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Dirty Dancez.We thought we knew everything about bunnies. There’s not so much to know about bunnies, really – they are fluffy long-eared fellas, who love carrot and… well, to love, to make a long thing short. They live in burrows and are farmers’ best friends. Sometimes, when there’s no good burrow around, bunnies have to live in cages. Ah, yes, and they are somehow mysteriously related to eggs and Easter. We were sure we know everything about rabbits. A well-set scientific survey could have corrected this mistake, set everything right to its places, revealed all deep and mysterious corners of a rabbid’s personality. It could have been a Nobel Prize in biology, but – the moment is now lost. How terribly wrong we were! As it suddenly turned out in year 2006, there’s a lot of things bunnies can’t do. They can’t milk a cow (actually, they don’t have any idea of what to do with cows). They can’t play football. They never close doors. They can’t fly – but if they do, they only fly downwards. They don’t understand bowling, can neither jump nor slide. They don’t use toothpaste, while loving to stuff themselves. They don’t like bats, are extremely cruel to pigs, and, strangely enough, they are not ostriches. No doubt they don’t sleep well – and that’s not yet to mention their awfully slow reactions and poor knowledge of anatomy. But there’s one thing rabbids can do for sure. THEY CAN DANCE! And, for some reason yet to be found out, they love Beethoven’s Ninth. The bad thing about it is that their screws are all loose. In the fullest sense of a word.  …It was a perfect day for a picnic, so Rayman and a bunch of his froggy friends-Globoxes went to the forest to take the best of it under the apple-tree. But something strange happened: out of nowhere there appeared three silent blue-eyed and long-eared figures (hmm, were they hiding underground or what?) and took baby Globoxes away. But the worst of it was still ahead for Rayman, as there actually were four attackers. It simply appeared so that the ambush was too small for the fourth one, a nightmarish huge and grim figure that could have belonged to a rabbit – but for the size. To make the things look even worse, the monster was wearing a metal mask. For no obviously explained reason – but, well, that could be a family business: the guy might be of some relation to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who knows? When you look like that and your name is SergueÑ—, there’s no need to explain someone’s got problems. For Rayman it meant becoming a gladiator.That’s the whole story – from the beginning to end. No spoilers. No character development. No wide choice of weaponry (well, there IS a gun, actually. A very special one, indeed). No combos, no quick keys. All you have to do is deal with rabbids. The problem is that’s difficult to say which is worse. The game is a collection of mini-games of various kinds. It can be played in several modes – from ‘Story’ to ‘Family’ through ‘Score’, but to unlock the latter two, you must play the ‘Story’. ‘Score’ mode, as the name suggests, is for those pointmaniacs, who just love to be first – either among friends or all over the Internet (yes, the highscores can be saved online). It’s somehow difficult to tell the difference between this one and the ‘Family’ mode, but it may be presumed the latter doesn’t include the nastiest and most vicious rabbid entertainments – that’s, so to say, it’s for kids and grannies. In the ‘Story’ mode Rayman has to fight in the Arena for fifteen days, winning a minimum of four competitions a day – these include 3 usual ones and a Boss trial. The fifth one is for pointmaniacs loving to get a candy for the efforts – you complete all the tasks and get a bonus – either unlockable movie/art material or Rayman clothes set or music, or whatever else is there. The last thing I got was a Golden Cow (worth approximately 415 million carrots). Shall put it on my bedside table. The games are… Well, it can not be explained. It has to be seen. Preferably played. Or at least heard. No man in his sane mind can describe anything that has been invented by the perverted creative spirit of a herd of vicious, psychopathic and dumb as a doorknob bunnies who don’t know what to do with cows and – strangely enough – are not ostriches. The most describable of these is a boar race. Sometimes it even resembles a good old shooter – if you can remember anyone who ever used a plunger-shooting gun. Yep, rabbids have strange affinity to toilet plungers normally used to push a jamming in your kitchen-sink drain through. This is the most favorite choice among all homeware they use as a weapon (it’s rather hard to believe sausage could be used in a melee combat – until you see it); when there’s no war, though, it can still be used as, say, a prize to the Arena champion. Or as a trumpet. Or… Whatever. They love plungers – that’s all.  The bad thing is that to save progress you have to complete the day. As soon as you do, you will be tempted to play another day of competitions. And another. And yet another. And the last-one-for-today-for-sure. And you won’t stop until either your mouse, hand or keyboard starts malfunctioning (if you anyone thinks that was a figure of speech – see Day Two Carrot Juice trial for details). So before starting the game for the first time (‘I’ll just see why everybody’s mad about rabbids and play later at night’), make sure you’ve fed the cat, took pizza out of the microwave and finished with the rest of household. In case you’ve shut the PC down after 10 minutes of gameplay, make sure it was Raving Rabbids you were playing.Sometimes rabbids think they’re in a movie. And they also recycle other games’ scenery. That’s mean. ‘RRR’ contains lots of stuff from films you saw and games you’ve played – from westerns to thrillers, from Splinter Cell to Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Far Cry. Rabbids think they are Supermen and wear Sam Fisher’s brand night-vision goggles; they surface the sea in a Yellow Submarine and wander around in Darth Vader’s helmet and Solid Snake’s cardboard box. They play pogo stick ninjas (that’s a nasty sort) and fly the long-eared saucers. And they dance to ‘Misirlou’ from Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’. Well, actually they dance to everything they consider musical enough. If they can’t dance – they sing. If neither – they’ll find some other nasty thing to do. And if you hear a distinctive rabbidish ‘DAAAAAH!’ yell – that means it: the rabbids are raving again. Now – the verdict. Rabbids are proclaimed guilty in causing bad fits of hysterical laughter, nasty spasms of pointing fingers, extremely indecent behaviour in public places, causing extremely strong addiction, et cetera, et cetera. The convicts are to be taken into custody, and remain under close observation at all times. Any attempts of idiotic behaviour are to be stopped and cut short at once. And, for goodness’sake, take those plungers away from them, anybody! It’s a hit. And this is as clear as a carrot juice. |
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