So when most people spend all night partying and drinking the party usually involves more than two guys sitting in a room and the drinks are usually a bit stronger than IBC Rootbear. For my buddy Andrej and me though, a party involves a 65" 1080p TV, a dozen different consoles and a couple hundred games. Our day long gaming marathon started at 2:00 PM and ended at 4:00 AM. That's a lot of gaming huh? So what did we play?

Well we started off with the reason for my visit. I needed help in the first Oddworld game. I was stuck on the fourth screen. Yea I know, I suck. Or so I thought. As soon as Andrej started the game up he started doing a bunch of moves that I didn't know existed. He used a mind control move to take control of an enemy, he asked friendlies to follow him, he in essence did a whole bunch of stuff that the game never told me existed. It was an eerie foreshadowing of a game that would come half a day later on our odyssey, but I simply was shocked that moves that were required for the player to progress in the game were not ever mentioned until after they were needed. How did the game expect me to know what I had to do? Oh well. We got through the first ten or fifteen screens and then decided to move on.

Next we checked out the PSN to see the new releases on the store this week. We decided nothing was worth downloading, so we took a look at a demo he had previously downloaded- Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. We could only play a couple of the 30+ games on the collection so we just went through the list and watched the trailers for each of the games. Neither of us ever owned a Genesis so a lot of the games were new to us. There were a lot of cool Genesis games huh? I kind of want to buy this collection, but I already own most of the games on my PSP Genesis Collection. Still these collections are seriously good values. There are nearly a dozen RPG's in this collection, most of which are over sixty hours long. That's a lot of gaming! Still, I don't really enjoy old school RPG's so I don't know how much I would get out of them.

After spending a good hour looking through the games I said we should try out one of the new games he had bought earlier in the day, but he wanted to play them on his own, so we got up and looked through his collection. About five minutes in my eyes settled on a game that sent shivers running down my spine. I felt a tingle in the back of my neck that only shows itself in the face of the worst of games. My stomach immediately started roiling, my cheeks were burning. It was a sensation I last got when trying to play Sonic the Hedgehog for 360. What was this game? Yes it was my lowest rated game ever, RLH. This travesty of a game is simply one of the worst games ever made. It turns out Andrej had picked it up for $2 and never played it. I told him we had to play it just to see how bad it was. Now I should mention that Andrej has very, very, low standards when it comes to gaming. He'll like pretty much anything so I was interested to see if he could actually find enjoyment in RLH. For the uninitiated, RLH is one of Interplay's last published games. It tells a rather cliché story of a astronaut far in the future who returns to his ship only to find that it has been overrun with monsters. Of course his fiancé is stuck on board and it is up to him to rescue her. Unlike Dead Space or other good versions of this story there is nothing interesting about the characters or world of RLH.

We started off with the tutorial, and we almost never made it out. Andrej and I agreed it was the most boring, dull, long winded, and flat out worst tutorial in a game ever. It took well over half an hour to finish, during which you mostly ran around the ship to talk to people. The dialogue is horrible in this game, the acting is worse, and the character animation borders on non-existent. By the time you reach the twentieth utterly dull long winded conversation about things you don't care about you'll be begging the tutorial to end. You are constantly nagged by a girl that you need to get to the bridge as fast as possible, and in all honesty we would have warped to the bridge if at all possible. Instead half of the elevators on the ship are broken and you are sent in circles trying to find a way to finish this snooze fest and start the actual game. Eventually you reach the combat tutorial and things get really bad. Combat in this game is horrendous. It's not that it doesn't work, it's just that it is just plain boring. You hold down right trigger to lock onto an enemy and press A repeatedly to fire. When the enemy is dead just depress the right trigger again to lock onto your next target and press A some more. I compare the combat to Diablo in that it mostly involves just clicking one button over and over until everything on screen is dead. The difference here is that the enemies require no strategy to beat and you have no spells or skills to spice up combat. And of course you aren't receiving loot or experience with each kill, so there is really no reason to fight these enemies. There is nothing to work towards. No rewards that we found. You just press A over and over, room after room until you come to a door that you need a key for. Then you walk up to everything in the room and press A until something gives you a key.

If the gameplay wasn't bad enough, once you get into the actual meat of the game you'll quickly realize that the graphics, audio, and menu all suffer from atrocious design. The graphics are so dark that we could barely see a thing that was happening in the game. We turned off the lights in the room and set the brightness in the game on max and still we could barely make out doors and enemies in the almost pitch black ship. Secondly, the audio mixing is simply, well, broken. Voices are almost inaudible, while ambient noises like the buzzing of the ship are set so high that you can barely hear the music or combat sounds over it. Then some sounds, like the opening and closing of hanger doors are so loud that our speakers nearly blew out, and remember we couldn't even hear the voiceover. Finally the menus are incredibly confusing. We are both game designers and life long gamers and these menus had us flabbergasted. Nothing was labeled well. You had to press a half dozen buttons to do something that could have been done in a single press, it simply was terrible.

So after playing this game for several hours, our dinner arrived. It was a classic Israeli meal- falafels. We ate and talked and then I mentioned I had never played Mario Galaxy. Andrej insisted that I try it but first we went downstairs to pick up some drinks - IBC Rootbear, Organgina and pomegranate juice. Yea we are hardcore. Then we started up the Wii and popped in Mario. Wow, what an amazing game. I had only used a Wii a couple times before in my life, but it only took me a couple minutes before I was playing like a pro. The game was just pure fun. The controls were flawless, the music and audio was perfectly sampled, the graphics were stunning for a Wii game. Truly a top notch effort all around. I said I wished that Nintendo put out more games of this quality. Andrej said that there were a lot of great games for Wii. I asked him to prove it. He listed a couple games like No More Heroes, Madworld, World of Goo, and Zack and Wicki. I told him that those games were fine but they were all really arthouse games that I wasn't sure I would enjoy enough to make the system a worthwhile purchase. So he said Nintendo made a lot of good games. Again, I asked him to prove it. He listed Metroid Prime 3, Zelda, and Mario Kart. I asked him to name a game made in the past couple of years and he couldn't. So I decided to not buy a Wii.

I played for an hour or two and then Andrej said I had to try a game that he loved back on the PS1. The game was Heart of Darkness. Wow. Just wow. What an experience. The story makes little sense. The characters are all very Jim Henson-esque is design, and the story seems ripped out of one of the director's classic movies. You are a boy who must save his dog from an evil land of darkness. The game is a puzzle platformer. It's actually very similar to Oddworld. The mood is outstanding. The game just has this great mix of dark elements and sugary sweet parts that could only be found in a 90's game. It just has a feel and style unlike anything released today. It's an indie style missing in today's gaming landscape, where the game was built to be the best game it could be, not a game that fits well into a marketing scheme.

Heart of Darkness is hard. In fact we often were stuck on puzzles for well over an hour. And unfortunately the answer to the puzzle invariably was something that should have been obvious... if we had known we could do it. Yes, like its Oddworld brother, Heart of Darkness suffers from the problem that the game never gives you even a hint that you have an ability and certainly never tells you how to use it. I felt so mixed playing this game. I loved the mood. I loved the graphics, audio, and story. I loved the animation, I loved the puzzles, the controls, almost everything, but then we would get to parts where the game just didn't give us enough info to progress. The game would give these cryptic hints that more often than not actually got us more stumped than we were before. For example, in one area we had to shoot several plants to get past a screen. First off the game had never told us we could shoot. We didn't have a gun, and for a large portion of the game we couldn't shoot anything. But then out of the blue we could. Then there were these plants that before had been dealt with in a certain way. We obviously assumed on entering the room that we had to use the same skills to defeat the plants that we had in the past. The game's hint also seemed to say that we were on the right track. Nowhere did it mention that these plants could be stunned if shot. In most games when a new element of gameplay is introduced it is explained in a small tutorial or other sequence that lets the player know he has new abilities that can be used in a certain way. This game had none of that. Anyways, at around 4:00 we reached the end of the first disc and decided to call it a day.

I grabbed my bottle (or Orangina) and stumbled out to a cab and slurred something about my address. Who knew you could have so much fun with Rootbear and video games.