Video Game Review: Tetris

In this game, you are Tetrov, a Russian architect trying to rebuild the Berlin wall using substandard Russian bricks. When you are successful, your country launches satellites and palaces into space in celebration. When you fail, you are shot.

Now, in the US version of the game, most of the plot points have been edited out and the focus is on the blocks. However, in the Russian version of the game, the block-dropping portions are actually bonus puzzles played after thrilling platform-jumping levels where you dodge CIA agents and seduce female government secretaries in order to steal their keycards and gain access to classified documents and information pertaining to the fabled Stealth Bomber.

When you complete the game by infiltrating the Groom Lake facility, you fly your hijacked jet back to the Motherland as rockets, fireworks, and Kremlins explode jubilantly in the air around you.When the jet lands, you are still shot because you know too much, but your family gets bread. I give this game ten stars for gameplay, awesome graphics, and its heroin-like addictive qualities.

Video Game Review: Mother

This Japanese game is a knock-off of Dragon Warrior. Its creator is a sadistic monster named Shigesato Itoi. Why do I call him a sadistic monster? Because you have to invest at least six solid months of your life into leveling up in order to have any hope of beating this game, which none of you do to begin with because it’s in Japanese, which you can’t read.

My superiors question the utility of a video game review for a game nobody in D’Starkville will ever encounter. My answer to them is this: in five or six years, someone might make an awesome sequel to this game, and then somehow it will draw attention to this game, and then people might find themselves faced with the option of importing it, or if computers have evolved far enough to allow reasonable emulation of NES hardware, stealing a digital copy of it.

Should all of these things happen, our readers will remember back to this day, this glorious day, and they can say, ‘Yes! I read an article telling me to avoid this game at all costs!’

I’m not saying to avoid it because it’s bad. In fact, the dialogue is pretty clever, and if someone were to go through all the trouble to translate it into English (my game counselor Dan says this is being done as we speak, but the game will probably not actually be released) I bet it would sound snappy and clever.

The music is great (love that track that plays at the shopping mall), some of the enemy sprites are pretty detailed (even though the overworld sprites are VERY basic and one could argue that they suck pretty hard-core…) and it even has a few touching moments.

No, I’m saying to avoid this game because it’s just too time-consuming and difficult. Unless you can find a way to cheat. If that’s possible, I say go for it.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that this game will never spawn a cult of rabid fans united by a fancy network of interconnected computers.

Also, I’ve killed this farmer guy about 150 times.