Barbie: Race & Ride 2: The Reckoning

I know this sounds absurd, but please trust me.

Okay. So - to get some things straight, my name is Hephaistos A. Dionysus Jr. I am a PS1 collector - yes, there is without a doubt an abundance of us - however, this isn't what this is about. I had a very large collection of PS1 and PS2 CDs, so when I saw a listing on a niche website which I will not be naming, for a... strange PS1 game named Barbie: Race & Ride 2: The Reckoning. The image was... well, extremely peculiar.

I did some researching, and I got a single result for that game - the listing itself. Yet, figuring I had enough money to bid on a likely scam, I bid the minimum - that being 25$. I thought a random scammer would take the money and give me nothing. I ended up winning the auction, having bid on it a few minutes before it ended.

A few weeks later, I was playing Simpsons: Hit & Run on my PS2 - when suddenly, I heard my doorbell ring, so I paused the game and got up to open the door. It was the mailman - he gave me an envelope and left. I wasn't thinking of anything at the time, so I opened the envelope expecting some card or whatever.

Rather, the disk had arrived.

Yes, you heard me - the video game with no results (I had searched for the game a day after winning the auction. Absolutely no results - not even the site I bought it from) arrived. Funnily enough, despite being a game collector I never had Barbie: Race & Ride in my collection, as I heard it was one of the worst games for the Playstation. However, the first thing I noticed about it was the fact that it came with no case. Yes, I should've expected it considering it came in an envelope the width of a birthday card, but I wasn't thinking about logic! I was thinking about the fact that I either got the only copy of a forgotten game, or the only copy of one hell of a bootleg. It even looked the same as in the listing (granted, my room had a lot less... mold)

I ejected Hit & Run and put it back in its case (a very well maintained one, given that I have money to burn) and inserted the disk into my PS2. Surprisingly, I wasn't met with a screen with no input or even a red screen. No. At that moment, I knew what this was.

The "game" had successfully started, which was surprising for this quality of a CD. Speaking of quality...

This menu had none.

The main menu screen was a REALLY low quality, poorly cropped Barbie in a farm. It seemed the game was manufactured by Hourse Inc, which I deduced from the "horse" that had "Hourse inc." written on it. It told me to "press button" to play. I pressed every button on my controller, to no avail. I tried the analog stick buttons, but I moved the stick a bit by accident, causing the menu to fade out into a surprisingly uglier game (I thought it couldn't get any worse!)

By the way, the PS1 is a console with 3D capabilities. That surprised me, as it looked like a shitty NES game. Barbie was on the left side of the screen on top of a green plate that I presumed to be grass. The "sky" was the most obnoxious shade of cyan my eyes could process. I moved the left analog stick to move Barbie, which had no result. I tried the right one, no difference. I tried the D-Pad and I was unsurprised with the result. It didn't do jack shit. I had to use the buttons. The SHAPES moved Barbie around. It wasn't even right, the square was right and the circle was left.

I moved Barbie all the way to the right of the screen, which caused her to appear on the left again. It looked like it looped, save for the fact that there was a brown rectangle in the middle of the "grass." I walked up to it, and when Barbie touched the rectangle, text showed up in the most HIDEOUS font that could not be rivaled by Comic Sans or even Papyrus which wrote, and you won't believe this -

"Y to jump"

Y!?

Y IS NOT EVEN A BUTTON ON ANY PLAYSTATION CONTROLLER, MAYBE THOSE CHEAP KNOCKOFFS YOU'D FIND AT THE DOLLAR STORE - WHICH I THINK IS WHAT THIS GAME WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PLAYED ON.

Anyways, I pressed the triangle button, to no effect, X? Nope. Even the analog buttons, maybe? Obviously not! Guess what button Y is. If your answer isn't "select", YOU'RE NOT EVEN CLOSE. WHY WOULD ANYONE, LET ALONE "HOURSE INC." MAKE THE Y BUTTON, ON A PLAYSTATION GAME PARTICULARLY, WHICH SPECIFICALLY DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A "Y" BUTTON TO BEGIN WITH, SELECT?!

I pressed Select - no, "Y" apparently - to jump. The game doesn't allow me to even move while jumping, it instead forces me to go right the entire time. I moved to the right of the screen, which causes the same thing to happen, but instead of more rectangles to jump over or text that tells me to "Press 9 to crouch" or whatever bullshit Hourse Inc. had to offer, let's talk about the sprite of Barbie, or "BARBY" as the incredible developers so lovingly call her. The sprite, which is a 12x9 image (Yes, I could count the pixels.) continuously of a really pixelated... Barbie, probably. The sprite was a loop of her running backwards, despite the fact that she was walking forwards. There was no jump animation. It really was that horrible.

As I kept going forward, I noticed that the background was beginning to be more crushed. I had no clue what this could convey, as I'm pretty sure unless the developers made the worst bug ever, probably was intentional.

Until it happened.

Right before I got to the end of the screen again, the background went pitch black. Mind you, there was no sound the entirety of the game, so there was no indication of it happening.

I started thinking about why it became pitch black. Maybe it was a new level? Maybe I didn't press Y enough? Maybe I had to search for the A, B and X buttons too? Maybe there was a button to blink and I didn't press it for long enough, making me blind but only for the background? I kept moving to the right. What was going to happen? I'll fall into a pit? That seems like too much coding for the lovely people at Hourse Inc. to do. They already made such a masterpiece.

I kept going right again and again - not because I was having fun, but because I spent 25$ + shipping on this... what can I even call it? An abomination?

I was about to eject the game and set it on fire - that was until something new happened. Surprising, I know. There was another pixel-art abomination on the right of the screen that looked exactly like, er, "BARBY", I suppose. By the way, the animations weren't correct on this one, either. Don't get your hopes up. Both... players weren't even in sync, their animations were different enough that it was noticeable. I got closer to the other BARBY, or tried to, as the other one was walking away from me every time I tried to move closer. My interest piqued at this moment. Not that I was interested in the first place, I just was a bit more invested. This went on for 5 more screens until the clone finally stopped. I'm guessing the letters C and V finally broke on the developers' keyboards. I went closer to BARBY's evil twin, but when I got closer she suddenly lunged at BARBY. My player, I mean.

I quickly pressed my favorite button on my controller, Y, to jump over that crazed bitch. Unfortunately, the physics were so horribly made that I jumped 2 seconds after I pressed the button. I'm not joking. It's like they made the jump button purposely delayed. She caught me and the screen went pitch black. I wouldn't be surprised if that was because of an error, actually.

I pressed the reset button on my console. Nothing. Pressed the power button, and nothing happened.

My PS2 was bricked, and it was all because of Barbie Race & Ride 2: The Reckoning.

So I did what any sane person would do. Not feed it to an industrial-grade wood chipper. That's a good guess though. No.

I put the disk inside my computer.

Look. When you've got a game this horrible, you've got this need to look inside it and ponder. What were the developers thinking?! So, of course, I did just that.

So after searching for a CD reader (Look. I do not have an ancient computer worthy of reading CDs.) for around half an hour, I found one. I wouldn't be surprised if it started glowing a neon red and eating my soul the moment Race & Ride 2 was stuck inside, but that wasn't the case. No, it just didn't read it. Do you have any idea what was wrong? I put the disk in correctly. I had to put it in upside down for it to work. How did my PS2 read it, you might be asking? I don't fucking know. Dark magic, probably.

So. I looked in. The CD contained... brace yourselves...

An EXE file. Yes, really!

So now I'm doubling down on that dark magic theory, because either the sun emitted a cancerous amount of rays to swap every single bit on that CD to make an executable the moment I took the disk out of the PS2, or something fishy is up. So I opened a VM and double-clicked the file. Yes, I used a virtual machine. Shocker. I didn't wanna open the haunted (probably) disk in my main OS.

I know what you're thinking. "Man, I wonder what that EXE contains!". If not that, then "What the fuck is this guy doing?". If you're the first type of person, I am about to tell you. If you're the second type of person, shut up and listen.

So I opened that file. I was certain it would remove my soul and start puppeteering me to sell someone this godforsaken game. It didn't do anything. It was like, 500 megabytes large, so it was probably a coding error on line 1492.

No. There's nothing else. That was genuinely just it. I got a new PS2 and gave that disk to an old man who's probably gonna give it away.

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