To be fair, this game has some things going for it. Its official site is more stylish and complex than, oh, this one. It's also available in a presumably handsome hardback, indicating the presence of actual resources (and evolution knows I have a soft spot for anyone brave enough to throw money into the RPG industry). Its creator, JT Smith, had the decency to apologize for the idiotic actions of his forum-spamming followers, even if said followers didn't, so hooray for him. Its opening quote – "That which does not kill us, makes us stronger" – has a slight chance of (by this point) having not been overused to the point of nausea. Finally, it's nicely edited. I mean really nicely edited. I actually had to pay attention to catch the typos, something I've never had to do with a RPG before. I was impressed!

Unfortunately, these virtues go into a game of brutally non-existent substance. deadEarth is among the most ridiculous, poorly-conceived, cocksucking excuses for a piece of crap I've ever seen, and I worry that even that is giving it too much credit. Only the sanity-testing presence of such intense shit as Multiverser and World of Synnibarr reminds us that there are, indeed, greater atrocities that can be inflicted upon the hapless masses of the gamer elite. I've seen gamers come up with a better post-nuclear RPG after playing Fallout for ten minutes, and it's enough to make you want to track this JT Smith character down and ask "Mr. Game Designer, sir, I saw your game, and I couldn't help but to wonder...well...how to put this politely...uh...oh, fuck it. Jesus! H! Christ! What the hell could you have been smoking?"

Incidentally, deadEarth has already been flamed on at least three different sites, but if there's a running theme here at Middle Finger Evolution – either in the games or our coverage of them – it's that dead horses should, no, must be beaten.

The central problem with deadEarth – other than the fact that its random character creation sucks a world record of an ass (especially the part where how many actions you have in combat is determined by one 2d6 roll), Rifts is the most recent game I can prove that its designers are familiar with, an assault rifle does the same damage as an arrow, it's possible to interpret the rules to mean you can only create three characters ever, there was little attempt whatsoever to have things make sense...

...okay, backing up here, the central problem is that deadEarth claims to be realistic. I'm not sure its designers understood that "realistic" would mean trying to present a brutal nightmare of a ruined, diseased world where you're better off just shooting yourself – ie, what you would get with a real nuclear holocaust – but it's pretty obvious they want you to be frightened and depressed anyway.

So what kind of nightmarish setting have they created towards that end? A grittier version of The Road Warrior, perhaps? (How would you do that, anyway? I dunno, maybe give the bad guys even more of a preoccupation with brutality and rape.) A darker vision of The Postman (the book, not the movie), where every hope of civilization has been crushed under the brainwashed armies of fascist warlords? Or maybe the designers really pulled out the stops and based their game on movies like The Day After or the aforementioned Threads, setting a new milestone in horror RPGs!

Hell, no.

Instead, the designers of deadEarth use a different definition of "realistic" than the rest of the human race. This isn't a post-apocalypse game – it's a simulation of a particularly weak-ass batch of LSD. I mean, where else but in the most embarrassingly stupid of acid trips can nuclear radiation turn you into Jesus, give you great pimping skills, or cause you to die if you kill someone? I'm not kidding. deadEarth is worth reading for the radiation tables alone – they're so fucking ridiculous that they make Gamma World look plausible. Think about how bad that is.

(And for our younger viewers who might have missed the "Golden Age" of gaming, radiation in Gamma World not only gives you super powers, but it can also mutate plants and animals into sentient races!)

Of course, radiation in Gamma World will hurt you, and it gives you radiation sickness long before you get anything from it. deadEarth generously spares us any such bullshit, taking us straight to the wacky mutations, maybe eight of which (out of hundreds) even vaguely resemble the real effects of radiation.

Realistic?

Ha ha ha ha ha...no.

I would invite deadEarth's designers and fanboys to watch Threads and then try to tell me that they still think deadEarth is "realistic". Now that is what a nuclear post-apocalypse should be like: bleak and horrifying in absolute measure. Players should get to see insane famine victims fighting over the rotting carcasses of animals. They should have waking up with their skin flaking off be the least of their problems because for breakfast they'll be fighting some diseased wretch over a can of dog food. They should have to amputate infected limbs with hacksaws or serrated knives. They should live in a world where everything's covered in dirt and ashes, and appendicitis, diabetes, and drug addiction are all death sentences. They should have the fun of trying to grow crops on irradiated soil without sunlight. They should go into shock one day when they suddenly realize they can't remember the faces of their loved ones or the feeling of anything they once enjoyed. They should learn the hard way that radiation is to be avoided at any cost because it doesn't "mutate" people after it's done frying them to cinders or destroying them from the inside out – it deforms them. And, most importantly, they should feel an overwhelming fear that civilization is about to perish forever – or that it already has and it sucks to be them because they're still around to watch its corpse rot down to nothing. Violence, deterioration, and death.

If deadEarth had been more like that, it would have lived up to its hype. Of course, it would also be monstrously pointless to play, but hey, that's the way I feel about it now. Except that it's pointless now because it's an awful game, not because it presents such a brutal, hopeless challenge. The only thing that's frightening about deadEarth is the amount of money and effort its creator must have spent making books for it.