Newly-announced Fall Out Boy tour-mate 50 Cent isn’t the only one on the Believers Never Die Part Deux tour with a brand-spanking new video game. Fall Out Boy Trail is an internet update of the good ole’ computer game favorite, Oregon Trail. The basics are still there; there’s oxen, you have to ford rivers, hunt for food (in this case, the munchies are unfortunately tagged as “McNuggets”), and members of the band gain and lose levels of “happiness” (aka life) through the usual mess of typhoid and tapeworms (and with an update of gaining life through pulling pranks and listening to music).
Fall Out Boy Trail is a pretty entertaining online game, and one that can suck you in quick. With the understanding that the internet is a black hole for short attention spans, the folks behind FOBT have packed the game with a mix of other games. Rather than the straightforward fording the trail, you traverse the tour circuit as Fall Out Boy. There are three levels of play, the hardest being “hardcore.”
At each tour stop, you play a gig through a lo-fi version of Guitar Hero/Adium. The songs are all the big Fall Out Boy hits, and the basic melodies are played through a tinny-sounding keyboard with the 1-5 buttons on the computer keyboard. The play access is a little awkward, as the number keys are quite close together, but it gets the job done and is entertaining in small bursts.
After completing each song, the band “parties” with different stereotypical individuals. This might be the one spot of the game that’s woefully over-the-top in its compliance with mainstream images and concepts of how rock bands interact in a society. Still, bonuses are abound, and if this passes for humor in some circles, so be it.
Other stops on the trail offer more 8-bit versions of popular games. You can shoot zombies while fording a river:
You can fight a monster that looks quite a bit like Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
You can even hang out with Obama in DC:
All and all, Fall Out Boy Trail is a pretty entertaining internet diversion. Sure, the humor may be a little infantile:
And the emo-and-other-subculture stereotypes may play into society’s humorless hands (though who would play this game without taking these jokes with a grain of sand). But, it’s all in good fun… until some member of FOB dies:
… in the game, that is.
