Chicks Dig Jerks

IFReviewed by Paul OBrian on 2006-07-19 07:11 

Yecch. After an hour of playing Chicks Dig Jerks, I feel like I've been swimming in sewage. The PC and his friends are some of the most repulsive human beings I've ever seen described, and spending time looking through their eyes was pretty sickening. Now, it's clear that the author is aware of this fact. The game begins with a big banner reading, in part, "There are absolutely no role models in this game." Fine. But if it was intended to be some sort of satire, it didn't work, at least not for me. Perhaps some reader smarter than I am will explain how in fact the whole game brilliantly skewers the emptiness and horror of its protagonist's life, but for me, that didn't come across. Instead, it just felt like living some stereotyped nightmare for no particular reason. Remember those fratboys at the beginning of Photopia? This is basically an entire game from their viewpoint, with some off-the-wall supernatural stuff thrown in for no readily apparent reason. The fact that the game was loaded with bugs and writing errors didn't give me much confidence that it had some sharp, intelligent viewpoint behind its ugly veneer, but I don't think that's the main reason why I found Chicks Dig Jerks so unpleasant. That reason can be summed up in one word: misogyny. The game's fear and hatred of women starts at the title and just snowballs from there.

The game's basic notion is that women come in two varieties. There's the Dumb Chick, who is prey to the PC's predator. She has no illusions about her status, and apparently likes it, because she's attracted to men who will treat her like dirt. Then there's the Evil Bitch, who hates all men and is out to kill them and/or drain them of their vitality, at least until she can find one strong enough to dominate her and turn her back into a Dumb Chick. The male characters wandering through this world have two basic goals: score with (i.e. fuck) the Dumb Chicks and avoid or kill the Evil Bitches. We see the former in the game's first sequence, in which the goal is to get two phone numbers from a group of women at a bar. The PC does this by approaching them with the dumbest lines imaginable, and guess what? Because they're even dumber then the lines, they think he's cool and give him their numbers. Here's what the PC has to say after accomplishing this goal: "Word up." Then one of the Dumb Chicks takes the PC home and they have "animal sex for the better part of the night." Then the PC bolts, leaving "a little note" and his number. What a guy. Thus ends the Dumb Chicks portion of our show. Moving on, the PC then invades a graveyard (did I mention he makes his living as a grave robber?) where an Evil Bitch tries to kill him. He ends up killing her, which is too bad, because I was really rooting for her. Then he gets real sentimental because his best friend (male, of course) was killed in the battle. Damn those Evil Bitches and their short male accomplices! (The game also seems to have a problem with short men.) Damn them to hell! There are two dreams described in the narrative which illustrate this dichotomy perfectly. In the first, the PC is lured into an unoccupied room by a seductive woman, and in the room he sees the dried, dead husks of all his male friends. Then the succubus drains him too, and sticks his skin to the wall with thumbtacks. You can probably guess which side of the coin she represents. Then, in the second dream, the PC is having a fight with his old girlfriend, who apparently was the one person with whom he didn't act like total scum. She breaks up with him, and in remembering the breakup, he wishes he had given into his impulse to "rock the bitch's world and leave her reeling and bleeding." He also regrets all the time he didn't spend "being an exciting, unavailable, uncontrollable asshole." Hey Avandre, here's a hint: if your girlfriend left you because you weren't enough of a jerk, the answer isn't to be more of a jerk. The answer is to FIND A SMARTER GIRLFRIEND! But that might be too much to ask of this character -- a woman who he sees as a human and who is as smart as or smarter than him would just be way, way too scary.

Speaking of scary, let's talk about this game's code. At one point a character playing a video game exclaims in frustration, "This fucking thing has more bugs than a tropical swamp!" I had to smile at this, since the sentence (with the exception of the expletive) is lifted almost verbatim from a SPAG review of the author's last game, Saied. The description is also apt for Chicks Dig Jerks. Unless you go through the game exactly as described in the walkthrough, you will find bugs. At one point, I was talking to a character, and one of my conversation options actually put me back in a previous scene. That scene went differently, and then I had to sit through the whole "animal sex" thing again. At another point, two characters are described as being disintegrated, then proceed to take some actions in the following paragraphs, then get re- disintegrated. There's an item you can pick up, and no matter where in the game you pick it up, the description always indicates that you find something else under it, even if the thing you supposedly find is already in your inventory. You get the idea -- examples abound. Chicks Dig Jerks is the Cattus Atrox of the 99 competition -- I had a strong reaction to it, and that reaction was: I never want to see this game again.