Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator
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A good insult is certainly an art. Depending on what effect you’re trying to garner, it can be very easy to be off point, miss the mark or just be too scathing. I’m sure many of us have dispensed an insult we have immediately regretted and had to backtrack on. Well good news, there is a game where you can hone your insultation skills; Vile Monarch’s Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator.
I guess the clue is in the name. Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator is all about composing the most stinging barb you can in order to take down your opponent. You must take down your enemies hit point meter to 0 in order to win. To do this, the game presents you with a selection of sentence fragments. In a turn based manner, you will take it in turns to select the fragments that will help create your winning jibe. At the end of each ’round’, your character will read out your composed insult and deal an appropriate amount of damage based on how well you have composed the insult.
Gameplay & Mechanics
The game seems to generate the sentence fragments randomly and for the most part it works fairly well. The character you use and the level you play on seems to dictate some of the text that is generated as some of the options are based on the context of the argument. That being said, occasionally you are left with a selection of complete nonsensical things to use. You can even the balance sometimes, by pressing ‘X’ which allows you to take a sip of tea to ponder your thoughts. This provides you with two new options from your personal insult stash at the bottom of the screen; separate from the main body of text. You can make your insults quite lengthy depending on how you play it. Occasionally you will see “…” options which allows you to continue into the next round rather than complete your insult that turn.
In terms of assessing how ‘good’ an insult it, it can vary. You deal damage for putting together a coherent insult, getting personal or really focusing on a particular subject. Reusing a subject (if the subject occurs in the random word pool) nets you a multiplier. Knowing who you’re playing against can help get you more damage too. If you know a character is sensitive about their age and therefore inability to use technology, focusing your insult on that might deal more damage. I feel this system works fairly well.
However, I did find it odd (and occasionally frustrating) that your opponent, or you, can still randomly score points (sometimes minimally) for contributing a completely meaningless insult: “Your math teacher smells like your hat” for example may well do some damage, but it feels a bit of a stretch in terms of insults. Thankfully, some do zero damage, but not when they always should (ion my opinion). If you can’t form a coherent sentence (either by using bad grammar or not able to finish off your sentence) you will do damage to yourself and garble a mumbled response; like you just had a brain fart. A nice touch.
Story
This game is about insults and dishing out the best (worst?) insults you can. Of course, insults don’t work as well if there isn’t any context to whom you’re insulting. Luckily, Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator provides us with five different scenarios for us to sharpen our tongues on. Select a stage through the main menu and you are whisked to one of five locales to have a good ol’ argument. Depending on the stage will depend on what you are arguing about and what you are arguing for:
- Pet shop – as the player, you have a dead parrot, shoddily sold to you by the shop owner. You want to return said dead parrot.
- Lake – you have come across a dead man and you are trying to determine how the man died and who could have killed him.
- Train carriage – a case of mistaken seats escalates between two passengers.
- Operating theatre – there is only one liver available for transplant and two patients who need it!
- Heaven – you are arguing with God (voiced by a great Morgan Freeman impersonator) about the meaning of life.
Successfully winning the argument will garner the best of the results. If you are playing ‘tournament’, you will progress to the next stage. Failing gives you the chance to replay the level until you succeed. There isn’t much else to the game in terms of story, not that there needs to be. That being said, the story/stage dictates some of insult options you can pick.
Difficulty does seem to increase as you work through the levels. Of course, if you do a single round of insulting, it seems fairly balanced. I did spend a lot of time getting my ass handed to me by God on my first run through the tournament.
Graphics & Sound
Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator has a great style. Visually it has a retro vibe and the characters have a basic movement set. It won’t win any beauty prizes, but it certainly isn’t aiming to. The environments are distinguishable and varied. The display of the game is clear and the text is fairly easy to read; important given the mere 15 seconds you have to select your next sentence fragment. Each of the characters are unique and carry their own style and manner. And the parrot looks great too!
One of the things I enjoyed the most from Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator is the way that the insults are delivered. Once you have constructed your insult your characters take it in turns to deliver said insult. Each character delivers them slightly differently and are done in a great over the top fashion. I particularly enjoy Lovecraft’s voice who has an eerie sinister tone to it. Additionally, the speech is broken up slightly into the fragments so it is slightly disjointed in the delivery, depending on the insults picked. By no means a bad thing, I found this enjoyable.
Special mention to the voice actor who portrays God, it’s a great impersonation of Morgan Freeman’s God from Bruce Almighty.
Multiplayer
Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator sports both local and online multiplayer. Allowing you to couch insult people, via a TV (which is better than face to face right?), or you can do what 14 year olds have been doing for years and insult over the internet. In theory, at the time of writing I have not been able to successfully get into an online match with anyone else.
Replay Value
I guess how much you play Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator will depend on how much of an achievement hunter/completionist you are. It’s a fun game with great character, but after completing the tournament you’ll see most of what there is to see. The tournament takes about 30 minutes to complete and although you can unlock bonus stages and characters to play as, there isn’t much else to do apart from repeat the same scenarios and stages (albeit with different character rotations).
There are achievements/trophies for successfully pulling together certain set phrases. I particularly like “The B Word” achievement; asking you to create the phrase “Your country is not a part of Europe”, referring to the highly contentious Brexit debacle in the UK. There’s also an achievement for completing 100 rounds of Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator. This one is called “It gets boring after an hour” and feels apt.
Although the game is well put together and, for the most part, works well, it’s fairly samey and repetitive. That being said, it’s a great pick up and play to dip in an out of. Maybe you’re waiting for a raid buddy to come online and you’re looking to kill 15 minutes? Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator is perfect for those little pockets of downtime where only a quick game will do. It’s also a fun game to show people, it’s something hugely different!
