(For enhanced pleasure, IE recommends putting a Primus album on the CD player while reading this article.)
It's taken Viacom a while, but they're finally starting to get into the swing of this whole computer game thing. Last year, all they had were some hot licensed properties and not a clue of how to implement them. For example, MTV's Club Dead was a pretty shoddy piece of work. The gameplay consisted entirely of going up and down an elevator, hoping to view the right video clip at the right time. Their second MTV computer game is a lot better, and a lot funnier. Of course, it's hard to go wrong with names like Beavis and Butt-head on the package.
Just in case you weren't aware, Beavis and Butt-head are two nearly brainless cartoon teenagers with a half-hour show on MTV, which mostly consists of their commenting on how much heavy metal videos either rule or suck. The rest of the program chronicles the life of B&B, showing their attempts to find out what is at the center of a bowling ball, or the infamous "frog baseball" segment which had parents up in arms. It's very hard for many parents to see the humor in these morons while they imagine their own children mimicking their pathetic behavior. (For those of you keeping score, similar concerns have been leveled against the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bart Simpson, and so on and so on back to Bugs Bunny cartoons.)
While the head-banging duo has been called all kinds of names, (tasteless, brainless, gruesome, etc.) Virtual Stupidity from Viacom adds one more surprising adjective to the list: innovative. The idea of a game licensed from a popular TV show or movie is far from a new one, but these spin-offs are almost always action oriented, and just as often really, really bad. Virtual Stupidity is a full-fledged PC adventure game, complete with objectives to achieve, people to talk to and puzzles to solve. And the really surprising thing is, it's a really good game, too.
Beavis and Butt-head start the game stuck in science lab when the thought occurs to them that they should try and join Todd's gang. Todd is a bully who sees our heroes as a couple of worthless wannabe dorks, but they are far too dim to realize that. What starts off as a simple hooky excursion eventually involves getting thrown in jail, driving a Sherman tank and getting really, really wired on cappuccino. And of course, watching heavy metal videos.
The interface is exceptionally easy to use, and is (deliberately) very reminiscent of the design used for LucasArts' Full Throttle. Clicking on the right mouse button calls up a picture of a skull surrounded by icons representing commands like speak (a word balloon), grab/interact (a hand that makes the "rock-on" sign when it passes over a hot object), an so on. To choose an action, just drag the cursor over the appropriate icon and let go of the mouse button. It's incredibly simple, just like our heroes. And there's lots of stuff to break, too.
The puzzles are all directly related to the story. In order to get into the gang, you've got to get some food for some of the members, but Burger World is closed for renovation, only the drive-thru is open, but you don't have a vehicle, and so on. There's never any question about what you have to accomplish, but sometimes the solutions get a little obscure. Since there's such a large fan base for these guys, and not all of them have played adventure games before, an on-line help feature would have been a good idea. When you're wandering all around town just waiting for something to happen,... well, it can really suck.
Fortunately, when you run into a snag like this, you can always play one of the four "mini-games" included. (Did you really think that an MTV-based product wouldn't have any distractions from the main plot? Short attention spans welcome! Thank you, drive through!) Rest assured, these game-lets are just as tasteless, disgusting and violent as the main game. First, there's Hock-A-Loogie, which lets you lob a slimy spitball from the roof of the High School onto innocent passersby below. These include highway joyriders, bicyclers, squirrels, the occasional paper airplane, and the principal. The next game, Bug Justice, gives you the task of protecting a small pile of candy on the sidewalk from an advancing horde of insects, and all you have to stop them is your trusty magnifying glass. It's crispy critter time! In Court Chaos, you can pelt a bunch of annoying yuppies with tennis balls. And then there's the self-explanatory Air Guitar experience. 'Nuff said.
If you're one of the few adventure aficionados who is unfamiliar with Beavis and Butt-head, Virtual Stupidity can serve as a very good introduction. It's written by the actual show writers, and voiced by creator Mike Judge, so it really is almost like controlling an episode of the show. If you're a fan of the show, but don't know diddly about gaming, you'd probably still enjoy this product, but you might want to invite one of those dorky computer geeks in to help you with the rough spots. I mean, it's really cool to hang with Beavis and Butt-head, but losing sucks.
