Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
Action - RPG

Publisher	Virgin Games
Developer	Sculptured Software, Inc.

Our brains can turn themselves off and make us temporary morons like when you're holding two things and absent mindedly throw the wrong one away. You'll unwrap a popsicle, walk over to the trash, throw away the popsicle, and put the wrapper in your mouth. I do that all the time. Because like every other man, I think about sex every six seconds. Except I have to devote more of my attention to it since because instead of just the sex, I have to imagine a crime that requires me to be naked and Wonder Woman chasing me through an abandonded warehouse right before the sex, and the clerical error after the sex that somehow places me in an all-female prison where the conjugal visits are built right into your roommate. So you can see if I open a popsicle near a trash can, I have about a 20 percent chance of actually getting to eat that popsicle.

GAME TIPS: Make your daring prison escape!

Step one: escape from your shackles. Since you're not in any, this should only take a few tries.

Step two: find a weapon. Thinking you'd never explore the entire 10 foot area, the guards store a secret emergency sword on the counter at the other side of your cell. The key to finding it is looking for the sword-shaped object on the counter at the other side of your cell. Be careful to make sure you know which end is the handle before you pick it up, and don't put either end in your ear.

Step three: eliminate the guard. Expert Hint: An object in the room might be just what you need. Advanced Hint: Pointy things hurt when you hit people with them. Beginner Hint: Hit him with the sword.

There it is. You're on your own from now on, but if you were clever enough to break Robin Hood out of prison, you're probably busy using your new problem solving skills to open tricky bags of potato chips and decyphering the instructions on your shampoo.
But how long does a person suck on the paper popsicle wrapper before they know they fucked up? Two, maybe three minutes if they're dangerously stupid or distracted with Wonder Woman fantasies? Whoever threw away the good ideas at the Nintendo meeting like "space ninja with big gun" and "topless insect women from the future" accidentally kept the pad of paper with the ideas game about ketchup," "plan a trip to the nursing home," and "something based on a Kevin Costner movie." And they never noticed. They made the Kevin Costner idea into an entire game. I don't know how long that took, but I bet it's way longer than it should take for a person to notice there's a damn paper popsicle wrapper in their mouth.

The Kevin Costner Phenomenon: Somewhere along the way, Kevin found out that if he stopped talking for a few minutes between words, people would call it "brilliant," "rivetting," and "a satisfying romantic emotional resonance." In this game, the drama is lost since all characters spit out their lines with none of the silence that helps drag Kevin's films out to the length of three other movies on a bus trip across the country where you're smashed between two fat people and the air conditioning's broken. I found out that it became my responsibility to constantly hit the pause button to recreate the Kevin Costner pause-during-speech experience. To hell with that. The game should have been saved for the Playstation, where the loading between each word would bring the Costner drama from your TV to your TV when the Playstation's hooked up to it.

If you had to sum up the game in 1000 words, you'd write "wander" and "bonk" five hundred times each. After you bonk a man enough times with your sword, they explode like a dynamite-filled watermelon and you get to search through the goop to get what they were holding. Most times it's band aids. To search, simply press Start to bring up a menu, scroll down the menu to where it says SEARCH, and simply press a button. The game will triumphantly announce what you've found with a song. Then simply scroll down the menu to where it says EXIT, and simply press another button. Move Robin Hood on top of the stuff you pulled out of the exploded corpse, simply press button A while you're there, and the item is yours!

That's right. For every guy you kill, you only need to press 13 buttons, read a screen full of text, and listen to one trumpeting song to get his item. It's just that simple. You might have complained when Kevin forgot to hire an editor and Dances with Wolves rolled into its fifth hour of wolf dancing, but that's going to look as fast as a greased pig on rollerskates on a pig-transporting comet compared to the 50th dead body you have to punch in a differential equation to search. I'm glad the game was trying to recreate Mr. Costner's tediousness, but it felt more like I was trying to use an ATM to buy South America.

Graphics: 2
Most of the game is a bird's-eye view of Robin Hood playing in the dirt, only the bird's eye has a stigmatism and was just covered in an opaque turd from a bird flying higher than it. Sometimes you got to see a picture of the movie's actors when you got into a deep discussion like "HELLO MY FRIEND... HELLO. I AM AZEEM!" But they were such low quality ugly mistakes that it looked like the programmers accidentally scanned a picture of their stunt doubles. And then covered them in turd of course. Whoever did the graphics decided everything should look like it was made of chocolate.

Fun: 2
If you think hitting people is more exciting when you have to collect keys and band-aids afterwards, you'll find this game exciting*. It's like Legend of Zelda only uglier, clumsier, and less fun. You may save yourself a few dollars by just putting a bag over your head and playing Legend of Zelda from a chair made out of angry animals.

Targetted Suckitude: 6
This game was confrontationally bad. A lot of games suck, but you'll swear that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was specifically designed to piss you off.

* "You'll find this game exciting!" ...Seanbaby.com