Hey! It looks like you're new here. You might want to check out the introduction.
Show rules for this event
Endless Struggle™
Just when you thought it was finally over, MAGNITUDE Studios is back at it again! The latest and greatest installment in the Endless™ franchise, Endless Struggle™ is here to sate your masochistic needs. Ever wanted to fuel a never-ending political debate on the internet under complete anonymity, but you couldn't be bothered to travel all the way to a MyPipe video on home improvement? Have you ever wanted to spend the majority of your life climbing the corporate ladder only to enter a mid-life crisis when realizing the futility of your actions? Have you ever craved the experience of crippling depression that makes each day immeasurably harder than the last? Have you ever wanted to just lie down and die? If your answer was 'yes' to any or none of these questions, then Endless Struggle™ is the game for you! This game features a number of innovative features, such as being the first game to allow the player to experience full shifts on a 9-5 job with few benefits and minimum wages. The game also includes full Virtual Reality support, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in a depressing world made all the more depressing by the fact that it is basically the real world. Numerous mini-games are available for play throughout the story mode, including a puzzle game entitled 'Why Do I Get Out Of Bed Every Morning?" This game explores many such questions, such as "What am I doing with my life?" and "This one isn't actually a question?". Note: the majority of these have no meaningful answer. Another similar mini-game, dubbed 'Homework', follows the life of a college students as the player attempts to survive exams, studying, and writing ridiculously long papers, all while perpetually chugging coffee to regain health. Here is a list of reviews from people we absolutely did not pay to say good things about us!*
"Endless Struggle is the kind of game that comes around once in a millennia. The kind of game that revolutionizes and irrevocably changes the medium as we know it forever." - IGNoramus.
"Overall: 7/10, could be edgier." - GameFrick.
"This insightful look into the lives of the developers provides a portal into a world that was previously sealed away in their parent's basement. Many gamers, myself included, cannot wait to start playing and compare our own pitiful lives to those who created the game. I, for one, can affirm that I am probably way cooler than those devs. Filthy neckbeards." - Baben Jewell.
"Endless Struggle is the kind of game that comes around once in a millennia. The kind of game that revolutionizes and irrevocably changes the medium as we know it forever." - IGNoramus.
"Overall: 7/10, could be edgier." - GameFrick.
"This insightful look into the lives of the developers provides a portal into a world that was previously sealed away in their parent's basement. Many gamers, myself included, cannot wait to start playing and compare our own pitiful lives to those who created the game. I, for one, can affirm that I am probably way cooler than those devs. Filthy neckbeards." - Baben Jewell.
This reads just a little too much like a Mad Magazine comic for me, personally. Once I realized what this was going to be, I was hoping for some real cutting gaming satire, but ended up getting pretty light spoof. I dunno, ultimately, it feels kinda toothless, right until the reviews which start crossing into what I consider "mean" territory.
Bringing everyone up to two reviews! Let's push for three or four or five!
First of all, author, this is what your story looks like on a laptop screen. A literal wall of text. For the love of Thoth, paragraph breaks, please.
Content-wise, this was ... I don't know. Occasionally amusing? It got in some nice jabs, like the VR support and the first mini-game. It tried way too hard on a few jokes, like the third puzzle-game question whose humor had nothing to do with the rest of your piece. In several places this makes jokes that are obviously there just as jokes, and the elaborately fake brand-name expys are distracting, both of which break the tone (of this being a genuine product pitched straightfacedly) that you're trying to use to sell the humor. In some cases those name expys are so obscure that you only get the joke if you're embedded deep in gamer culture to begin with (such as with Gabe Newell at the end).
And since it's not a Horizon review without tearing apart the opening line:
... is distractingly ungrammatical. The first half is a subordinate clause, meaning the "it" by default refers to the subject of the main clause (which is Magnitude Studios). Magnitude Studios isn't over?
Anyway, this isn't quite walking a tightrope between straight-faced game-trailer parody and random silliness, so much as careening back and forth destructively between the two. I'd recommend tightening up and doubling down on your sales pitch, and letting the jokes flow from that.
Tier: Needs Work
First of all, author, this is what your story looks like on a laptop screen. A literal wall of text. For the love of Thoth, paragraph breaks, please.
Content-wise, this was ... I don't know. Occasionally amusing? It got in some nice jabs, like the VR support and the first mini-game. It tried way too hard on a few jokes, like the third puzzle-game question whose humor had nothing to do with the rest of your piece. In several places this makes jokes that are obviously there just as jokes, and the elaborately fake brand-name expys are distracting, both of which break the tone (of this being a genuine product pitched straightfacedly) that you're trying to use to sell the humor. In some cases those name expys are so obscure that you only get the joke if you're embedded deep in gamer culture to begin with (such as with Gabe Newell at the end).
And since it's not a Horizon review without tearing apart the opening line:
Just when you thought it was finally over, MAGNITUDE Studios is back at it again!
... is distractingly ungrammatical. The first half is a subordinate clause, meaning the "it" by default refers to the subject of the main clause (which is Magnitude Studios). Magnitude Studios isn't over?
Anyway, this isn't quite walking a tightrope between straight-faced game-trailer parody and random silliness, so much as careening back and forth destructively between the two. I'd recommend tightening up and doubling down on your sales pitch, and letting the jokes flow from that.
Tier: Needs Work
Welp. The prompt is endless struggle, the story name is endless struggle, it only makes sense that reading this would be an endless struggle.
Bad premis, horrid execution, a litteral wall of garbage. If I've read a worse story, it escapes my mind.
I am sorry, whoever wrote this. I cannot find a single good thing to say about your story.
-/10
Bad premis, horrid execution, a litteral wall of garbage. If I've read a worse story, it escapes my mind.
I am sorry, whoever wrote this. I cannot find a single good thing to say about your story.
-/10
I don't think that this is a bad idea or an idea incapable of being funny. In fact, I rather like this sort of premise of marketing the tediousness of everyday life as some sort of game (looking at you, MMORPGs), but this sort of execution with the immensely sarcastic narrative and obvious jokes that everyone familiar with gaming has heard many times over just fails to impress. I agree with >>horizon that the jokes are just too forced in this story. It feels like you wanted to jam-pack every sentence with some sort of funny line, but it suffocates the jokes that had potential to be actually funny. Good humor needs at least some space to breath. The construction of the prose here is also sub-par, and as many have stated, that opening paragraph goes on forever. Redrafting, cutting, and refining your jokes I think would greatly help, as currently this just resembles a rough outline.
Rating: Needs Work
Rating: Needs Work
Er, I hesitate to call this a 'story', but that's not the issue here. What gets to me is that there's no texture to this; the only response I had to any of what's going on here is 'nope', which... is difficult to get people engaged in. Life sucks at times? Yeah. Pointing that out doesn't really feel profound, and asking if I want it to suck isn't really, you know, going to get much variance in my reactions. Even saying 'Haha life sure sucks!' only gets so far, because the third or fourth (or seventh or eighth) time it happens, it starts getting old.
If this was trying to satirize life, it could use a keener edge; maybe point out some of the things that people might actually want to do, and then show how they're not all they're cracked up to be? If it's trying to satirize video games, consider having some actual game tropes in here, like 'collect all the things' or 'savepoints' or something, I dunno.
Suffice to say, it's not really the direction that this took which bothered me. It's that it only ever takes one direction, without varying itself enough to really feel like it's trying to get somewhere.
If this was trying to satirize life, it could use a keener edge; maybe point out some of the things that people might actually want to do, and then show how they're not all they're cracked up to be? If it's trying to satirize video games, consider having some actual game tropes in here, like 'collect all the things' or 'savepoints' or something, I dunno.
Suffice to say, it's not really the direction that this took which bothered me. It's that it only ever takes one direction, without varying itself enough to really feel like it's trying to get somewhere.
The bitter sarcasm here is too one-note. It doesn't feel all that imaginative or clever. I think there are better ways to do this type of a story (for instance, I enjoyed Waiting: The Simple Solution to All Problems quite a bit) that don't feel as flat.
The wall of text doesn't help. Also, in a comedy, not every sentence has to be a joke. One joke every paragraph is a good rule of thumb, generally. Otherwise it comes across as a little obnoxious, especially if the jokes are kind of stale.
The wall of text doesn't help. Also, in a comedy, not every sentence has to be a joke. One joke every paragraph is a good rule of thumb, generally. Otherwise it comes across as a little obnoxious, especially if the jokes are kind of stale.