Tonight I was going to review Batman: Arkham Asylum, but as it installed the shop’s PS3 yellow-lit. I expected it to happen earlier; I had purchased the 60GB model from some idiot who didn’t treat it very well for $150 almost two years ago. Diet Mike is coming over in the morning with his torx bits so that we can repair it.

Instead, Classic Mike and I thought we’d continue our desparate bid to keep ourselves on Google’s index by analyzing the butt-kising surrounding the Wolfenstein reviews that followed our firsy and show you this blurry picture of the assy-sounding Skate City Heroes for the Wii, along with a bonus round of our favorite office game, Buzzword Watch. To make it extra confusing, I put the PR text below the box art in the Wii’s native color, Snowblind White.

“Your best skating buddy has been kidnapped by Virus, your arch-nemesis, and only you can save him! Become a skateboard master as you zip between hover cars, grind on rails, and pull sick trick combos throughout a futuristic metropolis. Hidden bonuses and items will help you impress the evil captor in order to free your friend. Your grappling laser and trusty skateboard are all you need to smack down your nemesis and restore peace to the city.“

Buzzword Watch is our favorite game because there are no losers. Every time we highlight one and both agree that it’s a pretty good example of a word we’ve seen in press releases hundreds of times before, we squirt vodka down each others’ throats. Look forward to entire press releases being reprinted and completely boldfaced, followed by Mike typing a bunch of farting and cocksucking noises with the last of his consciousness.

But that’s not what we came to talk to you about tonight. Instead, we wanted to give a big shoutout to our niggas, the noisily fellating game press, for the good job they’ve been doing being complete and utter fucking weasels. Remember how we told you to stay the hell away from the new Wolfenstein? Well, there’s a reason. It’s not a good game. It’s an excellent graphics engine wrapped around a bad game like crispy bacon around a runny turd, which was then tossed into your open living room window.

I was wanting this game, mind you. I wanted it to be the next Serious Sam. Wolfenstein 3D defined the genre and I expected to slide around, having a wild time, shooting Nazis that threw glass beakers at you and slaying a grossly wide, bionic Hitler. What I got was a game that took the revoltingly stinky Wolfenstein mythos and played it completely straight-faced. It wasn’t fun!

So to host our first bad journalism awards, Mike and I got kitted up to the teeth in our finest clothing and stage makeup in preparation of the ceremony and the endless feast at the local Jade Dragon restaurant.

Since we were already careening around and knocking shit off our desks, we decided to get less ambitious than originally planned and just condense all the categories into one big Ass-Kissing Little Brown Man statue, not pictured to spare the sensibilities of our more emotionally frail readers like the entire fey staff of The Escapist.

OUR NOMINEES!

Eurogamer.net - While our limey cousins across the pond gave Wolfenstein one of its lower scores (a still ass-kissing 6/10) they try to make up for the litany of legitimate complaints peppered inside the context of “at least it’s nice that it’s there” comments, Dan Whitehead tries to compare Wolfenstein to that classification of movie that’s “so bad it’s good.”

No, we can’t fly over and carpet bomb Europe anymore. Yes, we asked. The FBI had me in the hot seat under a lamp for five hours and I think one of the agents gave Mike an Indian Wrist Burn.

Let’s get this straight; You can’t transcend badness in a game, only the cutscenes. In a movie, you can gloss over the bad parts, laugh at how that stupid crap isn’t happening to you, or imagine you’re having sex with at least two Megan Foxes. A game requires all of your attention and action. If it’s bad, you’re suffering it. You’re experiencing it. Then again, my experience dozing off while still playing it might show that Whitehead has a point. Who knows.

1up - “SCORE”, I thought as I saw them on the Gamerankings chart. Nobody sucks a dick like 1up, these days. I had never heard of review Justin Haywald, but apparently he fits right in because he gave the game a nice, quote-friendly B. The introductory paragraph is the typical introductory paragraph; it serves no other purpose than to prove you’re reading a review. It also lets you know right away that the whole damn thing is going to be one of those dull, laundry list reviews that list off everything the game lets you do without offering a solid opinion. Do you give a fuck how the special ability meter drains and rises if it isn’t something wonderfully unique? Only if you have a geode collection stashed somewhere.

Haywald won’t let details get in the way and lauds Wolfenstein’s pseudo-open-ended gameplay. I don’t know if I mentioned; the game has a hub map. All you do in this hub map is make your way to the Black Market shop, then a contact’s HQ, and then you go to an edge of the map for the next linear mission. This could be accomplished in two minutes by letting you purchases weapons from a menu between levels, but hubs are the new It for gaming. Some illusion of choice. It’s crazy, but I can point to the current love of my life, Valkyria Chronicles, and point out how the same limited select-your-mission options can be accomplished by means of a menu. A very interactive menu. But no, Raven wants you to spend ten minutes slugging through more of the same shit to pad out their game.

“Wolfenstein’s plot is little more than an excuse for you to revisit the titular Wolfenstein castle and cause unnecessary mass destruction, but even without the added magical powers, Wolfenstein is built on a solid foundation and packed with hectic action.”

…there was a castle. It was one, short level. It wasn’t the titular castle. The mass destruction is limited to some brown crates, and the hectic action was nowhere to be found in the version we received. We can only come to the conclusion that Haywald was reviewing his own dreams.

Giant Bomb - I’ve long held that the name of this site is a warning, not a homage. And since the review seems to lack a byline, I can’t tell if it was written by the bloated honcho of the website or one of his sniveling friends.

“It’s the use of the Veil powers that makes Wolfenstein more than just another World War II shooter“

And turns it into a cross between just another WW2 shooter and just another TimeShift.

I can’t tell if they honestly liked the game or they’re just underhandedly panning it while holding out their stumpy little hands for the next pre-release copy. Saying it has a “good, solid single-player campaign” and then complaining about the brevity of gameplay and how easy it was? Maybe I’m the retard, but I don’t get it.

Tacky, guys. Way to celebrate the godawful ass-kissing that Gerstmann was supposedly fired for fighting against. Or rather, sitting in his chair and eating Twinkies against.

Gamespot – I got as far as the opening sound bites with the pro being listed as “the guns are fun to shoot” and had to close the window. There was nothing here for me. Be ashamed, Kevin VanOrd. Of your probably inane review and your dainty name.

Team Xbox – I tend to think I’m too smart to click on any link that leads to spam or Ign’s Ign Entertainment Games’ Ign’s Team Xbox. Pseudo-review Dale Nardozzi, armed with only his ethnically confusing name and probably his comfort blanket, upholds Team Xbox’s reputation by pretending no other console exists by referring to Wolfenstein as a game that will “carry its latest X360 FPS through at the cash register, because it has been fairly mum on the PR side of things. The proof should be in the blitzkrieg anyways, not the PR campaign. So, does this surreal take on a titanic IP pass muster? Read on, meine freunde.”

Pointing out your clever use of German with italics, huh Dale? Touche, we say. Which means you’re a cunt.

Having exhausted what few German words he learned in a southern California bathhouse in the late 80s, Dale continues to use his only other talent -italics- to emphasize each proper noun in the review and the word “denouement”, for reasons that probably even he can’t fathom.

AND THE WINNER:

Nobody. If you were paying attention, you’d notice that nobody wins in this business. Everybody’s a fucking loser. The end.