Ladies and gentlefolk, I want to talk to you today about games. Well, not just games but what games can be.
People, there’s this man. His name is Dennis Greenidge.
Now, for those who haven’t heard of or come across Dennis Greenidge, as well as making art and musical noodles, Dennis designs videogames. I’m fully aware that lots of people design videogames but none of them do it quite like Dennis.
Y’see, Dennis used to send his designs to videogame companies. For all I know, he may still be sending his designs to videogame companies. Yeah, yeah, so far, so ordinary I know. But Dennis didn’t produce massive 300 page design documents, Dennis didn’t have great idea’s for games (“it’s a massive RTS MMO set in the Haloverse with Mario and Luigi waging war against Thing On A Spring”) and hawk forums looking for people to make them for him. He’d send his designs off and just hope.
And the designs of Mr Greenidge were quite, quite different. Most of them were scribbles – crayon scribbles at that. Almost as though they were drawn for a Blue Peter “Design a monster for Dr Who” competition by Alex, Aged 10, Bedfordshire. The kind of scribbles that would make the now sadly deceased Tony Hart think twice before hanging them in the Take Hart gallery to be viewed on television next week. The concepts were clearly crazy talk and all generally labelled NEW VIDEO GAME. Y’know, just in case you weren’t sure.
Marvel at the possibilities of Caligari 2050, assumedly based on The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, although that’s a wild stab in the dark from the accompanying blurb of “New Cartoon Horror Classic”, be wowed by The Spacenads. Stare mouth agape at The Bat Gremlords. And you might well be thinking “so what?” but who, deep down (certain sections of the games as art movement excepted) doesn’t want to at least see what one of those games could look like? It’s only years of conditioning from casual games that lead us to believe that something like Space Strawberries 3D will be a crap Space Invaders clone. Stop and think for a moment longer and the possibilities are endless. Strawberries… in space… in 3D… with todays technology? We could go anywhere we wanted to.
And that, my friends, is one of the beautiful things about games. As an interactive form of escapist entertainment we can take the player anywhere we want to. We can go to the moon, we can roll up planets, we can invent fictional cities beneath the sea, we can be a ball of tar crawling around a sewer… none of these are ultimately any more crazy than a Dennis Greenidge design.
Yet despite the endless possibilities, the myriad of things we can do, the sheer scope of the universe that is gaming, despite all that I’m still sitting here and having to write a review of something that’s so totally and utterly uninspired that it makes me want to hang my head in my hands and go for a little cry.
I’m talking about a game so uninspired that the author couldn’t even be bothered giving it a name. A game so ugly that for all I can tell the background graphics could spell out “your mother is a whore” in paint splats and I’d be none the wiser after an extended play session. A game with so little game it makes The Graveyard feel like the worlds most complex RTS.
You’re an unborn entity fighting unknowns in Untitled Prologue. Hah! Tricked you – because you don’t really fight anything in the game. You sort of float along running into things, occasionally shooting something that offers no resistance, occasionally activating a shield and well, nothing else.
It’s not just a waste of 200 points we’re talking about here, it’s not just a waste of hard drive space but something that makes me genuinely sad to see. An amateur game is one thing but to show so little verve, so little imagination, so little love for the power and strength of videogames as a medium, that’s another thing entirely.
When you look and you see a scribbling of Hollowise by Dennis Greenidge, a sort of half alien, half crab, half crayon thing and stop and think about the medium that we hold so dear and everything it has been, everything it is and everything it could ever be and then you look at this…
Dennis wouldn’t stand for it, that’s for sure. He’d be busy plotting The Long Wattkins with their space helmets and elephant noses instead, busy dreaming of all the places he could take us next.
I want to go wherever Dennis is going. I don’t want to go here.
This title was 200 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 80 Points.
No related posts.
Yep, it’s a non-shooty horizontal scrolling shooter with one enemy type that moves right to left and a Hanna-Barbera style looping background of utter madness.
After several minutes of tedium, I think there was supposed to be a boss battle, but the game boots you out at that point to make you buy it.
I tend to doubt that boss battle will make it worth the play time to get there, much less worth the money.
This game physically assaulted me.
OK, maybe not physically, but never before have I experienced the feeling many people complain of, of feeling dizzy or experiencing a headache after playing video games. I thought decades of gaming had made me immune.
This game broke that trend.
I had to take a painkiller and lie down for half an hour before the effects of trying really hard to actually see and play this game wore off. Apparently, sufficiently concentrated awfulness has negative effects on health. Or maybe it was just extreme brain-warping and eye strain from trying to distinguish the important bits of the game from the hideous, technicolor-vomit background. (And if you think I’m kidding about the vomit, check out a few screenshots. What screenshots won’t convey is the way it warps slightly as it parades across your screen.)
The baffling thing is that the game is more polished than many of the other Community Games. It’s like someone managed to faithfully follow the checklist for making a polished game with nice menus and whatnot, but frgot to actually make a game to polish.
I would almost suspect this game of being some kind of artsy exploration of just how bad you can make a game without making it completely unplayable. As it stands, this game is only 99% unplayable, or 100% unplayable if you value your health.
OK, here’s a great example about how awful this game is – see that screenshot heading the article? The main character is in that screenshot somewhere; can you see him? Can you see where your character is? How about an enemy? Is there an enemy about to destroy him?
All-in-all, a great review, though. Dragging Dennis Greenridge into it was a great way to say something meaningful while spending as few words as possible on the game itself. The poignancy of ending that long, wistful diatribe with the bullet-to-the-heart of the unspeakable disappointment that is this game was quite palpable. (Though I was briefly afraid you were going to tell me that this game that leaves people physically ill was the result of one of Mr. Greenridge’s ideas. I’m glad to see that’s not where you were going.)
Like one of the previous posters, It confused my eyes and brain somehow, not in the same way a dimly lit FPS with a wide view angle would make me feel sick. I think the contrast of having a very sharp crystal Nik-nak/Guyver type character against the slightly blurry and fast moving background through me.
I think it is a shame, there are at least nice touches.
On the other hand…games like this remind me why I love this site so much. Heheh. Beautiful writeup.
The truly awful revelation about this game was, that if the background was darker/foreground objects were lighter, more people might actually enjoy playing this POS on a stick!
*sigh*
I wish I was more motivated to finish a CG.
I feel ya.
[...] not the worst game on the service by a long chalk (that honour currently goes to Untitled Prologue) but it’s also not got a hope in hell of sitting up there with the best either in its current [...]
[...] to a great degree seems like one of the silliest design decisions since someone decided to make an entire game that looks like vomit and the breakout element, well, it all seems so pointless given there’s a good chance that if [...]
[...] is what would have happened if Untitled Prologue [...]