Xbox 360
It was the summer of 2005, three months until my first year of university and the culinary abortions that marked it, my mum had gone on holiday leaving a month's supply of ready meals as subsistence. This explains why I'm so good at e4's Ready Meals Quiz; a flash game that has you scrutinising pictures of ready meals to see which one came out of which packaging.
You certainly do have to scrutinise, a scientific grade microscope is practically a requirement to see what's in each image. Perhaps this is deliberate to add to the challenge or even a symptom of the meal's packaging so as to disguise the generic and bland contents but either way it doesn't add enough of a challenge to make this game worth playing for any sense of achievement beyond the first-picture-does-not-have-X, therefore-it-must-be-one-of-the-other-two logic.
Sure there's a paltry amount of variety; the questions change to "Decide if the picture is a ready meal or home cooked meal" and even "Is it dog food or meatballs?". But this can't disguise the fact that there are only 15 questions and they don't change. It was appropriate to have a dog food comparison as the last memory of the game as this "quiz" is about as entertaining as a dog turd.
Sure when the dog is young its first bowel movement is interesting but the experience grows stale, just like this affair. Ready meals already have enough downsides: environmentally damaging packaging, low quality meat and the associated depression that comes from eating one; don't add a game that could be recreated with a pack of crayons and the cut out pictures from the meals' boxes.
If the developer's design brief consisted of making the least technically challenging but most tedious game they succeeded. Just to prove a point, here's one better idea I had just while writing this review, Ready Meal Top Trumps - contestants compete to see whose meal is the cheapest, contains the most salt, and other intrinsic qualities of the ready meal . By the way if anybody fancies a challenge, make my game, best creation gets a prize.
e4 provide entertainment; this "effort" fails to carry on the tradition of this Great British Summer of Games. It's quintessentially boring and unappealing, so whilst that might qualify it to be British, it doesn't make it a good game and falls well below the general standard of Flash games.
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Under the previous scoring system (before 09/09/09) this game received a score of three out of ten.