Supremely awesome and fantastically cool. Those are a few words that I'm sure Strong Bad, a guy who walks around with boxing gloves, a wrestling mask, and no shirt on regularly, would use to describe himself. He's also the main character for the game Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, a collection of five episodic games that are set in the Home Star Runner universe from the Home Star Runner website.

Being a big fan of the website, I looked forward to the opportunity to play the first episode and will be reviewing the later episodes soon. I really enjoyed a lot of different things from this game.

The game begins with Strong Bad's usual day of waking up and checking his email. Promptly he encounters the question of "Why haven't you beaten the snot out of Homestar yet?" from one user.

As far as who Homestar is, well, he's one of the many characters that Strong Bad encounters throughout his escapades both on the website and in the game. He's an armless white skinned person with a beanie and an odd accent that constantly gets on Strong Bad's nerves.

Strong Bad proceeds to rectify the problem of not having beaten the snot out of Homestar Runner and decides that he'll beat him in a race to show Homestar who's better.

This is one of the main conflicts in the crazy world of Strong Bad and his answering emails, dealing with Homestar and anyone else that bothers Strong Bad.

The game itself is a collection of mini-games and an exploration/puzzle-solving game using items found throughout the world. The first problem I encountered was how to get Strong Bad into the race in order to beat Homestar. Entering the race you might say, sounds pretty simple, right? Ah, but then you're presented with the item options of hedge clippers, an onion, a metal detector, or a bunch of balloons and the registration for the race was two months ago, what do you do?

Discovering the correct item to create the desired effect now becomes a bit more complicated, and a whole lot of fun. The different oddball characters that Strong Bad talks to, the dialogue between characters, the actions of the characters, and the general feel of the game, translated the jokes and theme of the website wonderfully.

As far as how to solve the conundrum of entering the race, I won't spoil it, but that's just one of the many sort of "quests" Strong Bad goes on during Home Star Ruiner.

I felt like I was playing a Strong Bad email traveling through the world of Strong Bad and company. Whether I was using the mouse to point and click where I wanted Strong Bad to travel, using the inventory to try different objects on characters to see what would happen, or waiting to hear what quip Strong Bad would come up with, I found the game highly entertaining. As I mentioned before, there are mini-games within the main storyline-related game. Snake Boxer 5 is one of the mini-games where you box different 8-bit style snakes in a bid to, presumably, become champion with the aid of keyboard buttons. In addition there is the mini-game of Teen Girl Squad where your aim is to slay each of the four characters in some crazy way with different item combinations by the end of the comic. These are just two of the whacky mini-games you can play in Home Star Ruiner.

The sheer weirdness of it all and random things that I came across, both in the mini-games and in the main game, were what made it great and unpredictable. The voices and character actions were right on with the site's humor. Also, the controls were very easy to follow and pretty self explanatory (though there is a tutorial section). You can even take screen shots of your game to send to friends.

Find a part of the game you really enjoyed? Then just click a button and it's saved on your hard drive, no need to edit. A handy feature for someone who wants to immortalize Strong Bad, and I doubt SB would disapprove of being immortalized.

Puzzle-solving and exploration are key when playing the game, but simply walking past a character just to see what they'll say was fun too. There are plenty of goals to complete and things to do within Home Star Ruiner and if you're a fan of the site I'd highly recommend playing it. However, having said that, if you've never been to the site that's fine. The jokes aren't completely drawn from segments from the site (though there are some "in-jokes" that you get if you've seen some Strong Bad emails). For the most part, I feel that it's a funny game even if you don't know about Strong Bad. Where else can you actually gauge how awesome you are with an "official" ranking?