Dude, Stop

It’s no secret that I like WarioWare Inc. for the Game Boy Advance. I named it my favorite game of all-time, a position it still holds for me fifteen years after it came out. And yes, to the roughly three-hundred people who alerted me to the fact, I’m aware Nintendo’s releasing a “Best of WarioWare” next month. Considering that I’m not a fan of any of the games in the series besides the original, I’m not excited at all for it. I’d rather try something that takes the formula and plays with it. And I don’t mean playing with it in the type of way that lands you in front of a judge while you try to explain that she SWORE to you she was 18.

Well here’s Dude, Stop. It can be summed up very simply: WarioWare meets the Stanley Parable. You’re the test subject of a game-solving experiment that involves tiny slivers of mini-games. The hook here is that you’re actually encouraged to fuck up, so as to drive the developer mad. The game is divided into multiple “packs” of mini-games with various themes, all of them having essentially the same amount of play value, with multiple different objectives for each. Beat a pack making all mistakes. Beat a pack making no mistakes. Other times there’s different objectives, like trying to complete a quiz in twenty seconds. Otherwise known as the Derrick Rose method.

Oh this one will cause undue arguments.

And I want to talk about that one, because it leads into the main problem with Dude, Stop: it’s a comedy game that’s just not that funny. It took me several tries to actually get it right (I was trying to hit the checkboxes and not the pictures or words next to them), and by time I did, the game did a “haha, I wasn’t using my stopwatch” joke and made me do it again. And after doing it again, they repeated the joke one more time before making me complete the quiz in under twenty seconds for a third time. Well that’s not funny. That’s just being obnoxious. It’s like that “want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?” gag from Dumb & Dumber, only you’re the one getting it screamed in your ear. A kick in the balls is only funny when it’s not your balls.

Which is not to say Dude, Stop is never funny. There’s a few chuckles and at least one laugh-at-loud joke thrown in that I’m going to be a complete cunt and spoil in the next picture. But the premise of annoying a game developer by intentionally failing at their game just doesn’t work. Besides, anyone who has spent time on the indie scene knows the real way to get under their skin is to wait for it to release and then leave a negative review on Steam with only 0.1 hours of playtime.

So Dude, Stop has to be able to stand on its gameplay merits, and it sort of does. I mean just enough to get by, but it still counts. There’s a relatively large variety of games with different objectives, with each game having specific win and fail conditions that you’ll eventually have to do one of each of in order to unlock everything. You might have to take a seat in a theater and silence your cell phone (or jack up the volume of it). You might have to put away a Christmas tree without procrastination (or leave it up throughout the Spring). It’s a clever play on the WarioWare formula, and it works for the most part. I mean, the physics are shit. You won’t believe how maddening it can be to turn a Christmas tree upside down so you can fit it in a box using just a mouse, or kicking a piece of paper into a wastebasket. At times Dude, Stop feels unrefined and in need of clean-up. But who has time for that shit when you’re writing unfunny jokes about a digital duck taking over the program?

To Dude, Stop’s credit, it pretty much admits that it’s not funny. Which is probably the funniest gag in the entire game.

But, I’ll fully concede that some of the gags and “packs” of Dude, Stop are downright inspired. A section framed like a children’s educational book-on-tape is the highlight of the game, because Corgis are scientifically proven to be so stupid so as to be the only living entity that’s funny by default. Honestly, if you’re a comedian or a sitcom that’s bombing, always have a Corgi on stand-by. When the audience gets listless and starts to boo, just wave one of those crimes against nature at the audience and I guarantee you LOLs will be had. Almost nothing the angry narrator says is funny in Dude, Stop, to the point that you can smell the stench of flop-sweat on it. This is a game where maybe one in ten jokes actually lands (and that’s being generous), but when I was all finished and ready to review, I kept thinking back to how adorable it was to bang the Corgi against the refrigerator. That counts for something.

If it sounds like I’m going too rough on Dude, Stop, I should probably note here that I did like it and recommend it. Yea, it’s a (mostly) not-funny comedy game that has more issues than National Geographic. Like how sometimes it’s not exactly clear what the win-fail condition of a game is (I’m ashamed to admit I had to look up how to fail at drilling a hole in a wall, then face-palmed myself when I realized the solution was super-obvious). But, Dude, Stop cuts a fast pace and, bombing or not, I at least cared enough to see where they were going with the plot line. Most importantly, it never gets boring. Imagine playing a game that’s failing at what seems like its primary goal but still enjoying it in a unironic way. That’s an accomplishment. Sort of.

And yea, I’m wired to enjoy games like this, but hey, I hated stuff like Frobisher Says and that was clearly going the WarioWare route. So it’s not like I can’t toss microgame collections aside with a defiant cry of “fuck this shit!” The only time I ever came close to that here was during the forced-repeats of the 20-second timed achievement, and that was after I had already beaten the game. So, yea, Dude Stop must be pretty okay.

This took me five minutes to do correctly. At least in the video game version I didn’t take out three pedestrians in the process. Well, really two-and-a-half pedestrians. I don’t care what the prosecutor says: that chick in the wheelchair shouldn’t have counted as one full homicide. 1/2 a homicide and destruction of property at most, and even then, it’s not like she would need the chair anymore so whose property am I really running over?

Well, except for one more thing, and I really hate to do this. I really, truly do.

$14.99 is a fucking absurd price for what’s here. Hell, I bought it on sale earlier this month for $13.49 and that still feels like a gouging to me. Dude, Stop should be a $10 game and that occasionally goes on sale for $8 or $5 or something. Yea, the developer is promising to add more games eventually, and that’s nice, but still, this should have been $10. At that range, Dude, Stop had the potential to be a full-on viral indie hit. Especially considering that most people find the game funnier than I do. Which, meh, big whoop there. Big Bang Theory is constantly ranked in the top 3 on television and I’ve never once found anyone I respect who finds it funny. If you’re reading this and are saying “hey wait, Indie Gamer Chick must respect me even though I’ve told her I find it funny” then this might come as a shock to you, but then again I’m pretty confident you don’t have the attention span to have made it this far anyway and thus will never know.

Dude, Stop was developed by Patomkin
Point of Sale: Steam

$13.49 (normally $14.99, horseshit) asked why you’re patting on my kin, Patomkin, in the making of this review. NOW THAT’S A JOKE!

Dude, Stop is Chick-Approved and the first game to wear the newly-redesigned Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval designed by Kevin Willingham. Visit his site or follow him on Twitter. Reasonable rates for your artistic needs. And some of you assholes could use better logos. We’ll be discussing that pretty soon. Not Dude, Stop. Its logo is perfectly eye-catching.

Oh and it’s ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Also Cathy totally respects you. But you would need an attention span to know that.