This week in the Hall of Shame, it's the economic themed Wall Street Kid!
Featuring:
-Wall Street Kid
-Prisila, The Pricey Prima Donna
-Larry, The Lofty Lawyer
-Ruth, The Ruthless Banker
-Stanley, The Crafty Consultant
-Connie, The Arrogant Advisor
-Ralph, The Regal Realtor
-Doc, The Bogus Boatsalesman
-Pamela, The Patient Pet Dealer
-Cal, The Cranky Car Dealer
-Ted, The Tuff Stereoman
-Art, The Artsy Artist
-Dion, The Dashing Designer
-Julie, The Jolly Jeweler
-Austin, The Astute Auctioneer
(With special guest stars Vincent Chiucchi as The Inducting Inductor and Weena Mercator as The Hopping Woman)
He's pretty happy knowing his uncle is now dead.
Like many horribly thought out games, this game gets annoying the moment you start playing it. The monotonous music is so annoying that the first button you press for this game will be the mute button. The intro is also weird and pointless. It starts off listing off all the characters that are featured in this game. A couple of them were even featured on the box art. Despite the intro describing what they're like, all of them have the same deadpan personality. Well, except for Prisila. She's a spoiled whore. Also, is anybody going to get exciting to play this game when they see some generic character getting featured, especially when some of them have stupid puns for names? "Art The Artsy Artist?" It's like they're barely trying.
The story of this game is that you're extremely wealthy uncle Benedict has passed away, and you are his only surviving relative. Wait...I'm his only surviving relative? Nobody else related is alive?! Oh my god, where's the rest of my family?! Anyway, before you can inherit in his $600 billion in assets (okay seriously, you have $600 billion and you couldn't find at least a trophy wife to make kids with?), you have to take $500,000 and make huge profits with it by using the stock market. That wouldn't seem so hard until it turns out you also have to use that money to spoil the gold digger of a girlfriend you have, which according to Larry is the "Benedict Standard of Living" (again, if that's the standard of living, why did my uncle die without any relatives?). The goal of the game is to complete various tasks such as getting a new house and buying back the Benedict castle, all of which is basically done by having enough money at the end of the month.
A majority of the game however is looking at this screenshot:
Oh yeah...that DEFINITELY looks like fun.
Besides investing in stocks you also have to spend time with your hoe and go exercising. I had no idea why I had to exercise until I read an FAQ saying that if you don't exercise in the game you start to feel bad. I never realized it's importance because the game never really says anything about going out to get some exercise. You're told to pamper your hoe, you're given advice about what stocks to invest, but nothing about exercising. There's also no indication as to how healthy you really are. The dating and exercising each have three different options, where the only noticeable difference is that one takes 2 hours (in game time), one takes 4 hours, and the other takes the entire day. You don't actually do anything though. It's just a blank screen with text written on it. Yeah, why play platforming games with all those pretty graphics and awesome battles when you can be reading text on a blank screen in a game about the stock market? Sometimes you're not allowed to do certain activities with your hoe or do certain exercises because of something that happens in the paper. Sometimes you won't get to do the exercise of your choice for no adequately explained reason. What exactly is the point of this?
The newspaper plays a vital role as it basically tells you what stocks you're supposed to invest in and sometimes will list an activity. At first I never bothered taking the headlines at the end seriously because most of the time the newspaper says ridiculous things that don't even apply to the game at all. These are some of the headlines that I've read:
Another Gangster "Shoot Up" at a downtown tavern after a big brawl – No injuries reported
Gang shootings in bars? What demographic is this game aiming for? Plus what do gangsters have anything to do with investing in stocks?
Prince Lopoloco going to marry American Heiress – Combined worth over $75 billion.
What the hell kind of name is Lopoloco? Does he actually appear in some form in the game? Considering all the characters were already introduced, I doubt it. Hence, pointless.
83 year old woman comes in first in the annual USA Marathon – Now wanted for channel 3 sports show.
Why am I supposed to care about this? This is sounding less like a stock market newspaper and more like Fark.Com.
Hollywood's talkshow hosts make waves as they battles for overseas ratings points
Unless I'm actually appearing in these talk shows, I don't care.
More giant cockroaches invade small south seas island – giant cans of Raido used without success.
Okay, how the hell did we go from gang shootings to giant cockroaches? Is this game supposed to be some kind of parody? Actually, that might be exactly what it is, because in some sort of attempt to be funny, all the stocks are puns off real businesses, like YBM, American Depress, Xearox, and ATNT. ATNT? Now I know they're definitely not trying!
The game takes a while to beat, so naturally it has a password system so you can save your game. However, the geniuses behind this game have decided to make passwords that are over FORTY characters long! What the hell kind of game is this where you have to remember passwords FORTY characters long?! The passwords are a combination of numbers, letters, symbols, and reverse letters. Yeah, REVERSE LETTERS!
How the hell are you going to write down a password like that? Why do you need to write something like that in the first place?!
Overall this game is flat out BORING. All you really have to do is pay Connie to get the stock you should be investing, and then basically pool all the money you can in that stock, then just spend every day you don't have enough money in new stocks on your hoe and exercising. Sometimes this can be a challenge when the damn stocks decide not to go up to give you the money necessary to reach the next part of the game. The furthest I was able to get was buying the Yacht but not having the money to pay the loan, even when I was investing in every damn stock Connie told me to. Even if I got past that however, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be missing anything since you're basically doing the same thing over and over.
