365//365: Day 016 – E.T. The Extra Terrestrial – Digital Companion (GBC)

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You know, some of the games I pick to review are either decided upon ahead of time, or chosen at random. Most of them I have played before, and some I have never played, nor ever heard of. I happened to have stumbled upon a Game Boy Color game I never new existed. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial – Digital Companion was that game, but I don’t think I’d call it a game, but more of a cruel and unusual punishment for a child that plays too many video games.

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Once you pop the sucker in, E.T. will begin to ask you questions for the next hour. I’m not joking. These questions range from understandable (name, birth date, favorite color) to the most asinine thing you can ask in a video game (where do you live, what is the first name of your favorite actor, YOUR FREAKING EMAIL ADDRESS?!). I’m surprised E.T. didn’t ask me what my bra size was. Literally, the questions he starts to ask borderline inappropriate. It just goes on and on for what seems like forever. After a torturous twenty minutes, it looks like there’s no end in sight. Is this the game? Am I playing 20 questions with a pencil necked extraterrestrial who can’t count, or find the right time to shut up?

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You better be mailing me a refund after all this torture you've been unleashing on me!

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Apparently, after you answer how Stone Henge was formed and where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, you actually get to something different. It took me over an hour to answer them all, with several pauses in between so that I wouldn’t shut the game off, or throw myself out the window. I check my Start Menu and notice I have three options: Messages, To Do’s and Events. The messages are in the form of two emails (oh, I guess the email question had its reasoning) from E.T., welcoming me “2 E.T.D.C.” and to “Be good!”. Gee, after all that time answering all those questions, now he thinks that he’s the boss of me?

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I check below the Messages option at the To Do list, and it wants me to enter a friends name, complete the About You portion that I spent five months answering questions to, set my password, feed Flopglopple (the games virtual pet), buy school supplies, finish summer reading (in the winter nevertheless) and my first day of school. I naturally check all of these as done, since I refuse to ever answer another question this game throws at me. I then check my events calendar and it lists the following in order: Hanukkah Starts, Hanukkah Ends, Christmas Day, Kwanzaa Starts and….Christmas Eve. Apparently on the planet Moron, Christmas Eve comes after Christmas Day and Kwanzaa.

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E.T. won't be phoning home for Christmas Eve until after Kwanzaa starts.

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After a little bit….rather, after what seems like hours of patience, I start to fiddle around more and discover things here and there . It’s really nothing more than a crude PDA, with E.T. references thrown around, and even some….GAMES?! Yeah, this “game” has “games” in it, with the only reprieve you get from these being that the vomit inducing music actually changes….to less vomit inducing music. The mini games are crude, very reminiscent of Atari 2600 functionality with Coleco Vision like visuals. These mini “games” make this full game as a whole, even worse than the seven weeks you spent answering why pigs can’t fly and why the sky is blue. Hell, the very FIRST time I entered the Word Scramble game, the first word I unscrambled perfectly describes this game:

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A review done in one word: BALLS.

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This might be the worst thing I have ever played in my life, and I’ve played Cosmic Race. It’s not even a real game! It’s a kids PDA, if your child was projectile vomiting pea soup while their head did 360′s. People called E.T. on the Atari 2600 the worst game ever, but E.T. The Extra Terrestrial – Digital Companion on the Game Boy Color makes that game look like Fallout 3. Don’t even try to hunt this one down. No man, woman or child should ever have to suffer in the ways I suffered! What did I ever do to deserve this torture?!

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Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go through the only activity in my To Do section that will benefit me as a human being –

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Do it.

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Rating: 0.2