"You're like in this house. Then you need to plug stuff in and put things in slots huh huh. Then you can play a cool game or something."

The show may have ended its run, but the spirit of Beavis and Butt-Head lives on. As one of the few successful MTV non-music experiments, these two teens with nothing whatsoever to recommend them wind up in a pretty decent game given the postmodern cartoon they star in. Although the game requires a good deal of patience to learn(learning sucks,) you get to do some cool stuff. And you probably thought Genesis was just good for wuss music, huh huh.

They didn't have to dig deep for a plot: Beavis and Butt-Head(B+B) buy a couple of GWAR tickets in the intro. Anderson's poodle comes by and chews them apart, which sucks, and then Anderson runs over the remnants with a lawn mower. He's one of the people you'll have to beat up as you track down the nine ticket pieces and post them back up on your bulletin board. Then when you get to the concert with your ticket you have the option of trying to go backstage, or you can just watch it.

Along the way you can play as Beavis or Butt-Head with the option to switch at any time. A nice feature about this is that you can take twice the hits, but on the other hand Butt-Head's farts are much more difficult a basic weapon than Beavis's green burp clouds and the only one I know of where you have to turn away from the intended target to hit it. Fortunately the game pauses conveniently during the initial muddling through the option menu. There's also a problem with how the monsters act; sure, it's your job to keep them at bay, but they tend to run past you and back if they get close enough, causing a quick weird drain on your health as they can hit you with relative impunity while you don't know which way to turn. I know the game's supposed to make B+B out as stupid but making enemies take too-clever advantage of a nasty loophole is unfair.

Also enemies tend to back up when hit whether by the dart gun or the regular body functions, and as they often drift offscreen it's disconcerting until you realize they can take damage there. And once you move to a new area you have to switch someone's 'weapon' from the remote control or you'll be zapped back--then of course the start is the only place you can leave from. Still, the teamwork involved by knocking off a bad guy as Butt-Head and recharging Beavis from the burrito or hot dog dropped before returning the other of B+B returns favor is almost touching. Not that it's anywhere close to the sublime pleasures of fully copping a feel, dude.

But in order to get to combats or, in fact, anywhere you need to use the remote. It's a pretty straightforward device, found in the bedroom before you go back to the room with the TV that has inspired so many plain-spoken musical critiques. Select the remote in the inventory and flip through the channels until you hit the location you want.

The places you'd visit would be depressingly run-down even if you weren't stuck moving horizontally most of the time. Turbo Mall 2000 is where most of the action is, and it's typical of what you'll find. You'll need to react quickly to invincible items running across the screen(shopping carts and bowling balls) and other times just fight an enemy who appears more predictably after you cross a certain line. You can enter a store by pushing forward and muck around in there, often avoiding periodic obstacles to reach an important item. Other locations include Burger World, where you need to combine items to serve something disgusting so a customer throws up a piece of the ticket, or The Street, where you may need to use the run feature(button A) in conjunction with the jump(B) to avoid slime drops across long unbridged sections of sewer, or the Drive-In, where a semi-alien dweeb blocks your progress until you've sold enough stuff to the pawn broker at the nice Turbo Mall. There's also Highland High, a hospital you can't explore until you eat something revolting, and a chance to get rebuffed by the guy manning the ropes at the concert.

Given the nature of the game's puzzles and eventually repetitive fights, it had better emulate the TV show with a good deal of senseless violence and antisocial behavior if it wishes to stand out for more than Butt-Head's odd attack. And there definitely are funny moments where the game almost feeds off its roughness or poor plot progression, and they outweigh the instances where someone tried and failed. The worst offender may be the password you get each time you make it to the poster-board with the tickets. To recall your position later, the game shows a random unanswerable question on a quiz, which is funny, but writing in your password isn't. It's fifteen letters with upper and lower case, numbers, and +/- signs. That makes for ninety bits, but I got caught up with capitalization a few times until I fumbled around, and by the time I put an overscore on lower-case letters when I wrote mine down, the game was nearly over. Then although the game saves your current password in case you're killed or in case you mis-typed one letter, typing in the new one requires you to erase the letters one by one. Wouldn't it like have been cool to have an option for Beavis to throw the stupid quiz in the trash? Early on there'll be a lot of recalling so this may get tedious.

Most of the other humor such as the contorted running and jumping is legitimately funny on its own, but there's the occasional dichotomy between stuff from the TV show that's only funny if you've seen the game(a bowling ball, from the hysterical Mr. Anderson's Balls, rolls by for damage) and stuff that's not in the TV show but might sneak past people who haven't seen it as stuff that's probably terribly funny for those who have(a hairspray girl pushes the boys out of the way or you can fight a mall police officer or bouncers three times as big as you that throw banana peels--they seem culled from Simpsons rejects.) Couch fishing is the worst, with the fishing rod as a weapon and the catch depending on the item as bait--about half that actually work kill you, and you can't give up if you don't have the hang of it.

But usually there's just the classic stuff that may be overdone, and you know the writers know it, but you laugh. What better way to show it than with Old Beavis and Old Butt-Head saying 'this game sucks' watching an unplugged TV? Of course given the show wasn't always this logical, where you find the pieces doesn't necessarily have to be, which allows for gross-out humor. But wait! There's good old-fashioned violence with a tree to be cut down senselessly, but the game becomes slightly less unsophisticated with the lit bomb the boys pick up and, much later, throw somewhere, with a gaping idiot smiling through the explosion. Todd and Earl are funny as punks you can shoot down, Mr. Anderson's lawn mower has the feel of a tough boss, and if Buzzcut isn't teaching the right class he still projects a loud and intimidating air despite the Genesis's unimposing sound. The pawn broker either gives you money or funny advice for each item you sell and you won't notice until the game's over that they forgot to put a Cornholio episode in. The boys' expressions change with the health meter until it's empty and they're completely mangled, and anyone who doesn't enjoy the air guitar after they find a ticket piece have no business buying the game. In general this is a good game to put on the Genesis; B+B is a phenomenon where desolation and seeming lack of necessary detail are part of the equation, with repetitive sounds.

Once you figure out how to get around and fight(note: the SUCKS option to leave a remote area quickly really does suck,) the game is more entertaining. So if you buy it used, be sure to orient yourself with the instructions. It manages to take enough good jokes from the show and mixes a small item list well enough with occasional fights that you should enjoy it despite occasional un-funny illogic too lame even to be propagated by two miscreant teens who, instead of getting absorbed in video games, sink lower enjoying terrible bands like GWAR.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/27/02, Updated 12/27/02