Articles
 by Jeff Strand May 10, 2002 |
The
Seriously Whacked Point of View “Survivor: by Jeff Strand |
As it prepares to wrap
up its spectacular fourth season, I admit without shame that I am
completely addicted to the show Survivor. I never miss an episode,
I participate in bulletin board discussions, I dutifully consume Snickers
and Sierra Mist, I bought the computer game version, I…
Yes, I bought the computer
game version. On purpose. At full price, as opposed to today, where
Best Buy employees desperately try to stuff copies down your shirt
when you’re not looking. Now, I wasn’t expecting much; the TV show
is based on human interaction more than anything else, and the game
designers had a tough challenge ahead of them. They rose to this challenge
by making the single worst piece-o-crap ever to hit my computer.
When I say this, I’m counting
the adaptation of my novel How to Rescue a Dead Princess that
I tried to create, which never got past the first screen and had graphics
that basically consisted of a tree that was a long brown rectangle
with a very tiny green triangle on top, although there was also a
key that I could never figure out how to let the player take. All
you really got to do was click on a few things and read the descriptions,
but it still offered more entertainment value than Survivor:
The Interactive Game.
I’m not being sarcastic.
If you were to create an entertainment scale where staring at a blank
wall scores a zero and watching Evil Dead II on an oversized
waterbed occupied by a baker’s dozen of physically attractive and
unclothed specimens of your gender preference(s) scores a 100, then
my game was about a 2. Pretty sad, but still a positive integer. Survivor
has a negative entertainment value. In fact, while it was on my hard
drive, I noticed that other games were less fun than they used
to be! Grim Fandango suddenly developed a tedious maze and a sliding
tile puzzle, and Guybrush Threepwood gave me the finger.
I’ve played a lot of bad
games in my life, but Survivor was the first where I felt that the
game designers hated me, personally. Like, maybe when we were kids
I used to make them eat worms or I laughed when they dropped their
Popsicle or something. Of course, this line of thinking implies that
I wasn’t the worm-eater or Popsicle-dropper, which would’ve been pretty
cool.
You can choose between
a 13-episode, a 7-episode, or a 3-episode game, though it doesn’t
matter which one you pick because you’ll be uninstalling it somewhere
around episode two. Then you pick your character, and the game begins.
The first section is “Survival
Period.” Here, for three minutes and 20 seconds, you watch your
character walk around and do survival stuff, like pick up pieces of
firewood. It’s about as much fun as watching a character on your computer
screen walk around picking up pieces of firewood. You can also converse
with other characters, which is sort of interesting except that the
conversations are mind-numbingly tedious and every character has the
exact same list of responses and the dialogue has all the coherency
of an Internet chat room filled with third graders. I told a player
that we needed to start winning some challenges, and he agreed, even
though we hadn’t played any challenges yet. I told another player
that what I missed most of all was a good night’s sleep and she agreed,
even though we hadn’t spent the night out there yet. This part of
the game sucks.
The second section is the
“Loading…” screen. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t meant to
be an official part of the game, but it lasts long enough that I’m
giving it honorary status.
Next is the “Reward
Challenge.” Here, you get to enjoy exciting challenges like a
race that involves dragging a tree trunk behind you. Dragging a tree
trunk, of course, means that you’re moving very slowly, which might
suggest that it’s not necessarily the most exciting sort of race to
be incorporated into an interactive computer game. After a while you’re
freed from the tree trunk and the race continues the same way except
that you’re moving a little faster. About twenty seconds after you
say “When the hell is this race going to end???” the race
ends. I won matches. Since I wasn’t actually out there surviving in
the while, I didn’t much care.
Then comes the “Loading…”
screen again, which allows you to play a much more entertaining game,
like trying to clip your toenails so that they pop up into your mouth.
Next is the “Survival
Period” again, which sucks even more than it did the first time
because you’re still sick of it from the last time. It’s followed
by another guest appearance by the “Loading…” screen,
which should probably have a built-in screen saver so that it doesn’t
burn its image onto your monitor.
After that, you get the
“Immunity Challenge.” I got to sit on a slow-moving canoe
and shoot arrows at targets. It was a bit more fun than dragging those
tree trunks, although the sound of the arrow being pulled back was
obviously accomplished by stretching a balloon. You will get really
sick of hearing balloons being stretched before this challenge is
over. I ran out of arrows fairly quickly, but it still made me ride
all the way to the end.
Since my team lost, we
had to go to Tribal Council, where the team must vote off one of its
own members. (SPOILER WARNING: You won’t care who gets voted off.)
After you vote, the game shows you the names of everybody who received
votes right away, to eliminate any suspense that might have accidentally
occurred.
I didn’t receive any votes
at the first or second Tribal Council, and I was probably well on
my way to victory until I suddenly realized that I was still playing
this supernaturally awful game and put a stop to that sort of nonsense.
Yes, it’s that bad. And
the next time you’re at Best Buy, wear tight clothing.
Jeff Strand is the author
of How to Rescue a Dead Princess and its incomplete computer game
counterpart. You can visit his ridiculous website at http://www.jeffstrand.com.
He wishes he had a pug.
