Angry At Your Boss? ‘Take Your Best Shot’ On Computer Screen

Did you ever have one of those days when you felt like jamming a stick into the boss’ mouth sideways and then turning it through 360 degrees while his eyes bugged out?

You know, one of those days when a client gets your goat and makes you want to do something emphatic and unambiguous.

Something like sticking a cannon up your client’s nose, striking a match to the fuse and then firing it off.

Something like pulling somebody’s ears around to the front of his face and tying them in a knot.

Or maybe you just would like to mush some co-workers in the snoot. Like, maybe, mush them in the snoot 347 times in a row, quickly.

7th Level Inc., one of America’s hottest new producers of CD-ROM titles, incorporates all that mayhem and much worse in its latest title, Take Your Best Shot ($20).

The result is nothing less than an emerging new genre in desktop software. Techniques like “executive tension relievers” or “stress busters” are favored by the marketing experts flogging this new CD-ROM title.

But you might as well call this software what it is.

Call it “Kill the Bossware.”

The CD-ROM at hand is a 1990s multimedia update of those little plastic boxes that were the rage a decade ago, the ones that gave off machine gun sounds or raspberries when you pushed a button after the boss was out of hearing range.

The program uses graphics from animator Bill Plympton, whose film clips of two middle-aged business guys in suits popping one another in the nose have become a staple on MTV.

In fact, those two guys in suits pounding one another to a pulp have become a worldwide icon for uptight business drones among young people who scorn the whole suit-and-tie gestalt.

The feuding suits helped Plympton win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in France and had a big part in his Academy Award-nominated feature, “The Tune.” In England, these two guys have become the logo for a brand of corn chips.

The geniuses at 7th Level, best known for their first title, Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time, realized that the suits were missing their most lucrative potential customers as long as they courted the counterculture set.

If alienated youth enjoy watching animated guys in suits beat one another flat as taco shells, real guys in real suits would really love it, 7th Level’s executives reasoned.

The potential market for such a product was underscored in a recent survey by the New Jersey-based market consultants Coleman & Associates, which found that 25 percent of the people who play computer games played their last game at work rather than at home.

The study also found that 51 percent of the men who own computers and 38 percent of the women with machines use them to play at least one computer game regularly.

Clearly, this strange product has some potent demographics going for it.

Meanwhile, it must be left to saner heads than a software reviewer to ponder the philosophical and ethical meaning behind the fact that this outrageously violent stuff is enormously funny.

The obvious question is whether today’s business climate is so grim that stuff that once would have been too violent for a Sam Peckinpah film now passes for mere tension-breaking entertainment.

Other treats in the program include a subroutine that maps wacky sounds to each key on your keyboard, which means when you write a letter or fill in a spreadsheet, each keystroke is accompanied by a different sound-sproings, screeches, boings, bongs, honks, breaking glass, backfiring trucks, maniacal myna birds and many more.

There also are subroutines that let you replace the icons on your desktop with a wide range of dumb and dumber pictures. Thus, Microsoft Excel loses its familiar icon and, in the future, you click instead on Monty Python’s famous chicken man to call up your spreadsheets.

You can even associate one of the obnoxious sounds with the icons, which means that opening a spreadsheet with a chicken icon is accompanied with the sproing of a giant spring unwinding.

All in all, a reviewer can say at least this much about forking out the $20 asking price for this dubious digital diversion:

It’s better than getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick.