Whatever the review scores say (I haven’t played the game or read any reviews yet), I have to give THQ some major points for their interesting choice in promotions/publicity stunts/giveaways for Red Faction Guerilla. If you’d been strolling the streets of London yesterday you might have seen a car being pounded on by strangers with a sledgehammer.
This wasn’t a case of revenge, random violence or vandalism; THQ had taken a rather odd event most often used for a fundraiser at state fairs and utilized it to promote their newest game. Usually whoever’s running the ‘car smash’ charges a few bucks for a few whacks at the vehicle, but this time taking out your aggression on the automobile was more than free; it was profitable. Inside the car were over a hundred copies of Red Faction Guerilla. Folks at THQ said it was an ‘experiment’ to see how many people would stop in the middle of their day to wail on a car in order to get a free copy of the game, inspired by the game’s incredibly realistic destruction engine. They also get kudos for taking the car in for recycling after the conclusion of the event.
If you liked all those little casual cake baking and waitressing games, then you might just enjoy Gazzoline from the folks at Addicting Games. Now you too can see just how badly the service industry sucks for yourself by waiting on idiots who want way too much too fast, dealing with drive-offs and trying to fit three sports cars at the one sports car pump.
Gazzoline is exactly like those other games–click on the pump to start it, click on the gas station hot dog someone’s feeling suicidal enough to eat (seriously, who eats gas station food unless they have to? Are there no McDonalds around? That’s at least supposed to serve food.), click on the car to bring the item to it, take the money, repeat until your index finger falls off.
It’s fast–maybe a little TOO fast–and it’s also a quick, engaging little play. You’ll have to survive ten days as a gas station jock in a station where people are really impatient, and you’ll discover that you can get pretty annoyed with customers really quickly. This is, of course, nothing new to anyone who’s actually worked retail (served five years in a video store, thank you very much), but just in case you’d like a lesson in how the other half works, then you’ll get it fairly nicely from Gazzoline. Otherwise, spare yourself the misery of reliving your part-time summer job.
One of the great things about writing game reviews is the opportunity to find those little known items that you can play for free. One such item comes by way of Newgrounds, and it’s called Shopping Cart Hero.
Now, you may think that nothing could quite top the sheer weirdness quotient given to us by “You Have to Defecate Upon King Bhumibol”, and you’d be right. But how about a game that lets you jump a shopping cart? With rocket boosters on the side? And full of girls?
Before you start thinking that this is the kind of thing Johnny Knoxville sees if he drops acid (though you’d probably be right), that’s the point of the game. Customize your cart with a selection of upgradeable parts, buy new tricks, and jump your cart to long distance, maximum height and maximum style.
It’s nothing fancy–all the characters are stick figures, and you can forget about anything resembling a story. What it is, however, is a fun little time waster that you can play quickly if you have a couple minutes to spare between websites or YouTube videos or what have you. At the end of the day, it’s a fun game, and that goes a long way.
Coming to you from the depths of the XGen Studios vault is a casual browser game that burned through a LOT more time than I care to admit. It’s called Motherload, and it is indeed a motherload of fun gaming.
In Motherload, you play a miner on the surface of Mars, but you won’t be on the surface very long as you drive your mining buggy down into the Martian soil in search of vast mineral wealth. You can upgrade your buggy with better hull plating, faster drills, better engines, and a panoply of additional devices including reserve fuel tanks, teleportation systems, and explosives.
Playing Motherload is a lot like playing that old game Dig Dug, only without the enemies and with lots and lots of greed. Completionists will find this game like crack as they tunnel through the soil and snatch up every last crumb of rock from beneath the planet’s surface. The graphics are, of course, only inches from 16-bit fugly, but the gameplay is both fluid and compelling, giving you that just-one-more-level feeling until you finally reach the surprise at the end. And it will be quite the surprise.
Motherload is a fantastic little time-waster that’ll keep you occupied for hours until you finally reach the end, and when you do, you’ll likely leave satisfied, the best measure of a casual game.
When a game requires you to defecate on a sitting monarch, you have to wonder how long it’s going to be before the game’s creator winds up in a deep hole somewhere. Thus, it’s hard to say how long the guys behind “You Have To Defecate Upon King Bhumibol” will be around.
Billed as “a complete ripoff of Mazapan’s IGF-nominated “You Have To Burn The Rope” (which was also, by the way, surprisingly fun)”, “You Have To Defecate Upon King Bhumibol” is almost a new low in gaming. Essentially, all you will do is negotiate your way through a tunnel. You’ll be attacked by no enemies, but you can throw your hat if you like at the vast among of nothing charging at you at any given time. At the end of the tunnel is “a certain Thai royalty”, ostensibly the titular King Bhumibol. You will then have to position yourself directly above the king, which releases a large quantity of brown sludge onto the enormous (relative to your character) King Bhumibol.
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