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Review: Billy Bob the Cactus Blob 1.5
Author: David Newton (DavidN)
Added: 06/02/2004
Overall:
Average:1/10

Much like I said for the last game that I reviewed on this site, this is quite something. However, it's quite a different something compared to the last something that I reviewed. In summary, it's a bizarre game that's so obviously meant to be deliberately bad it's almost funny. I'll guide you through my play through in the vain hope that you'll find it mildly amusing.

So, the game opens with the head of Billy Bob, which is composed of exactly four different coloured circles and some extra lines. There's some scrolling text as well. It looks hideous, like the kind of thing that someone would put together in Paint in five minutes. Seconds, maybe.

The map screen comes next, where you guide the ghostly head around an unconvincingly coloured landscape and can shoot green triangles. Everything is labelled really badly in a language that is even less coherent than the average thirteen year old AOLer. You can go in to his house at this point, but I really don't see the point in it. There are a few minigames which are mildly distracting for about as long as it took to draw the main character, but the real meat of the game is in the "advensher mode" [sic].

The first task is to fire brown air-sprayed "bait" at a fish to stop it moving then walk around to some vague white circles, while what sounds like a hybrid of the Casino Night Zone and the music from the end of "Monsters Inc" plays in the background. After guiding the monstrosity through a set of fences (the movement uses "bounce" when you hit a wall, which is a fatal mistake no matter how you look at it), you kill the first boss by hitting a "rock switch", which turns him in to a pile of rocks. Actually, it might be meant to look as if the rocks fall on him, but it doesn't.

The plot continues to be explained in the badly spelled System font text objects. Some library graphics here help illustrate what's going on a little more than the author managed. To cut a long story short, you end up climbing a grey line (mountain) for hours as the author apparently decided to cut your movement speed in this section to half a pico-metre per fortnight. In an inspired touch, the sky is labelled "sky".

One evil mongoose fight later (it looks like a blue triangle with a beak and eyes, and you're congratulated afterwards with "yay it is dead") you can tumble down the mountainside again. Fortunately the author speeded up the movement this time, and here is shown the first bit of competent programming I've seen in the game so far - scrolling. No, that's it.

You then have to fight a psychedelic jester and turn him in to a multicoloured square, then dodge musical notes fired from lamp-posts. I've no idea what the author was on when he made this, but I'll guess that he got it from Shigeru Miyamoto - but unfortunately he was lacking in one main ingredient: talent.

There's more. I'll just ignore some of it and pretend it never happened, as it really has to be seen to be believed. There's no attempt at any sort of coherency at all within this game, and it may well have invented a new Click genre: "Trippy". Even though this is rather pioneering, I have to say that I imagine it can be done several thousand times better than this.

Wait a minute, that was a bit clever. As I went back to the game I thought that the author had mucked it up and made the game reset when I pressed 'n' as prompted, but it was apparently because I had gone insane. Most Hideo Kojima. After a while playing this, I can understand why the main character was going insane. Have a point for that and go home.

(Footnote: This is genuinely worth a 0, but I didn't want the author to have that honour as this was obviously meant to be a deliberately bad game. If it isn't, I'll be rather shocked as I'm simply unprepared to believe that anyone could genuinely spell like that. It's worth the download to see how bad it is.)

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