Dispatch from the Video Game Realm

I have my brother Dan to thank for turning me on to this (Thanks!).

Some background for the folks unfamiliar with some terminology. This entire post is aimed at exposing my few readers who don't care for, or play many, video games to a flash cartoon that is funny and entertaining. The background could prove helpful.

Video games are big business nowadays. Besides providing a lucrative environment for career computer folks, it provides fans of all stripes countless hours of entertainment. There are also many websites geared toward those fans, and many of these sites provide previews and reviews of new games, as well as forums so those fans can converse, post their own reviews, and post their own games and videos made using Flash technology, also known as "flash games" and "flash videos". (Flash is brought to you by a company called Multimedia, a rival of the better known Adobe.)

Gamers, as they're occasionally known, can show a cheeky sense of humor. Take this example, to which the flash video I'll eventually link to is in response: a game called "PSTW: An Epic RPG"

An RPG, in the video game universe, is a "roll playing game"; in this type of video game a player plays as a character solving puzzles and occasionally fighting bosses. The most famous RPGs are Nintendo's Zelda franchise.

PSTW is a crudely animated thing with stick figures created from large pixels, and, using a trope of the early RPGs, has worded prompts at every screen giving you your choice of action. Here, it says "Press Space-bar to pick up sword", and once you press the space bar, your stuck figure is now armed with a line. Then "Press Space-bar to attack enemy".

It becomes apparent quickly that the only action is to press the space-bar, and if you stop reading the prompts and continuously mash the space bar, you send your stick figure knight on a rather long quest, ultimately besting the final boss in a foregone conclusion. That's when you realize PSTW stands for "Press Space-bar To Win."

Now, the cheeky element of gamers thought this game was hilarious, satirically making fun of the RPG genre while producing a product that must have taken a while to program. It garnered an incredibly high aggregate score of something like 4.26 out of 5 on the member's voting board...while gamers may have a sense of humor, they are notoriously hard critics of new games.

Not everyone thought the game was a riot. It appears that on at least one reviewer the joke was lost. This person wrote an angry review; angry that it was so easy, angry that it dared to call itself "epic", and angry that anyone else could actually like it.

Fans of the game thought this review was also hilarious, and had some fun with it. That's what this link that I'm posting about in a second is: a flash video of a hilarious reading of the angry review of a satirical flash game.

Even if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, this video should still make you laugh. They've kept the misspellings and captured the tone of the angry reviewer well.

Dot Dot Dot

Here's the original game, PSTW if one might be interested in checking it out for themselves.