Time We Will Never Get Back: A Look at the Internet Games That Are Wasting Our Lives
with generous amounts of help from Melissa!
The Internet is pretty great for the most part. It can be massively entertaining, you meet up with distant people you’d never have met any other way… Unless the world really is putty in the hands of Fate and if there were no Internet right now, we really would somehow run into all of these people in strange, strange ways.. But I mean I am on my second sentence of an article and I probably shouldn’t ALREADY be getting distracted from the topic at hand. Wait! I haven’t even introduced the topic! I was starting with a slightly-relevant hook to trick you into reading what I am going to be discussing with myself! Browser-based Internet Games. (more…)
No doubt you have already covered yourself as if you were in the first row of a Gallagher show, because you expect some shit to be flung around all over this article. Well, we’re saving the shit for toilets and the bathroom floors of restaurants that have extremely bad service this time. You see, just like the movies it is inspired by…this game has a twist. This twist is even more unpredictable and much more satisfying than any of the ones in its cinema cousins…this twist is actually pretty damn shocking and doesn’t make you wonder why you didn’t just spend your $7 purchasing a real snuff film in an alleyway. I hate to spoil things for you, but the twist is as follows:
Well hello there ghouls and ghosts! It is I! The Gravekeeper to frighten you with even more terrible games for the Halloween season! Along with more cheap scare tactics than a bad Sam Raimi rip-off movBOO! HAHAHA! Got you! Anyway, this time our line-up of horrors is provided exclusively from our good friends at Atari, men and women who know what horror is all about (ever own a Jaguar?). So get ready kiddies, it’s time to go back into the depths of my crypt, and marvel at pixels so frighteBOO! HAHA! You’re an easy one! 
In the late night hours, you find yourself doing things that you normally wouldn’t when it comes to entertainment. Whether you all of a sudden realize you’ve just sat through 4 hours of a Bob Newhart marathon, or you’ve mindlessly ambled through a viewing of Bewitched (the movie), it has happened to all of us. The later it gets, the more your standards go out the door, and it gets to the point to where you will take just about anything…whether you like it or not. I guess it’s sorta like being an ugly girl in that respect.
You find yourself in a maze filled with edible orbs, and you are not alone. Monsters lurk in this place, is it a dungeon? Is it a castle? Is it a level of Hell? You must run from these evil things, oh! You catch a glimpse! They’re g-g-ghosts! Vengeful spirits of the damned chase you, wishing to devour your soul. So you run. You dodge them by darting into unused corridors! Oh god but there are more! Mindlessly being forced to eat orbs as you run in terror, you stumble upon one that causes the ghosts to flee from YOU. Ha ha! Who’s chasing whom NOW, you fiends?! You gobble them up for a few seconds, not nearly enough seconds. Then their fear is over. You didn’t kill any of them. You do not simply kill ghosts. The chase is on again, and again, and again. Until you somehow eat all of the orbs. Then it all starts over. 
“Are you surprised at my tears, sir? Strong men also cry… strong men also cry.” 
I finally managed to play through Silent Hill: Shattered Memories a while back. Being a huge SH fan over the years, this one really put me off initially. I’m not a fan of Wiimote waggling at all, and it seemed like this new SH was about to take it to all new pants-shitting levels of annoyance. And while I wasn’t entirely wrong with that initial assessment, I’m glad I finally took the time to play through it. Overall it’s probably one of the more unique games you’ll play regardless of all the frustration you may have with it. It’s such a strange game in overall concept that it will probably take a few days of going over it in your head after you’ve beaten it to really rein in the things you saw and did in a way that will make sense. And even then, there’s going to be a hazy cloud of uncertainty sitting around. This is a good thing, BTW. Just in case you were wondering. Well, except the waggling. 
Back in the nineteen hundred and nineties, Maxis released a game for pcs that I thought sounded like a heck of a lot of fun: SimAnt. I had played, and been impressed by, the original SimCity, so I was enthusiastically looking forward to a game that did the same thing but with an ant colony. My inner science nerd was way more advanced than my inner city planner, you see, and I wanted nothing more than to control an ant city located deep under a human lawn. 
Remember Kyle Petty? Maybe? Of course you don’t. He’s some guy that raced cars or something in the 90s. The point being that whether you remember him or not, he had a completely baller mustache. And people with amazing mustaches get games made about them. This guy just happened to race in Nascar, which thankfully made for an easy game to be cashed in on the SNES. I mean, imagine if the guy was a professional waiter or something. A game about professional waiters with awesome mustaches would only suck slightly more than Kyle Petty’s No Fear Racing. 
Spike McFang is just stupid. But stupid in a good way. It was one of those SNES games that really only stood out for being completely strange on every level. Essentially what you get is your typical top-down action RPG that Zelda and Secret of Mana had made famous for years. In that regard, Spike McFang is nothing too special. Sure it’s fun, but it’s not until you get into the actual storyline and characters that you realize that you’re dealing with something that may be worth more than a ten second glance at your local video store. 
I’m sure we all know 
