I was reading about some up and coming games the other day when I’ve seen two titles of up and coming games which made me question as to what in fact is the point of them at all.

Firstly on the Nintendo DS was the Face Trainer game. Yes indeed my gut reaction was WTF and then I saw an advert on TV for it. Basically it’s supposed to be more of this bullshit Nintendo farce of trying to keep yourself “fit” but using a DS. Now the more grounded members of society will dismiss this immediately as absolute tripe  but I was intrigued so I actually watched the advert. The DS films your face and you’re supposed to make your face fit the outlines that it tells you. A few points here. Number one, why do you need exercise of your face muscles especially when it takes about 7 muscles to smile, and a while lot more if you actually have a conversation. Is this intended for people who don’t speak? Or actually have the same facial expression glued to their countenance day in day out? Secondly, this is a GAME. What is this had achievement points? What could you possibly do to get them? 10G for pulling a stupid face? 20G for doing the Macauley Culkin face from Home Alone? It’s ridiculous! And thirdly, the most important one in my opinion, is that hand held consoles are tailored towards commuters and people riding in vehicles. Are you seriosuly trying to tell me that someone is going to sit on a bus pulling facial exercises in public? Is someone actually going to gurn like Les Dawson on the number #82? No! Either that or it could be a good to make sure no one sits next to you because you’ll look mental! I mean look at the picture on the right, looks more like and instruction on how to do a Chelsea smile! Or look like The Joker!

The other game I’ve heard about which made me question what was the point is the up and coming Michael Jackson RPG game. Before I start shouting at people telling them “He’s dead, get over it”, they’re actually bringing out a Michael Jackson game. Ha ha don’t think I’d have forgotten about Moonwalker on the Mega Drive, whereby under the premise of a Streets of Rage side scrolling beat ’em up, you play Michael Jackson throwing your hat at gangsters like Oddjob from James Bond. No I hadn’t forgotten about that, but at least it is a film tie with the Moonwalker film.

But seriously an RPG? I’ve having to restrain myself about making kiddy jokes especially that most of the JRPGs I’ve played have adolescent protagonists so I’m not going to go there per se.. I just can’t work out in my head how that’s going to work. Well lets look at the different kind of RPGs out there. There’s the aforementioned JRPGs with kids saving the world, so would that make Jacko the antagonist? Ok well there’s the MMORPG…can’t really see how that would work and if someone is actually going to make a server of 500 billion Jacko avatars walking about in a virtaul world. And then there’s the Fallout 3/Morrowind style FPS RPG, which I would only imagine you’d wander about in the perspective of MJ and throw hats at people. None of these ideas work! And plus there’s the fundamental of levelling up in an RPG. And seeing that most class characters change when you reach higher levels, are you trying to transcend from black to white? (lol)

I just don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense to me.