Video Review: Wendy's Grill Skill

Recently -by which I mean at least 3 years ago- someone leaked a Wendy's training video called Grill Skill to the internet. I worked at Wendy's myself several years ago and I don't remember watching this training video, but then again it was a long time ago. One way or another, I just couldn't let it go without getting made fun of.

Warning: This is going to be long.

Video Links: Part 1 and Part 2.

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The video starts with Wendy's founder Dave Thomas standing in a freezer. If all you know about Dave comes from 90's era Wendy's commercials then brace yourself. Because even though this was filmed 13 years before he died they still managed to film it entirely with his reanimated corpse. He seems to be somewhere between bored as hell and suicidal for the entire video.


"Maybe if I stay in this freezer long enough I'll catch pneumonia. Then I won't have to do this stupid video anymore."

It's not polite to mock the dead so I won't go too much into his speech impediment here. Suffice to say that after two minutes of telling us how he has the fray-shest burgers in the bid-ness, he leaves us alone so he can have an old fay-shioned hamburger with mustard, pickle and onions.

We cut to a static shot of a keyhole accompanied by random bird sounds. This scene drags out almost long enough to make you reach for a razor before we finally meet employee Bill. Bill is an idiot.

Anyway, Bill is told to go speak to the manager, Mary, who wants him to learn how to work the grill. Before sitting him down with a training video (yes, the character watches a training video in this training video) she takes the time to remind him that Wendy's only uses 100% pure ground beef, because apparently no one ever explained to the actress that this was a training video and not a commercial.

Anyway, Bill puts the video into the television and this is where everything goes to Hell. The television promptly explodes in a cloud of smoke, which forms into a disembodied spectral head. Because we've already established that Wendy's training videos are made by necromancers this surprises nobody but Bill, not that you'd know he was surprised from the actor's performance. The head introduces itself as the Duke of the Grill (vassal of the Burger King, I'm sure) and drags Bill into the TV and no, I am not making any of this up. It really happens.


"I'm here for your soul. If you're working in food service you won't need it."

Bill finds himself in the home dimension of the Duke of the Grill, who happens to be a dorky black guy in gold-rimmed sunglasses. Sadly for the Duke, his world is nothing but a tiny cage floating in a black void filled with laser lights, his only furniture a single Wendy's grill, and his only food an endless supply of cheese, buns, and talking meat patties.

Maybe if you had some real furniture you wouldn't need to make your meat look pretty, Duke.

What happens next is one of the most painful moments ever recorded to video: a two minute rap about hamburgers. To be fair, the Duke isn't the worst rapper I've ever heard, though that's mostly because Bill tries to rap too. To be unfair, it doesn't matter how good he is, because either way he's still rapping about Wendy's hamburger patties. Snoop Dogg may have been able to name himself after a cartoon character without losing street cred, but even he would look like a jackass doing this rap.

Over the course of the longest two minutes of your life, the Duke explains the proper way to cook a Wendy's burger. The first thing you may notice is he's not wearing any sort of gloves. This is not a mistake. The grill worker doesn't wear gloves for safety reasons. If you accidentally touch the grill or get a grease splatter on your hands then latex gloves will melt and stick to you, turning what would be a mild first-degree burn into a hospital stay. As for cleanliness, well, they're supposed to wash their hands. Personally I always washed my hands before work, but to be totally honest I think I was the only one.

Anyway, on to the actual preparation First you lay it on the grill with the help of an arrow on a piece of paper, because meat has grain (just like wood) and if you lay it down improperly it will turn into deadly poison and murder your dog while it sleeps. Anyway, he then explains about the four corner press. This is where you crush the meat into the grill to spread it out and make it cook faster. As the name implies, you press the meat four times, and you do this twice for a grand total of eight smashes. Usually pressing meat out on a grill like that dries it out, but Wendy's burgers have so much fat in them that even after being smashed out eight times you still have to drain it off, as shown.

Finally the Duke finishes up his rap. Unfortunately, Bill then does the exact same rap again, only with infinity times less enthusiasm. After a gloriously failed attempt at a fist bump, the Duke goes into *shudder* a second verse, this time about how to add cheese to a burger. Defying all logic, this process somehow manages to be longer than one step.

He also mentions that you must never serve burnt, dry, broken, or incomplete patties because "quality is our recipe." But because they use a different recipe for chili, they are allowed to put the burnt, crappy meat into that. That may not sound very appetizing, but to be fair they do shove said meat into a drawer over the grill for several hours before someone finally comes to get it and stick it in the chili pot. Eat up, chili fans!

Finally we cut back to the real world, where Mary snaps Bill out of his smoke-inhalation-induced hallucination by screaming in his ear. As they leave, the camera hangs on the TV way too long in a segment that makes me think the thing is about to transform and eat everyone. Sadly, it doesn't.

Instead we get a montage of Mary teaching Bill the same thing he just learned on the video, then spending the rest of the day watching over his shoulder like a crazy person while taking notes. Clearly after watching the kid stare slack-jawed at a malfunctioning TV for what must have been hours she realized he couldn't be trusted to operate a spatula without close supervision.

Finally, we're back to Dave, who has just received his old fay-shioned hamburger from a girl wearing gigantic nerd glasses. Dave almost bites into his skimpy little burger before realizing what an awful idea that is and putting the horrible greaseball down. He then rephrases the opening speech, this time making sure to assure us that cooking a burger is a very difficult and extraordinary talent that takes lots of practice. You keep telling yourself that, Dave.


"You have to eat it, Dave. The cameras are on you. No, you can't go hang out in the freezer again instead."

We end on a two-minute music video for an awful song called Grill Skill, over which we see clips of hideous people cooking hideous burgers while simultaneously flexing their scrawny muscles, lip synching badly, and playing air guitar with their spatulas.

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I actually feel a little bad about making fun of this video, because it's obvious that some poor, misguided person really tried his best on it. That person was the geek who played the Duke of the Grill. As for the other "actors," Bill and Mary's performances are almost good enough to be called phoned in, but the real shining star of half-assedness is Dave Thomas himself whose performance is somewhere between "smoke-signaled" and "100-character tweet without bothering to capitalize the 'I's."

As for the special effects editor (and never before or since has the word "special" been more appropriate), he seems to have tried his best given that a head of cabbage has more brain matter in it than his head.

That's really all there is to say about this video, but there is one last thing I want to leave you with...always remember: Wendy's 100% real ground beef is pattied into squares so the meat hangs off the edge of the bun.

Power Rangers Jungle Fury

Super Sentai Equivalent: Juken Sentai Gekiranger (Beast-Fist Team Fierce Spirit Ranger)

Long ago, the Beast War occurred on Earth. Mighty transforming robots known as Maximals battled against the evil Predacons to harvest the planet's energon... okay, yes, I'm getting tired of this gag too. It has a passing similarity to something else, let's move on.

Long ago, the Beast War was fought among the animal spirits, between those who followed Dai Shi in his belief that humans had no place on Earth, and the Order of the Claw, also known as Pai Zhuq (pronounced "pie shwa"). The Pai Zhuq masters prevailed and sealed Dai Shi away inside a magic box. There he remained for 10,000 years, until some jerk named Jarrod came along and donked it all up. Freaking Jarrod, am I right?

Anyway, with Dai Shi free and the Pai Zhuq master Mao slain in the battle, the three remaining students will travel to... some city the name of which we never learn. There, at Jungle Karma Pizza, they will find the last Pai Zhuq master, kind-of-a-dick New Age slacker bro R.J. With his help and their totally lame sunglasses, they will become... Jungle Fury Power Rangers!

In terms of story, Jungle Fury starts off pretty strong, actually. The heroes are likeable (even R.J., in spite of his being kind-of-a-dick) and with good personality. The villains have a level of complexity approaching In Space and Lost Galaxy. The show was able to teach the occasional moral lesson without coming across as (too) contrived or condescending. The writing was tight and focused. It was going somewhere.

...and then the Writers' Guild Strike of 2007 to 2008 happened, and all of that went away. The story fell dead in the water. It became stagnant and mired in plot holes and out-of-character moments. They even attempted to introduce a new character during this time, the Rhino Ranger, and he ended up being a black hole of plot almost on tier with S.P.D.'s Omega Ranger... almost.

Fortunately, at least, the strike did end in time for the last few episodes to not totally suck.

The series also managed to have some pretty cool ideas, like the animal spirits being means to an end that were neither good nor evil and could be used by both the heroes and villains. I also felt that this series formed an interesting counterpoint to Wild Force, with Wild Force's Orgs representing industry and pollution, while the Dai Shi and his minions represent uncontrolled nature. I would have loved to see a crossover between the two series exploring this, but that doesn't happen. Actually, Jungle Fury is the first series of Power Rangers since the Zordon era to not have any crossover elements with any other series. Even Mystic Force had a guest appearance from S.P.D.'s Piggy!

They also took some more risks with the source material, creating their own Rangers for the first time since Lightspeed Rescue. It is slightly undercut by the fact that they - by their own admission - only did it to have some more toys to sell, and the three Spirit Rangers have very little to do in the show... but it's still pretty cool.

In all, Jungle Fury is a good series that might have even been great if not for the writers' strike. I honestly feel like I owe Bruce Kalish an apology. Nothing I said about Kalish or the shows he executive produced is necessarily untrue, but I just don't feel like it's fair to put it all on him. Disney gave him an absolute mess and told him to fix it, then gave him basically zero resources with which to do so, and in spite of that he still managed to turn out two passable series (S.P.D. and Operation Overdrive), one good series (Jungle Fury), and one of my top 5 favorite series to date (Mystic Force).

At the time of my writing this, my reviews for the Kalish series actually still haven't gone up (at the moment the latest review I have up is for Lightspeed Rescue) but I'm not going to rewrite them. Like I said, nothing I said in them is really untrue, and also I feel it's important to write about them as I thought of them at the time.


GOOD

PROS:	CONS:
+ A solid start and finish. Really, very good writing and characters for at least half the series	- The Writers' Guild Strike screwed up everything in between.
+ Had some really cool ideas.	- Having cool ideas means nothing if you don't explore them.

Video Game Review: Slayer Shock

Originally posted on November 13th, 2016

Let me start by saying that I do really like developers Minor Key Games. At the time of this writing I've got 44 hours in their first game, Eldritch, a "Call of Cthulhu by way of Minecraft" type first person rogue-lite. So you could say I'm a fan and none of this is meant as an insult against them.

Slayer Shock is an interesting game and does have potential. You play as the Slayer, an implied Buffy expy who hangs out in a coffee shop with a gang of friends and occasionally goes out to hunt undead monsters. The game is very Buffy, even to the extent of dividing itself up into seasons and episodes - every mission is an episode, find and defeat the boss vamp, that's the end of the season. Move on to the next season and the next boss.

It isn't a bad premise and like I said it does have potential. The problem right now is the gameplay. Again, the idea isn't bad. It's basically the same combat and movement mechanics from Eldritch, but turned up a notch. There are RPG elements at play; you can't just expect 1-2 shot kills all the time like you could in Eldritch, instead enemies actually have HP and damage stats of their own.

And that's kind of the issue here. Slayer Shock is a hard game, and unfortunately it's not all for legitimate reasons. Despite what the game's Steam store page says stealth really isn't optional. Enemies tend to travel in large packs, they often take many hits to kill and they strike fast so evading isn't as easy as it was in Eldritch. If you're playing on anything above Easy difficulty open combat becomes suicidal, so you'll really need to rely on stealth to get by.

The problem is, the stealth doesn't work very well. You move so slow that trying to sneak up behind enemies while they're moving away from you is next to impossible, there is no grace period when you're spotted, and even with the perk that lets you deal additional damage on a backstab you're STILL looking at a protracted battle against most enemies.

Worse, enemies like to spawn in on top of you. I've seen enemies pop up two inches in front of my face as I was walking, and unlike Eldritch where you could stop spawns by not looting enemies, here there is NO WAY to stop new enemies from re-appearing constantly.

Basically, Slayer Shock is a good premise, executed poorly. The developers are still working on the game as of this writing, so hopefully they'll fix the stealth mechanics and the respawn problem. If they do then expect this review to be updated but for right now I can't really recommend this game in good faith.


BAD

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Annotation From The Future:
It seems that Minor Key Games has, sadly, given up on Slayer Shock so sadly none of these issues will ever be fixed or addressed. I know it's their game but still. It had potential and its sad to see that potential squandered. As they say, a work of art is never finished, it is only given up on, and Minor Key Games... they gave up.

Power Rangers Operation Overdrive

Super Sentai Equivalent: GoGo Sentai Boukenger (Rumbling Team Adventure Ranger)

Many years ago, Last Sunday A.D. The elemental brothers Moltor and Flurious wrought havoc on the universe searching for the magical crown of the gods, the Corona Aurora. They were defeated and imprisoned by the mystical Sentinel Knight. In order to prevent the crown from being fought over any longer, Sentinel Knight took the crown jewels and scattered them across the Earth. In the present day, adventurer Andrew Hartford discovers the crown, accidentally releasing the evil brothers into the world once more. In order to correct his mistake, he'll gather a team of the most talented individuals in the world, to become the Overdrive Power Rangers!

As always, I'll start with what the series did right. The Rangers aren't bad. This is the second series after Lightspeed Rescue where the Rangers are explicitly recruited for their skills and they actually have a certain degree of competence and maturity to them, though they can still be a bit whiny at times too. There's also a pretty interesting plot twist involving the Red Ranger, Mack, which I won't spoil. In all I found them pretty likeable, I enjoyed the interactions between them... not bad.

On the downside, the plot is pretty weak and it's all Disney's fault. According to the crew, the show was pitched as the Power Rangers take on Indiana Jones, with "a new exotic locale in every episode." Disney loved it so much that they gave the show a shoestring budget that made that impossible, and demanded the use of even more stock footage. One has to wonder why Disney even wanted this franchise if this is how they were going to treat it. Haim Saban might be a greedy dick, but at least he kind of cared about what he was doing.

The villains are pretty weak too. They get their small victories, which is important as I mentioned in my review for Mystic Force, and that at least puts them a step above Lightspeed Rescue's villains. They're just... not really interesting. And they come so close too...

For example, let's talk about the aforementioned elemental brothers, Moltor and Flurious. These two actually used to be human, but they turned themselves into monsters in order to gain power. "OMG! Spoilers, man!" Except not really, because in order to be a spoiler it has to be an actual plot point and it isn't. The only reason I even know about this is because of a single throw-away line in the penultimate episode, in which Mack calls Moltor out on sacrificing the "precious gift" of humanity. It means nothing.

Oh yeah, and even though they're brothers, they hate each other! Why? Well, when they were kids, Moltor broke Flurious' favorite toy sled. Haha, that's sure silly, I guess... but wouldn't it be cool if it was replaced by an actual backstory instead?

Oh yeah, and the kalishplosions begin to reach critical mass, to the point of watching things like the villain Flurious shooting the Rangers with ice, and causing them to explode in a giant ball of FIRE. What?

There's a little bit to like here, but not enough to make up for the show's flaws.


MEDIOCRE

PROS:	CONS:
+ Rangers are pretty okay.	- Story is pretty weak and never does much to stand out.
+ Villains get their small victories.	- Ice beams explode into fire because Bruce Kalish is a lunatic.
+ Multiple villain groups creates the potential for some interesting interactions.	- The villains' potential is totally squandered.

Video Game Review: Bubsy Paws on Fire

You may remember a while back I reviewed the entire Bubsy franchise, or at least the older ones. I never looked at the newer stuff because I just couldn't be interested. Well, suffice to say I finally managed to work up enough interest to try this game: Bubsy: Paws on Fire... mostly because it was on sale, and I had enough points saved up on the Nintendo eShop to get it for almost-free.

So, did it redeem the franchise and make me think Bubsy is good again?

Ha ha ha ha ha! Ah...

Let's start with the story... the characters and characterizations are all from that god-awful cartoon pilot that no network was stupid enough to pick up, which means that everyone sucks and is obnoxious as Hell. Fortunately, there's a bare minimum of story here. Unfortunately, you still have to listen to Bubsy and his "friends" making crap puns on every stage.

Moving on before I need to kill someone...

Level design! It's boring and uninspired. The environments and obstacles are all very samey, and there's never anything new or interesting to see. Just play the first level. See those wood platforms and sawblades and TNT boxes and bugs? Okay, now eject the game and sell it back to GameStop because you've seen the entire thing.

To be fair, it's probably for the best that there's nothing interesting to see, because you won't have time to look at it anyway. Oh yeah, Bubsy is also a Running Game now, for some reason. It's almost as if the developers realized that literally everything this damn bobcat touches becomes an utter failure, and they just have no idea what the Hell they want the franchise to be anymore... but obviously that's nonsense.

So, yeah. It's not even really a Bubsy game anymore. It's just frustrating and tedious. The controls are weird. Jumps are awkward to time, and one hit from anything kills you instantly, just like in the old school Bubsy games. The difference is this game doesn't even have the humorous death animations that were literally the one saving grace of the old games. Also, Arnold the Armadillo's bonus levels suffer from a bizarre... I'm not even sure what to call it. Glitch? Oversight? Sadistic prank by Satan himself? Point is, you roll down a tunnel, and if you move too far toward the top, then the game reverses your controls for some ungodly reason. Who the Hell thought that was a good idea?

Okay, okay, I'll admit it. The game is at least competent. It's not a bug-riddled mess. It doesn't crash. They didn't forget to add in any of the levels or graphics... but it's just so BORING. Normally this might earn it a rating of 3 - Mediocre, but... this is Bubsy and Bubsy can go to Hell.

It does feel bizarre to say this, considering I'm one of the few people who actually used to defend Bubsy... but it is absolutely mind-boggling to me why people are so insistent on trying to keep this miserable trash pile of a franchise alive, while so many other much better franchises languish in obscurity, just waiting for someone to come along and revive them. Seriously, just let Bubsy die already.

SHOVEL

PROS:	CONS:
	- Story and characterization straight from the worst cartoon pilot to ever crashland in Crapville.
	- Level design is boring and uninspired.
	- Environments are boring too.
	- Gameplay is frustrating and tedious.
	- Literally causes cancer, leprosy, and gout.
	- Will kill your dog too.
	- And sleep with your wife.
	- Seriously, there is absolutely nothing good about this game.

Video Game Review: Immortals: Fenyx Rising

On a distant island which is home to the gods of Olympus, a young shieldbearer named Fenyx awakes, washed ashore after a horrible shipwreck. They are alive, but not safe. Monsters roam the island, the gods are nowhere to be found, and everyone they know has been turned to stone. Typhon, the father of monsters, has broken free from his imprisonment, and intends to destroy the world to remake it in his own image. It's up to Fenyx to rescue the gods, defeat Typhon, and save Hyrule -- ah, I mean, the Golden Isle!

Okay, yeah, let's get this out of the way. It's Breath of the Wild. Absolutely and totally. That is what this game is. It's Breath of the Wild, as made by Ubisoft. From game mechanics to art direction, there is no area in which this game doesn't completely ape off of Breath of the Wild. That on its own isn't necessarily bad. People still enjoyed Quake and Doom despite them being basically just level packs for Wolfenstein 3D. More relevant to this, most people have been fairly positive about fellow Breath-clone Genshin Impact.

In fact...

Gameplay

I'll start here because I want to say right off that there are two areas where I actually give points to Fenyx Rising over Breath of the Wild. Number one, your weapons don't break. Number two, and this is going to sound weird but bear with me: it's not a Zelda game. Not because I dislike Zelda, I love it, and that was the problem. My one major complaint that I always had about Breath was that it was a Zelda game without dungeons. It had the shrines, yes, but I'm talking about real dungeons. Ocarina of Time style dungeons. You just can't have Zelda without dungeons. I spent all of Breath of the Wild waiting for the dungeons to appear and I was always disappointed that they didn't. Divorcing the game from the Zelda franchise made that more palatable.

All of that being said, Immortals: Fenyx Rising does not put its best foot forward in gameplay.

For one, looting isn't very fun for me in this game. Weapons and armor aren't particularly interesting here. They don't have different stats, only different perks, none of which seem very useful to me. Also, looting to unlock new color variants for weapons and armor, as opposed to actually unlocking new weapons and armor and then getting to dye them myself if I want to like in Breath, feels really lame.

And now for the more serious complaint...

I'll be honest, I only half enjoy physics puzzles as it is. I'm not really a fan of this genre where I can figure out your fairly basic puzzle in a few seconds, but then fail 30 times anyway because Ian Malcolm was wrong. It gets worse when the physics puzzles are full of bugs. Oh yeah, this game is a buggy mess.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I spent almost a half an hour on one puzzle because it was broken. The puzzle itself was pretty obvious. I had to flip a switch, which caused a wooden ball to spawn, which gets blown by some wind jets over to a platform. I have to run and jump to reach the platform and grab the ball before it rolls away into the abyss. But I can't... because the physics engine bugged out and the ball doesn't make it all the way to the platform. It's obvious that it's supposed to, but it doesn't. Except sometimes it does, and I only ended up getting it after a half an hour because I finally got lucky and it actually hit the jet right, allowing me to move on.

That's only one example of many. Sometimes, as in that example, jets wouldn't push stuff as hard as they should. Sometimes physics objects would spawn inside the floor, or not spawn at all. It got to a point where I could never be quite sure if I was failing to figure out a puzzle, or if the game had bugged out again.

Also, it crashes a lot.

The game does actually work at least, not because there's no bugs or that the bugs aren't serious, but because there's at least workarounds for it. Saving and reloading will reset puzzles and fix the physics, and the game's constant autosaves mean that you never lose much when it crashes. Also, the game is generally pretty fun to play when it is working. I mean, it's Breath of the Wild without weapon breakage. Of course it's fun.

Please note, however, that's not me saying it's all fine. "At least there's workarounds" is not something you want me to say about your game. That's like saying at least you gave me a band-aid for the gaping head wound you left me with.

Rating: 3/5 - Fun to play, less fun to loot, full of bugs.

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Presentation

I almost don't even feel fair rating presentation. I'm basically just rating Breath of the Wild here. It's the exact same stylized "3D cartoon" style of artwork. It's nice, but I've seen it before is what I'm saying.

I don't really get why. I mean, aside from the obvious answer of "because BotW did it". Ubisoft has their own style already, and people like it. In fact, according to the developers, they got the idea for this game after a glitch in Assassin's Creed Odyssey turned the sailors into cyclopes and they decided they wanted to see a fantasy-themed Assassin's Creed game... so why not make that? Why not give us your realistic designs except now with grotesque monsters? I know you're ripping off Breath of the Wild and I accept that, but you can at least do one thing of your own, right?

Well, at least it does look pretty. Also, you can select your weapon and armor, and then select their appearance separately, meaning you can play with the perks you want and the look you want too, which is definitely nice. I'm still taking off a point because I don't like the weapon and armor designs, though.

What? You already knew I was an asshole.

Rating: 4/5 - Can't put Fenyx in the Gerudo outfit, 2/10 stars.

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Story:

In this case, there's two things I want to talk about. The first is the writing, which I actually enjoyed. I know this isn't the case for everyone, but Fenyx Rising's sense of humor is actually right up my alley, at least most of the time. I appreciated the witty observations on Greek mythology, and I found the Wise Guy/Straight Man dynamic of Zeus and Prometheus to be pretty fun. There were a few times where it got a bit too over the top, and some jokes that fell flat, but also a lot of times that made me seriously laugh out loud.

Even with that being the case, though, there were also definitely times when I wished that Zeus and Prometheus would just shut the hell up and let me enjoy the game in peace. I actually liked the humor and it still got old for me. If you don't even like the humor to begin with, you will hate this game.

And that said... it's time to climb into the cesspool...

The big problem with the story is that we're obviously supposed to be on the gods' side, but the game never manages to successfully convince me of why I should be. To quote Roger Ebert, "you can't have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense." Typhon's entire raison d'etre is that the gods are trash and bad for mortals and he intends to take their place. While he might not be much better than they are, everything he says about them is right. Even if you don't already know the myths and you're only speaking in the context of the game, it also doesn't shy away from it and in fact plays up the gods' assholery so much that it's impossible to sympathize with them.

And yes, for a slight spoiler you probably saw coming anyway, the gods eventually realize they were jerks and promise to be better by the end of the game... but so what? Look, I believe in second chances as much as the next guy. You need to have second chances, otherwise you might as well just give up and become a serial killer the first time you make a mistake, because you're done anyway. But the Greek gods are not the best choice to use for this allegory. If anything, they make a better allegory for why you should never give anyone any chance ever.

It's one thing to argue for a second chance for a petty criminal or a jerk jock, it's another thing to argue for a second chance for a genocidal psychopath. Just go Kratos on their asses and call it a day. You can't spend your entire game casually joking about the time this character turned into a pig so he could rape a woman, and then murdered her entire family to cover it up, and then expect me to want that character to have a happy ending. In fact, no, you know what? You can't spend your entire game casually joking about rape and murder. What the actual fuck is wrong with you, Ubisoft Quebec?

Rating: 1/5 - #TyphonWasRight

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I'll admit I did have fun playing the game. It's not terrible, but it's got way too many flaws for me to call it really good. The worst part of it is the story, and that's such a big part that I can't just ignore it and focus on the gameplay, not when Zeus and Prometheus are going to chime in every time I even look at a new puzzle. So, overall...

MEDIOCRE

PROS:	CONS:
+ Pretty fun to play, when it works.	- A buggy mess that crashes and glitches out constantly.
+ Fairly witty dialog if you're into this style of humor.	- If you're not into this style of humor, then...
+ No weapon breaking.	- Constant commentary ruins immersion.
	- Trashy story about trashy people being trashy and getting away with it.
	- Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact both already did it better.

5 Reasons Cracked Has Always Sucked And You Just Didn't Know It

A note before we begin: I'm not actually sure when I wrote this article. The "Created On" date my computer lists is January 7th, 2016, but I'm pretty sure that's just when I got my new computer and transferred the file over to it. Given the dates of the linked articles, I probably wrote it closer to 2012 or 2013. Point is, it's been a while. In the time since, Cracked has gone absolutely off the rails. First, over half their readership got permabanned... for liking puns. No, seriously. John Cheese wrote a column about how much he hates puns (I guess Cheese doesn't think they're very gouda.) and got so much flak for it that they banned half the site. The writers who were left with brains in their heads instead of smoldering craters of rage decided to jump the rest of the way into the deep end, and now spend their days flailing their arms and shrieking madly about how all men need to die as punishment for the Ghostbusters reboot getting a bad review. So yeah, Cracked is no longer worthy of even a passing glance from any intelligent person. I decided to post this anyway, because I'm an asshole, because I wanted another article to post, and to prove that I was hating Cracked before it was cool, you hipsters.

Way back in 2003 I was inspired by a combination of Seanbaby and the Agony Booth to create my own website, full of all my artwork, role-playing character biographies, and various video game reviews. That site was Knight Productions and it sucked. In 2007 I was inspired again to create a blog with better reviews, less other stuff, and 100% less of Angelfire's bullshit.

While I was not actually inspired by Cracked.com, the website version of the now-defunct Cracked Magazine (aka the poor man's Mad Magazine), it has influenced me quite a bit since then, mostly by showing me that list-based articles are very easy.

Aside from videos, comics, and photoshop contests, the content on Cracked can be fit into two groups: regular articles, which are written by members of the community and pass through the hands of multiple peer reviewers and editors before they hit the front page, and columns, which are written by the site's permanent staff writers and go through absolutely no editing process before being posted.

There are also two types of columnists at Cracked. The first group uses this whole "no editing" thing to awesome effect, being as raunchy or frank as they want without the fear of some editor making mincemeat out of it. The second group uses it as an excuse to take a huge dump all over Cracked's readers once a week.

Guess which group we'll be looking at.

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5. 7 Phrases That Are Great Signs It's Time To Stop Talking
By Christina H

On the surface Christina is hard to dislike. She primarily rants about things we all hate: phony people, obnoxious douchebags, the whole works. But then you read the articles and you notice a disturbing trend. She's not talking about specific groups of assholes...she's talking about everyone. Literally everyone is exactly the same to her: a phony, arrogant hipster who needs to get over themselves.

Think you have an interesting and unique personality? Stop pretending you're cool, PHONY. Think you have an interesting story to tell? No one cares but you, ASSHOLE. Think you're talented or skilled in any way? No, you're not, LOSER.

Like a lot of these articles, 7 Phrases That Are Great Signs It's Time To Stop Talking is kind of a misleading title. In this case a more accurate one would be 7 Excuses To Dismiss Legitimate Arguments. In the article Christina discusses 7 "red alert" phrases which she claims instantly let you know the person you're talking to isn't worth your time and can be safely ignored: phrases like "I'm not racist, but..." or "I don't care what anyone thinks of me." If you're not sure what the problem is here, I'm sorry you had to find out this way, but you are everything wrong with the world.

Real intellectuals don't look for petty excuses to ignore dissenting opinions because they know that ignoring dissenting opinions, no matter what your reason, breeds ignorance - of course it does, the word "ignorance" has the word "ignore" right there in it! You can tell a lot about the kind of people who do look for these excuses by looking at the comments to that article. "I hate philosophy." "Anyone who talks about morality outside of church is wasting their life." These are the people who like Christina.

Thing is, I don't believe Christina is stupid. If she was then she wouldn't be writing even semi-philosophical articles like this one. She'd be writing about Ke$ha, or Britney Spears, or about getting drunk and high. No, Christina strikes me more as a person who is at least moderately intelligent, but who is so terrified of being seen as "full of herself" that she's playing dumb in exchange for popularity. There comes a time in every smart person's life when they realize that the world does not want them to be smart, and an unfortunately large number of them will make exactly the same decision that Christina clearly did.

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4. The 8 Stupidest Defenses Against Accusations of Sexism
By Luke McKinney

In simple terms this was a follow-up piece to one of Luke's previous articles, The 5 Most Ridiculously Sexist Superhero Costumes, but even saying that is giving this passive-aggressive temper tantrum too much credit. A more accurate name for this one would be "8 Comments On My Last Article That Made Me Totally Cry, You Guys."

Let's get one thing out of the way first: men who write articles about the media's portrayal of women are like white guys who write articles about the N word. I'm not going to say that you're not allowed to be bothered by it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Prejudice and discrimination should still bother you even if they're not directed at you, so sure, a man can absolutely write a post about how women are treated badly... but when it's every single post you make? When you spend hours a day writing article after article about that, and nothing else? People are going to start thinking you're compensating for something.

Besides, objectifying people is literally just what comic books do. Sure, men aren't sexually objectified as often as women, but despite what internet slacktivists tell you, there are other kinds of objectification out there. So yes, the women are the sort of half-naked vixens that prepubescent nerds wish they could get with, and the men are the chiseled slabs of trigger-happy testosterone that prepubescent nerds wish they could be.

Such a stupid premise couldn't possibly have found a better champion than Luke. He established his knack for ignorant bullshit back in 2007's 5 Recent Scientific Advances (And How They'll Destroy Us All). The primary argument in all of his columns is "I don't really know what I'm talking about, but if I remove all context then it doesn't matter." Eventually he moved on to writing social justice articles, presumably because he too realizes he's a moron and knows that now people can't call him out without being accused of hate crimes.

For the sexist costumes article he starts by only bringing up the weakest examples possible, then in a particularly glorious moment of stupidity attempts to prove Wonder Woman's costume is sexist (of course it is, see above) with not one but two pictures of a woman who is not Wonder Woman.

When astute (or at least vaguely awake-ish) readers pointed out that Luke had just made a complete ass of himself again, he responded with The 8 Stupidest Defenses Against Accusations of Sexism, otherwise known as Luke McKinney Calls His Readers Celibate Homos 8 Times, which is especially ridiculous since "call the other person gay" is his number 8 entry. He specifically points out how stupid of a defense that is, then proceeds to use it to defend himself for the rest of the article.

This wasn't the first time a Cracked columnist wrote an article like this, of course. Thing is, the other time was Seanbaby, who has built his comedy career on 1) being an arrogant and dismissive asshole, and 2) being so damn funny and charming that number one doesn't matter. By comparison, Luke is almost as uncharismatic as he is unfunny, and he tries to compensate for that fact by being a hundred times whinier.

Also, no, you don't need to tell me that Seanbaby is an asshole. Since writing this I have developed a much lower amount of respect for him. No, Seanbaby isn't cool, or smart, or even particularly funny. He just acts really confident about what he's saying, which tricks the simpler parts of your brain into thinking that he's making better points than he really is.

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3. 5 Unhelpful People You Meet In Every Hospital
By John Cheese

I don't have an actual link to this article, as it seems that everything John Cheese ever wrote for Cracked has since been expunged from the site, presumably because even they realize that he's a total piece and are trying as hard as they can to distance themselves. To be honest, I'd congratulate them on their wise decision, but considering they were perfectly willing to ban half the site for him earlier, I doubt the decision was made for wise reasons. Anyway, I've left the url there just to show that there was a real article at some point, but the link will end up just taking you to Cracked's home page.

If a news story broke tomorrow about a bad crop of strawberries that was giving people food poisoning, Christina H would write an essay on how responding to the story is a sure sign of arrogance and selfishness. Adam Tod Brown would work it into another article on how the outdoors are evil. Luke McKinney would write an article called "5 Reasons Strawberries Hate Black People" and populate it with photos of kiwis. John Cheese would argue that we should all eat the berries anyway because it's not like we could have grown any better ones.

Most of his columns go about the same way: John starts off by ranting about some problem with modern society, then about halfway through he remembers he's a spineless coward and he does an abrubt 180 flip and starts defending the thing instead. If he can't come up with a reasonable defense for it, then he falls back on the easy response of "we're all just too stupid to understand."

It seems there's nothing too terrible for him to defend it, whether it be child abuse, surrendering to bullies, placing money above everything else, or giving up everything you enjoy. So it's a bit hard to choose just one column as being worse than the others.

And again, none of those links are going to work.

In the end, though, I think the title has to go to 5 Unhelpful People You Meet In Every Hospital. Again, to be fair he does at least start out by complaining about a real problem with society, in this case nurses and candy stripers who don't care about their patients, but as usual by the end of it he's rabidly defending their right to murder patients through neglect then casually laugh it off and move right back to gossiping with their co-workers. Unlike some of his other articles people have actually died thanks to the group he's defending, but the real reason this one takes the cake is that his own girlfriend very nearly also died at their hands, which he acknowledges in the article itself.

Yes, even the near-death of a loved one isn't enough to make him actually stand up for anything.

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2. New Applicants
By John Cheese

Yep, it's John Cheese again. In this case, not only do I not have a link, I don't even know what the actual title for this one was. All I had written down is what you see above, and as mentioned none of Cheese's articles exist on Cracked anymore. I'm pretty sure the title was something along the lines of "The Biggest Mistakes Made By New Job Applicants" or something.

When Cheese isn't being an apologist he's being a money-grubbing, pompous elitist. Nowhere is this better illustrated then in this article. In the second entry on his list, Cheese tells the story of when he was a manager at an unnamed business. A teenage boy came in to apply and while he was filling out the application his father told the employees that his son played video games too much. Then, when the father and son left Cheese stamped "Do Not Hire" on the application and threw it away.

So, what lesson could an unemployed person looking for a job take from this story? That if your parents like to undermine you then you shouldn't bring them along while job-hunting? About the only lesson we can take from the story is that Cheese is an asshole. The story isn't even remotely related to the point he was trying to make anyway. (The point he was trying to make was about children asking their parents to fill out their applications for them.) Clearly, Cheese was just so proud of himself for stomping on a kid's attempt to get a job that he felt the world must know.

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1. Comedians Destroying Hecklers Article
By John Cheese

Surprise! Okay, not really. Given what I've said about John Cheese before, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he's here a third time. Keep in mind, however, all of what I wrote about him came BEFORE he had half the site permabanned to suit his ego, and before whatever meltdown I don't know about that led the rest of the lunatics at Cracked to decide he was too crazy even for them, and finally say "no more Cheese before bedtime." [UPDATE: After actually bothering to look into it, turns out John Cheese was fired because he was literally a rapist. Just goes to show, whenever I call someone an asshole, I'm always right.] Also, there's still no link or title. I'm sure that's a huge disappointment to everyone.

Also, damn it, at least when I'm posting obvious filler because I'm too busy with other things to update properly, it's still things that I actually wrote myself. Where's MY top dollar comedy contract, internet?! Huh? WHERE?!

This article is actually the closest Cheese has ever come to getting anything funny or intelligent on the site, and as with his previous article, "The 9 Most Brilliant Pieces of Comedy Hiding on Youtube", it's entirely because the videos do all of Cheese's work for him. Not that I'm complaining. If this article had been just the videos then it would have been lazy as Hell, yes, but it would also have actually been funny. Cheese's recaps of the videos are so stupid and unfunny that they almost suck all the fun out of watching Bill Burr call a room full of drunks a bunch of assholes. Almost.

Okay, so it's already a lazy and unfunny article, but it's also a prime example of why Cheese sucks. When you actually do read the recaps (because you're a masochist like I am, I guess) you realize that Cheese clearly doesn't understand at all why the videos are funny and satisfying (that is, because they involve smart and witty people defeating stupid jerks), because Cheese prescribes to the Jamie Kennedy method of Human Worth = Money x Fame, and views all the videos in that light (that is, as wealthy and famous people humiliating weak nobodies).

It's obvious the reason Cheese loves these videos so much is because he likes to imagine himself as the comedians in said videos, handily dominating all of his many detractors, while also being so hilarious and insightful about it that even the people he's destroying have to laugh at his jokes and awe at his wisdom. Of course, the irony of the situation is that his amorality and ignorance not only ensure that he will never, ever be able to stomp out his enemies like that, they're also the entire reason why he has said enemies in the first place.

Basically, if he was smart enough to be able to prove all his enemies wrong, then he'd be smart enough to realize that they're actually RIGHT. I like to call this particular phenomenon the Stupid Asshole Paradox.