Well, I started D2 on the Dreamcast this evening, and am actually really enjoying it.  I haven’t seen much of the, you know, horror bits, but I’m finding that sniping bunnies is way more fun than I expected.  It’s a little weird going from Blue Stinger with free roaming 3D motion to a game with Resident-Evil-style tank controls for the main character, but I’m adapting.

Before that, though, I did me a little rolling, Beautiful Katamari style, and managed to finish all the King’s requests in, well, not very much time at all.  It’s almost a sin to go through a Katamari game with the sort of must-beat-this-and-move-on attitude I’ve been applying to games lately, so I will be going back to it at some point, I just need the massive overwhelming backlog to be a little less massive and overwhelming.

Something I won’t be going back to is, well, you remember a couple of years back when Burger King put out a line of Xbox/Xbox360 Advergames right around the holidays and every poor kid in the country was crushed to find them swelling up their stockings on Christmas morning?

Yeah. Those things.

Well, I’d heard at the time that, if it came right down to it, Sneak King was actually worth playing for a laugh, and I have to report that, having played it, I concur with that assessment.  There’s something about the concept behind the game that abrades the soul: you’re ambushing people with fatty food, and the horrible horrible fixed grin of the Burger King mascot adds to the overall creepiness level in ways that are both fundamentally wrong and – just a little – tantalizing; it’s as if someone were to release a game in which the goal was to drive 5 miles under the speed limit at all times, using the passing lane.

And yes, I worked on that last metaphor quite a bit.  I came up with several “it’s as if…” possibilities before that one, but none of them were the sort of thing I’d like my readers to think I actually fantasize about.

ANYWAY.  Back to Sneak King.  Sneak King consists of 4 levels; each one has 20 challenges; you need to complete at least 10 challenges per level to unlock the next level, so I considered that doing 10 from each level would be enough to call the game beaten.  It took a little over 3 hours to do this – so, considering that the game itself cost me 0.89, I think I got surprising value for money.

Some of the challenges on the last couple of levels are actually quite, well, challenging and I got a feeling of real accomplishment from pulling them off.

Let me emphasize that:  I found satisfaction in the feeling of delivering fast food from the confines of a rubbish bin.

I’m a little weirded out by that.