BATTLE SYSTEM INTERACTION ORIGINALITY STORY MUSIC & SOUND Variable VISUALS Variable CHALLENGE 200 COMPLETION TIME 6000 to 7000 hours OVERALL 5.0/5 Rating definitions

   Sometime last year, around the same time that Hell froze over and the world was in shock from the Great Flying Pig Disaster in Oregon, RPGamer shocked us all when they announced the post-production phase of a thus unknown game based on their hit website. The game, simply entitled "RPGamer RPG", was released two days later, and this gamer is thankfully finally able to say he has completed this mammoth of a game. RPGamer RPG is a game made for RPGamers, by RPGamers, and will make you laugh, cry, giggle, retch, "rotflol", die, be ressurected, die again, be reborn, and also order a lot of junk food.

   The story in RPGamer RPG is frighteningly complex and often-times hard to follow. The game starts as you create an account on the RPGamer forums, and shortly thereafter the community you just joined is shocked to learn that Firemyst, the ever-present President of RPGamer, has gone off the deep-end after eating a bad batch of tofu, and has now become a tyrannical sadomasochistic overlord hell-bent on turning his website into a used shoe store. Of course, being a hardcore RPGamer, you cannot let this happen, and you set out on a quest to overthrow this tyrant and get his stomach pumped before something irreversible happens, such as the world imploding or God smiting all the 32 year old people in the world with his pinky (two of the three thousand possible endings).

The Hero and Firemyst square off for the final tofu-filled battle!

   Somehow, the staff of RPGamer have become entranced by Firemyst's tofu-generated aura of footwear entrepreneurial desire, and are all on board with this change, and you must use the forums and community to help defeat the staff members one by one. To do so, however, will not be an easy task, and this is where RPGamer RPG's unique battle system comes into play.

   You begin the game with the simple ability to attack, and your first battle will proceed in a simple turn-based order. However, your one attack will only be sufficent to defeat the newest of RPGamer's staff members, whose true powers have yet to awaken, and in order to proceed farther, you must take on their challenges in order to learn new attacks. Each staff member presents you with a series of ten challenges after defeating them, all of which involve beating or other-wise performing some special task, in another RPG and then giving them the save data. You don't need to beat every challenge before moving on to the next staff member, but each challenge provides you with more and more powerful skills to use.

   While this means that the actual time playing RPGamer RPG itself is limited to only twenty or thirty minutes, the dozens and dozens of RPG challenges you must complete, many of which are ridiculously hard, easily inflate the playing time to 6000 hours for the average hardcore RPGamer, though the truly hardcore who still live with their parents, have no job, and steal money from their mom's purse to purchase more games, will be able to spend literally their entire lives playing through the myriad of challenges and extra-special downloadable challenges that can be found on the forums, as well as trying to beat a number of special, ultra-hard bosses, which include Hironobu Sakaguchi (armed to the teeth with a good dozen famous Final Fantasy swords), and Peter Molyneux, who, after being defeated, offers you a series of challenges that involve performing tasks in Fable using mechanics that were cut from the game before it was released.

This is what RPGamer RPG looks like on a Black and White TV!

   While most of the challenges are fairly easy, particularly the first ones, which usually consist of simply beating a game, many of them can get into the realm of insane. For example, Dragon Quest fanboy Matt "Wonderslime"'s seventh challenge is to beat Dragon Quest VIII using no equipment whatsoever throughout the entire course of the game. While this sounds absurd, it doesn't compare to his 10th challenge - to beat all eight Dragon Quest games in less than 1 hour each! Derek "Roku"'s sixth challenge is strangely unique, in that it asks you to beat a randomly selected RPG, and then tells you to write a review for it! I still haven't quite figured out how you're able to upload the review into the game, but the solution must be there somewhere!

   Other well-known RPGamer figures also come into play, both in battle and on the forums. For instance, MonCapitain and his army of evil mod monkeys will regularly come after you if you choose to explore the forum world searching for special challenges, and make up the entirety of random battles in the game. Anti-Sony activist JuMeSyn also makes occasional appearances, challenging you to complete obscure challenges in even more obscure RPGs. Completing this challenges eventually unlocks a hidden mini-game - a side-scrolling platformer in which you must infiltrate and destroy Sony's headquarters by throwing Sega Saturns and Dreamcasts at them.

   Graphically, the game is unique and composed entirely of Fan Art from the RPGamer website. As you can guess, this leads to some very jarring scene transitions, and also a very wide array of quality. Music is similar in this regard, as it is composed of the fan songs on the website as well.

   By the time you finish RPGamer RPG the chances are that you will have played nearly every RPG released in the last 15 years, and several times at that. But it's well worth it, as the surprise ending where Firemyst turns out to actually be a space pirate from the galaxy Fabulon Beta 23 and is also your mother and father at the same time is totally worth it! Wait... oops.

   Sorry.