Morbid Moped Invaders

**Morbid Moped Invaders**

"Morbid Moped Invaders."  If it sounds like a bargain bin game, that's probably because it is.  I literally found this one in the incongruously-labeled "bargain bin" at my local office supply store.  "Incongruously-labeled" because calling this rape of my sanity a bargain is like calling a buy-one-get-one-free offer on a shit sandwich a whopping great deal.

The intriguingly evocative title screen with the sexy gothicly-themed "invaders" astride a bevy of Vespas and... *not*-Vespas belies the true nature of the game as a brain aneurysm simulator.

Once you've discovered that programming in recognition of any sort of mousing or gamepad type device is a completely foreign concept for the developers and not something they just overlooked, you get to lament the fact that this did not dissuade them from using an on-screen cursor instead of keyboard shortcuts... WASD control? no! Arrow keys? no! Numpad? oh hell yes!  And customizable controls? Not a chance!  Eventually, you may find yourself at the "Start Game" screen.  Calling it the Start Game screen is, however, both generous and a misnomer.  Pressing S while hovering your numpad-controlled cursor over the "Start Game" button leads you to the "Language Settings" menu where your options are either "English" or "English with Subtittles" (sic), along with an ancillary option box to toggle "subtittles" on or off.  In either case, toggling the subtittles seems to have no effect whatsoever.  Pressing B over Back will finally lead you to the actual Start Game screen where you can select Back again or, at last, "Invade!" (press I!) to start the game.  Oh how you will wish you'd just gone Back.

As near as I can tell from the opening "cinematic" -- a mixture of early nineties 3D renders, early nineties FMV and a "heavy metal inspired" (what's the word for the *opposite* of music?) distressed cat wailing which drowns out the spoken dialog (I do certainly wish I had "subtittles" right about now!...) -- you are the leader of a moped biker gang who's invading the Earth to protect it from the *other* alien moped biker gang from the moped biker gang planet of the future (incoming plot spoiler: the moped biker gang planet of the future *is* Earth, of the future).

And while the concept isn't *entirely* devoid of promise for your typical eighties action wank movie, as a mariana-trench-level-low budget game, it falls flat on its skintight leather-clad face.  Most of the game is top-down and tile-based.  AI mopeds follow you around (when they're not getting stuck on the corners of buildings, or street signs, or dead pedestrians, or trees, other mopeds, you, themselves, or invisible black holes that make them flip out of existence entirely).  And as you gather this following of mopeds around you,  your reputation meter rises.  As your reputation rises, more pedestrians come out of the buildings to bother you with fetch quests.  The more fetch quests you complete, the more buildings are "taken" and the closer you are to completing the level.  So far, this doesn't actually sound that bad.  Except, here's the brilliant stroke of the game: remember the story?  There are *never* ***any*** encounters with a "bad" moped biker gang, and I think that may be entirely intentional.  For one, the programmers didn't have to bother writing any combat AI.  For another, it perfectly resolves the plot twist since anytime one of your AI mopeds so much as looks sideways at a pedestrian, the pedestrian dies.  But you *need* pedestrians.  And you need them alive to give you the fetch quests.  And you need your moped followers, because you need the rep... to get the pedestrians... to give you fetch quests.  But your moped followers are *damn* efficient at murdering the fuck out of the pedestrians.  The best strategy I could find was to accumulate enough rep for a new quest-giver to pop his head out the door, and then jet to a building as far away from him as possible (since the quest givers will also flock to you), then quickly ride in circles around a single building until all of your followers are stuck on either the building's edges or themselves, and then finally ram myself into the quest giver, who hopefully hadn't already rammed themselves into the moped barricade (as was often the case), forcing me to re-collect all the followers to re-gain the rep, to re-spawn the quest-giver, to re-do the whole mess all over again.  At later levels, this is frustrating beyond belief and made me want to buy a real moped and smash it over the heads of the developers.

So I did.  They won't be making games anymore.  I'm serving three years (down from 97 after the judge tried the game) for seven counts of vehicular manslaughter and I have no regrets.

2.5/10
(The title screen was really nice.)