[[Eh, okay, seems amusing, I'll take a pot-shot at myself.]]
CHYOA.COM Daily Herald: "When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces."
Author: "Gabby Gums"
Editor: "Susie Samatar"
WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND THOUGHT "INSIDE THE GAME" WAS WORTHY OF "STORY OF THE WEEK"?
I've read this story cover to cover multiple times, and all I can say is; "The Fuck?"
Nemo of Utopia, that pathetically self-important and undeservedly opinionated sad-sack who catapulted himself to as close to the top of the "notable author's" section as he could get via deliberate questing after every possible award that he could wrap his grubby little claws around when the new award system was rolled out, (even going so far as to BUY his way into first place by subbing to the patreon within hours of its being launched to grab the 'generous' tag, an act that was nothing of the kind), has created a pathetic pile of bilious horse shit that would not be fit to wipe your ass with for fear of contracting VD in his latest-and-greatest story, "
Inside the Game". While he's been up to his typical practices of altering the location in which his story displays in search rankings by modding the title with unnecessary and superfluous ASCII characters that type of chicanery is child's play compared to some of the other crap this pathetic waste of skin pulls on a regular basis and is FAR from the limits of this festering infected waste dump of a story's sins.
Let us begin at the beginning, or rather, DON'T. The first 3-5 chapters of any branch of this story will contain nothing of substance, and assuredly none of the hot and licentious action for which our good site is known and frequented, merely the author's deliberately cryptic musings on the subject of, good gods, video game genres! If you have the misfortune to be stupid and emotionally damaged enough to keep going I regret to inform you that it does, actually, manage to get somewhat better, but that is possibly a misstatement on my part, because you should prepare for disappointment. Of the 10-12 published storylines that received any significant development at all, only four or so have at all memorable sex-scenes, one of which is the main story, a 75 chapter deep slog of badly mangling a single turn of the game Civilization 2 into a cheap and uninteresting sex-fest about polyamory and the daily life affairs of a petty dictator without even a tinpot to piss in who supposedly will, in theory, manage to advance the Aztecs to a world-spanning super-power, if he ever manages to get over the impulse to fuck his royal council like its some kind of bloody
checklist. The characters are vapid, the pacing indifferent, the description; Ok, I do have to admit that there are small moments of truly amusing or arousing descriptive text to be found, but they drown in a sea of floridly overwrought purple prose and long-winded digressions about the world and its people that just, to be honest, are irrelevant to the plot.
That one-and-only storyline which has more than 26 chapters of depth as of this writing plunges long and straight with hardly any side branches into the depths of obscurity on matters so picayune and mundane that I cannot even begin to express how truly mind-numbing it was to read, and the rest of the story is little better. With this 'Slice of Life' attitude that makes what should have been exciting and interesting video-game based content painfully embarrassing to try to keep going with when, in truth, this should have been a tour-de-force of callbacks to epic videogames both old and new, the story stumbles artlessly in a disjointed, (but, I'll grant, heartfelt); attempt to fulfill on its initial promise that never really seems to quite materialize on the transporter platform when beamed onto the page from the imagination of the writer.
AND YET: against all odds and
sanity, this hot-mess-wreck of a story somehow managed to win
Story of the Week? I guess Stalin was right about one thing: "Quantity has a Quality all its own"...