Gas leak board gaming. Cruelty Squad's aesthetics and disdain for the capitalist subject's condition are on display here, except nobody involved was in on the joke.

Cruelty Squad's graphic design is also here, because this game is disgusting to look at in a way that you assume (hope?) was intentional. Everyone has the Big Head Mode cheat on. The characters have two emotions:

1) WASPy irritation
2) the Black Hole Sun music video

and neither of them feel good to look. This is preferable to some of the still images they use for specific tile events, which look like they ran out of budget to fully animate the game and touched up some storyboards they had lying around. Ugly comics, and sadly they take up the bulk of the game's events.

The board itself is very detailed and colorful, but what they choose to render was so innocuous that the effort goes to waste. The game's audio, however, was focused and refines on the atmosphere the rest of the game set. Much like The Sims, the soundtrack attempts to invoke, 1950's consumer culture but in the most obnoxious way possible and through heavy audio compression. Rockabilly and do-wap tracks that would suck without sounding like they were being played through an intercom, but instead are just unsettling. As the game progresses, it lampoons other musical trends through the decades leading up to the 90's, and the rest of the soundtrack lands with a dud. There's an announcer and voice actors for events. They're easily the most normal, and consequentially the least interesting thing about the game.

The gameplay is still The Game of Life. There aren't many decisions to be made and most of the real board game is Candyland with a spinner that comes loose. This game improves upon the original by keeping the flawed game play in tact, except occasionally you get to see an unfunny animation and if you're really lucky, it's kinda racist. The most daring game design choice is to have occasional ""minigames"" which consist of randomly picking boxes and praying that the RNG rewards you monetarily.

I played this as a kid, and even at the time this game came off as low rent. I was the target audience for this game (children too stupid for RISK) and even I thought this game was too greasy and offputting for anything other than a game or two with my family. I had a hard time finishing the game, mostly because it ran poorly on hardware from the time. This was a port where you could tell they didn't care too much, and when they did you wish they cared less.