There can be a joy in reading negative reviews where the reviewer appears to have seen some Earth-Two version of the novel, movie, or game in question. Charlie Stross recently revisited Amazon one-star reviews of classic books. One of my favorites is from Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons”:
It is long and boring. I was uninterested in reading this so called play as soon as I read the first page. It is lame and slow. I highly recomend discarding this play before you realize what I have realized…….it is not worth your time and effort!
Author John Scalzi went a step further, encouraging authors to own one-star reviews of their books. However, if we’re going to talk about negative reviews viewed as entertainment, nothing beats Dot Dot Dot, in which a badly-written negative review is read aloud and set to kinetic word art.
Now that is a negative review.
Awesome. Reminds of Strong Bad pronouncing misspellings, which is how I first came to love Strong Bad.
Now I want to play the game. I hate multiple buttons. Back in my day, we had a joystick, and it only went left or right. Push button to fire. THAT’S IT. You kids these days…
But the reading, oh, the reading was fabulous.
Joystick? Buttons? We just had a knob to move the pong paddle back and forth on the black & white TV (we didn’t even have the color overlays).
Now, get off my snow-covered lawn…