Monday, December 28, 2009

A Tasty Treat

Wait a minute, this isn't the right picture for this article.
At this festive and celebratory time, my thoughts always naturally turn towards rich, delicious food, and a little more good drink than is good for me.

Which reminded me of a special treat I was sent this year - Mountain Dew World of Warcraft Gamefuel. Except for the "delicious" part, but then we're getting a little ahead of ourselves.

Apparently Pepsi often make special editions of their sugary liquid, and since my blog is read by gamers (and it would seem at least one of the Mountain Dew marketing team) I was offered some free bottles in return for saying nice things about it.

This was very much a conundrum - with a fledgling blog, do I sell out early, or wait until I have a more sizeable readership and sell out later for bigger bucks? I opted for a middle road, choosing to accept the swag in return for an article about it. And here is that article.

For those not in the "know", there are two factions in World of Warcraft and for ease of identification they are coloured blue and red. Hence two versions of Mtn Dew (that's the accepted shorthand, says Wikipedia).

First I tried the blue one: "Dew with a Punch of Wild Fruit Flavor" sounds delicious (after all who wouldn't like a punch in the mouth?). The description helps to persuade you to drink it, even though your brain is screaming that pouring what looks like antifreeze into your mouth is Not A Good Idea.

My brain may have been right - a couple of gulps had the not entirely pleasant side effect of making my mouth numb. After drinking a third of the bottle I felt dizzy and had a headache, which I put down to the chemicals and sugar coursing through my veins. I started to wonder if this was what a superhero would feel like after drinking their perfectly safe chemical concoction, and shortly before their powers first manifested.

Overall I would describe the taste as being a bit like someone had crushed up a roll of Barratt's refreshers and mixed the resulting powder into a can of 7 Up.

It's worth noting at this point that the dizzying blue version only contains 25 percent of my daily allowance of sugar per bottle, as opposed to the red mixture's 26%. With this knowledge I decide to wait until the next day to try the second variety.

After an uncomfortable and restless night's sleep (and a morning where I awoke with no noticeable superpowers, to some disappointment) I crack open the second bottle at work the next day.

"Dew with a Blast of Citrus Cherry Flavor" provokes many of the same physical symptoms as the blue bottle had, though curiously no worse. Obviously after tipping over the magical 25% sugary threshold an extra one percent isn't going to cause any extra fuss. Either that or my heart had already started to grow immune.

This second variety tastes like eating an entire packet of Haribo Starmix in one mouthful. And I'm pretty sure that "Citrus Cherry" isn't even a proper flavour.

Once again I felt ill after having less than half a bottle. I'm clearly not cut out for a life of a hardcore gamer, surviving on my wits, network latency, and enough sugar to kill an elephant.

So I can conclude that Mountain Dew Gamefuel is delicious, and well worth purchasing. Unfortunately due to some clerical error the World of Warcraft editions will be well off the shelves by the time this update is published.

If anyone from Mountain Dew would like to send me some more freebies, I think I'll pass if it's all the same to you. Cheers,

No comments: