Every once in a while a game comes along that’s almost more fun because of its silly content than because the game itself is fun to play.  Teh Internets is just such a game.  I mean let’s face it, you can’t even spell the name of the game correctly if you have spell checking on.  At its heart the game is basically a variation of the old classic Copter – minus the need to worry about hitting walls or ceilings – but it’s the content that really makes this game worth playing.

You control the ROFLcopter, and your mission is to last as long as you can before the ills of the internet wreck your ship.  You start out with three lives, and over time can collect more until you have a total of 5.  Each time you get hit by one of the “bad” things you get a noticed that you’ve FAILed and you lose a life.  When all lives are lost the game is over and you’re treated to the wonderful “blue screen of death” that always made older versions of Windows so fun to work with.  Bad things include popup windows trying to sell you stuff or warning of viruses,  actual viruses themselves that come at you from the left side of the screen (which would be behind because you’re always traveling to the right), and various varieties of trolls.  You can actually shoot the trolls with hamburgers to kill them, and each troll takes three hits to kill.  The average trolls are especially annoying because they get smaller when you hit them and the last hit is often hard to pull off because of their size.

Enter The Firewalls

For each bad thing you avoid you get some points.  You also get points for collecting LOLcats as they float by.  Finally there are the little dudes that look like 8 bit Tron characters which give you points and an extra life.  You control your copter with the direction pad in the lower left side of the screen, and to shoot trolls you simply click on them.  The controls actually work pretty well, except that the game suffers from the usual problem that sometimes your fingers can get in the way of some of the action.  This is especially true if you’re trying to shoot a troll that’s at the bottom of the screen.

The graphics in Teh Internets are great.  The background is a map of the world overlaid with floating binary digits.  The helicopter is actually an over-rendered ASCII craft, and the LOLcats are unanimated images of cats with a glaring green border around them.  The trolls are fun because they scale poorly as you shoot them.  You might even say that the graphics are not great until you remember that this is a parody, and then you understand how beautifully they actually work.  The sound effects are a pretty cheesy affair as well.  Each game starts with the oh so familiar (for old timers anyway) sound of a modem connecting up.  The LOLcats meow and the trolls growl just as you might expect them to.  There’s not really much of a sound from the burger weapon, though, which is a bit disappointing.  The music is actually the highlight of the audio, as it’s actually rather good.  I would have expected it to be a bit more tinny speaker sounding to fit the whole aesthetic atmosphere.

From a game play standpoint, Teh Internets doesn’t really offer anything that other games of this genre don’t already have.  Now it is true that many of them don’t let you shoot anything, but I’m not sure how much that really added to the game as a whole.  Where this game clearly stands above the crowd, however, is in the game’s character.  I can’t help but smile when I see the popup windows pass by, and the content as a whole is a humorous reminder of the goofy aspects of internet computing.  I highly suggest that anyone that’s even slightly hooked on using the internet should give this game a try.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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