Lester The Unlikely
by Vanor Orion

I've actually reviewed a lot of games for this site that I actually enjoy, but we can't have that, nosiree. There has to be balance, so now that I've showed you one of the worst NES games ever inflicted on the Human Race, I now proudly present you with something far worse for the Super Nintendo. What really sinks this game to a whole other level of awful that even manages to surpass Quattro Adventure is that not only does the game play more stiffly than a dead man during mid-coitous, the game is an insult to gamers in general. Where do I even begin?

I think the best place to start is with the title character.

Do I even need to say anything else? Doesn't the title screen just sum up what this game is about in one fell swoop? No? FUCK.

The idea behind this game is that you play a geek who starts the game out as a complete and total pussy and gradually as he progresses through his adventure, he becomes a man. This transition from "pissant little nothing" to become a real man is pretty much the entire gimmick behind Lester the Unlikely. It's actually an interesting idea but the implementation falls off of Mount Everest and fucking implodes to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

The actual plot involves our titular character reading the latest issue of some random comic with such a cartoonishly geeky name that you can actually feel the text cut into your eyes because that's how stereotypical and insulting this will be to the person playing it. Whilst reading this comic at a fucking seaside harbor, he falls asleep next to a crate, which is subsequently hauled onto a cargo ship, which then sets sail with their unwitting stowaway obliviously asleep in the hold. So now guess what happens next.

What the fuck is this? Somalia? No offense, but somebody dressed like that isn't going to be anywhere near the kind of waters that modern day pirates travel. But after this transpires, somehow Lester manages to swim to the shore of a nearby island, and thus the true of horror of this game can unfold...

How exactly this works is that Lester's confidence and manly qualities (or lack thereof) are conveyed visually by his mannerisms as the game progresses. He starts off looking like this:

Poor posture, badly dressed, huge specs, babyface (as indicated by the HUD and opening), and acts like a total fucking wimp. Of course he's a nerd! Seriously though, I'm less pathetic than this guy, and that's saying something from me. Apparently the developers really wanted to make a character that the player would identify with. But I guess that the memo they first etched out during their intial design conference that said "unassuming, sympathetic protagonist" was trashed and replaced with "super-stereotypical dork of a caricature." So it goes from being someone the player can get behind to being downright insulting. Then again, maybe it was meant to make dorks feel good about themselves, because there's no fucking way in hell that ANYBODY could suck harder than Lester the Unlikely. He makes Busby the Bobcat look like Sonic the Hedgehog. THAT is how hard this game blows.

Anyway, this emphasis on a pantywaist protagonist doesn't stop at the aesthetic level. It saturates the gameplay and the result is very....well just allow me to demonstrate:

This is the first enemy of the game: A crab. Man I'm quaking in my boots. What the fuck cold be scarier than a fucking appetizer at your local Red Lobster?

This is the second enemy you encounter. A fucking turtle. You know what Lester's first response is to seeing either one of these creatures for the first time?

That's what happens. You lose all control of Lester as he does an aboutface, and flails his arms around cartoonishly as he flees in unbridled terror from...a fucking HERBIVORE! Literally though that's the entire gimmick manifesting itself in the game proper. There'll be parts in the game where Lester will ecounter some new beast or geological obstruction that will just cow the man into hiding in a corner and wetting himself while sucking his thumb in the fetal position. Eventually he regains his gumption and you can take him back to whatever it was that freaked him out, and now he should be more inclined to actually do what the fuck you want him to do. But that's really the Achilles Heel of this game: There's no fucking logic to any of this. Let's put ourselves in this guy's shoes for a moment...actually, let's just imagine that we are there in his stead.

For starters, none of us are dumb enough to fall asleep reading a comic with an embarassing title in a fucking dock next to a fucking cargo shipment clearly tethered to a chain. And seriously, as far as the Carapaceon goes, I'd just ya know....walk around it. And the turtle, fuck, what the hell is it gonna do? Give chase? "Oh god that lumbering slow as fuck turtle is on my ass I gotta move!"

Now, to make things worse, is that his emasculating arm-flailing doesn't stop at enemies. No, when you first scale obstacles in first of many annoying platform elements, Lester will look at you and will whimper like a beat dog that he doesn't wannt scale the cliff, or jump down.

It doesn't take long for this to subside, but the combat for the first few levels is definitely Picard-Facepalming-Worthy.

Yes, Lester's kick attack....Jesus. Seriously, everything about Lester just screams GAY! I don't even use that word. EVER. I never use the word pussy either! The fact that I'm pulling both terms from the drechs of my vocabulary should be indicative about how hard Lester fails as a fucking hero. But that gradually changes over the course of the game.

Through 22 stages of half-assed platforming, laughable combat, and befuddling level design, Lester gradually becomes less of a foil for the likes of say Syllvestor Stallone or Arnold Swartzenegger (ya know, kinda like Rob Schneider or uh....Rob Schneider) and something more reminiscient of an actual hero...though Daniel Berhardt needn't worry about being usurped by this loser, despite being in a movie about cyborgs and their forced perspective dinosaurs. By the end of the game he looks like this:

But....wait....WHAT THE FUCK??? Yeah, that's right, when they said the ship was attacked by pirates, they meant the scurvy-ridden, peg-legged, parrot-toting ones. Not the more contemporary, AK-47-wielding iterations of modern day pirates. I don't even know where to begin with this. How does that even begin to make sense? And moreover, how the fuck did they sink the cargo ship?! Uh, most contemporary freighters probably have higher hull-stress tolerances than probably the fucking Virginia or the Monitor. So how the hell did a wooden boat with cannonballs that would probably bounce off the ship's hull and MAYBE put a dent in here or there, overtake and sink a ship of the line? Ya know what? I really need to stop thinking about all of this before I start bleeding my brains out through my ears.

Anyway, you may think that as Lester becomes less of a wuss that the gameplay would probably improve, but you'd be wrong. This game's combat and platforming veers dangerously close towards the Batman Forever end of the Suck-O-Meter for gameplay controls and level design. Yeah, it's that bad. Sometimes you have a hard time making Lester climb things. It's hard to see ahead of you, cuz of the poor scrolling, so you'll hop down a cliff, and right into a pit of spikes you didn't see below you. Instant death. Get used to that shit. And your health is personified by canteens on your HUD. Right next to a really hideious depiction of Lester's face. And the music is just the most insipid and annoying crap you could imagine. I could go on, but I don't need to.

I can't even finish this game despite cheating and using an emulator. It pisses me off that much. Now imagine what this was like for me when I was fucking ten years old. This game makes me wanna go to a rodeo and punch a bull in the balls just because I can. But now there's only one way left for me to counteract this sissy bullshit: