Extreme RPS Online

Ever felt yourself wanting to play Rock Paper Scissors? What about playing it without having to see the other player’s face? What about playing a computer at it? What about playing a computer at it whilst looking at poorly drawn graphics which don’t even clearly show what choice your opponent has made? If you answered yes to most of the previous questions, then Extreme RPS Online might just be your game.

Taking a simple concept and polishing it into something great is a perfectly good design philosophy, and can lead to some great games. However, the key to this working is taking a fun concept, and crucially remembering to polish it. This game attempts to make the classic playground game more interesting by adding different playable characters and dressing it up like a beat ‘em up.

Where it falls down is that in making playable characters for the game, they make a rock, paper, scissors sign with their hands to show what you’ve picked, the problem is that you can barely see this as their hands are so small. This makes it almost impossible to play properly, even on a HD monitor I’m sitting 10 inches away from, let alone playing it on an old CRT from across the room. In the first level, you play against an arcade machine, in which it’s choice briefly flashes up on it’s screen in dot-matrix style, which makes it even harder to see.

Only to make matters worse is the dull and repetitive soundtrack, which quickly becomes annoying, and loading screens so blurred that they’re practically painful to look at. Suffice it to say, there’s little to recommend here.

Extreme RPS Online was created by MonkeyWare Studios and is 200 points.

This title was 200 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 80 Points.