Flash - Don't Shit Your Pants

Haiku-Review:

a practical slant
on one of life's dilemmas -
pray, don't shit your pants

Additional Comments:

While 99.9% of all Flash games out there just don't deserve the time of day - at least in long-winded, commentary prone to dissect every aspect of the game, there are those rare gems and oddities that make you crook an eyebrow and say to yourself, "Hold on. What's this?" Flash games for the most part are juvenile time-killers that may potentially pack in a whole lot of fun in a neat (well, maybe neat's not the best adjective) little package or even a barrel of laughs if you're lucky. For me, Don't Shit Your Pants has fun, laughs, and the ability to move eyebrows. I remember Sven told me about the game over the phone and I was already laughing just listening to his own take-away. Shortly thereafter, I headed on over to Kongregate and checked it out myself.

Ok, the game is absolute stupidity all the way through to its very core, but it's also fabulous in its presentation and execution. From the incredibly poor Microsoft Paint graphics to the fact that your trying to hammer in commands while the timer counts down to impending doom, you can't help but not laugh and enjoy the experience. It's so easy to hate and love at the same time. Everything about it barks "I'm a shitty game," yet it teeters on that fine line that screams "Play me," despite its obvious crudeness, ugly presentation, and total lack of gameplay, even for a text-based adventure game.

There's a certain something about this game, much like Super Press Space To Win Adventure RPG 2009, that makes it stand out above other banal Flash excursions into gaming. I could say it's the concept of "simplify, simplify," but there's more to it than that. I think it's the fact that it plays on the absurdity of what a simple game is or could be, even in a text-based format which is about as basic as you can get. In a time when game designers continually push to make the most complex, convoluted gaming worlds that they can possibly think up, here we are presented with a simple screenshot of a man, a door, and a very real problem. He's crowning and there's only one solution. Actually, there's ten, but they all pretty much result in the same steamy achievement.

Nano-Win:

Any game where you can lose, er...win before you even start is a-ok in my book.

Rating: 4 pairs of soiled pants out of 5