Lester the Unlikely
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| This article was copied (instead of imported) from the now-deleted Crappy Games Wiki. |
| Lester the Unlikely | ||||||||||||
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 "It's unlikely that this is gonna be a good game."
— The Angry Video Game Nerd | ||||||||||||
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"And the original Lester will always be a classic that's improved like wine. Wine that's made from fermented rat piss with a fine aroma of the dead fly-swarmed carcass of a three-day-old deer, with the delicate crisp flavor of skunk farts with highlights of ass sweat. The palette is rich with hints of residual dry poop crust from a truck stop bathroom. Goes down with the long lasting finish of fly-covered summer horror trash."
— The Angry Video Game Nerd
Lester the Unlikely is a 1994 platform video game developed by Visual Concepts and published by DTMC in North America, and Asmik Ace Entertainment in Japan for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
Plot
In the beginning, a typical teenage boy named Lester, who is "kind of geeky" and "kind of sleepy", recently got a new issue of the Super Duper Hero Squad comic book. He was reading it while walking on a dock until he fell asleep next to a cargo crate lying beside a cargo ship. After he and the cargo were loaded onto the ship by a crane and cruised off, the ship is ransacked by pirates who scuttled it. Lester luckily found a life jacket and swam toward the most adjacent island while the cargo ship sank. Lester must find his way home by exploring the island for someone or something that can help him survive.
Why It's Unlikely to Rock
- Lester's drowsy and careless presence in the intro cutscene was the reason he got himself in trouble, which makes him look like a completely hopeless nitwit.
- Lester himself is an extremely cowardly crybaby that is also a clumsy loser throughout the first half of the game, always running away from every enemy he sees for the first time and occasionally refusing to do actions required by the player to get through the level, which is incredibly irritating and unnecessary. He feels very much like a poor man's version of Madeline from Celeste, who, unlike Lester, never goes against the player's control.
- His voice is also rather annoying and uninspired.
- Lester walks very slowly, and his walking animation at the beginning of the game is completely cringeworthy and ludicrous. It's like he had surgery on his legs.
- Lester may also do something stupidly vexing throughout the levels, like cowering before approaching obstacles or running away from enemies encountered for the first time, while moving slowly making the monotony grow excessively.
- Lester's only forms of attack for most of the game are kicking and throwing rocks at enemies, which makes Lester very feeble and simple-minded at the same time.
- It's possible and easy to take fall damage. The only way to avoid it is to slowly lower yourself down a cliff, which is tedious beyond belief.
- The graphics are ugly, especially by SNES standards. The backgrounds look bland, dull, and not nice-looking. They already look like a cartoon, even in the jungle there seems to be nothing, the character models and enemies are awful looking, especially Lester himself, who apparently was made by a college student in a week, and the color palette is a pile of vomit, especially in the jungle.
- The totem poles that shoot darts, men that throw spears, etc. instantly kill Lester, while other enemies will only inflict one point of damage.
- The section where you have to travel on rafts is very frustrating. There are snakes that fall on you, which you have to dodge by moving away from them, but the space at your disposal is very limited and you can easily fall into the water unless having gotten used to the grid-based gameplay, even if you weren't at the very edge of the raft. Also, sometimes a fish and a snake attack you simultaneously, forcing you to take damage.
- Odd collision detection. In the section where you have to jump from platforms to vines and vice versa, Lester can easily miss the vines and fall without apparent reasons, taking damage. To retry, you have to go back to the start of the level, but the road is full of poisonous flowers and falling snakes, making the trip a very unpleasant one. Finally, if you fall three times, you'll lose a life as there is only a single health pick-up.
- The controls delay whenever you run or jump. It can be frustrating when dying every time you try to defeat enemies.
- Some enemies are invincible or near impossible to defeat, due to Lester's feeble nature letting other enemies getting the better of him like an unrealistically, giant-sized eagle being able to carry Lester back to a section of the first level in which you have to run through again, which is frustratingly ridiculous and this is one of many examples of how it all makes Lester also look like a Butt-Monkey as well. This, coupled with the aforementioned odd collision detection, makes for many unfair deaths.
- This can be even more frustrating when there are enemies you need to use a walkthrough to figure out what to do for any alternative, which could also be said this monotonous and strangely long game.
- The ending to the final level is very abrupt and anti-climactic as all Lester has to do is free Tikka's father is to use a ladle full of water to douse the spark running on a fuse.
Likely Qualities
- Lester may be the second worst idea for a video game platforming protagonist: almost everything can kill him and he is a cowardly & wimpy dimwit at first, however in a similar way of presenting the Crouching Moron Hidden Badass trope, Lester turns into a much more courageous person near the end of the game when he saves Tikka from a ape and is willing to fight the pirates and risk his life in order to save an innocent islander, as way for him being able to return home. In which this is when his walking animation is actually less embarrassing, and he doesn't go against your controls at all anymore *although the control still sucks and is thoroughly stiff*. This can serve as a tale relating to believing in yourself and shows how Lester sort of tends to more likely represent in a rather insignificant way how he Took a Level in Badass.
- While they're cringeworthy and ludicrous, there are some animations that are quite impressive by SNES standards.
- The soundtrack is quite catchy, if slightly repetitive.
- Using a Level Select screen can help skipping frustrating levels can be more relaxing to just skip to the end. Too bad most of the levels were poorly designed or even unnecessarily open ended as well, though.
Reception
Lester the Unlikely received largely negative reviews from lots of players and critics, with criticism going towards the controls, graphics, and the character of Lester himself.
Videos
 "What were they thinking?"
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