What is the inverse of being entertained? It's not being bored. No, that's the opposite. I'm talking about the actual inverse, the state of feeling like past moments of entertainment have actually be removed from one's memories. That's what the following three flash games will do to you. They will actually make your life worse than it would have been if you had just sat in one place and stopped breathing for a minute or so. This is the Awful Flash Game Roundup. I'm sorry.
Some jerk named Andre Gres decided it would be funny to make an insulting "sport" game that puts players in control of what I am obligated to assume is an airplane presumably so they can fly through an endless series of green hoops suspended in the ether. I'm using the immense power of the human imagination to convince my rational mind that the sprite controlled by the direction buttons is supposed to be a plane. Really, it looks more like someone hastily glued a cocktail shrimp to a half-eaten hotdog, attached a blinking LED to the front and let a cockroach land on it to ponder to the myriad absurdities of human behavior. As if that isn't a strange enough visual, Mr. Gres decided to do the laziest possible photoshop job on his clouds, which are really just several mirror iterations of the exact same image, resulting in a bizarre inkblot effect that would be cool if somebody did it on purpose. The visuals are the most interesting part of this game, seeing as the plane doesn't so much pass through the green hoops as it does phase out in the obvious layer behind them without any noticeable change to the score or any sound whatsoever.
Ya know what? I'm glad I played this horrible, horrible game. It gave me a sneak peek into the deficient mental processes that result in flash atrocities like Eragon: The Shade Slayer. First off, the title hints at a toxic combination of bad taste and a lack of originality. The movie Aragon was a complete piece of crap that somehow still made my mom cry when the CGI monster with a human voice fake-died. The fact that this game's designer decided to steal the name makes it perfectly clear that he or she wouldn't know quality entertainment if Jeremy Irons forced it down his or her throat with a copy of Dead Ringers. Eragon: The Shade Slayer puts players in control of an artifact from a cheap techno video that shoots "fire", aka a splotch of rainbow-colored light, at gothy Ghost Monsters. My favorite part of this game is that the entire world relies on the buttons the player presses. The shades won't fire at you unless you fire at them and the scenery doesn't move unless you move. Truly a masterful work of game design.
I've never played Left 4 Dead but I have it on good authority that it's a very fun, well-designed game. That said, I may just hate it anyway for inspiring this awful freaking point-and-click game. In fact, Right 4 Alive isn't so much a game as it is a poorly constructed Powerpoint presentation. Players are given a few different options on each screen, all but one lead to a crappy Paint image informing them that they have been eaten by zombies. Thankfully, the game is short enough to justify multiple play-throughs to find the winning ending, which amounts to a stale joke about a "break glass in case of zombies" shotgun. God, I can't wait until the whole zombie meme thing dies... for good.
In other news, last week's poll about the veracity of The Secret of Invisibility is closed. The results are in and you readers have called the site fake. In fact, the only ones who voted it Real were obvious plants from the site itself. For that little bit of foul play, I won't be giving The Secret of Invisibility the AK Smile Seal of Approval, but I will be giving them the special Invisible AK Smile Seal of Approval. Here it is to prove it:
Ain't it pretty?
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