Review of the McDonald's Video Game

Every so often, you can come across a humorous gem on the Internet. The McDonald's Video Game is a hilarious free game that must be played.

While not endorsed by the famous food chain, this game has grown in popularity over the last few months. The download site has crashed twice in the last three months, and is expecting more crashes now that it is mentioned in the April 2007 issue of Playboy magazine.

The goal of the game is simple. You are to make McDonalds's the most profitable company in the world.

When you first start out you must build pastures for soy, and buy cows to be slaughtered. You will also need to hire burger makers and people to work at the cash register. When sales exceed production, you need to create more pastures, and buy more cows.

While playing the game, random negative events will happen. In some instances, customers will start questioning the nutritional value of your product. You may counteract this by paying of nutritional experts.

Corruption is a major part of this game. At times you may need to buy off politicians, the mayor of the town where you hamburgers are produced, nutritional experts, environmental groups, and others. There are also times where you may need to genetically enhance your soy fields, or eliminate a section of the rain forest to make sure that you have all the land that you need. You can even wipe out a small village if it gets in your way.

When it comes to your workers, you have a few options. You can hire and fire workers, award them, or scold them. For obvious reasons, like staying with the game's overall theme, scolding them always works better then awarding them.

You can also increase your sales by creating propaganda that the national will feed into. You can make an alliance with Disney to bring marketing dollars into your company. You can change the quality of your food so that it appears to fall into the food pyramid. You can even create a marketing campaign to corrupt the minds of children to make them need your burgers 24 hours a day.

The game is extremely predictable at times. Whenever you take a politician off of your payroll, some group will come after you. The graphics will remind you of the original 8-bit Nintendo System.

The sound quality is no better then a game that came out fifteen years ago. On top of that, the music that plays while you are involved in the game will put even the most hyper of listeners to sleep.

All of this said we have to take a moment to look at the connotations of this game. It makes McDonalds look like a company that will take any method to ensure its success. It will go to great lengths to bribe, intimidate, and obfuscate. This is what makes this the most realistic game I have ever played in my life.