REO Speedwagon is almost the precise opposite of punk, arguably the opposite of rock n’ roll itself. Like a sort of anti-Rush, they’re soft in the places they should have been powerful, nasal in places where they should have been operatic, resolutely bland in the places where some small dash of melodic variety could have helped.
Yet now, some twenty years after it might almost have mattered, REO Speedwagon of all bands is an adventure videogame.
Yes, in Find Your Own Way Home, you (presumably a female — again, they’re like the anti-Rush) get to experience the bizarre thrill of finding missing lead singer Kevin Cronin in time to ensure that his prom-enhancing falsetto is part of the big concert. I can only hope that there’s a way to play the game such that you can make the band break up forever. (Maybe you can make the drummer o.d. or something?)
I can think of few arts-related developments that seem better calculated to make me almost queasy with boredom — if you know the feeling I’m describing — unless somewhere out there there’s, say, a novelization of the Starship song “We Built This City (on Rock n’ Roll).”
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Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball was released with great fanfare and marketed toward men, but I swear it has to be the most gay video game I’ve ever seen. The default sound track is like musakified dance party music and you basically have to win volleyball games to earn money to buy just the right trinkets and treats for the girls to make them wear skimpier bikinis and they mostly just go “tee hee” at you and if you don’t keep buying them stuff abandon you in a huff.
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