South Park: The Stick of Truth and its Hilarious, Prostitutes-and-Diarrhea-Infused Gaming Past: South Park Rally

Those of us with a proclivity for obscenity, merry middle fingers vociferously brandished at popular culture, jokes about ballsacks and so forth (which is every bastard, naturellement) would presumably punch a shriveled octogenarian's face in the face for access to South Park: The Stick of Truth. The raveningly-anticipated RPG from Obsidian Entertainment is scheduled to make a dignified appearance on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on March 5 (to wit: emerging from Satan's ass, flailing Mr. Hankey the Christmas Pooh in the faces of unsuspecting passers-by so flecks of crap splatter their expensive overcoats).

In the week that remains, then, what we need is a snarky retrospective of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's previous ventures into video games, and the preposterous array of wonderment and/or turds (standard bowel movements, not sentient ones adorned in an unhygienic Santa hat) that have sprung forth. Today, join us for a tale of underpants-thieving gnomes, exploding turds that can be laid as impromptu land mines and wanton women that will obscure your screen with a dose of herpes.

If a homing dog-missile with a furious red erection (presumably) doesn't hump your kart to an amorous halt first.

South Park Rally was released in 2000, the only kart racer ever to garner a ‘mature' rating (we won't count Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Bunnies Cruise About Racetracks That Have Been Installed in the Grounds of the Old Ogler's Voluminous Mansion, For No Reason at All. With No Pants On. We won't count it because it doesn't exist. Apparently, our revolutionary, paradigm-shifting video game ideas are too avant garde to be adopted by Nintendo and their ilk). It was, we'll concede, another of those notoriously half-assed Mario Kart clones that were expelled from Lucifer's anus in bulk during this era; but at least it was amusing, offensive, juvenile and semi-competent. Not many such abominations from this genre can make boasts of that caliber.

Screw you, Crazy Frog! Screw you always! Your game still sucks King Kong's five-foot phallus.

This South Park racer's primary championship mode took the guise of an array of objective-based shenanigans, an anomaly in a shit-polluted ocean of tedious races versus the A.I which is the standard issue in these affairs. It constitutes fourteen 'events,' which will encompass different holidays (Valentine's day, new years and so forth) and you'll compete to achieve a seasonal objective based thereon. Such chicanery as ramming Mr. Mackey to steal his stock of Thanksgiving turkeys and collect them yourself isn't the kind of oddity you can experience anywhere else.

The most pertinent homage to the lunatic universe of South Park is surely the power-ups. Mario Kart bestows banana skins, turtle shell missiles and stars with ACTUAL GODDAMN FACES on us. Who wants that? No one, that's who. Nuts to it. South Park Rally, meanwhile, has an arsenal that includes a homing hooker which immediately gives you herpes on contact (to wit: large, unsightly red sores will block your vision for a fleeting moment).

It's both an amusing indictment of the dangers of cavorting, wang first, in the red light district and a novel idea. The racing mechanics are serviceable if remarkably average, but there's just enough of that quintessential South Park balls-out crude humor to excuse such shortcomings. After all, who hasn't entertained the notion of dropping trou on the highway and laying an explosive shit on the asphalt (or assphalt, if you will. Which you damn well should, because that's some sparkling wordplay indeed right there), so as to waylay any prospective pursuers?

Nobody we know, that's for damn sure.