February Bum Poo Wee Games Reviews

Oh Cappa, you've made it so very difficult for all of us to follow that, outstanding stuff. I think I still own this after getting it for the remote and have yet to play it, I didn't bother after seeing NGamer's review of it and I think its probably gonna stay that way after yours.

P.S. Amiibo Festival is a rubbish excuse for a game but I can at least say it did what it set out to do fairly well.

I'm not gonna read Cappa's until I've done mine. That said, I saw Smurf's reply and briefly thought Cappa had done Wii Play. I was ready to kick off.

That's absolutely tremendous. Any paragraph could be held up as an absolute belter. Flingsmash as a drink, the take on the opening, Warne vs. Posh... Oh wait it's Artoon? That explains everything, apart from the tremendous prose. Well done Cappa, the bar has been well and truly set.

Artoon made Blinx, I will have no ill will shown to them.

I've never even heard of Flingsmash and think it's for the best I don't learn any more.

Same mas, if you'd asked me what came packed in with the wii remote plus I'd have told you Skyward Sword! That or Wii Sports Resort with the motion plus add on (I think?)

I'm not surprised that half of you haven't heard of FlingSmash, it quietly came and quickly went at Christmas 2010. I wanted to find NGamer Magazine's review of it but it's a pain in the arse to go through my old magazines - at least Metacritic shows that they gave it 60%. That's 30% too high.

Oh bloody hell, that's just a reminder of the "bad times" that. Cappa, your review both made me laugh and made me sad for a potential terrible future of videogames, thankfully one that never happened.

Instead we have microtransactions! Wait... aww.

I am gutted, gents - gutted. I played my bum poo wee game a couple of times over the last few days, only to find that it's not bum poo wee. It's not good, don't get me wrong, and I won't be keeping it around - but it's not bad. How do you review a game like that entertainingly? If I can be bothered I might try again, restricting my choice to the bottom 10/15 games. For now: gutted.

I've not played mine yet but I kinda get the same vibe from what I've seen, I have a high tolerance for crap so I might even be positive.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

I'm not surprised that half of you haven't heard of FlingSmash, it quietly came and quickly went at Christmas 2010. I wanted to find NGamer Magazine's review of it but it's a pain in the arse to go through my old magazines - at least Metacritic shows that they gave it 60%. That's 30% too high.

Despite the score I'm fairly sure it was a scathing review if I remember correctly, perhaps the extra 30% was down to the free Wiimote.

I'm happy to do the same for you if you'd like Smurf!

I just didn't think any of those 8p games looked manky enough to be worth bothering with. I'd be surprised if anybody could get 8p's worth of words from any of them.

Mine cost £9! There should have been something there to get my reviewing teeth into... and yet.

I've only just installed mine - luckily it was on sale, but I spent my bleddy gold points on this. However, NGamer callbacks may happen...

Mine did have (haven't checked the price since it launched) a £35 physical release on Switch, why when I saw it same week for £4 on XBL thought why not.

Balladeer wrote:

I'm happy to do the same for you if you'd like Smurf!

Nah it's cool, I'll at least give it a try as this is purely speculative, it's got a rubbish score for a reason.

"Outshiteify" is quality vernacular and deserves to see be more commonly used.

Right, I have delved into the depths of the eShop and unearthed a steaming turd. Let me give you some words.

Superola and the lost burgers (yes that is how the title of the game is formatted...)

A whopper shite - Burger King this is not



The Switch eShop isn't exactly a bastion of well-curated and quality titles. A cursory glance through the Current Offers section will unearth a plethora of what I would lovingly describe as "89p nuggets of shite". These heavily discounted titles are rarely worth a look and exist simply to try and push themselves onto the top sellers list and rake in some easy cash from the unsuspecting masses. I've decided to do you all a service though and ensure that you are fully aware of a most suspect title. I have forgone my Greggs Sausage Roll - despite one erstwhile forumite describing it as "floppy and salty, like a fanny", I have resisted the urge to nip down the high street for a floppy delight and have instead picked up a 89p nugget named "Superola and the lost burgers".

Superola has you play the role of a llama on a quest to retrieve lost burgers across the kingdom after they were stolen by humanoid hot dogs. Look, I don't know either, but I wasn't expecting Shakespearean prose for 89p, so let's gloss over the barebones and nonsensical premise for now.

The meat of this shiteburger is in the gameplay - what little of it there is. This is a runner-style platformer peppered with some short minigames throughout your quest. Each level has you hopping over enemies and obstacles in a sprint towards the finish line. Being a runner-style platformer, there's very little to do beyond timing jumps, so these style of games often feel closer to a rhythm game at heart. Superola attempts to make things at least mildly engaging by enabling you to fire a laser to clear out enemies and obstacles by consuming a burger, but this ends up being an excuse for the game to throw nigh-impossible jumps at you and force you to use this ability to progress. Comparing this to the likes of Bit Trip Runner doesn't paint Superola in a favourable light from a pure gameplay perspective - there's not a lot of game here at all. It reminds me of the sort of pish I'd play for five minutes on Newgrounds back in the Flash game days. Those were free, mind you. The minigames aren't exactly anything to write home about either. There's one where you tap a button as it passes through a reticule - Guitar Hero, this is not - and there's another one where you play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock to advance. Oh, yes, you read that correctly.



You see, without anything in the way of an interesting game to hold it up, Superola relies on good ol' memes and references to prop it up. These aren't clever or subtle references in any way shape or form, though. The shiba inu meme from about ten years ago pops up and quotes Zelda and if your sides have recovered from that brilliant reference, the aforementioned laser references the very timely "imma firing mah lazer" video from 2008. These sort of nods are everywhere in the game and I genuinely want to know if anyone finds this shite funny. Did somebody actually spend 89p (or god forbid, the full price of £4.99) on this and found themselves chuckling away as opposed to wishing they'd put the money towards a grab bag of McCoys? Look, I don't mind a reference in a game - hell, I recently played and enjoyed Evoland 2 which is totally centred around calling back to games of yore. But when there's zero subtlety or tact towards how these jokes are made, it all ends up grating worse than yer da's attempts at My Way after a crate of Tennant's Super.



I could maybe forgive the barebones gameplay or the terrible attempts at humour if the game had some decent tunes or was presented pleasantly, but this game really is ugly as sin. There's no charm in any of the spritework and the enemies are either the lifeless wacky memes or miserable Cronenburg monstrosities. However, the real offence to the senses is the fucking horrendous chiptune loops that assail your eardrums during each level. If you dare, take a listen to this utterly minging tune that plays during a dreary volcano level.



I genuinely had a headache after a session of this. I felt like I was rocketing down Willy Wonka's boat with no earthly way of knowing which direction I was going. I felt light-headed and weak, as if the memes of the 2000s were sapping away at my very spirit, threatening to leave me a lifeless, humourless husk. The repetitive chiptune loops bored into my skull as I watched that shitty llama collide with a walking emoji and a hotdog doing the Peanut Butter Jelly Time dance. There was no escape from this waking hell - no escape from the memes.

...just buy a fucking sausage roll instead, for the love of god.

Ah sh*t. One of the people doing it randomly got this game as well... Maybe my 'keeping it secret' wasn't such a good idea when not everybody was doing it the same way! I'm really sorry other person: do you want to MP me and we'll sort this out?

I'll read yours in a mo Jay, when I've recovered from cocking this up.

This game deserves a double drubbing, to be fair, so it's not the worst thing to happen - I'll be most interested to read another person's take on this steaming turd. And we could form a support group for some much needed post-game aftercare.

...well, I've listened to the volcano theme and that would have been muted right the f*ck down. Much like the game should have been. 'Imma firin mah lazer' jokes in 2020... Good work Moyles, and my condolences.

I have to ask, were you hungry while you were writing this?

@Jay - I noticed you were playing this earlier and figured it was for this thread so I went to the eShop to take a look and yep, you have summed it up perfectly. Oh also I hated the little smarmy look the Llama constantly has on it's face & it never changed no matter what you were doing either....it was just there staring a hole down to the deepest darkest pits of your soul.


*shudders*

Art Sqool



I've never been the most accomplished of artists, it's mainly because I'm naturally clunky with all the grace and coordination of Bambi's mum on ice, after she met with the hunter, which coincidentally is how this game plays.


I was greeted by this nightmare a number of times when loading in

The main premise of Art Sqool unsurprisingly tasks you with doing a series of artistic assignments, all the while you can roam around the handful of floating islands collecting new drawing tools. The tasks are assigned entirely at random which to its credit is a little interesting, each playthrough could have a completely different set of 50 drawings, the first of which I had to draw was "something boring", not at all foreboding. Naturally I had a little play around first and it soon became obvious that no matter how handy I may or may not be with a paintbrush, I was never going to create a work of art here, the cotrols are uglier than the lovechild of Piers Morgan and Katie Hopkins.


This was probably the apex of my art career

I won't go in to too much detail of how it works but you have to paint with the R button and then use the right stick to move the brush. This might not sound bad on paper but grab your Switch now and try to imagine drawing a circle in this way, it feels more awkward than that time I fell asleep on the toilet at a friend's house getting someone's name wrong. There is touch screen controls however the default screen has your picture in a small window you can't possibly work with, even with a stylus. There is also an option to go full screen, great except it's not because it completely throws everything out of sync and makes you draw about about 6 inches west of where you selected, if your game is about Art at least make it possible to draw a comedy Wang in the area you're actually highlighting, not a wang's length away.


The most fun I had with the game, walking in to these chairs sent them flying so I made a game of trying to get them in this box

So as a tool for making pieces of art, this fails pretty spectacularly on controls alone, if you were somehow able to work around them it wouldn't matter anyway as ratings for each assignment appear to completely random and not at all linked to what you're tasked to do. One galaxy brain level assignment asked me to draw nothing at all, I thought "cool that's quirky" and went and submitted a blank canvas only to be told I needed to do more. My eventual submission was a busy mess which by this point I'd realised would be enough to pass any assignment the game threw at me. There was even an assignment that asked me to draw for 4 minutes but by this point I'd already wasted enough of my life so tried to submit a quick 20 second mess and lo and behold it was accepted with a B ranking to boot.


Definitely met the brief here. P.S. spoilers!

I don't know who this game is made for, anyone with any kind of artistic flair won't be able to get anything out of it, it's attempt at humour is sigh worthy and the unpleasant singing from protagonist Froshmin in the games cutscenes are enough to make you wish you were Vincent Van Gogh. If I were to compare Art Sqool to a piece of art it could only ever come close to the abstract stuff created in the watery canvas of a toilet bowl.


Sadly pal your game isn't

Bloody hell, both those Superola and Art Sqool reviews are brilliant. Very humourous and stashed with quality one-liners, but not at the expense of being well-reasoned, articulately written and genuinely insightful. I really enjoyed those!

Thanks, think you and Jay have done a corking job with yours, I found it very difficult truth be told, putting the boot in is one thing but making it worth reading is another, goes to show how talented the NGamer writers were to do it so well time and time again.

Superola and the lost burgers: THE SECOND SLAMMING
Time for a roast



When Balla assigned Superola and the lost burgers to me as my Bum Poo Wee game, he apologised in advance. When it turned out Jay had reviewed it too, he apologised to me again. What he really ought to do now is apologise to Jay for inadvertently foisting this on him when it could have been avoided. Disgustaaang.

I am in the unique position of being able to offer some follow-up critiques to complement Jay’s delicate musings - those such as “nuggets of shite” and “fucking horrendous”. Let me be very clear: those are entirely accurate musings. The game is terrible, the people who made it are bad people, and Superola should die in a fire. And while the ultimate message of my review will really be no different from his, it seems only fair that I share in the pain of having to play it, both as a display of solidarity with my fellow east coast Scottish pal, and because am I fuck spending a couple of hours of my life with this bilge without dragging it through hot coals for your pleasure.

I wanted to go into this with an open mind, despite the 31% Metascore and despite the fact this game was chosen specifically because it is a pile of poo. So let’s see how that goes.

Greeted with the title screen, I noted ‘Undercoders :copyright: 2018” in the corner. Then I transitioned into the menu screen, and it changed to “Undercoders :copyright: 2017”. “Huh,” I thought. “That seems wrong. Maybe it’s just an oversight by the developers. Or maybe it’s totally normal! I’m not au fait with copyright law.” I booted up the story mode.

An alien hotdog (modelled after the Terminator) says “all your burgers are belong to us” - fuck’s sake, ok - and then there’s a llama having a picnic and it’s a Sunday so it’s burger day but the alien hotdogs are stealing all the burgers so the llama has to… right, ok, this appears to be pitched at an 11 year old living in 2008. Gotcha. (The doge and ‘it’s dangerous to go alone, take this’ screenshot Jay posted appears by level 3, so the developers aren’t wasting any time in squeezing those memes in!)



Gameplay-wise, as discussed, it’s an autorunner. I played a couple of autorunners about a decade ago, so I guess I’m as qualified as any other knob on the internet to talk about them - I lived through some heady days of playing Canabalt and Robot Unicorn Attack on my iPod Touch back in 2009. But that was 12 years ago, back when people had iPod Touches they played games on. You know, Undercoders probably could have gotten away with Superola if they’d released it in 2009 rather than 8 years later. (9 years later? The copyright status has thrown me.)

That said, it would still have been deemed a honking jobby back then. Example: You can jump over enemies or kill them with your laser, but each level is quite stingy with the burger power-ups that let you fire your laser so you need to make sure you time everything EXACTLY. Of course, that’s easier said than done, because all the sprites are proportionally far too big for the screen, and your laser doesn’t always actually kill the enemies because there’s sometimes a lag in the collision detection. Cue starting levels over again and again, until you get to your 21th, 22th and 23th try. Not only did the developers forget about fun level design, gameplay, and the basics of software programming, but simple grammar as well.

Graphics? I guess it technically has them. Most enemies have 2 frames of animation (some even have 3 or 4!) but none of them ever really seem to fit the attempted level aesthetic (why are there Monty Mole ripoffs and pterodactyls in one level and then Rastafarian something-or-others in with bread cats in another?)… unless that aesthetic is “memes” (see: troll face, grumpy cat). Which I might appreciate if I was an 11-year-old playing this in 2008 but, more’s the pity, I am not.

And music! This was weird. It mostly seems to be terrible chiptune versions of copyright-free music (as discussed, copyright is a confusing issue for these guys), such as The Banana Boat Song and When Johnny Comes Marching Home. I think I’m thankful for that, though, because while the music is nothing short of terrible, at least it was based on old faithfuls, which HAS to be better than something they would have made from scratch, right?



Main game aside, there are the mini games Jay mentioned too… well, actually, there’s one mini game, and I think the other one Jay referenced might actually be its attempt at boss fights? Now, I’d never heard of Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock, but I’ve since googled it and apparently it’s some internet bullshit from 2005. Anyway, you play it against the alien hot dogs periodically, who are the main antagonists. I don’t understand what lizard and Spock do, so I just played it as if it was normal rock-paper-scissors, and I still won, so shockingly, it's almost as if it's simultaneously a completely redundant game mechanic and a failed attempt at humour!

Then there’s the mini game where you hit a button as an icon goes through a reticule which is based around the car smashing bonus game from Street Fighter. Now, this one confused me because it tells you the icons are keys for your car, but… they’re not. They might be keyholes I guess? They’re round with a line in the middle. The icons don’t actually have anything to do with the beat of the music anyway - you just have to hit A for the green icons and B for the red icons - though I’m 99% sure it tells you to hit A for all of them. But then THAT doesn’t really matter either because even if you fuck a few things up you can still get a PERFECT score and then a monkey comes along and has a sad face because you broke his thing by punching it - all very hilarious.



Positives? The jump button seems to be quite responsive. If you hold it down for longer you consistently do jump a bit higher. So it has that going for it.

And my ultimate verdict? Well, that Balla is a sociopath for facilitating a situation where esteemed Scottish national treasures JayMoyles and Rum Rapture were BOTH subjected to playing this steaming midden of tits for no very good reason. Never again.

The Jaster wrote:

Oh also I hated the little smarmy look the Llama constantly has on it's face & it never changed no matter what you were doing either....it was just there staring a hole down to the deepest darkest pits of your soul.

I will absolutely not apologise (again), because that was gold.  Two excellent slammings of Superola there, and that the picture right at the end had me absolutely howling for no good reason.  I can't believe they even got the copyright year wrong...

EDIT: And I missed out Smurf's review of Art Sqool! More tremendous stuff. (We've all done the toilet thing, haven't we?) Top captions too.