Love him or hate him, you
still have to respect American McGee for sticking to his convictions.

American is convinced that most children’s literature has been
Disneyfied, that is, the more gruesome parts have either been removed
or toned down for today’s namby pamby children who are so fat
and lazy that they eschew playing with real Legos in favor of playing
with virtual ones.

In fact, it is stated rather
explicitly at the beginning of each Grimm episode that, “Once
upon a time fairy tales were valuable cautionary yarns filled with
dire warnings and sage advice. However, over time, the stories have
become so watered down with cute woodland creatures and happy endings
that they have lost their true meaning and purpose.”

Now
why this upsets Mr. McGee so much I’m not sure, especially as
today’s precocious tots are much more likely to be watching
Director’s Cut, hi-def Blu-rays of Saw IV
or blowing away hookers in Grand Theft Auto IV
than they are reading a smelly, old book.

American McGee’s
Grimm is a collection of fairy tales on Gametap
with a new episode available every week. To date, there have been
eight installments – A Boy Learns What Fear Is, The Fisherman and
His Wife, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, The Girl Without
Hands, Godfather Death, The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs and Beauty
and the Beast. The entire series is to be comprised of twenty-four
episodes broken into three segments of eight episodes apiece.

Each
episode opens with the excellent Grimm’s theme song and then
our narrator, Grimm himself, relates with sputtering venom the ‘watered-down’
version of this week’s fairy tale. The story is nicely presented
by strange string puppets that jiggle about like they are having an
epileptic seizure. The voice acting, for both the opening and closing
story, is splendid all the way around. These wrap-arounds for Grimm
and his puppets are voiced by voice-over veteran Roger Jackson whose
industry credits go all the way back to Roberta Williams’ King’s
Quest VII: The Princeless Bride in 1994. Each story
then concludes with a satisfied Grimm retelling the story in its original
form.

The character of Grimm
adds sort of a Fractured
Fairy Tales feel to the game, though in a much more
ominous manner than those classic Jay Ward cartoons. It seems that
both Grimm and Fractured
have the same objective in mind – to unobtrusively encourage
reading – but Fractured accomplished
its goal through inspired silliness while Grimm is more attuned to
the modern sensibilities of violence.

We
are then inserted into the story, playing as Grimm, our goal being
to destroy each chapter of the diluted fairy tale by darkening the
land/story with our foul smell. This is done by scurrying about the
landscape and turning everything dark. There are some humorous bits
scattered through the different stories – grandfather clocks
wind down, flowers wilt on bushes and so on. In some areas, happy
people and fluffy creatures will follow behind cleaning-up your dirty
work and requiring a butt-stomp to stop the cleaning.

At the top of the screen
is a dark-o-meter that ranks your progress from smelly-stinky-gross-foul-rotten-nasty-disgusting-repulsive-putrid-rancid-vile
(can’t help but wonder what the board meeting for determining
the levels of disgustingness for the dark-o-meter must have been like).
At the beginning of each chapter you are given a smell to achieve
before you can butt-stomp your way to the next chapter.

Navigation
is a breeze as either your mouse or keyboard is used to guide Grimm
through the land. To jump is a left click and a butt-stomp is a double
left-click. Butt-stomps are used to open gateways to new areas or
to sometimes clear an area of vicious plants or other items relatable
to that story.

If you stand in one place
too long Grimm will begin to pee. Your urine (well, Grimm’s
urine) can be aimed to determine how far you can jump to a given area.

Was this necessary? It
really cheapens the entire experience (look everybody, Grimm is showing
his willy wonker, tee hee) and smacks of a ploy to attract negative
attention from the mainstream press. In keeping with the gross-out
aspect of the game, why not just have Grimm squeeze a pimple until
it pops to mark an area?

The graphics – well,
they’re pretty cool. Think Gahan
Wilson meets Charles
Addams meets Tim
Burton. If you like this kind of demented, over-the-top imagery
then you’re in for a treat.

Now,
the first few episodes seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot
of running around and to be honest, were just a casual game in sheep’s
clothing and I was getting bored. Nor was I interested in bettering
my time in blackening an area or comparing my time to do so against
other players. Just not my cup of tea.

But somewhere around the
fourth or fifth episode, the tone seemed to darken; the humor blackened.
Babies started birthing out of mother’s wombs like jet rockets,
psychotic bunnies that would scare a pellet out of Max (of Sam
and Max fame, of course) had to be butt-stomped to death
and even the eternal motto of every diehard gamer was to be heard
– All your base, are belong to us.

Power-ups
such as super speed and super butt-stomp were added and instead of
just running from scene to scene, many scenarios have been modified
with platform-like game elements. Suddenly, the week long wait between
episodes became unbearable!

Is each episode worth the
$3.99 price tag? Not when you consider that an episode can be completed
in under an hour. But if you were to purchase a monthly subscription
to Gametap –
which would then allow you to play through their entire catalogue
of hundreds of games – then they could be considered a real
bargain.

Everything here is top-notch
– the voice-acting, the music, the graphics (though it is unforgivable
to have misspelled words in the subtitles. It cheapens the entire
affair). One would even be hard-pressed to find fault with American’s
goal to have children read the real deal (though in the interest of
fairness, the first volume of the original Grimm’s
Fairy Tales in 1812 was criticized as not being suitable
for children due to the subject matter and some sexual references).

So
before we tuck this review in for the night, I must ask one last question,
and this is for Mr. McGee. I don’t know if you have children,
but if you do, what fairy tale version do you read to them before
they close their eyes for a good night’s sleep? The sanitized
Red Riding Hood where she is saved by the hunter before being eaten
by the wolf and everyone lives happily ever after, or the original
version where the wolf swallows both the grandmother and Red whole
until a hunter comes to the rescue and saves them by cutting the wolf
open and then killing it by filling its body with heavy rocks?

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows® 32-bit
  version
• CPU: 2400MHz
• RAM: 512 MB
• Video Card wth 128 MB
  onboard memory