I recently sat down to review RuneScape for your benefits. And let me say, I got what I paid for. Of course, I paid nothing, since it’s a free game, so you can expect what I got. Let’s start from the beginning:

My journey begins here at the registration screen. After choosing a name for my character, I’m taken to the body creation screen, where I get to choose between crappy hairstyles, crappy faces, and crappy clothing. I eventually settle on a green-haired brotha with flaming purple clothes. Impressed with my work, I click “OK” and it takes me to a tutorial…a tutorial that fails to put the “ending” in “condescending”. Yes, I’m mildly aware that that statement made no sense. Anyway, over the course of what seems like an hour, I’m taught how to open doors (you click on them), attack monsters (you click on them), pick up items (you click on them), and use them (you click on them). How unique! This game sets itself apart from every other RPG I’ve played! I feel spiritually nourished having wasted my time! Thank you, RuneScape, for draining my youth like some sort of horrible mummy!

Buchanan's in the house, yo! See…he's indoors! So technically he's in the house! Yeah? Fuck you too.

After the lengthy tutorial, I’m dropped into a town. Thankfully, I’m given some supplies to keep me alive: a sword, a shield, and some “raw rat meat”, among other “useful” things. So I equip my shitty items and walk down the road. It’s not long before I get a “trade request” from someone named “avril_slut_69″. “What a wholesome individual.” I think to myself, and attempt to accept her offer of trade. Not surprisingly, it turns out that you trade with people by clicking on them. Super. I’m taken to a trade screen where I offer my “raw rat meat” to her. My reasoning is…girls like rat meat. No dice. She tells me to “**** off” and walks away at a glorious 2 frames per second.

I guess I wasn’t surprised that RuneScape censors bad words. However, I was surprised that RuneScape took it a step father by censoring approximately 95% of the English language. Among the words that have been banned, besides the obvious, are:

Rectum, cheat, suck, bizatch/bizotch, Negro, Hitler, Nazi, scrotum, hack, fok/phuck/fhuck/fuhk, cyber, crud, awww (but not aww or awwww), ewww (but not eww or ewwww), plzz (but not plz or plzzz), excrement, feces/fecal, the phrase “I wanna live”, da.ru, www, fart, slit, spank, turd, pass, password, upgrade, macro, nipple, kokiri, therapist, condom, fellate, pimp, crap, wang, dik/dic/dictate, lick, ejaculate, and throb.

Yes! I actually tested all of these words! I’m that dedicated! Or something. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that Jagex doesn’t want players to communicate in any way whatsoever. For that reason, RuneScape has to be the worst thing to happen to literacy since Tom Clancy. Anyway, all the stupidity in the word still didn’t stop me from expressing myself:

CENSORSHIP LEADS TO FASCISM

After my calamitous encounter with the skanky pop/rock fan, I head out for some pixel-licious fighting action. Several goblins get “all up in my grill”, so I’m forced to dispatch them with my Mighty Sword. Sadly, it takes approximately 10 minutes to kill a single goblin, since the hit accuracy of both players and monsters seems to be non-existent. Are they legally blind or something? It’s like watching Ray Charles assault a disabled kid with a bat. Or like watching two old people jab each other in the necks with their walking sticks. Later on I come to a farm with a large flock of cows. “TASTY MEAT YUM!”, I think to myself, and immediately begin hacking the living daylights out of one of them. Hell, the farmer doesn’t even seem to care. But then…out of nowhere…

WHY ISN'T THIS CENSORED

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, NO! Why is the cow giving me a blowjob? You know you’ve made some really terrific graphics when the player can’t tell the fucking difference between oral sex and fighting. Good work, Jagex Software! Give your orangutan a cookie for opening up Paintbrush and randomly mashing keys! He deserves it, since he did ten times as much work as you dickheads. The rest of the “animations” are equally appalling, but at least they don’t imply inter-species fellatios.

The cow eventually succumbed to my Mighty Sword. Or maybe he choked on my character’s load. I don’t know. What I do know is that I walked away from the experience with a slab of raw beef, some cow hide, and an egg. Yes, I somehow got an egg from a cow. But I’ve stopped questioning the logic in RuneScape. Doing so only brings more pain.

Now…what’s left? Well, there’s the “storyline”. It basically consists of frustrating mini-quests written in shaky English with absolutely no use of punctuation. In one quest I had to sheer a bunch of sheep in order to raise my sheep-sheering skill or something like that. In another I had to return a skull to a corpse. I remember envying the corpse as I handed the bloody thing over. The language skills of other players aren’t much better. When you’re not being randomly cursed at by people with names such as “slut_angel_grrl_2000″ and “fyre_drake_moonbeam_elf”, people will beg you for money and items, often following you around until you either give them what they want, log out, or track down their real addresses and gruesomely murder them. Nevertheless, the ignorance of RuneScape players has its upsides. It’s ideal for scams. In the first half hour alone I was subjected to several of what were obviously fraudulent schemes. Thusly, anyone with half a brain can turn a tidy profit here. Of course, this is only RuneScape money, and will not benefit players in any way whatsoever other than being able to purchase the next level of “Faerie Dragon Armour” or whatever the fuck these people buy.

So what have I taken away from this experience? I’ve lost faith in our youth. Wait…I already lost faith in our youth. Well, I suppose more so now that I’ve played RuneScape. If you do choose to play this game, expect random aggression from other players. For no reason. I’m serious. It’s as if Satan and Barbra Streisand wed and spawned a large group of ugly, ill-mannered children who then proceeded to play RuneScape. Yet another reason the world was better off when the British Empire ruled everything! Back then we kept our kids dressed up like pansies and kept them the hell away from negative forces such as video games, the internet, and “toad-in-a-hole”.

In the end, I’d say I got what I paid for, only I don’t remember paying for a throbbing headache.

Or should I say, a “*****bing headache”.