Check this out: Review of Wraeththu My favorite part being: On that note, some of my favorite rants come Roger Ebert: "Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how, on December 7th, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle" "To see the snowman is to dislike the snowman." "Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way." What are some of your favorite negative reviews? Edit: Oooh, here's some more for Battlefield Earth. Washington Post: "A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as "Battlefield Earth." This film version of L. Ron Hubbard's futuristic novel is so breathtakingly awful in concept and execution, it wouldn't tax the smarts of a troglodyte. And when it comes to star John Travolta's performance, well, hammy William Shatner's hairpiece is more convincing. In the future, turkey cognoscenti will be heard to say: " 'Ishtar,' pishtar! You haven't endured pain till you've seen 'Battlefield Earth.' " Jon Stewart: "A cross between Star Wars and the smell of ass."
Oh wow. There is no God, and the proof of this can be found in a .pdf file from Fatal Games. From TV Tropes: FATAL is, hands down, the all-time reigning champion of horrible RPGs. The rulebook consists of 900 agonizing pages of poor mechanics, a massive number of ill-defined stats, violations of common sense, and all-around contempt for basic human decency. For example: One of the most basic rolls in the game is 4d100/2-1. That's right: roll a hundred sided die four times, sum the results, divide in half and subtract one...for all seventeen of your stats, and anything else requiring a bell curve. The creators, on learning the flaw of this system, decided to "improve" it to 10d100/5-1. For the record, if you are using real dice, that requires 20 d10 rolls. Character creation takes a while in this system, especially since (at least in the first version) each stat had four sub-stats (requiring more than a hundred dice rolls), and at one point it calls for a 1d10,000,000 roll. For the record, that's either 8 d10 rolls (one per digit), or one die that would be better for crushing Indiana Jones than for getting a random number. Practicality is thrown out the window in favor of vulgarity and offense, a quality not helped by the creators' claim that only white, non-Christian people inhabit The 'Verse and their constant flip-flopping between claims that it's either "controversial humor" or historically and mythically accurate (which, it obviously isn't). Races are incredibly badly thought-out for player characters, and given that every race shown hates each other, it's unlikely that any sort of adventuring party would be formed. Character stats are complex and include things like head size, social status, whether you're married (and whether or not marriage is unhappy), and anal circumference. It's very possible to get ridiculous results via this method, and the older version of the game had it possible for a character to have zero anal circumference, or even negative. That anal circumference stat is actually very important, because during combat your roll may cause you to accidentally start raping your opponent, and how many hitpoints they lose depends on the mismatch between the circumference of your appendage and their orifice. We repeat: it is possible to accidentally rape an opponent to death during combat. The sheer number of rules is ridiculous and makes the game incredibly difficult and annoying to play rather than giving a fun challenge; to calculate the results of sex, one must solve quadratic equations. The class system is terribly thought out- classes all earn experience points in different ways (and for some it's possible to die of old age before reaching second level), many classes are civilian jobs no player would think of taking, and most of the classes are just plain incomplete. The magic system consists of spells nobody would use in normal play, spells too situational to be useful, spells that are time-consuming and impractical to cast, spells that will probably end badly for you, spells only useful for sexual situations, magical date rape drugs (that only work on women, naturally), and a spell that kills everything on the world (mercifully ending the game). Oh, and said world-ending spell is part of the miscast table (along with various other bizarre effects), so it's entirely possible to accidentally cause the apocalypse when trying to determine whether or not you're pregnant. On top of all this, the game is absolutely drowning in Unfortunate Implications, featuring piles of misogyny, rape, and apologia for same. The most fleshed-out thing in the whole book is prostitution, and women are either housewives or whores. The game also seems to assume that you'll be playing the game as a rapist asshole, and goes out of its way to provide you the opportunity to do so. RPG Net reviewers Darren Maclennan and Jason Sartin have a far more detailed, and horrific, review if you're still tempted... (NSFW) An older version of the game included unfortunate more-than-implications including things like magic items themed around racist caricatures. However, the theme song is pure comedy gold.
Waaaaaiiiittt, Battlefield Earth was written by L. Ron Hubbard? OMG, after so many years it suddenly makes sense now why John Travolta had to make that movie. I really didn't realize at the time. Honestly... that book was just so unbelievably mind-blowingly bad. I think in the end I really threw it in the trash.
I love these kinds of snarky reviews for books and games. There is nothing more hilarious than reading some reviewer's highly inventive ways of expressing how terrible a thing is.
I had a horrible experience watching Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings cartoon, until I saw that this fellow human had the same experience. Then my life's wasted hours were suddenly worth it: A Critique of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings (Check out the guy's board game as well while you're at it. It's awesome: The Lord of the Rings Board Game)
Which is the single worst fantasy book you've read? Weed-day, 2016 Also... What is the worst fantasy book you have ever read? : Fantasy Dec 10, 2017 What is the worst fantasy book you've read? : Fantasy Jun 28, 2017 What is the worst fantasy book you've ever read and why? : books Nov 2, 2016 What's the worst fantasy book you ever read? : Fantasy Feb 16, 2015 I have a big soft spot for bad fantasy for some reason. Actually, any work that relies purely on tropes with no creative subversions or self-awareness will usually get one read out of me because it's kind of like learning how not to write. You could copy the masters ten thousand times, reanimate Hemingway's corpse just to have his zombie train you like a stereotypical hero's mentor for ten years in the Art of Literature, and wish upon the Dragon Balls for all the talent in the world, but reading a single page of a mediocre-to-bad novel will teach you more about what not to do.
The worst one I've ever read would have to be the one about a Mary Sue were-rollercoaster. It had whole-book sporkings on Something Awful and Livejournal, and like said, I use it to inspire myself to write better.
I hope one of my books eventually ends up as part of one these discussions. I actually already have written a "worst of" type story before that gained notoriety.
I'm starting to wonder if there's a story in "MC trapped in a game designed by the *worst* game designer in the world"
I love when people review books in genres they don't understand and don't WANT to understand. The weirdest review I got was a 2 star review that said "Good author I hope to read more." Maybe they were confused? I sure was.
I almost want to say Rougelike by Paul Bellows is this... but I'm only 10% into the book. Still, rougelikes in general can be frustrating and rewarding at the same time.
