Sinclair User


How To Be A Complete Bastard
By Virgin Games
Spectrum 48K/128K

 
Published in Sinclair User #67

How to be a Complete Bastard

This review will contain the following words which may be considered offensive: wee, fart and bastard. If you think you may be offended by these words please do not read on.

How to be a Complete Bastard, the book, was not a very likely subject for a computer license, and yet now we have the game. Still Virgin got it cheap. It owns the rights.

How to be a Complete Bastard may be the only title here that actually merits an X-rated tag (or at least so some will think) it is also the only such game ever to have been issued by a major software house.

How to be a Complete Bastard

Curiously How to... looks quite a lot like the Young Ones game. A split screen shows you; Sir Adrian, and the room you are currently in on the top half and you; Sir Adrian, and the room you are currently in on the bottom half. Um.. er this may sound a bit confusing but in one screen it's you as seen from one perspective and in the other it displays the room from other angles. The bottom view also spins round and round if you get drunk.

Playing the game is like this. Move Sir Adrian - a medium sized sprite - around the room of a largish house in which the party appears to be in full swing. You can wander about searching everything including microwaves, sofas, garden tables, coats, desks and less savoury objects for items which look as though, one way or another, they could be used to give offence and thus improve your Bastard rating. Here is one, comparatively tasteful, example - search the coats for a pen, get the pen and accost a partygoer and... that's right - jab him with the pen. Fun huh? Just as doing nasty things earns you points doing nice (girlie) things wipes them out. Putting the Bam Bee video on, for example, is a mistake.

Most of the time, the art of the game is figuring out a dastardly use for the unlikely objects you find. Would you know the extremely unpleasant use of which clingfilm can be put?

Crass, tasteless, juvenile. I quite liked it really. Sensitive parents won't.

Overall Summary

Utterly tasteless but tolerably well programmed and quite funny really. Not for the sensitive or easily outraged.

Graham Taylor

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