This was the most beautiful, touching, philosophically complicated, and oh, I got to tell you, it was perfect. Perfect. Down to the last minute details game I have ever played.

One might look at the title, play it and think it's so simple to grasp what this game symbolizes, yet cunning linguists along with appreciators of ancient philosophy know such trivialities lead to nowhere.
The word desert here does not mean a place with sand which is coarse, rough, irritating, and it gets everywhere, but "desert" as in abandon.

Now, abandoning the game is easy enough, but something must be judged by its in-universe rules and not be influenced by external factors which inevitably lead to a warped view.
You cannot abandon the game from within the game. You gotta play. You can't even pause the game. You honk the horn instead. And what is the result of that resilience to pull through?

8 hours for just one point. Seems like a bad deal, yet such is the nature of a gamer.
We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.

When you turn the number 8 on the side, it becomes infinity. An ingenious move which shows the game technically has no end, yet not apparent to a player, who plays it for the first time thinking they'll get a natural conclusion out of it instead.

Truly one of the games of all time, yet I still feel there is much left to grasp, so I'll humbly give it a 0,5/5. Not from the game itself, but from how much there is still left to discover, making what I wrote not giving it the justice it deserves.

Honestly a unintentional breakthrough moment for games as art, Desert Bus is so powerful even in concept that its failure to release could not stand in the way of it being discussed nearly 30 years after its stillbirth.

At least in my eyes comparable to Duchamp's Fountain or the greatest works of Andreas Serrano.

The only things standing its way are the lingering technical issues due to it never being truly finished.

Let's get one thing out of the way. As a game, Desert Bus is pretty terrible, yes? It wastes your time with long stretches of doing nothing, but you can't just leave the game on while you read Scott Pilgrim or something, as if you do you have to do it all over again.

The five-star rating comes not from the game itself, but from how well it makes it's point about fake difficulty and wasting the player's time. I don't mean to sound like one of those "ohhhh you don't get it, it's SUPPOSED to suck!!" people, but at the same time that's LITERALLY the idea behind the game.

Every year since 2013, a French charitable event called "Desert Bus de l'espoir" (Desert Bus of hope) is held in order to receive donations for the Petit Prince association that finances dreams of children suffering from terminal illness. In 2022, over 70 609€ were collected.

While it would be easy to make fun of the "haha bus bad" game without taking into consideration the story behind its existence, I just really wanted to point out how something originally made as a piece of satire and novelty against the assumption that video games were too violent turned into such a symbol of support and empathy.

It amazes me that a game like this even exists but honestly I could say the same about many games. But as notorious this game is, it was actually fascinating reading into the backstory of this game.

This game was cancelled before it even released. It was one of six games featured in Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for the Sega CD.

Basically, they are two of the greatest entertainers of their time. They mix magic and comedy and perform it live, they're funny, they defy physics, they take jabs at bullshit, etc. They have been doing it for at least 40 years. The idea of a video game based off of them in the 90s was something that only they could have come up with.

The main reason why the game never released was because the company behind it filed for bankruptcy and shut down. But eventually it made its way onto the internet and has become a cult classic.

I also like the Full Motion Video sequences of Penn & Teller themselves.

One of my favorite Penn & Teller moments is where the two appeared on Hollywood Squares with motherfucking Gilbert Gottfried, the voice behind Iago from Disney's Aladdin, yeah no joke. And it was a really funny episode that featured a whopping 9 consecutive wrong answers.

It is a very funny watch. It's some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen in a game show.

https://youtu.be/iFMaPUtCi9o

But Desert Bus is a whole different story. This game is just asinine. But the worst offender is that everything in this game is deliberate. Penn & Teller made this game to take a jab at all the people who bitched about the controversy of violence in video games.

They decided "let's just make a game that is stupidly like reality and make doing the laborious busywork of real life into a video game." Now all we need is a video game where you can fucking do your taxes, but that might already exist.

The whole game is where you drive a bus. You drive, and drive, and drive, and drive..

Ocassionally you'll see a sign on the side of the road but that's pretty much it. There are no passengers on the bus to interact with, there are no other vehicles, there's no radio so you can listen to some music, and the road never turns. You can also push the B button to hear the sound of the bus door opens. That's.. something I guess.

Let's do some calculations. This bus is going from Tuscan, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. And it doesn't go any faster than 45 MPH. Tuscan to Las Vegas is around 360 miles. 45 MPH for 360 miles equates to about 8 hours of driving.

This game is 8 hours long?? Jesus fucking Christ. Well maybe once this 8 hour journey is over maybe we can get some insane payoff for doing it.

.....

Wait, what's that? Nothing happens?
You mean we are stuck driving the bus infinitely with nothing happening throughout and with no reward afterwards?

Well actually something does happen after 8 hours of driving. You wanna know?

You get a point.

Yep. That's it. A singular, fucking point.

Supposedly Penn & Teller were going to have a contest where you sent them your high score, and whoever got the highest score would win a trip on an actual bus ride with the two masterminds themselves from Tuscan to Las Vegas, with a show there and whatnot. Which sounds awesome right? But that never happened sadly.

You can't pause the game by the way. The Start Button just blows the horn. And this is also intentional.
Also, if you stop moving the D-Pad, the bus will automatically veer off to the side of the road and get stuck in the sand. Then you have to wait for a tow truck to show up and tow the bus. All. The Way. Back.

So does that mean if you have been driving for 6 hours, you have to wait 6 hours for the game to start over? What the fuck.

Or you could just, you know, reset the game...

You just have to keep driving!! Jesus Christ, I wonder how many people have pissed themselves while playing this. You can't take bathroom breaks, you can't stop to grab food, you have to keep driving this damn bus. Imagine the amount of sensory deprivation from players sitting in front of the screen driving this shit for hours upon hours.

The fact that a game like this was cancelled and yet it made its way onto the internet and people have played it and even adapted it into an Atari 2600 game and even made a remake of it on Steam really speaks volumes of just how insufferable the experience is.

The people who played this fuckfest want you to suffer with them.

I can't imagine anyone playing this for more than 20 or 30 minutes. The farthest I've ever got was an hour, and that was for a livestream. And yet that hour felt like the longest hour of my entire life. You think you're playing the game for shits and giggles but then it turns into a horrific sensory deprivation induced nightmare. I see nothing but road and sand in my fucking dreams.

I mean you know it's bad when I got really bad car sickness after playing this game. I actually suffer from car sickness in real life. So imagine that. I get car sick just from playing this game.

This game is simply a health hazard, both physically and mentally.

Please send help.

1/10