SA reviews "Journey through the Digestive Tract"

[Shining Aquas]

Well, after surviving the vast jolliness that was Christmas, I'm back for a bit to fulfill an obligation I left on this site, and while my Brain is totally ready to go my stomach is still in pain from Christmas dinner. Hopefully the answer will present itself in the form of Elbee23's "Journey through the digestive tract", a level designed to teach biology to those too lazy to read their textbooks.

Well, I thought that maybe the level would start by having you fall down someone's throat, but apparently the body we are exploring today is incredibly lazy so we need to go spider style and get ourselves eaten by the sleeping person (cause nothing is more delicious than 8cm of sack). We then fall down the throat, and hit the esophagus (which is apparently he spelled as oesophagus, which is not incorrect but probably means this level was made in Britain). In this particular case, the esophagus is simply just 2 boxes of food, 2 bananas, and 2 apples and oranges floating on what's supposed to be a representation of Mucous, apparently as purple gas. Call me crazy, but I probably would've gone with something more pinkish or on the side of yellow, and covered the top with in credibly thin layer of gas, just for accuracy's sake. By doing that, you also don't need to keep the food afloat by strapping them onto springs that are clearly visible and also cause you to DIE MISERABLY if you ever attempt to bounce for those score bubbles.
Afterwards you go down the gastroesophageal junction (or GE function for short) and will find the stomach where apparently the liver and the pancreas are side by side, which is actually fairly accurate. Anyways, some germs prevent you from getting any further and you need to kill them by playing the role of the standard white blood cell. Once they are all dead, you need to get through the intestine...........by riding a rocket car made out of golf balls.

Can I just stop there? Honestly, what person would be stupid enough to swallow a golf ball, let alone 4 of them. I know the text thing says "He swallowed some golf balls, use them to get out through the intestine" but seriously, how silly is that? I mean, you could've attached rockets to a piece of digested food, but golf balls!?

Anyways, after you ride through the roller coaster intestine on the......"shrugs".....you know what, you need to race through the large intestine on spinning sponge wheels until you find.....ANOTHER ROCKET CAR MADE OUT OF UNDIGESTED FOOD!!! Oh you've got to be kidding me. You cannot ride through the bowels on undigested food, you ride out on ****, because that's what comes out of the other end, not a combination of sushi, bananas and other various fruits, but a piece of fecal matter. at the very least, switch the 2 cars around, undigested food through the intestine, golf ball car couldn't be broken down and was excreted as such.

And that's the whole level, all in all it's amazingly short, but it's really hard to extend a level that is limited by what's actually involved in the digestive system, and since just about all of the main players were involved, it would be tough to criticize it for being inaccurate.....until I remember that it has a golf ball car.

Final Score:
6.0 / 10
A little bland, not very tough, and has a couple of "what the farg" moments, but the accuracy is the most part untainted, and it does serve it's purpose well.

On a side note, my digestive system is on whack right now from egg nog.

[Elbee23]

The oesophagus (yes, I'm Australian, so our spelling is based on British rules) is actually the section between the throat and the gas bits with the boxes.

The gas bit that has you jumping up and down is the stomach itself. Although in a human standing or sitting up, you would normally fall down and into the stomach, there are valves at it's opening and closing to prevent the acid in the stomach from going into the wrong organs. So what you are seeing is the stomach of someone lying down. ;)

As a side point, it is possible to surgically remove the oesphagus and stretch out the stomach to the throat to replace it. It just means that the stomach "waiting area" is removed, and food needs to be more predigested (like a liquid diet) before you eat it.

The section between the stomach and the "golf cart" section is actually part of the small intestine and is actually called the duodenum. Most people don't know this though and would be bored/overwhelmed with this bit of information.

The pancreas actually sits over the liver in a normal body. From a game play point of view it's just inverted for space reasons. If it was a normal body, that would be where the spleen is, but it is not connected to the digestive system.

People do eat odd things though, including golf balls. Something or someoen big enough to eat a sack boy could quite possibly eat golf balls... but it's all a bit silly. The golf balls were there because they were the only object which would allow a vehicle to move through the original version of the small intestine. Since it's been simplified from the original more complex route I could change it to something like oranges I guess.


Things do pass through the digestive system without being digested for any number of reasons. Something like a golf ball would not break down all that much and would go through quite quickly, especially considering it's round shape and relatively small size. Just don't try eating a golf ball. It's a bad thing to do and you will likely need to have major surgery as a consequence of it, which is a very, very bad thing. Even normal food though can sometimes pass through and not be all that changed. It usually turns into brown paste, but sometimes it can be relatively untouched.

So I could have included a whole lot more technical information and made things more scientifically accurate... but this is Little Big Planet, a game that can be enjoyed by anyone, from people with doctorates in specialised medicine to... 6 year olds that know you eat something and something else comes out the other end. I wanted to be fun with only a small amount of teaching so as not to overwhelm or bore the audience. :)

[SuperPhillip]

I enjoyed the level. I laughed at the absurdity of the golf cart, but it was more of a "this $@#@ is wild. Awesome." than anything bad.

Good work, both of you. More to Elbee not only for the hard work on the level, but also the explanation that was longer than the review. :p

[Elbee23]

Ah, I always write too much. It's just how us old people work. :blush:

It was a fair review though. Ultimately though a review is a person's interpretation of their experience. So what one person sees another might not. I think it was a fair explanation of the experience SA had, which gives people some idea of what people may expect. :)

[Shining Aquas]

I'm not old, I just like to write.

19 isn't old right? If it is, then I should probably get off the internet, switch to newspapers, and start watching the Channel 4 news.

Granted, I can't keep up with this era of teenagers (simply because I don't understand what the appeal is to Ugg's and High School Musical), but in no way would I consider myself old.

For this review, I just couldn't think of anything else I wanted to talk about. I pretty much spoke on what I saw.

[SuperPhillip]

Elbee was talking about him/herself being "old".
Not you, SA, you young, agile man! :blush: