Dr.Chaos

At a Glance: You've done it this time! It is very unfortunate that you had to run into a man with a doctorate in chaos. Now you must cross nerf swords with your innermost fears in order to rescue your brother. Frame rates and serotonin levels plummet as Dr. Chaos unleashes an extra dimensional maelstrom in his self-titled album/game by Pony Canyon.

Platform: NES (Download Emulator here - 192k)

Download: Download ROM here - 64k

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Game Plot: Your brother has decided to go hang out with Dr. Chaos only to be thrown into the interdimensional brig after possibly cheating on him with the much more attractive Admiral Order. The super sleuth that you are, you follow your brother's musky scent straight into the mansion of the doctor himself. Dr. Chaos sends out hordes upon hordes of tiny, useless creatures in an attempt to stop you. This plan would have been perfect if the doctor had anticipated you being able to use guns or walk. This will be his undoing. That is, if you ever actually ran into him. You never actually fight Dr. Chaos or even know who or what he or she ever was. All you do is enter rooms, punch walls, and shoot monsters. Perhaps Dr. Chaos just needed your assistance to help fight off these creatures. Maybe the little animation in the title screen is you murdering him or her. Perhaps I'm thinking too much about something designed by the same company whose last game consisted of taking pictures of Japanese girls.

When you enter any room you are treated to an awkward interface that both looks and functions like you cut off a hobo's hand and began flinging it around a room to open doors and pick up items. Readers beware! Stay in a room for too long and you'll get chased out by creatures that look a cake grew legs, started wearing high heels, applied makeup with a hose, and started wearing an XXXL Captain Kirk shirt for a dress. Don't make fun of her, especially on the internet. She knows copyright law.

Speaking of, this entire game can be best described as an exact metaphor for the internet. The enemies appear and never go away, like the internet. The bosses have to be sought out and then killed in a manner that is never explained to you, like the internet. No one ever talks to you because you waste all of your time getting angry at people on the internet, like the internet. Even clumsy controls and teeth-grinding enemies reflect everything one can learn about internet etiquette, or as I call it "Internetiquette."

Since by the end of this game you are never even given a consultation by Dr. Chaos or asked for your insurance, I guess I can use this last paragraph as my thesis and call myself Dr. Internet. I won't, because I have one last shred of dignity. Expect this to be gone by my next review.

Enemies: The invasion force from another dimension has landed! Thanks to this game, reading issues of Marvel comics, and watching the hit TV series "Sliders" I can now safely say I know everything about dimensional travel. To help all of you, I have fashioned this easy to follow chart to figure out if someone around you is from another dimension:

If you or anyone around you exhibits any of these symptoms, shoot them. If you see any bubbles appear around them after you shoot them, shoot the bubbles then shoot them again. Dr. Chaos teaches us that all enemies can and will reappear for fun whenever they feel like it. This is very different from the usual "off the screen" dimensional rift that causes your foes to reappear in other games. No, Dr. Chaos provides enemies that do this sort of thing for you, leaving (forcing) you the luxury of shooting the same enemy over and over again. You may need to do this anywhere from one to thirty times just to kill a single rat.

Despite the ability to never die, you can conquer these multidimensional wimps by shooting them or stabbing them enough. I fail to understand how monsters can expect to take over our dimension if some random guy with a knife and a handgun can eliminate the majority of their invasion force. When I could walk out of a hardware store after a two hundred dollar purchase and be considered "your greatest nemesis", pick a different planet. Preferably one filled with balsa wood houses and toothpick people.

Weapons: You begin and end you game (and life) equipped with grenades, a knife, a machine gun, and a pistol. Hitting the select button allows you to switch between these weapons at your inconvenience. Take it from me, pulling a pistol on a mutant fish monster while moving slowly underwater and avoiding flying skulls should not be this difficult.

Your pistol shoots little pellets at your enemies at an unbearably slow pace. The is the exact same as the pistol except it hurts your enemies more when (if) you hit them. Your knife more closely resembles a turkey leg than a blade, but clubbing a bat to death with a turkey leg is still as effective as stabbing it. Grenades are mostly a joke. Although you are never given any clue as to what weapon will hurt a certain boss, grenades are the only weapon that you have that offer a better chance of hurting yourself than hurting an enemy. Although I may be wrong on this, choking yourself as soon as a fight breaks out is not what I would consider to be a sound tactic.

Levels: If you're like me, you sometimes have a habit of forgetting how wonderful each level is after you've completed it because of injuries sustained. Thankfully, Dr. Chaos has a solution to this! After each stage is completed you are given the pleasure of traversing right back through the level. Remember all those exploding skulls that explode in such a way that you get hit and fall of the one of ten platforms that you need to go across? Have fun with them all over again!

Bosses: After accidentally stumbling upon the boss level and hopefully having the stuff you need to complete it, you will go toe to toe with an evil abomination from another dimension. The bosses of Dr. Chaos act exactly like real life bosses: they are sometimes ghosts and shoot fireballs or just move around real slow-like until you stab them. Then they get annoying.

Dr. Chaos is the type of game that doesn't get harder by demanding a higher degree of ingenuity or skill; it gets harder because things become more twirly. Bosses in Dr. Chaos use twirly things with startling success. The strength of the US military has diminished significantly since the Geneva conventions, where they agreed to cease production on all technology that would make their bullets whirl around in a circular motion. As you may have guessed the Bu$h administration is currently trying to find ways around this. Help stop them completely and forever by signing this online protest right here and sending two hundred and fifty dollars here.

Defining Moment:

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

– Kevin "The Goblin" Wilson