by Jeromy “Doc” Adams

The site saw quite a bit of traffic thanks to coverage by Gamercast Network, Xbox360Fanboy, and Kotaku, yesterday. Today, we’re happy to announce that the official Bad Game video contest has begun.

The rules:

1. Do not edit the song in any way.
2. Be sure to give yourself credit at the end of the video, while also listing SarcasticGamer.com. Our logo is located HERE.
3. Keep it PG-13 or cleaner.
4. Make your video title “Bad Game: The Shadowrun Song”

We will select 2 semifinalists who will compete for votes on our forums. One semi finalist will be selected based on the number of views that their video receives on YouTube. The other will be “Editor’s Choice”, decided by a vote amongst the Sarcastic Gamer staff.

So the sooner you post your video, the more time you have to accumulate those views, but the more time you spend on the video, the better your chance of winning over the judges.

We’d love to see some people lip-sync to this one, although we’d prefer not to endure too many videos like this one.

Winners will get their choice of a copy of Shadowrun (barely used), or a box of Nature Valley Oat ‘n Honey granola bars. (The Green package). The runner up gets whatever the winner didn’t want. The winner will also get their video featured on the SarcasticGamer channel on YouTube, alongside the Wii-Fit Parody and the Microsoft Surface Parody.

When you finish your video, post a link to it in THIS THREAD on our FORUMS.

Written by Jeromy “Doc” Adams &
Adrian “Lono” Cherikos

This week, Shadowrun made the top 5 in Xbox 360 sales! We could think of no better way to commemorate this “magical feat” than by releasing our newest parody song.

With the incredible line up of highly-anticipated games hitting the shelves this fall, we thought it might be nice to put a few less-spectacular titles in the rear view mirror. Here’s a song all about the games we enjoyed the least this year, most notably, Shadowrun.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD “BAD GAME”

Additionally, Matt “Volkov” Schmidt has climbed through your forum posts and millions of review scores to bring you the top (or bottom depending on how you look at it) disappointments for 2007 from each console and the PC.Read Matt’s article HERE.

Should this song make it on the “Worst of” list for 2007? Head over to our FORUMS and sound off!

Editorial by Matt Schmidt

It’s August 27th. Not quite the end of the year, but we figured this would be a great time to ‘recap the crap’ that has made its way to the shelves in the last 8 months.

Shadowrun

Award: Worst Usage of a License

In 1989, Shadowrun premiered as a pen-and-paper RPG (one of those nerd books). In 2007, Shadowrun premiered as a shooter with minor RPG elements. Shortly thereafter, the masses realized that the original nerd book was probably a better shooter than the video game will ever be.

I called Microsoft to see if they could do anything about the surfaced problems.

Microsoft: Welcome to the free Shadowrun support line! Because your $60 had to buy something besides dim-witted bots. How can we help you today?
Matt Schmidt: Yes I’d like to know why your game is only playable for about three hours.
Microsoft: Is your PC or 360 experiencing freezing or disc skipping problems?
Matt: No, I just got so bored I had to turn the game off. I feel like I’ve played the same maps my entire life, but I’ve only had the game for three days.
Microsoft: Oh, well our technicians are currently working on a patch for this issue, but in the meantime, we do have a workaround.
Matt: What could possibly…
Microsoft: Here are some tips to make the game more exciting:

• Close your eyes and play with ‘severed irises’ spell
• Turn the controller upside-down
• Play Bioshock, but pretend you are actually playing Shadowrun

Matt: That’s absolutely ludicrous. Even more so, I saw someone going up a ladder, but they just kind of floated up it. Is this a bug or…
Microsoft: *crinkles candy wrapper* …sorry….we appear to….be losing….connection…
Matt: *throws phone at wall*

Wii Fit

Okay, so it’s not even out yet, but the previews speak for themselves (see our Wii Fit video). Maybe they have their marketing right, because I’m sure Wii gamers are tired of having just one exaggeratedly muscular arm.

However, it looks like I could get more exercise from doing leg lifts with the “balance board” in hand — while eating Cheetos covered in lard. Sure, it’s a great way to track progress and fool the ignorant gamer into actually moving around a bit. However, it’s nothing a scale, a spreadsheet and a picture of your gut hanging out at the family reunion couldn’t do.

The only way I would ever purchase Wii Fit is if Chuck Norris personally did an infomercial for it. I bought the Total Gym, and it is doing a great job sitting in my basement losing weight for me.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Ah, Sonic the Hedgehog games are always a breath of fresh air. Originality at its

LOADING…

finest. When this game first game out, I couldn’t wait to pop it

LOADING…

in and wait for the goodness to spread warmth and joy

LOADING…

into my heart. But, I was greeted with a game with subpar gameplay, crappy camera angles, poor graphics, sluggish frame rates and, you guessed it, frequent and lonnnngggg loading periods. You couldn’t pay me to play the game for more than 30 minutes, and I pretty much whore myself out for everything.

Sonic the Hedgehog has never made a gracious transition to a console outside of Genesis, but for some reason, Sega keeps on trying. Why? My sources say it’s an acute case of Hedgehog Fetish.

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 – PC

Be careful folks. I am referring to the PC version of this game, which very much differs from the more ‘arcadey’ console version. PC gamers wished they had something closer to what appeared on consoles after the crap Ubisoft fed us.

The game started out fine. If you are accustomed to playing ridiculously tactical games (like the previous PC Ghost Recons), you may not notice just how hard the game can get as you progress through the levels. But even then, the downfalls are just too opaque not to recognize. Please refer to this Table of Frustration for details:

—

Don’t worry fellow gamers. The end of the year has numerous titles just screaming at your wallets. Just be careful, because I heard Halo 3 was totally going to suck.

Congrats. You made it through this painfully long article. Now head over to our FORUMS and spend even more time at SG!

(Title photo by Lono. All rights reserved.)

Please note that it may take up to 15 minutes for a new article to arrive on the forums

So Mitch Gitelman, FASA Studio Manager is mad as hell that people don’t give Shadowrun the praise it deserves. Why should I care? Most people play games for entertainment purposes… if people aren’t entertained, then shouldn’t that be the end of it? I mean really, if you have to sit people down and say “Look, you’re obviously not getting it, this is a gaming masterpiece… Look at it again. LOOK AT IT! YOU! IT! LOOK!” then maybe the problem is more deep seated than we originally thought. For clarity’s sake, Mitch Gitelman never actually said those words, but that’s the feeling I get whenever I read he or someone like him telling us how awesome Shadowrun or some other game is and that I should really put in the work to learning how to play it so I can get up to speed and *gasp* have some fun. By the way, I do this other thing in the daytime that’s actually CALLED work. I don’t want to work some more just so I might have some fun. I’ll probably just pick up one of the other dozens of games out now that starts being fun right away with no work on my part. That’s the kind of entertainment I prefer.

I remember growing up with videogames (I’m of the age such that I grew up with most videogames… I had an Atari 2600 when it was new if that gives you the appropriate timeframe here) and they were almost always fun or not fun. Hits were defined by whether you and everybody that played them couldn’t STOP playing them… you’d get instantly (or almost instantly) hooked. But what we didn’t have were the people that wrote the games telling us we really need to play it some certain way, or for some certain length of time before we’d learn to enjoy them. I’m noticing more and more that some games just don’t have that instant appeal for the mass market and developers and marketing folks are resorting to telling us how and why to play and it’s starting to seem like flat out desperation. Look at Viva Pinata. The game looks like it’s aimed at 5-6 year olds, but can you find me a 5-6 year old that can even comprehend what in the hell the game is about? My 10 year old son loves it (which amazes me — the other day he told his mom that two ladybugs were romancing in the grass… thanks Rare!) but then again none of his friends like it, they think it’s boring. The people that like the game seem to be adults. Adults that can put up with the kiddy graphics to get to the gameplay underneath. The folks at Microsoft keep harping that Viva Pinata is a great, great game. To some it may be, but why isn’t the game itself speaking to people saying “I’m great! Play me once and you’ll never want to stop!” because I think that would be more convincing to the dollar spending public. If your looks appeal to one group but by design you’re intended for another group, well… when people do that, there’s a strong possibility Eddie Murphy might “give them a ride home”. Look it up kids, Google’s great for that stuff. Is that the hidden message Rare wants to be sending out with their romancing game? I doubt it. Pick a target audience and focus both the gameplay and style to the SAME target, Rare.

Get the REST of this story on our FORUMS and let YOUR VOICE be heard.Tips N4G

It’s 7:30am, and I’m sitting in my office with my 1-year-old daughter, who is eating a banana. I just read her the article on Joystiq about how Circuit City is dumping all of their copies of Shadowrun Vista for free to anyone that buys Halo 2 Vista.

I can’t be sure but I think she just said “Daddy, Shadowrun is screwed.”

Either that or “I like bananas.”

Want to comment on this story? Head over to our FORUMS and sound off!

I was skeptical. Mostly because of the hype surrounding the release of Shadowrun. Let’s face it, we’ve all been hurt before.

About 90 seconds after I fired up the demo, those fears disappeared. Shadowrun is a welcome shot-in-the-arm to the First-Person-Shooter genre. Mixing mandatory teamwork with incredibly fast-paced action, this tactical title promises to make your whole night go by in about 20 minutes.

One of the coolest of Shadowrun’s innovations is its interplay with WINDOWS users. Yup. Live PC users playing against Xbox Live users.

I enjoyed the ability to revive teamates almost as much as teleporting through walls. The freedom of movement granted by the glider backpack is also quite addictive.

I am giving Shadowrun 4 out of 5 stars. I don’t like the Halo-like matchmaking service that they seem to have emulated. Personally, I think it’s a dumb way to assemble teams in what is supposed to be a tactical environment. I think they could have taken a page out of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Vegas handbook on that one. Better to let the gamers manage their own teams, instead of the annoying “party” system which caters to casual gamers. If you aren’t in a clan, you’ll spend a lot of time being matched up with noobs and goobs, so find a group of dedicated players to help reduce the amount of time you spend screaming into your headset for someone to come resurrect your ass.

Want to comment on this story? Head over to our FORUMS and sound off!