little boy and girl homunculi (none of which had blond hair and blue eyes, so I couldn't actually pick one that looked like me.) I went to virtual school, finked on my virtual friend Juan for the gun in his locker (young Juan was, oddly, chided for his heater by the principal, rather than being proned out by a SWAT team), wandered to the mall to meet my differently-abled friend, where we found a gun and properly alerted the nearest Mall Ninja. For making these two "Correct Decisions", I got to play two video games so dull they made me wish we hadn't forked over the gun to the rent-a-cop so I could turn it on myself.

The absolute best part? The Brady Center has wasted all this time and effort on this corny game to teach kids Three Things to Do when they see a gun. Can you guess what those three things are? That's right: Stop, don't touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult. Where have we heard that before? Well, I suppose that, when trying to come up with gun safety instructions for kids, one could do worse than ripping them off from someone who knows about guns.

Anyway, my verdict? This is positively the dumbest, most tedious video game since Sierra's mega-flop, Outpost. Anybody who thinks that the kiddies are going to tear their eyes away from Halo, Medal of Honor, or Day of Defeat long enough to listen to this drek should have their cranium examined to make sure it still contains anything.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes yes, thank you for mentioning Outpost. I had managed to forget it, but you managed to open up THAT wound and pour salt on it...

I know it's sad that the only thing I came away from the post with was a renewed hatred for that abomination of a game.

*shudders*

-Paul Simer

Tam said...

Talk about wounds:

I bought two more megs of RAM, my first CD-ROM drive, and installed Winders 3.0 on my 486SX just so I could...

...not play Outpost.

If anybody from the design team from that game ever goes missing in the next couple of decades, I'll be number one with a bullet on the suspect list.

Anonymous said...

I kept grabbing the guns... [sighs] I think I lost. Oh well, I named my character Glock 21 just for fun. [smiles]

Anonymous said...

Actually... WHERE DOES THIS KID LIVE? I mean, how can I get into that neighaborhood? Everyone who lives around him seems to have a gun and is offering it to him, I mean... what on earth? That sounds great!

Anonymous said...

I feel dirty just having had that program running on my machine.

Time for a bit of CounterStrike, I think.

NotClauswitz said...

Stop, don't touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult. Hey??? Do ya think the Eddie-Eagle might have grounds for a cease-and-desist or copyright-infringement suit against them there? :-) Kewl!