[Retro ≠ Good] Taboo: The Sixth Sense

Home videogame consoles have been around for the better part of 40 years so far and haven't shown any signs of slowing with gems like Bioshock, Mass Effect and Portal being released within the last six months and plenty more promising titles upcoming. Still, sometimes you just have to dust off the old NES, grab that wooden sword and lay waste to all the Moblins, Tektites and Octorocks in Hyrule 2D style. It's fine to revisit an old favorite. It's another thing entirely to convince yourself that every single game made before 1998 is good simply because it's "retro". I've played a whole lot of them and, friend, let me tell you, some of those games are great and some are worse than chugging a 60oz. Big Gulp™ of pureed herpes. Which is a perfect segue for the first game we'll be exploring in the new Retro ≠ Good section.

Taboo: The Sixth Sense is a Tarot card reading game for the NES. No, it isn't an adventure game in which you collect Tarot cards. Nor is it a puzzle game in which you must match up similarly designed cards to get rid of them. The only thing this game does is read a fortune and, if you count this as a feature, picks your lucky lotto numbers as long as the lotto you're looking to play doesn't use numbers over 40 and, nowadays, most do.

To get an idea of how the game is at fortune telling let's consider something that seems entirely unrelated - somebody who works as a German-to-English translator. You hire the translator to accompany you in Germany and you're all set, everything translates properly, the translator provides a useful service and does a great job. If, however, you rely on machine translations from Babelfish you'll soon find out that it is translating the English for "Where can I find the nearest bathroom?" to the German for "Why is the walking of proximity toilets?"

Now consider the human Tarot Card reader - vague and worthless on their very best day. What happens when you entrust an already worthless service to a computer is the video game equivalent of dividing by zero - utter chaos and confusion at every turn. Since the technology driving the game isn't sophisticated enough to really understand the question you asked, or know anything about you personally, it can't give you an actual answer, but only some extremely vague suggestions on how you can make up your own answer. For example I asked it "Will anybody ever read this blog?" As we all know, the answer is "no" and as the picture shows, questions to the divine powers that control the Tarot don't support word wrap. After asking, the game informed me that my significator card is the Two of Coins which meant that "Your present position is avoids changing or difficult situations."

No, we can't just chalk that up to Engrish because the game is made by Rare, a British publisher. There's no excuse.

Let's assume that we should remove the word "is". Now it's saying that my problem doesn't change and avoids difficult situations. It's up to you to figure out what the hell that even means and then shoehorn your own fortune into it, which makes the game all the more unnecessary.

After plodding through several more vague assertions the game gives me my no-longer-relevant lotto numbers and sends me on my way, wondering what in the hell I was supposed to get from all of that. Total play time: about 2 minutes.

Taboo is possibly the very worst videogame I have ever played, offering no gameplay - no game - whatsoever, but is one of the only games that I would ever applaud for having a total play time of less than five minutes. I can't help but wonder who is the bigger nutcase - the guy that thought he could sell games based on this premise or the people that proved him right.