Smoke & Mirrors

You may or may not have heard by now about the unreleased Penn & Teller game for the Sega CD. A copy of it made its way around the Internet recently, and bloggers everywhere had a fun time describing the game's "Desert Bus" mode. (Basically: as a reaction to Janet Reno's crusade against violent video games, Desert Bus was a completely nonviolent game, simulating the unbearably dull drive from Phoenix to Las Vegas in realtime, in a virtual bus that can't go faster than 45 MPH. After eight hours, when you make it to Vegas, you get one point.) But I think it's worth noting that the game's main adventure game mode, which I've spent way too much time playing, was completely insane and made no sense. I have a high tolerance for pointless adventure games, but this is when I stopped playing: when I got a slot machine token from a wood chipper after accidentally dropping a brown rabbit into it. The wood chipper was activated when I threw a deck of cards at it, and the brown rabbit I got from a street magician. He was pulling white rabbits out of a hat, trying to get rid of all my cockroaches, and every once in a while he'd throw out a brown rabbit, which I figured out I could pick up when I was pushing buttons trying to pull my own arm off. Like I said: makes no sense!