Day 133 - Dung Runners

Skeeter’s Take:

Dung Runners has a simple concept: You are a dung beetle. You must roll your poop ball downhill and avoid hitting poop piles that make you lose the game.

Something must have gotten fucked up along the path of creation for this game. Here is the entire playscreen:

The screen is super zoomed in to the point you cannot even see what is coming in front of you, making the point of the game pretty pointless. It feels like there is a fullscreen version of this game, and we are just getting a view through the magnifying glass. This happens sometimes with itch.io games you play on the browser. For example, when we played Giraffe we weren’t able to see the click counter until we put the game into fullscreen.

The problem with Dung Runners is it doesn’t give you the option for fullscreen. I wildly mashed all the buttons on my keyboard, so I’m pretty confident there’s no magic button that makes it happen. There’s no expanding box button in the bottom right of the screen. Hell, there isn’t even a menu. The game throws you right into the “gameplay” with no warning. Even when you lose, it autostarts back up again to send your animation-less dung beetle sliding down a ramp into the inevitable pile of poop.

In my final attempts to solve the zoomed-in-screen issue, I checked the itch.io page for any sight of a download button. It was a barren wasteland with the only oasis being half a beetle, a green hill, and a giant ball of shit.

So, Dung Runners is almost unplayable. You cannot see what is coming ahead of you, and because of that you are always running into shit.

Is this another metaphor for life?

Recommend: No

Replay Percentage Chance: 0%

Time Played: Played: 4 minutes

Sam’s Take:

For those that have been confused by the Doom videos I’ve been posting here’s a handy timeline:

One day we reviewed Fun Doom Bootleg. My review was this video, where I didn’t edit Doom at all, I just pasted a green dude from Fun Doom Bootleg over the final imp in the level as a joke.

Five days later we reviewed Fisk, a boring game with an incredible song in the background. I jokingly turned Fisk into a “good game” by making the fisk song the background of a Doom level in this video.

The very next day I was inspired to actually learn how to edit Doom sprites. It took a while, but eventually I figured it out and forced Skeeter to re-review Fun Doom Bootleg just so I could make this video featuring the green monsters and some color-swapped clones.

The Doom edits were quiet for a while until day 71 when we reviewed Monkey Buisness this game was terrible, but had a funny “WHOOP” sound effect and intro music that was just a two note loop. Obviously I had to add both to Doom. I edited the title music to be the two note loop, and the shotgun firing sound to be the “WHOOP” in this video.

A little secret undocumented easter egg, on day 76 we reviewed Awesome Calculator. I didn’t make a video about it, but I did add the post-calculation song as the victory screen at the end of each level. Also I still whole-heartedly recommend Awesome Calculator.

In a very confusing and frankly terrible video, I used the Giant Enemy Crab music in the background of -DON’T CLICK THE CRAB- as the background music of Doom’s first level.

On day 93 we reviewed What if They Kissed, and someone left a comment that was just a picture of the kissing slugs as a Doom weapon. Obviously I knew what I had to do.

This leads us to day 98, where we reviewed Wallpaper 2.0 Collab. This was just a collection of wallpapers, so I just took a good Newgrounds wallpaper to add to the background of Doom (and moved the help menu choice/retextured it to give credit to the artist). At this point however, we were nearing day 100, and our eventual reveal of Pink Alien Transplant, so after showing the background in this video, I also revealed that I had swapped Doom’s imp with Pink Alien’s head, along with swapping the last level of Doom’s music classical piece I had used in my Coloring Book review video (some other time I’ll chronicle our Pink Alien references like I’m doing for Doom now, but just know that the Coloring Book review was setup for the Pink Alien reveal that would happen in 39 more days).

After all this, there were no Doom reviews until our Roblox week Retrospective, where I added our Roblox avatars to the game (replacing the color swapped aliens from Fun Doom Bootleg). This is also a good video for hearing the Awesome Calculator victory music right at the start.

This finally leads us to yesterday, where I wanted to add the Buck Bumble theme to Doom, but was stuck in bed due to illness, and so I just put it on a to do list.

Then Skeeter sent me this Dung game, and I noticed a very specific orientation of the beatle and the dung:

Change the background and then suddenly that’s lookin’ a lot like a Doom weapon…

These are all real permanent edits that are compounding on each other, and my goal is to stream this awful Doom abomination sometime near the end of our year of reviews. Hopefully this review will work as an explanation as to what the hell is going on with these Doom videos, and provide context for future ones.

Also Dung Runners is a bad game.

Recommend: No

Replay Percentage Chance: 0%

Time Played: 5 Minutes, but 4 of those were spent trying to get a clear screenshot of a dung pile

Link to Game


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