Middle Finger Evolution

After looking at nice B-movie sites like Jabootu, The Bad Movie Review Website, and Oh, the Humanity, I realized that I'm the gamer equivalent of these people: I enjoy seeking out godawful role-playing games so that I can laugh and be amazed at their monumental ineptness.

Some of the RPGs here manage to be enjoyable like that, entertaining us despite (or rather because of) their technical or artistic crappiness.

Many more, however, suck in the painful way. But that's why this also features lovably bile-laden diatribes. We've suffered through gamer hell to bring you quality RPG ranting!


Atrocity Count

deadEarth (1st Edition)
Post-holocaust RPGs have never been the most popular or well-represented genre (no, Tribe 8 doesn't count), so fans have to take what they can get. Free RPGs are another category that seems to have trouble staying out of the toilet. It says a lot that even when you consider the low, extremely permissible standards of both these genres, deadEarth still blows.

Fantasy Adventure To Adult Lechery (FATAL)
The arguments are over. This is the worst-executed, most mind-numbingly idiotic excuse for a RPG ever.

(This is actually a review that I wrote with Darren MacLennan for RPGnet. It was eventually pulled from the site for being too extreme. Ah, Christ. I just said "extreme" and "review" in the same breath. Shoot me already. Anyway, as they say at Critical Miss, this review should only be read if you're mature enough to handle extreme vulgarity, but immature enough to find it funny.)

Hybrid (V 0.3)
And they said the human mind wasn't capable of more incoherence than Time Cube.

Imagine Player's Guide
It's a classic game industry story. Take some excited gamers who have been playing 500th level slayer/bard/anti-paladins since 1980 or so, just realized "Hey, wait! We can make an even better game than AD&D!", and have them construct a complicated, unintuitive rules system that requires more math and die rolls in one combat than most sane games require all campaign. Swirl in some of the most shameless hype since the last time some fanboy tried to one-up AD&D, and we end up with a bonafide hallmark of bad gaming.

Legacy: War of Ages
Why is it TSR used to sue us for misusing the word "fighter", but games like this can all but ass-rape Highlander and get away with it?

The Nameless Fantasy RPG (Pre-Playtest Version)
I was enlisted to playtest this high fantasy game, and I asked some of my friends to have a look, too. I cut it out after more than one of them complained about their deteriorating sanity.

Racial Holy War (1st Edition)
There are many lame-ass games that make me ashamed to be a member of the human race, but this is the first one that makes me ashamed to be specifically white.

Raven Star (1st Edition)
I don't know how you could combine elves, magic, cyborgs, and space travel and have it suck so badly, but...oh, wait, maybe I do.

TIMECUBE!!!
The satirical TIMECUBE shows us the way, and even though it isn't serious, the hideous, already-existing rants it's based on are.



Other Bad Gaming Crap

The Ex-Fanboy's Guide To Game Design (Error)
An article I'm too lazy to have finished yet, on the subject of designing games that don't suck. Right now it's down to show off the new error message.

The RPG Cliche List
A list I made of the many, many cliches of role-playing. This appeared in issue 7 of Critical Miss, but this version is more up to date.

RPGnet SenZar Review
Until I can put up an entry for SenZar, you might as well read my review on RPGnet (though it's slightly outdated now, with the creators' bio page having been gutted and FATAL now existing and all). You should also read Darren MacLennan's review of SenZar's first sourcebook.

SenZar Drinking Game
In a SenZar game with too much alcohol on hand? This handy drinking game will set things right.

Stolen Article Archive
Links to offsite crap of conceivable interest to fans of bad gaming.

Synnibarr Character Creation Guide
This is a short guide I wrote for my psychotic players in the online (and incredibly complicated) World of Synnibar game I was going to run back in the day. It only covers character creation, but gives a slight idea of how insane that game is.



Activities

You can always use the guestbook (below) to vent your joy or annoyance at this site. (Be warned that stupid entries in the guestbook will be mocked.)

And yes, I am also willing to accept guest reviews and rants. Hey, I can't be everywhere, and there are entire realms of shit games this site has only begun to touch on. The review format isn't too hard to grasp, and the more detail you can go into about why your selected game belongs on this site, the better.





The official Middle Finger Evolution guestbook!
As massively pointless as ever!

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Contact: darkmind@hotmail.com