Beavis and Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity (Win95)

By: The J Man

I should probably start this review by saying what I think of Beavis and Butt-head, as their humor can be rather divisive. If you're turned off by their brand of bug-stomping, fart-knocking, chick-craving shenanigans, you're not going to enjoy this game. I personally liked the show. I even thought they had some of their best lines during the dreaded rock video breaks. Yeah, that's right, I'm hardcore enough to have liked the videos. But overall, I certainly enjoyed the offensive toilet humor mixed with subtle, buried wit (see "Pregnant Pause" for my favorite "witty" episode).

If you're expecting those elements stretched into an adventure game, you've got the right idea. Unfortunately, "stretched" is the exact word for it. Do America wasn't bad, so I know they can do longform stuff, but this game definitely suggests that part of the appeal of Beavis and Butt-head is in their brief, disconnected, five minute episodes. Trying to hold onto one storyline, spread out across a continuous adventure, widens the inherent flaws in their humor. After sitting through the twentieth joke that starts out pretty good, but replaces its punchline with some variant of "shut up, dillhole," you'll start wondering if beating your meat actually would be a more productive use of your time.

Virtual Stupidity is a standard point and click adventure game starring the two lifelong pals, Beavis and Butt-head. The overarching plot is that these two are trying to join Todd's (a typical Texas hoodlum, and B&B's idol) gang, and going through various initiation tasks to win his favor. This quest takes you to eleven locales around Highland, most of which will be familiar to fans of the show. You'll have to use standard adventure game logic to break out of school, hang out at the park, hang out at the Food Mart, hang out at Burger World, turn Beavis into Cornholio to solve a puzzle, and occasionally, attempt to impress various chicks with your eloquent mastery of language. An adventure may seem like an odd choice for a Beavis and Butt-head game, but it actually works out extremely well in terms of mechanics. Even the episode "Party" followed standard adventure game logic - B&B want to throw a party so they get money, buy cheap leftover doughnuts, trade the doughnuts to a bum for some "hard stuff," and so on. Similar trading, and making creative use of free items, are the staples of this title.

"Come to Butt-head."

It should be pointed out that Virtual Stupidity owes a whole lot to Sam & Max Hit The Road, beyond the obvious use of two main characters. Both games have you controlling one character (Butt-head in this case) while the other follows you around. Both games use icons to represent conversation topics. Both games have fun, pointless, minigames you can play at any time, that really don't do much except showcase the characters through their antics. Both games even have their hyperkinetic character playing around against a calmer straight man. If you revere Sam & Max, you shouldn't be particularly offended that Virtual Stupidity "borrows" from your favorite game so apparently, and if you're going to make a buddy game, this is really the proven way to do it. Still, the similarities are undeniable, but the quality, not so much.

If you don't expect a "choke your chicken" reference coming, deduct five points from your score.

The game involves a lot of wandering around, selecting locations from an overhead map, and seeing what items are available to proceed in your quest. Interactions are performed by right clicking to bring up a menu of icons, selecting the appropriate icon, and passing the cursor around the screen. The icon will change when you're over something you can interact with - the "use" icon changes from an open hand to one throwing devil horns, for example. Every item will either be picked up, or used in exactly the same way every time you click on it. This can be helpful if you somehow forgot what an immobile object does, but mostly it's a miserly way to reuse the same animations over again, instead of creating some new ones, or an "I'm not doing that again!" loop. This extends to dialogue as well. When you talk to someone, you can click on either Beavis or Butt-head to let loose with the appropriate character. If they have something new to say as a followup, their icon will change. Most commonly they won't, and if you click again, you'll be hearing the same line repeated. It is a bit of a relief to get away from having to click a character repeatedly to hear every single possible line, and thus not miss a single bit of funny, but it does seem disappointingly cheap as well.

The original cast was brought on to fully voice all the characters, which basically means Mike Judge came in for a while. The good news is that, by getting him into the booth, all the recognizable characters are authentically voiced. This obviously includes all the lines for the titular duo. I can't imagine MTV trying to make a B&B game without Judge's involvement, but it's still important to know he's there when you consider that most of the lines work only because of their delivery. Beavis' signature "FIRE!" (though now "Fryer!" as this game is post-incident), "Thank you, drive through" and "Hey, how's it goin?" aren't particularly funny on their own. Neither is Butt-head's classic "Hey baby." However, they way they're said, in the voice they're said in, make the entire joke. All those lines are present in the game. Happily, they're all spoken just like they were in the show, along with some new ones that aren't too bad either. My favorite:

(after using compressed air to fill a condom like a balloon)
BEAVIS: "WHOA! Air has a really big schlong!"

The game looks very good, and the backgrounds appear to be from the same animators as the show. The game backgrounds are more detailed, and at an appropriately higher resolution. The characters are immediately recognizable, but not quite as stylized as the show. Most notably, they don't even attempt to recreate the sloppy squiggles. This results in characters that look the part, but share the same clean animation as any other adventure character. There are video segments that introduce the game and cover key plot points within. These are identical to the show, to the point that I thought they were simply rips and rehashes from previous episodes. They aren't. They instead appear to have been specially created for the game by the show's animators, based on the fact that B&B's shirts in all of these sequences have changed from "AC/DC" and "Metallica" to the non-infringing "Skull" and "Death Metal." Aside from that point, the world of the show is skillfully recreated. You can even sit down on the boys' couch, turn on the TV, and watch entire videos from the likes of Gwar and Primus, riffed on by B&B.

I actually did enjoy the game, though I suppose I expected the dialogue and events to be on the level of the best B&B episodes. Though there's some great lines, and some amusing antics, I think the game is mostly dragged down by the lack of the show's quick pacing. Instead of going from one joke to the next, deeper into trouble, and into a whole new story in ten minutes, you're hearing the same dialogue over and over as you try to find the item or action required to proceed. Hearing Butt-head call Beavis a "butt burglar" the first time is funny on that merit alone, but not after the fifth time, while you're already frustrated and wanting to move on. It's a good idea, a great recreation of the show, and a solid adventure game. But it gives you too many opportunities and too much downtime to realize how much of a one-act these characters can be.

-reviewed 11/6/06 - game copyright 1995 Viacom New Media

Great recreation of the show, Mike Judge does the voice work, some pretty funny situations and lines. Probably the only game that has ever used the term "boof."

A lot of aimless wandering, some of which is forced by the game to trigger event changes. Frequent repetition starts to dull the characters' humor and edge.

	8
	8
	7
	8
	82%

Beavis and Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity on MobyGames
Beavis and Butt-head (series) on Wikipedia

(staring at a mounted deer's ass)
BUTT-HEAD: "Huh... that one almost got away."
BEAVIS: "Yeah, but he probably thought of something funny, and like he... check this out... he 'laughed his ass off.' Heh Heh.. get it?"
BUTT-HEAD: "Beavis, cut it out."