Articles

by Jeff Strand May 10, 2002

The Seriously Whacked Point of View "Survivor: The Interactive Nightmare" by Jeff Strand

As it prepares to wrap up its spectacular fourth season, I admit without shame that I am completely addicted to the show Survivor. I never miss an episode, I participate in bulletin board discussions, I dutifully consume Snickers and Sierra Mist, I bought the computer game version, I...

Yes, I bought the computer game version. On purpose. At full price, as opposed to today, where Best Buy employees desperately try to stuff copies down your shirt when you're not looking. Now, I wasn't expecting much; the TV show is based on human interaction more than anything else, and the game designers had a tough challenge ahead of them. They rose to this challenge by making the single worst piece-o-crap ever to hit my computer.

When I say this, I'm counting the adaptation of my novel How to Rescue a Dead Princess that I tried to create, which never got past the first screen and had graphics that basically consisted of a tree that was a long brown rectangle with a very tiny green triangle on top, although there was also a key that I could never figure out how to let the player take. All you really got to do was click on a few things and read the descriptions, but it still offered more entertainment value than Survivor: The Interactive Game.

I'm not being sarcastic. If you were to create an entertainment scale where staring at a blank wall scores a zero and watching Evil Dead II on an oversized waterbed occupied by a baker's dozen of physically attractive and unclothed specimens of your gender preference(s) scores a 100, then my game was about a 2. Pretty sad, but still a positive integer. Survivor has a negative entertainment value. In fact, while it was on my hard drive, I noticed that other games were less fun than they used to be! Grim Fandango suddenly developed a tedious maze and a sliding tile puzzle, and Guybrush Threepwood gave me the finger.

I've played a lot of bad games in my life, but Survivor was the first where I felt that the game designers hated me, personally. Like, maybe when we were kids I used to make them eat worms or I laughed when they dropped their Popsicle or something. Of course, this line of thinking implies that I wasn't the worm-eater or Popsicle-dropper, which would've been pretty cool.

You can choose between a 13-episode, a 7-episode, or a 3-episode game, though it doesn't matter which one you pick because you'll be uninstalling it somewhere around episode two. Then you pick your character, and the game begins.

The first section is "Survival Period." Here, for three minutes and 20 seconds, you watch your character walk around and do survival stuff, like pick up pieces of firewood. It's about as much fun as watching a character on your computer screen walk around picking up pieces of firewood. You can also converse with other characters, which is sort of interesting except that the conversations are mind-numbingly tedious and every character has the exact same list of responses and the dialogue has all the coherency of an Internet chat room filled with third graders. I told a player that we needed to start winning some challenges, and he agreed, even though we hadn't played any challenges yet. I told another player that what I missed most of all was a good night's sleep and she agreed, even though we hadn't spent the night out there yet. This part of the game sucks.

The second section is the "Loading..." screen. I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant to be an official part of the game, but it lasts long enough that I'm giving it honorary status.

Next is the "Reward Challenge." Here, you get to enjoy exciting challenges like a race that involves dragging a tree trunk behind you. Dragging a tree trunk, of course, means that you're moving very slowly, which might suggest that it's not necessarily the most exciting sort of race to be incorporated into an interactive computer game. After a while you're freed from the tree trunk and the race continues the same way except that you're moving a little faster. About twenty seconds after you say "When the hell is this race going to end???" the race ends. I won matches. Since I wasn't actually out there surviving in the while, I didn't much care.

Then comes the "Loading..." screen again, which allows you to play a much more entertaining game, like trying to clip your toenails so that they pop up into your mouth.

Next is the "Survival Period" again, which sucks even more than it did the first time because you're still sick of it from the last time. It's followed by another guest appearance by the "Loading..." screen, which should probably have a built-in screen saver so that it doesn't burn its image onto your monitor.

After that, you get the "Immunity Challenge." I got to sit on a slow-moving canoe and shoot arrows at targets. It was a bit more fun than dragging those tree trunks, although the sound of the arrow being pulled back was obviously accomplished by stretching a balloon. You will get really sick of hearing balloons being stretched before this challenge is over. I ran out of arrows fairly quickly, but it still made me ride all the way to the end.

Since my team lost, we had to go to Tribal Council, where the team must vote off one of its own members. (SPOILER WARNING: You won't care who gets voted off.) After you vote, the game shows you the names of everybody who received votes right away, to eliminate any suspense that might have accidentally occurred.

I didn't receive any votes at the first or second Tribal Council, and I was probably well on my way to victory until I suddenly realized that I was still playing this supernaturally awful game and put a stop to that sort of nonsense.

Yes, it's that bad. And the next time you're at Best Buy, wear tight clothing.

Jeff Strand is the author of How to Rescue a Dead Princess and its incomplete computer game counterpart. You can visit his ridiculous website at http://www.jeffstrand.com. He wishes he had a pug.