Is that new South Park game out? I can't tell, so let's pretend that it is. Hey, everybody! Enjoying that new South Park game? How would I know? If it came out after Y2K and it's in English, I'm not interested. But I do know that you're probably bummed about THQ collapsing before the game could be released. This sin't the first time South Park was associated with publisher collapse, though. In enters the oddly pedophilically titled "Chef's Luv Shack", developed by "we make bad business decisions" Acclaim. After playing this game, I'm not entirely surprised that Acclaim is no longer around.

Problem number one: the presentation is incredibly cheap. Now I know what you're thinking: that I'm being unfair. After all, isn't a lot of the South Park appeal in how shitty it looks? Well, yea, I acknowledge this viewpoint, oh crazy person, but there's still such a thing as too cheap, and Chef's Luv Shack almost reaches that point. Sometimes, the animation looks like some effort was put into it, like when you get an answer right and see Cartman wave about or whatever. Other times, though, it's just awful. Some of the mini-games not only look like they were animated with five minutes of Flash animation, but that they're proud of this fact. This is on top of all five colors the game has on display. And ignoring all the graphical mess, the audio quality still isn't that good, either. Who was the sound engineer on this thing? Thomas Edison?....Because he invented...the....

Anyway, the actual game! Turns out it's a trivia game, because that's what I think when I hear "Chef's Luv Shack", just like "Renegade Ego" perfectly communicates the idea of talking about older Japanese video games. Speaking of self deprecation, I played this strictly multiplayer game all by myself, which I'm almost certain is the most intellectual form of masturbation. But that's not the dumbest decision regarding this game: that would more be the category choices. Like everything else in this game, they make absolutely no sense. What's the theme connecting DNA and famous lesbians? No, genetical relations don't count, silly, which leaves us with nothing. What am I supposed to expect from this game? How am I going to prepare my knowledge in advance or whatever? It just reeks of unfair difficulty.

Which makes it that much stranger that everything else about the trivia reeks of fair difficulty. Strange, right? I mean, some of the questions are esoteric as shit and I got half of them wrong, but isn't that sort of the point of a trivia game? Shouldn't the questions be arcane? If they were anything else, they'd just ask you "what is blue" and half the answers would be blue. (The other half would also be blue.) So disregarding the absolutely arbitrary category choice, Chef's Luv Shack is OK for what it is: a dumb trivia game you blast through with friends for maybe thirty minutes. Yea, you're not guaranteed to get the right answer (by which I mean "I never received a right answer for questions I got wrong"), but compared to everything else I've said about this game, it's hard to take that complaint seriously.

And th....what's this extra paragraph doing here? What more do I have to say? This is just a trivia game, right? I covered that already! Well, turns out that there's more to this than trivia. You also get Mario Party style mini-games! And I do mean Mario Party style; they copy the random selection and everything. Of course, there's a major difference between the two: Mario Party puts some actual effort into the mini-games, while Chef's Luv Shack can't be bothered to. The graphical complaints from before shine through fully here, but it goes further than that: there's no depth to these games. The kart racing is a perfect example: it's a perfectly round track where nothing changes for five laps. Why even bother playing past the first? Throw in at least two different versions of the shell game and embarrassingly pitiful AI, and you can understand why I'd be so ambivalent about recommending this. I guess it's like the first few seasons of South Park. Want some dumb, shallow fun? Yea, go with this game. Want something more engaging? Maybe the next game will fill that hole.

Review Synopsis

• Wow, this game looks like shit.
• And it plays like shit, too!
• And yet somehow, it's a barely decent trivia game.

For a lot of games, I have a specific rule: the more I love the game, the more I'll hate its fans. Don't believe me? Well, I have tried to find Fragile Dreams videos for this blog, and one of the results, sadly, was this dickhead ogling a 15 year old girl so he could cut her age in half. (There was also this comic that looked like Chickenhead became the villain from Taken, but I declined it because I couldn't tell if it was weird on any level.) For a wider reaching example, go to Google, do an image search for Gardevoir, and turn safe search off. You'll be cursing my name for months. Anyway, this rule holds especially true for Katawa Shoujo (maybe): I really love the game, but for very obvious reasons, haven't even bothered searching out worthwhile fan content regarding it. And then @andrewb showed me this. I can't embed it because it's not a video (care to guess why?), so instead, enjoy what has become a long and storied tradition of the Renegade Ego experience:

Yes, this link leads to the Tiny Toon theme song. I imagine approximately half my audience is experiencing dangerously high levels of 90s nostalgia, and I also imagine that this game will elevate those levels into Annoyingly Cynical territory. Why? Well, first, I'm going to assume that not a lot of you have played this. Maybe you were playing Aladdin on the SNES or Aladdin on the Genesis or, if you're extremely unlucky, Aladdin on the Master System. Well, you should have been playing this game instead, since vaguely tossing Tiny Toons and the first Sonic the Hedgehog into a single package would result in a 1990s implosion.

This is partly because the game feels a helluva lot like the bouncy cartoon it's trying to be. Konami didn't just slap Tiny Toons onto a random game they already had in development; they went all the fucking way with this. Take, for example, the music. In a mid-life Genesis game. I know you'd never expect it, but the electronic fart noise machine that was the Sega Genesis is an oddly perfect fit for music like this. Just listen to that bouncy, bubbly shit. It's just like a cartoon...is exactly what I'm going to say about the graphics. Everything from the well defined characters and vibrant colors to the backgrounds being noticeably more detailed than any of the characters. OK, that last one is jarring as all hell. Maybe it's trying to go for the cartoon feeling entirely by making the backgrounds the digital equivalent of a matte painting, but it just looks out of place. You know, like it would in a lot of cartoons in the first place.

Hey, you know what else looks out of place? This transition I'm gonna use for the gameplay. How is that shit? OK, I guess? As that question mark tells you, I'm not terribly excited about the actual game, strangely enough. Let me start with the petty complaints: the controls are a bit iffy. Nothing deal-breaking, but the jumping does feel more sensitive than it should. Merely looking in its direction will cause Buster to jump a couple of inches off the ground, even though I'd much prefer him just to jump. A minor thing, I know, which is why I prefaced it with the phrase "petty complaint". And it's really the only major complaint I have, because there's nothing else worth criticizing or even praising, really. There's nothing wrong with the levels; they're designed competently enough, with enough platforms and enemies and doo-dads to hold your attention. Hell, some of them are even outright enjoyable. The keep-away boss battles can certainly attest to that. But most of the levels feel like they're missing something; that je ne sais quoi that elevates it past simply keeping you from flipping over to the show it's based on. BUT WHAT COULD THAT BE!?

Oh, speed? Yea, let's go with that. What? You thought that I was comparing this game to Sonic because of the platforming? Hell no I wasn't. It's because ot the speed. Running through levels really fast and sometimes pressing the jump button. I'm well aware of how simplistic this is, so you should be aware of how little fucks I give. After all, sometimes I want pure visceral action, and I gave my Genesis and copy of Sonic 3 to my older brother, so this will have to do. But maybe I shouldn't just compare it to Sonic, as there's a bit more to it with this game. This may be too much outside context seeping into the blog, but what made the old Looney Tunes work so well was partly the fast pace. Just smart-alecky joke after smart-alecky joke. (Coincidentally, the lack of this is precisely why that new Looney Tunes isn't that good. Well, that and the sandwich fucking.) What's that have to do with this game? Everything: what better way to communicate that cartoony ethos than by making your game as fast-paced as the humor? It's a brilliant strategy

that I'm not sure the developers entirely realized. The only evidence I can see of it in the game is the occasional stuck-up can or rake just sitting there, ready for you to trip over it in a momentum killing second. Other than that, most of the levels aren't designed to let you speed your way through them. It's like Konami couldn't decide on whether this should be a platformer with a measured pace or if they wanted to save money on level designers, so they simply never decided. The game's still good, though, but not nearly as good as it could be. Just like the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Wait, has this blog finally come full circle, or do I need to mention lesbian trivia a few more times?

Review Synopsis

• You could mistake this for an episode of the show if somebody sold Tiny Toon Adventures episodes on cartridge, for whatever crazy reason.
• You sure do jump on stuff in this game.
• I think the hidden treasure in the title is referring to the massive amounts of speed Buster stumbles upon.