I am one of those deprived Americans who doesn’t have cable TV and
so don’t have much exposure to Beavis and Butt-head, MTV’s music video commentators.
What little I have seen, I have detested, I believe mainly due to the fact that
I think music videos are stupid. However, I played Beavis and Butt-head in
Virtual Stupidity a couple of years ago with much enjoyment, even going so
far as to rank it in my lifetime top 10 games, and so I was really excited to
hear there was a new B&BH adventure game out. I was not disappointed by Do
U.

The eternal question in this game is whether the boys will score
with the chicks. Beavis and Butt-head’s high school class, along with their weenie
of a teacher, Mr. Van Driessen, take a field trip to the local state college in
order to get a feel for what awaits them in the arena of higher education. Our
intrepid heros have another goal in mind, however–they only want to drink beer
and score with some college sluts. However, Mr. Van Driessen is firm–the boys
must complete the college tour, which involves getting eight different sign-offs
in eight areas of the college, in order to attend the reward party at the end
of the field trip. Of course, Beavis and Butt-head can’t do anything the conventional
way or be bothered to expend much effort, so they endeavor to obtain the sign-offs
in their own unique fashion. Everything Beavis and Butt-head do is aimed at the
ultimate goal of scoring with some college sluts, which gives rise to much juvenile
humor. I enjoyed the dialogue and the story quite a bit (I have very low comedy
standards, I readily admit), and so I give the plot an A.

In moving
your cursor around the screen, when you encounter an object or person you can
interact with, a cartoon “thought balloon” appears over B&BH’s head
(I will refer to them as one character from here out because they might as well
be Siamese twins) indicating that you can do something. Your left mouse button
interacts; your right mouse button examines. Items you pick up go into your inventory;
to use them, you drag them out of the paper bag on the upper right of the screen.
Playing the game is very straightforward, as is the method of moving from one
area to another. To see another area, you click on your sign-off sheet and then
click on the area you want to go next. The use of the inventory items is rarely
what you might expect, and therein lies the challenge of the game. There were
a couple of arcade sequences; one such near the end of the game was very difficult
for me, and I lack any semblance of patience when I have to try things more than
about twice–I had to ask my husband to complete it for me. I also got stuck enough
a couple of times that I had to resort to asking for hints, but when I found out
the answers, it turned out to be something I had just overlooked. Gameplay
gets a B+ from me–I liked the ease of the interface, and the puzzles had
just the right level of difficulty–some easy, some hard, but mostly somewhere
in between. My grade would have been an A if not for that one arcade sequence.

The
quality of the graphics is very good–as you all (should) know, Beavis and Butt-head
are cartoon characters and so this is a cartoon game. The entire game, both the
active portions and the cut scenes, had TV-quality animation. Even when you, the
player, are idle, B&BH are always doing little things like picking noses,
checking privates, and falling asleep while standing up. There are no great technological
leaps here–no 3D rendering or anything of that nature–but the simplicity of
the game allowed a great many scenes to fit on one CD with no slow load times
or other drawbacks that are inherent in more technologically advanced games. Because
of this and because the quality of the graphics and animation were still first-rate,
I give this category an A. I really liked the fact that relatively older
technology was still used to produce a fine adventure game.

The music is
mostly heavy metal, as you might imagine, but there is not enough of it. There
is one portion of the game where the music is some kind of seventies easy listening
disco kind of crap, which I just hated, and I was stuck on that part for a while.
I had to adjust the options to turn off the music there, and I think the game
designers were sadists for even putting it in there. However, I can’t let that
bring down my overall grade because it was exactly appropriate for that particular
portion of the game. The voice acting is quite well-done, although the characters
are purposely annoying. B&BH did tend to get on my nerves when I inadvertently
made them say the same things over and over again, and I would have liked to reach
my hand into the monitor and slap that wimpy Mr. Van Driessen upside the head
until he saw little birdies flying around his head. However, weenie-on-purpose
is much preferable to weenie-by-accident (like the main character in Sanitarium).
Sound effects in this game were great–lots of “plop”s and “squelch”es,
as you might image, all exquisitely gross. Overall, this category gets an A
from me–even though nothing was really appealing, as you might expect, absolutely
nothing was inappropriate.

I leave it to you to play the game yourself to
find out whether B&BH did, in fact, score with some college sluts. I recommend
this game to any who are not offended by constant “dammit, Butt-head”s
and toilet humor. It has all of the elements of a classic adventure game, and
it was really fun to play. My final grade is an A.

Final Grade:
A

System Requirements:
Windows95/98
P133 MHz or better
16 MB RAM
2 MB Video Card
4X CD-ROM

Soundblaster compatible soundcard