Important Blight Club News! Alex Navarro Is Subjecting Dan To Two Games!

There's some important news related to Giant Bomb's Blight Club feature. During the Giant Beastcast reunion panel, which was unfortunately not recorded, Alex Navarro announced that he would be taking the title "GAMES MASTER OF BLIGHT CLUB" in light of Dan missing/skipping his turn a little while ago. Alex's first decree is for Dan to play the following two games sequentially the moment he completes Superman:

1. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
2. Drake of the 99 Dragons

Why did Alex pick these two games? Well, they remain two of the lowest rated games from his tenure as an editor and reviewer at GameSpot. For example, in his 3.7/10 review for Terminator 3 he stated:

The game is, at its heart, a first-person shooter, but it also contains a boatload of CG and taken-from-the-film cutscenes, as well as a fighting game-styled combat system. This all may sound well and good, but Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines feels like a rushed hack-job of a game, with just barely enough cohesive action to keep it from completely falling apart at the seams.

Despite the fact that four different development teams worked on various aspects of Terminator 3, the game, as a whole, still feels completely slapdash and thrown-together. None of its gameplay components come together in any kind of an interesting way to make the game the least bit entertaining to play, and the muddy visuals, mediocre audio, and largely absent plot just don't make Terminator 3 anything worth recommending in the slightest. The only remaining thing that could appeal to anyone is the significant amount of film footage and random behind-the-scenes featurettes contained on the disc, but nearly all of this can be found on the recently released Terminator 3 DVD, which also has this footage in significantly better quality and doesn't require you to play through this mess of a game to unlock it all. If you want Terminator 3, watch the movie and pretend this game doesn't exist. You'll be infinitely better off.

Fun fact, Terminator 3 comes from developer Black Ops Entertainment and runs on the same game engine as Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror. You know... the game where you get into a fist-fight with Osama bin Laden in the name of avenging the death of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Nonetheless, the real doozy is Drake of the 99 Dragons which Alex maintains is "the worst game I have ever played," and his 1.6/10 review stands as a testament of that. In fact, the final paragraph of his review is absolutely scathing in its rejection of the game:

To simply call Drake bad would be a major understatement. Drake is simply an out-and-out failure in every single discernable category. Whatever style or pizzazz that Idol FX has tried to create for its comic book world is buried under a pile of cheap graphics, a lame story, awful audio, and an abysmal gameplay system that would still be painful to play even if it weren't as decisively broken as it is. There's nothing stylish or interesting about Drake, and, to be quite frank, any time spent playing this game is an absolute waste. If it isn't clear up to this point, let us sum it up with one simple statement: Don't play this game.

So, yeah, if Dan manages to survive this gauntlet then he is clearly made of tougher stuff than all of us combined.

I love that Dan's scheme to get out of playing games on Blight Club has completely blown up in his face in this spectacular of a fashion. Superman 64 was already bad enough but now he has to play not one but two games that aren't even fun bad, just bad bad. This is excellent news.

@ben_h: I mean they're fun-bad for us to watch. And that's what really counts when you think about it.

I'm a little disappointed by Terminator 3 because it's pretty short and it's just kind of a bad movie game rather than something truly special. Alex picked it because Dan once said he loved the Terminator 3 movie and Alex wants to punish him for that, which I respect, but it's pretty merciful all things told. Drake, on the other hand, is perfect. Especially because apparently the game on Xbox is broken but if Dan can't beat it he has to play it through, again, this time on PC.

It's great to see old cast members get involved in the site again, which is something that always used to happen back in the day. Honestly it would be fantastic to see Alex join some Blight Club streams to help torment Dan and Mike as the Games Master.

Blight Club is the best current feature on the site and the more elaborate it gets the better. It would also be fantastic if at some point they did a full game live together in studio. There are plenty of bad games short enough to make that feasible next time they get together in the same physical location.

I always saw Alex's role in this series as the Mads from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Give him an invention exchange budget and a TV's Frank to pick through his dvd collection in the background!

Drake of the 99 Dragons is absolutely brutal. Make sure Grubb and Minotti have copies of the tie-in comic to read every time Dan dies in the game, unless that planned tie-in comic was never made.

Oh this gon be good!

It's on the front page now, but the audio from that panel is now available on both the Beastcast feed and on Nextlander's patreon podcast feed. With recorded proof, now Dan definitely is not going to be able to get out of this one.

Did Dan ever eat that hat?

@ben_h: Oh dang, I didn't know it was on the Beastcast feed. Thanks for the info!

Dan Ryckert continues to construct an increasingly elaborate stick with which to beat himself and I am here for it.

@chrispaul92: As I recall, he ate a piece of rice paper with a picture of a hat printed on it intended to be put on the top of icecream cakes. And even then he was still worried if it would be bad for him. I think it was a UPF two years ago.