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 (Death by Sweet-N-Low would be more dignified than this)
AWFUL GAMING
Ninjabread Man
Developer: Data Design Interactive
Publisher: Data Design Interactive/Conspiracy Entertainment
Year: 2005
Genre: Platformer
System: PS2/Wii/PC
When bad videogames are made, more experienced gamers can sense them pretty well and pass them by with the disdain of wine critics. Some unfortunate people however, by their own foolish hope, not possessing this spider sense of bad design, or just plain masochistic, will end up playing these to make up the minute amount of profits that end up smaller than the respect I currently possess for the Oscars (which was killed off in 2008 when they gave Gran Torino ZERO nominations. Fuck you Academy Awards).
But some developers, against all reason, will continue to repeat their mistakes with the most devious of marketing shills. Enter Data Design Interactive, who have as much dignity with videogames as Rwandan mercenaries do overall, as you will soon find out. Enter, the Ninjabread Man.
Story - So I read the back cover of the game box and it was pretty succinct about what the plot was. You are a gingerbread man, who is a ninja, and you must defend Candy Land from terrible creatures. That's kind of it. Seriously there's more plot development in Tom Selleck's moustache then in this game, this has practically negative story involved than comic book canon has. And I mean Ultimate canon. So unfortunately without any story to go on, I decided to find another game to just swap out a story with and pad this out a little more. Anubis II.
 (Whatever furries do to him cannot possibly be worse than this)
Long ago, an evil and twisted spirit known as Mumm'hotep plunged the Land of Egypt into Darkness. It was believed to be forever destroyed, but the evil spirit rose again and took physical form, to place a 'Pharaoh's Curse' over the fastest, strongest and most poisonous of Egypt's inhabitants, holding the once peaceful civilization in its hands.
The situation has become so terrible that the Gods have called on the only warrior that could rid the sands of these evil monsters and return peace to Egypt...The mighty Anubis. The hero of the Egyptians, Anubis, embarks on his quest to save Egypt from the Curse of the Pharaohs.
So......okay barring the BLATANT lack of understanding involving any Egyptian mythology (and showing Anubis in an even stupider light than furries do because at least furries make him look sexy good), this is at least a bit of effort in a plot. Why did I pick this particular game to give a story to Ninjabread Man which has nothing to do with Egypt? Well you'll find out.
 (Welcome to ignorance, which you will soon wish you had)
Gameplay - Ah yes, the "gameplay". What should be your standard stale excuse of platforming with basic jumping and a wonderful TWO attacks, becomes a horrendous mess of incredibly unresponsive controls, annoyingly respawning enemies and terrible game layout. I mean I'm pretty much struggling to pad this out because this game is so bad, so empty of any and all promises of fun that compared to this game "fun-size" Mars Bars are like fucking Disneyworld.
You have two attacks as far as I know, slashing with your blade and shooting out shurikens. Problem is the controls are so blatantly off that you won't even be able to hit properly without getting hit yourself. And let's not even think about the Wii controls.
Holy fuck, the Wii controls are more unresponsive than a broken Furby, and I mean a Furby both literally AND psychologically broken. On the Wii, you naturally swing the wiimote to make your ninjabread man slash, right? On the 20th shake of my wiimote, he actually slashed. That is how bad the controls are.
The jumping is uneven and uncontrollable in the sense that you jump really badly for a ninja, and that you're never sure of where you land. Yanno what, fuck it, I'm tired of reviewing this game already, why don't I review something else, like Anubis II?
 (A creature so pathetic that even Scrappy Doo wouldn't touch him)
So, we have this horrible excuse of a chibi form of Anubis running around the Egyptian lands with a staff and magic bolts to attack with. You go all across the land of Egypt (apparently cuz the pyramids seem to be a big giveaway) and deal with a variety of mummified beasties with cane and magic bolts, rather like you would with say, a blade and a shuriken. Not that I'm implying anything, no not at all.
I'm downright STATING that this game is a fucking ripoff of Ninjabread Man. By THE SAME COMPANY.
There is literally no way around this fact. Ninjabread Man has nothing going for it gameplay-wise with stupid enemies, a stupid character and a boringly simple but incredibly unresponsive control system that barely even gets what you want to actually do. The makers have literally made their game more retarded than the average Youtube poster. And that's fucking incredible.
I could go on about it, but all I would be doing is describing how painfully mind-numbing the controls of this game are and how idiotic they are to you to the point that you will not have any idea of where you're going.
I'm serious.
 (On the plus side, every slash you do with the wiimote burns off 180 calories)
Graphics - For a game in 2005 on the PS2, you'd be forgiven for thinking they look good from far away, and at the least a ray of bright sunshine amidst a land of "realistic" brown and grey, with its magnificently painfully bright candy-coated colours. I could forgive you for that. Hell I'd forgive you for fucking my mom as long as you gave her a good time.
But I wouldn't forgive you after you've played five minutes of this game and still said the graphics were good, despite the fact that you would now be even more legally blind than Mr. Magoo. And fuck do I hate Mr. Magoo.
Videogame graphics should do two things. Create an atmosphere and not obscure one's way. These do neither. These graphics have the atmosphere of a dentist's waiting room in the summer and will not aid you at all in direction despite the huge-ass red arrow that tries to do such a task. That arrow is useless by the way, not that you'd really want to go anywhere in this horrific facade of sugar and broken dreams.
You think Uwe Boll was bad, he's got NOTHING on these developers, at least the movies are hilarious because of their faults and he eventually got better, but these fuckers of Data Design Interactive have NEVER been better. They are the....there is no director out there that is bad enough to compare to these guys, so let's just call them the Academy Awards Committee in terms of actual talent.
Data Design Interactive have also been around since the Great Videogame Crash of '83, and that should probably be a warning of death, or plague rather which would fit the Egypt theme more appropriately than Timmy's school report (a.k.a the story of Anubis II). Now you probably think that maybe Anubis II would be better right? Or at least better looking right, maybe if you got past the shoddy graphics and if they looked nice ENOUGH then you could play the game. Wrong.
 (This particular swing also took 180 calories off my body. The game itself took off three years)
LOOK AT IT! LOOK AT THIS SHIT. It has the exact same interface, the same level of graphics in what is perhaps the WORST usage of the Havok Engine ever in existence. They don't change a single thing, all they do is reskin every single model and background into something else. Now I may not be a programmer or anything, hell the most complex thing I ever did was a calculator program back in high school which I've completely forgotten how to do now, but this looks pretty fucking lazy by anyone's comparison.
Hell they didn't even change the level design. I'm serious, go find a video of the first level of Ninjabread Man. Then compare it to Anubis II. They are literally exact, they didn't even change THE FUCKING LAYOUT. This is the fucking Video Brinquedo of laziness right fucking here.
I don't know what's worse. The fact that they even began this in the first place, or thought that people would actually be so stupid as to fall for the same trick AGAIN, with the promise of a sequel in the fucking title.
([citation not needed] it is not a sequel to anything. It is literally the most weak-ass marketing tactic they could deploy to fool retards into thinking they saw a nonexistant game and played it. They would STILL be disappointed by this game compared to the prequel that doesn't even exist).
Oh wait, I KNOW WHAT'S WORSE! The fact that they did it THREE GODDAMN TIMES.
 (JESUS CHRIST)
They have less shame than the entire 80s ever did. They have less dignity than the guy who falsely accused Michael Jackson of being a paedophile, or worse still, the Irate Gamer. They have literally no sense of....of....ANYTHING.
You can't believe that these people would be so cynical as to believe that gamers would be such corporate shills (as if we could even AFFORD to be, do you KNOW how much a fuckin' frappuccino costs at Starbucks!?) that we would willingly fork out cash to buy a game that pretends to be a sequel but even without something to compare it to, is still somehow even worse than what it was pretending to be.
 (I am no longer recognised as human on WiiFit having lost my soul to this fucking game)
I mean, they just literally reskinned the goddamn game and added a different sound effect, ONE sound effect, which I am pretty sure is very easy to do in videogame developing, but hey the fuck do I know, I'm just a critic who wasted 19 years of his life playing this shit, surely I couldn't be trusted to know on what makes a GOOD videogame or not, right!?
Music/Sound - Hahahaha, oh you want MUSIC!? Yeah good luck trying to find another song that ISN'T the single looping theme in Ninjabanubis Adventures or whatever the fuck it's called now. The sounds in the game probably come up to the number you can count with one hand. If you counted five, congratulations, you are overqualified to work for Data Design Interactive who clearly do not understand that a game needs a sound library and a soundtrack in order to be anymore compelling.
Both Ninjabread Man and Anubis II have the exact same song. A song that is played in THREE of their games, a cheerful little ditty that slowly begins to grind away at your sanity for the fact that it NEVER STOPS LOOPING. This is some unconstitutional shit right here to even allow such a song so fucking irritating to even exist, that it should be considered as weaponized music.
You think Justin Bieber was bad!? Compared to this one single song, Justin Bieber IS the fucking Kurt Cobain of our generation. This song contains every single method in destroying the sanity of a human being as well as some types of trees and at least two llamas. And they used this in three games.
The other game is Billy the Wizard: Rocket Broomstick Racing, which is thankfully different from this game, but the fact that they re-used THE ONE SONG is testament to their talentlessness.
 (There has never been a more insulting tribute to The King since they sold plungers in the shape of his death mask)
Rock 'n' Roll Adventures admittedly DOES have a different song, probably because they realised they had to make the tiniest of effort to give SOME pretence of rock and roll in a game called such. While the song is admittedly less annoying than that of the only other song they ever made, it's still only one song and it reeks of the disgust of effort in any shape or form.
Not that Rock 'n' Roll Adventures was any better mind you, having only a darker sort of landscape but the exact same controls and such.
You really wish that there was at least one likeable thing about any of these three games, but there isn't. They, or rather, IT, contains nothing but the worst humanity can do with less effort than a horse taking a shit. It has less effort than Youtube's flagging-and-banning system because that would imply actual AI. It reeks of procrastination and laziness that quite frankly made me proud to not just write the same three sentences for every fucking facet of the game, and instead end up with paragraphs upon paragraphs of untold hatred that took far longer than whatever Taco Bell break this....THING took to make and rehash two more times.
Fuck this, I'm gonna play Custer's Revenge again.
Fun and Innovation - 0.3
Replayability - 0.3
Gameplay - 0.3
Presentation - 0.3
 (Have a real Ninjabread man folks, and happy 2011) "Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto  Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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