The Ultimate Gaming Franchises

Sometimes fans can take a franchise too far, as evidenced by these force-feeding fetish illustrations of Final Fantasy 7 character "Tifa". If this we Duke Nuke 'Em, 3D Realms would have already released a 3rd person shooter based on force-feeding holodukes with cream pies.Game developers strive to create an entertaining game, game producers strive to produces a title so unique and monumentally entertaining that it will spawn a long lineage of successors and spin-offs. There are huge amounts of money to be made in a franchise, hell some companies base nearly their entire product offering on a single title. Take for example Square Soft, who have been reselling and repurposing what is at its core the same Final Fantasy game over and over. They've released several spin-off titles based on Final Fantasy, some of which are considered by many to be superior to the original franchise. And people keep buying them, for the most part, because Square keeps releasing relatively good games. They have not "tarnished" their franchise with an apocalyptically shitty game.

Obviously there are other companies that haven't managed their respective franchises nearly so well. Companies like 3DRealms and their horribly misused Duke Nuke 'Em license that is apparently five dollars and available for everything from chess games to baked goods. I admit I still look forward to them actually releasing a sequel to Duke Nuke 'Em 3D, but I also dread it because I know if it is successful they will have Duke Nuke 'Em socks and puzzle adventure games on shelves almost the next day. Hey 3D Realms I hear the Bubble Bobble license is also about as hot as the Duke license, maybe you could work out some sort of smash hit crossover where Duke shoots bubbles with a harpoon! HAIL TO THE KING ME BABY: DUKE NUKEM CHECKERS 3D!

Then there is a third breed of gaming franchise: the beast that was horrible to begin with, grows progressively more horrible with each release, and some how manages to turn a massive profit as the producer spits out a game roughly once a week. I'm looking at motherfucking you Army Men. WHO THE LIVING FUCK IS BUYING THESE GAMES? I'm pretty sure it's the same filthy cocksuckers who are buying all those Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen games that are on every platform known to man. Do you want to hear some really bad news? There are FIVE goddamn Olsen Twins games for the Game Boy, six if you include the one on Game Boy Advance.

I am left to assume there is a race of earth-burrowing invisible worm people who buy these games because there is no possible way the human race is supporting these two franchises. Yet, every time I go into a game store, I see box after box plastered with the monkey-faced girls from Full House crammed right next to nearly an entire section devoted to those despicable Army Men games. Therefore I bestow upon the Army Men games and the Olsen Twin games the titles of "Ultimate Franchises". They have both outlived the hunting games, the comedic reverse hunting games where you play animals chasing guys with shotguns, and even that game where you play a duck that shoots fire at rabbit poachers that sold a million copies at Wal Mart.

Since my entire career as a humorist relies on illuminating and mocking awful things in this world, I wholeheartedly support Army Men games and Olsen Twins games. These 20-40 dollar shitburgers are my bread and butter, and I am going to do everything in my power to make sure they continue to produce thousands of titles throughout the remainder of the year. To this end I have put together information packages and press kits for a series of upcoming releases in both franchises. I feel confident that these games will utterly disappoint players in every imaginable way, yet somehow inspire them to keep shelling out cash for the same regurgitated manure.

For Immediate Release: Army Men in 2002

3D0 in association with Gutterware Software is pleased to bring you our Army Men lineup for 2002! Do you remember playing with little green army men as a kid? Sure you do, because ever since Toy Story came out Disney has been ramming those memories down your throats, then we ripped them off and started ramming it down your throats! Fantastic! The marketing for our entire product line consists of a single image rendered from 3D Studio Max of a plastic soldier being melted by a flamethrower. That's because this is the concept for all of our games too!

Only we added characters recently, like "Sarge" and "Tits" and "That Rabbit Thing"! It just does not get any better than this; in fact this year's line up somehow manages to be even worse than last year's.

Army Men Battleground: Picnic (August 8th)
Platform: PC CD-ROM, Playstation 2, Xbox, Game Cube
Take command of Sarge and a squad of soldiers that look exactly like Sarge but have slightly different voices as you battle for supremacy of a picnic ground. Using a picnic theme has allowed us to tile the same red and white checkered "blanket" pattern and reuse the condiments and food from last year's "Kitchen Kombat!" This translates into even less fun for you! We also threw in some crazy gimmicks like ants that randomly attack you and Frisbees that land on your tank, this makes the game even more frustrating and unplayable. If you don't understand what we're talking about, then you're our target audience. Reading comprehension is not necessary to play this game!

Watch out for those crazy ants! You never know what to expect from all of their craziness!Army Men Tetris Assault (August 9th)
Platform: PC CD-ROM, Playstation 2
Tetris is fun, why can't it be fun with a slightly-animated picture of Sarge in the corner of the screen? We don't know, but it sure as hell isn't fun. Listen to all the hits Sarge repeated endlessly when you clicked on him in all of our other games because Lord knows we haven't paid a voice actor since 1996. To make Tetris even more fun we have included ants that will run onto the screen and shift your blocks randomly around.

Army Men Battleground: Picnic II (August 10th)
Platform: PC CD-ROM, Playstation 2, Xbox, Game Cube
Sarge is back with a squad of his men to fight over completely recycled picnic battleground with improved graphics and all new units! We have added a water balloon that randomly falls on your men, an enlarged ant we called the "super ant", a new tank that moves faster and has even more pathfinding AI errors, and a new enemy army called "The Browns". The Browns are like The Tans only they are BROWN. HOLY MOTHER OF FUCK IS THAT COOL!

Army Men Battleground: Picnic Portable (August 10th, Afternoon)
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Do you remember how shitty the other two Battleground: Picnic games were? Well now you can take it with you to a real picnic thanks to the Game Boy Advance! And remember all those low-res textures on our polygons, they are replaced with sprites on this scaled down version so it looks even worse! We also removed ten levels and half of the units! Have fun with this one suckers!

Army Men Kart (September 13th)
Platform: PC CD-ROM, Playstation 2, Xbox, Game Cube
Did somebody say multiplayer kart racing? Party games are the rage these days and we have worked hard to "regraphicize" our "3D models" into a sitting position and place them in wacky go karts. We don't know why, but you can also race against a dragon and a ninja! Ants randomly attack you too! Buy this, you need it.

When you first talk to Sarge you will be given the option of inviting him to go to a "love hotel" with you. Choosing this option will not get you any closer to unlocking the CG scenes with him.Army Men: Hot Date (Christmas)
Platform: PC CD-ROM
We only have four characters with names and three of them are male, but by God we are going to have an Army Men entry in the dating simulator genre too. We'll probably have you play Sarge or something crazy like that and you'll get to romance Tits, Rabo, or the evil Tan commander whose name even we can't remember.

Army Men: Makeover (Christmas)
Platform: To Be Announced
This is really just the Barbie Makeover Studio game we released two years ago repackaged in the unused boxes for Army Men Take Manhattan. We thought about putting new graphics in but we were too stupid to figure out how to turn on our computers so we just included stickers you can put on your monitor. We didn't have Army Men related stickers though so it's just a sheet of Knight Rider decals. 3D0 "bought" like 500,000 of them when a condemned warehouse near their offices got demolished by the city.

Thank you for taking the time to review our exciting lineup of Army Men titles for 2002. Chances are twice as many Army Men games as I have listed in this press release will actually hit store shelves before next year, but trying to keep up with all of the games in development would just give me carpal tunnel.

Thanks,

Jackass Marketing Director
3D0

With the strong ideas I have put forth I have no doubt that 3D0 can shovel even more of their Army Men crap into the gaping maws of the tunneling invisi-worms and reap huge profits. Let's take a look at what's on the horizon for Acclaim and their Mary-Kate and Ashley franchise in this helpful press release I've cooked up for them.

2002 Releases from Acclaim and the Olsen Twin Corporation

Those utter scamps are up to it again! Up to what? Profits! Acclaim is pleased to announced no fewer than four Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen games slated for release before the end of the fourth quarter. These two dynamos are powering our entire development department day and night. More importantly they are keeping the guys in the Mortal Kombat 4 team from having their electricity cut off for failure to keep up with bills.

Just two of the many outfits you can dress them up in during the "Haunted Fashion Show"Mary-Kate and Ashley's Adventure in the Funtastic Funpark Funstravaganza
Platform: Playstation 2
We have more grainy footage of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen then you can shake a stick at in this spooktacular interactive adventure. Discover clues and solve a very non-threatening mystery that has nothing to do with an actual crime and includes vague concepts that could be misunderstood as "educational" in between horribly acted sequences that you will watch over and over because Mary-Kate has slight camel toe. Can they answer the riddles posed to them by the ghosts who haunt the Funpark? Can you hide the purchase of this game from your girlfriend by putting it underneath the Gran Turismo 3 disc? Only your skills can answer these questions!

Mary-Kate and Ashley's Assault on Death Island
Platform: Playstation 2, Xbox, Game Cube
The always lovable Mary-Kate and Ashley have a mystery to solve on Death Island and you can bet that despite the word "death" being in the title, the mystery has everything to do with lost necklaces or magical gems and nothing to do with even slight injury. Travel with them in this exotic interactive adventure filmed on location in Hawaii. We will put pictures of them in bikinis on the cover to entice our 18-45 year old viewers to buy the game, but they will be big bikinis that conceal their nipples very well so as not to offend parents or younger girls. In the game they won't actually appear in bikinis because they have a clause in their contract that makes us pay them double rate for wearing any clothes considered "underwear or revealing athletic wear".

I think this is the part in "Fashion Model" where you fly your pegasus through the magical TV screen.Mary-Kate and Ashley's Portable Fashion Model
Platform: Game Boy Color
You'll have no idea why we associated this side-scrolling platform jumper with the Olsen Twins once you play it because the Game Boy Color graphics are so shitty everything looks like a poorly colorized photograph of sand. You see, we got this indy developer trying to sell us this GBC title called "Magic Cave" or something equally retarded. We just lengthened the hair of the elf, added a pixel on its chest for breasts and slapped Mary-Kate and Ashley's money makers all over the cover. We expect to sell five million copies.

Mary-Kate and Ashley's Shopping Spree Adventure
Platform: Playstation 2
We're not sure how we did it, but we worked solving a shitty milquetoast mystery into the concept of Mary-Kate and Ashley on a shopping spree. We even have some fucking ghosts in this, that's how good we are at cramming every single Scooby Doo cliché together with every single Seventeen magazine cliché. Believe us when we say if the Harlem Globetrotters were still a draw in any way they would be guest starring with Don Knots in every single one of these shitty games.

We look forward to submit review copies to you in the future. We find it hilarious whenever we get bad reviews because it has absolute zero effect on our sales. Not that you would even think of giving the girls a bad review, because if you did you would never again receive advance copies of one of our Olsen Twins titles.

Thanks,

Soulless Draconian PR Maven
Acclaim

Those two sweethearts are probably going to take over complete control of America before 2004 with or without me, but my little "assist" should help get their upcoming games the attention they so richly deserve. If you ever hear news of a crossover project that combines Army Men with Olsen Twins, start stocking the bomb shelter with perishables, the apocalypse is right around the corner.

An Exciting Look Into the Near Future!

We here at Something Awful pride ourselves in being the online eLeaders of Interactive iAction zCyber-Content.com. With this in mind, we have created a sneak peek look at next week's installment of "Something Awful: The Website," a feature we like to call "Next Week On: Something Awful!"

This preview is crammed full of action, suspense, mystery, action, and most importantly, action! Interested in what's coming up next week on America's favorite website (I have recently renamed myself "America")? Click this here underlined sequence of colored letters and indulge yourself in the feelgood sensation of whatever year it is!

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)