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The Review The Review

The Last The Last review
by CashmereCat


Length: ~5 minutes

RMN's 5 Year Anniversary 5-hour event challenged people to make a game in 5 hours, and the theme was revealed to be "badaptations": bad video game adaptations of TV shows, movies, songs, comics, etc. Instead of being a literal bad game adaptation of another piece of media, however, The Last The Last either decided to go another route, or completely misunderstood the point of the theme, and created a game about people making bad games.

Three businessmen pitch you an idea for a game, that's really just a 5-hour long cutscene with one quick-time event at the end: "press X to win!" Turns out that this game gets rave reviews from publications such as 'EyeGN' and ships 5 million units. The maps in this game are terrible, but the story serves as a witty satire of how things work in the video game industry. Given it's made in 5 hours, it doesn't really matter that it looks like crap, but the story is interesting. It's a shame that vibli and Kunsel seemingly made no more games because they seem to be competent writers. I encountered another case of this very same thing - people coming to this site and posting one game that was made with very little effort and it shows a lot of promise, then they never show up again. It's quite a curious phenomenon.

I played this game not expecting much, but it's surprisingly well-written. Graphics are a bit of a crapshoot, but that's completely understandable for something made in 5 hours. It works as a satire of the video game industry, including how the crowds perceive what is a good game, and what critics judge what titles live and what releases die. A reprehensible game gets rave reviews and ships 5 million units, whereas a quality game suffers, and the developer gets depressed and wants to die. This is a joke but it's sometimes true. There's criticism here of critics who love games that are easy to play because they have no real skills or experience in gaming, and the only reason why they review games is because their degree in journalism doesn't give them many jobs, so they turn to this.

So the maps are terrible, but the story serves as a witty satire of working in the video game industry with light-hearted tone and levity. It would be nice to see these guys tackle a real game because their writing chops are well above average.

That's my review of The Last The Last, and I give it a C-, or a 2 stars out of 5.

Posts

Pages: 1
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
03/09/2015 11:44 PM
Nicely fleshed out Cash.
NTC3
5625
03/10/2015 10:16 AM
I agree, nice review. Since there isn't much to talk about the game, I wonder if more can be said about the phenomenon. Speaking from experience as a heavy Metacritic user, I often find what I call "the rule of 68", where games that are scored that at or around that number end up with cult followings and often greater long-term popularity than many green-rated games.

Alpha Protocol, Binary Domain and Nier are probably the best examples here; try to start a discussion about either of them online and you'll likely only hear about how underrated they were. Even weaker fare in that range, like Of Orcs and Men, Remember Me or The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (OK, maybe not XCOM, but that had a HUGE in-built bias against itself from its announcement) are still remembered fondly by the limited audience who played them. It's strange, but I suppose that's part of the market dynamics, and other creative industries aren't exactly immune from it.
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
03/11/2015 11:17 PM
I've never heard of the rule of 68 but all I can say is that there's a tighter correlation between critical success and commercial success in the gaming industry than the music industry, and especially the film industry. I know that a lot of cult classics in film spawn from 68-ish metascores, but for games I always assumed the higher, the more popular. Gamers are more likely to use Metacritic as their game Bible than movie-goers, who are more likely to use IMDb, a user-rating driven site.

But I think game was specifically in criticism of the CODs of this world becoming ultra famous, whereas the truly innovative games get swept under the carpet because they're too inaccessible. Or something. I feel like a game that satirizes the video game industry would be a fun one to play, it's just that this wasn't it, it was only a glimpse of a nice idea.
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