Violence (Japanese Edition)

Remember Dungeons & Dragons? Stop shaking your head: we know you better than that. Remember B2: 'Keep on the Borderlands'? Rogue? Mines of Moria? Doom? Eye of the Beholder? Baldur's Gate? Remember all those innumerable dungeons you've bashed your way through: kick down the door, kill the monster, steal the treasure; kill, loot, kill, loot; over and over again, rolling those dice or thumbing those buttons until their corners were worn down? And you loved it. Every second of it.

That's VIOLENCE: killing and looting in an endless frenzy of senseless and moral-free bloodshed. But VIOLENCE brings the hack-and-slash genre up to date with a bang: this is full-on 1999-style gore-filled chaos: city centres, offices, apartments and tenement blocks just stuffed with experience points waiting to be claimed. How many can you amass before the SWAT team finally takes you down? The game includes rules for damage done by household implements (including the different damage inflicted by belt and orbital sanders), lists of innocent-victim types, and an extremely dubious section on sex.

Don't look at us like that. It's meant to be vile. That's the f*cking point. We're not idiots, we don't think bad taste is intrinsically cool. VIOLENCE isn't Postal. Postal didn't make you laugh. VIOLENCE will make you laugh -- in an awful "Oh god, I really shouldn't find this amusing, it's disgusting, what kind of sick, perverted animal am I?" way, but you will laugh. Because it's one of the funniest things we've ever read -- and we're English, so we have a pretty sophisticated sense of humor*. After all, 'Designer X' is the man who designed Paranoia, Toon and the award-winning The Creature That Ate Sheboygan. He pitched VIOLENCE to us back in 1994, and we commissioned it well before the Littleton shootings. Salve your conscience, we're not cashing in here -- we're just surfing the zeitgeist, cracking a few jokes and making a few points about the state of the art in interactive entertainment.

Challenge your own perceptions; visit the seamy side of the games industry; experience the most radical set of games mechanics ever devised; and judge for yourself whether formerly respectable publishers and writers are really willing to nauseate the world for a quick buck. Buy VIOLENCE. Or we'll kill you.

* if you ignore Benny Hill.