The first review I read was of  Hasbro Interactive's Tonka Search and Rescue and was written by someone called Nicky Evers, age 6.  Here is his succinct assessment of the playing experience: What I liked the most was the prize and what I liked the least was how hard it was to drive [italics added - ed.].   In other words, the driving, the core play mechanic of Tonka Search and Rescue, is broken.  So does tricky Nick recommend the game he just finished savaging?  Of course; this is CyberKids.  "I think all kids would like the game, probobly from when they're 4 to when they're teenagers," is the exact non-sequitur with which he closes the review.  Hey Nick, didn't they teach you how to spell "probably" in your fancy kindergarten?  But wait, he's not through yet!  In what is possibly the most shameless act of journalistic misconduct I've ever seen, he actually thanks Hasbro "for letting me keep the game."  Congratulations Nicky Evers, you're a whore.

In another issue, Diana Richer, age 6, and Helen Feldman, age 7, review Menlo The Frog, a Musical Fairy Tale.  First of all, let me just ask Diana and Helen to confirm this fact for me: it took two of you geniuses to write this embarrasingly bad review?  They spend the first two thirds of the piece planting a wet kiss right on the ass of Windy Hill Productions, then proceed to brazenly state that "the clam game was too easy for us."  Last time I checked, Menlo was recommended for ages three to seven.  Did it occur to either of you idiots that a three year old might find the clam game rather challenging?   The title ultimately receives a B+, even though the last paragraph contains this interesting observation: We did not like finding the key because it was boring.  So finding the key - just the whole fucking point of Menlo the Frog - was boring, yet the game still receives a B+.  If a boring game rates an impressive B+ on the "Richer" scale, what would it have to do to get a B-?   Spray cat piss right in your mouth?  Jesus.  Whose dick does Windy Hill Productions - the solid waste excreting orifice of the edu-tainment industry - have to suck to get a good review from CyberKids?  I guess six year old Diana Richer's and seven year old Helen Feldman's.

Drakan
    You better watch out and hold on tight
    We're heading your way like dynamite
    Uhhh, Delivering the goods!
    Uhhh, Delivering the goods!

Tiberian Sun (?)
    I'm a rocker, Oh oh
    Do as I feel as I say
    I'm a rocker, Oh oh
   And no one can take that away

One interesting entry doesn't sound like Judas Priest: 

Quake 3:Arena
    My niggas they never change.
    They kicken it wit they gang and remain the same

It is, I discovered, Cleveland's own Bone, Thugs, and Harmony.

That's it.  I walked around for ten hours and came away with nothing.   Considering Chet and little ricky don't pay me to write for them, and considering you don't pay to read it, I guess you all got your money's worth.  And, since it's not an OldMan article until someone badmouths Monolith or talks about poop, Lithtech 2 - eat shit!

So if you thought he ripped it up working on his site part-time, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

I think by "ripped it up" they mean to evoke images of the Three Stooges "ripping up" some socialite's fancy townhouse as they try incompetently to install plumbing.  Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense.  And speaking of not making any sense, here is a description of one of their boldest new features:

On the left you'll see a section called "Stomped Chronicles". These are subjects that are generating a lot of interest or news, but only a bit at a time.

James Vipond, if you are reading this, please avert your eyes:   Sweet Jesus, what the fuck are you Stomped people talking about?  Unlike the staff of Stomped, Redwood in particular, the employees of Internet Entertainment Associates, LLC, and any of the temps they hire to type Jason Hall's name and address into Access so they can later send him a fruit basket, I didn't graduate from high school.   But most of our smarty-pants readers did - many of them went to college - and my informal polling shows that they don't know what you're talking about either.  Maybe you've all got some post-tertiary degree that's necessary for understanding your secret purpose, or maybe it's just "wack."

For our young readers who may be missing already the life lessons freely distributed in Redwood's "State of the Wood" diary pages, let me pass along one of my own observations from something I experienced just yesterday:
Someday you'll have a girlfriend.  You'll argue with that girlfriend; sometimes heatedly.  In the passion of battle, do not scream hysterically, "You know who loves me?  Mommy!"

Dry brambles blow through her womb.

Is her vagina and its environs a haunted ghost town?  That's sexy.  And is there anything hotter than a womb?  If so, Wagner James Au hasn't heard about it.  If I had a nickel for every woman who begged me, in "choked gasps" as she climaxed, to talk dirty about her womb, I could afford to make another baby.

Play a first-person shooter long enough and its morbid reality seems to descend over your awareness like a grid, accompanied by a kind of adrenalized hyper-awareness and euphoric rage. Grid, adrenaline and rage stay with you, far past the point when you exit to the desktop. Walk away from the computer, and they still persist. You find yourself stealing up on street corners as if preparing to strafe the adjoining block; you seem to see a crosshair traced across the bodies of passersby.

Dear Wagner James Au, please remember to take your meds.
He seems to think that this 'grid' is a concept familiar to his readers, a common feature of the human experience for which further explanation is unnecessary.  He mentions the 'grid' again in the very next paragraph:

For the overwhelming majority of us, with well-adjusted social lives and a diverse range of interests, the grid recedes. But it's not at all hard to conceive, absent those factors, that the grid would remain in place.

I don't know what the grid is.  Perhaps one can't be told what the grid is.  I do know that Mr. Au feels we gamers are trapped in it.  I also know that it's only a matter of time before he reaches the inevitable conclusion that death is the only surefire escape from the Grid and that he, Wagner James Au, can become the "savior of the Grid" by shooting at us from atop the hood of the car he calls home.