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Claire Keane
Today's Document
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Keni

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Love Begins

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@badgamehalloffame
Discontinuation of the Bad Game Hall of Fame Tumblr
For those not “in the know”: The Bad Game Hall of Fame has continued to update and flourish on its own dedicated website (BadGameHallOffame.com). While the plan was to continue posting updates to this Tumblr pointing to new articles as they’ve been going up on the primary site, I must confess that the task has sort of fallen by the wayside, leaving this blog hideously out of date with recent developments. Knowing full well that this is just gonna happen again even if I try and recommit to keeping this page up to date, I’m making the move to simply discontinue the Tumblr entirely. I’ll always appreciate the fact that the Bad Game Hall of Fame got its start on Tumblr, but the format simply doesn’t suit our [technical] needs anymore.
For those of you still interested in keeping up with the site or looking into other pages we continue to maintain, I’ll go ahead and provide a list of links below:
WWW: BadGameHallOfFame.com Patreon: Patreon.com/BadGameHallOfFame Discord: Discord.gg/AvGGs2a Twitter: Twitter.com/BadGameHOF Twitch: Twitch.tv/BadGameHallOfFame YouTube: YouTube.com/channel/UCeSODvVAGxpF9JNoxRMQvVw
I would also encourage you to check out my webring project; Game & Love. It is a webring dedicated to connecting and promoting queer games-content creators. We’ve got some really cool creatores affiliated with the ring already, and we’re always looking to bring more folk on.
Welp, I reckon that’s all folks. Hope to see all y’all down the road!
Captain Novolin
“Check You Feet for Dry Skin.”
“If only I had sufficient manual dexterity to consistently win…” (North American box art)
As a member of a generation who grew up with video games as a constant part of our lives, many of us have memories of the “edutainment” titles from our childhoods: Those games developed with the goals of both educating and entertaining. And as games intended to be played during some of our most formative years, the memories of them can tend to stick with you. For me, the title that most continues to linger in my memory is The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary; and boy howdy, do I remember it vividly. Even though I had already encountered the likes of Doom by the time I got to Dr. Quandary, I still recall being deeply unsettled by what his secret island had on offer more so than any imp or cacodemon that might’ve caught me off-guard in a dark hallway. One of the very first visuals that a child is subjected to in the game is watching themselves get sucked into the mouth of a terrifying doll, as tense music plays and an old man maniacally laughs at them. Can you think of any better way to ease a young mind into learning and puzzle-solving?
The early 90s were sort of an odd time for edutainment software in general, come to think of it. There was this sense that kids had such easy access to what I’ll call “non-educational” video games, it was something of a challenge to get them interested in games that were more obviously meant to serve as teaching tools. And so, you saw developers having to try slightly more subtle approaches: Straight up terrifying kids in the case of Dr. Quandary, ecasting recognizable characters as virtual teachers à la Sonic’s Schoolhouse, and sneaking anti-drug messages into otherwise straightforward genre games like Wally Bear and the NO! Gang. If you were a developer looking to hook kids into your edutainment game, you had to come up with some creative way to grab their attention, and convince them that they weren’t just in for an interactive lecture.
And so, I picture in my head the creative team at Raya Systems sitting together in a boardroom, pondering as to how they might be able to interest kids in a game that would serve to educate them about the rather unamusing subject of diabetes. Just as they’re all about to call the whole thing off, one of them jumps out of their chair as they’re struck with a bolt of inspiration, and excitedly proclaims “Kids love superheroes!” The game practically writes itself from there, and the infamous end result is 1992’s Captain Novolin for the Super Nintendo. Today, we’ll be taking a crash course on the often-mocked release, and grading it on its abilities to both educate and entertain.
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Shaq Fu
“My Wrap Is Better Than Your Rap.”
“He wears Size 22 EEE shoes on his feet. His opponents usually wear them on their face.” Knick-knack Shaq-attack, give @importantbusinessdinosaur a bone.
It's hard to hate on Shaquille O’Neal. Outside of his career as an NBA MVP, he's also earned himself the reputation of being one of basketball’s most lovable goofballs: Constantly charismatic, and never taking himself too seriously. At the same time, you get the feeling that no matter what this dude sets his mind to, he just commits to it 200%, and I admire that a lot. He's also a man who refuses to be labelled as just being a figure in sports, willing to try his hand at anything he seems to develop an interest in; whether it be acting, rapping, or even pursuing a doctorate degree. And of course, he was even the star of his own video game, now with a sequel set to release nearly 25 years after the fact. Sadly, this last bit isn’t really an accomplishment all that worthy of celebrating.
1994’s Shaq Fu likely needs no introduction, but it's gonna get one here anyway: It's known as one of the very worst games of all time, making a multitude of lists and countdowns on the subject. It is the product of a very particular era in licensed games history, where celebrity brands found themselves associated with all manner of unlikely, seemingly unrelated genres of game. So reviled is this game, it’s spawned a website dedicated entirely to the purpose of tracking down and destroying every last copy of it. Even O’Neal himself has gone on to spoof his involvement with the title in all manner of media, able to find the humor in his name being tied to such an infamous product of 90’s excess. As a result of all this, Shaq Fu might very well be the most well-known bad game of all time.
At a certain point, Shaq Fu seemed to transcend the very medium of video games, and became something more… how you say, incorporeal? Seriously; folk seem to think of it less as a physical cartridge to be plugged in and played, and as more of an idea -- some intangible, purely imaginable thing, spoken of more along the lines of legend rather than as a real product that was ever offered for sale. The problem here is, more folk have only ever talked about Shaq Fu than have actually ever played it for themselves. So much of what is “known” about the game is rooted in reputation and oral tradition rather than actual hands-on experience, giving the game this sort of mystical aura about it. But Shaq Fu is obviously more than just myth: There really is an actual game cartridge buried beneath it all!
So, here’s the score: I’ve gone and played through Shaq Fu, and now I’m here to write about what exactly made it such a hated game to begin with. Not only that, but I’m also here to discuss who developed the game and how it even came to be. But you know what? That still isn’t quite enough for me, so I’m also going to go ahead and review the four conversions of the game to different consoles and handhelds of the era! And hell, as long as I’m here, I might as well talk about Shaquille O’Neal’s hip-hop career too, because why the hell not? And when I’m finished with all that, I’m going to tell you why the sequel we’re getting now is a stupid idea, and why it will ultimately underwhelm everyone foolish enough to pay it mind. In the spirit of the man himself, “I'm a be a Shaq knife and cut [this game] with precision.”
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Snake’s Revenge
“What Is Metal Gear? I Have Never Heard of It.”
“You’re a combination Rambo, James Bond, John Wayne, and Lawrence of Arabia.” Top-secret art by @edupatilla.
Solid Snake is dead. The Hind Ds have left the Haven, the victims have been bled, red velvet lines the cardboard box, so on and so forth.[♬] But in a cruel bit of injustice, his murderers have gotten off scot-free. I am of course referring to none other than Konami Holdings Corporation; the former games conglomerate turned pachinko peddlers. Konami is guilty of far more than just terminating some of it’s most beloved games franchises though, with far more serious charges related to their mistreatment of employees, attempts to discredit and stifle some of their star developers, and embarrassing bouts of mismanagement bordering on self-sabotage. In other words: They stink.
But Metal Gear is a franchise that has always existed sort of perpetually on the verge of death, what with Hideo Kojima himself wanting to retire the series for the better part of two decades. With each new installment in the series promised to be “his last,” Kojima has always demonstrated a desire to move on to new projects and to let sleeping snakes lie. Hell, even as early as the first game in the series, he had no immediate intention of producing a follow-up. It’s by a series of fortunate events that Kojima would be inspired to direct his own sequel — a series of events that would first see an alternatesequel developed entirely without his input.
Snake’s Revenge for the Nintendo Entertainment System released in North America in April of 1990. Despite being developed by a team within Konami of Japan, the game was never intended to be sold in its country of origin. Designed specifically with what Konami considered to be the tastes of the “Western market” in mind, it represents something like a divergence — an alternate path the franchise may have well traveled down, if Kojima had not stepped in to steer the series back on course. As a Metal Gear title developed without his supervision or even so much as based on one of his own ideas, the natural impulse of many of Kojima’s most ardent fans is to dismiss the game outright. But while it’s most certainly not canon, is that really sufficient grounds to write it off entirely?
Today, we aim to declassify this top-secret project, and uncover the shocking truths hidden within. We’ll order a sitrep on how this whole fiasco got started, proceed to the mission at hand, and recount the details of what happened after the game’s release in our debrief. So grab your guns, bring your bright red camo, and prepare to infiltrate the “FORTRESS FANATIC!”
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Friday the 13th
“If Jason Manages to Defeat All the Children, the Game Ends.”
"You see, Jason was my son, and today is his birthday..." Good-timey camp time art by @spaloonbabooguuscooties
The games industry doesn’t have all that great a reputation for licensed releases based on horror films, does it? Sure, there have been some great horror games that have taken cues from cinema -- your original Resident Evils and Fatal Frames and whatnot. But when it comes to actually adapting licenses, something always seems to get lost in the translation. Whether it’s failure to fully realize a film's unique concept in video game form, inability to instill fear in a player, or straight-up bad game design, so many horror movie games have come out feeling so lacking.
For my money, there were three games that managed the feat in the 8-bit era. The first is 1989’s A Nightmare on Elm Street for DOS / Commodore 64, which actually does a surprisingly decent job of capturing the spirit of the Dream Warriors installment in the film franchise as a top-down action game. The second is probably a somewhat “controversial” pick on my part, as I actually genuinely enjoy 1987’s NES take on Jaws as published by LJN. At the very least, you have to admit that compared to sitting down and watching Jaws: The Revenge, it’s a far better way to spend a couple hours of your life. My final pick is another possibly controversial one, and it’s another one published by LJN: 1989’s Friday the 13th, as developed by Atlus. (Yes, that Atlus)
Friday the 13th has taken on something of a reputation as a hated game, likely thanks in no small part to the Angry Video Game Nerd’s take on it. There’s also the matter of it not necessarily being a wholly faithful translation of the movies’ premise, taking all manner of creative liberties -- such as inexplicably tossing in zombies, for some reason. But you know what? I’d argue that despite all that, Friday the 13th on NES absolutely nailed the spirit and ever-present tension of the film franchise in a way that very few horror movie game adaptations have, before or since. It’s definitely not a game without its flaws, but I’m going to make the argument that it gets more flak than it deserves.
Yes, folks: Today, I am going to try and sell you on the game that dressed Jason Voorhees up in a purple hoodie and gave you a handful of rocks with which to stop him. But first, we’re going to have to put things in perspective a bit by taking a quick look at some prior attempts at translating horror films to video games, including an even earlier attempt at cashing in on our favorite hockey mask-clad killer. With those frights fresh in mind, we’ll reveal the evil within the accursed NES cartridge. And finally, we’ll investigate the devastation it left in its wake, and briefly check in on the current state of slasher flick game adaptations.
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Venetian Blinds
“A Fully Operational Venetian Blind.”
“Conceived and designed by Activision.” (Mock-up box art re-created by me)
Hey folks, have you heard the good news? No more video games! Eyup, it’s been a long time coming, but they’re all gone now and they’re never coming back. So, go ahead and pack it up; nothing to see here, end of an era, so on and so forth.
Sike! April Fools! Boy howdy did I have you tricked there for a minute or what, huh? That’s why they call me “Cass the Master Prankster,” folks: You hang around me long enough, you’re gonna end up getting bamboozled, boy I tell ya’…
Okay, so I don’t actually have any sort of jokes or stunts planned for April Fool’s day. Truth be told, I actually kind of find the whole “mess around on your website on April 1st” gimmick a little played out. So, I’m gonna take it in a different direction on the Bad Game Hall of Fame: Instead of writing joke articles about regular games or something like that, I’m going to write regular articles about “joke games” — titles which themselves were intended as pranks, novelties, or outright hoaxes. That being said, today’s subject was perhaps designed with a more unique intention: Pettiness.
Today we look at the most realistic windowsill simulator ever committed to an Atari 2600 cartridge. It’s honestly something of a stretch to even call it a “game,” as there’s no real objective to reach or entertainment to be had with it. In fact, I can pretty much sum up it’s whole functionality in a single sentence: You can open and close a set of blinds in front of a window. Needless to say, this was never intended as an actual retail product to be bought and sold… until someone had the gall to do exactly that. This is the story of the making [and eventual monetization] of Venetian Blinds.
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Castlevania Judgment
“Oh, You Know Who I Am… Musta Got Pretty Famous, Eh?”
“I will give you the greatest of pleasures.” Delightfully devilish art by Neesh.
As a diehard fan of the franchise, I take no pleasure in having to cover bad Castlevania games on this website. But the way I see it, when life gives me lemons like Castlevania: The Adventure and Haunted Castle? I’ve gotta make long-winded essays about them — the proverbial “lemonade” of internet content, if you will. So, here I am to squeeze another lemon dry… presumably.
You see, I’ve never actually played Castlevania Judgment for myself. I’ve had the means and the want to, but I just never wound up getting around to it. It’s not even that I was dissuaded from doing so by the negative reputation surrounding it — that much should be obvious from the fact that I run a website dedicated to the very subject of maligned video games. But hey, now that I’m running said website, I reckon that’s just about as good an excuse as any to scratch this one off the list!
So, a Castlevania fighting game, huh? You know, it’s really not all that terrible an idea on paper, if you ask me. There’s certainly a large enough roster of established characters to pull from; spanning dozens of entries in the series across multiple centuries of convoluted canon. All you need is to whip up (pun intended) any weak excuse for them to inhabit the same space at the same time, and you’re off to the races! But of course, fighting games cannot subsist on premise alone: You’ve gotta back it up with some hard-hitting gameplay.
But Castlevania Judgment was never given so much as the benefit of the doubt that it would turn out to be anything other than awful. From the very moment it was announced to be a fighting game, an uproar began the echoes of which can still be heard to this day. Hell, I don’t even think folk got nearly as mad about those “erotic” pachinko machines! Which begs the question: Could the sheer volume of this fan backlash have drowned out what is possibly an underrated game? It’s up to us to pass judgement.
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Drake of the 99 Dragons
“I Doubt I’ll Ever Be Done Feeding the Undying Dragon.”
“Let’s just say I’m done believing in ghosts.” Undying art by Nina Matsumoto.
Dreams really do come true. Yes, as the President [and still sole member] of the “Drake of the 99 Dragons Fan Club,” I just about fell out of my chair when I heard the news that my favorite guilty pleasure game would be making its way onto Steam in 2018 — a surprise announcement which came just a day after the surprise release of Chrono Trigger on the platform. But while the version of Chrono Trigger currently on Steam would seem to serve as a hugely disappointing conversion of a beloved game, Drake of the 99 Dragons has no such high expectations to meet: It was a game critically reviled on its release, and whose legacy has remained one of infamy for the better part of fifteen years.
It’s been an uphill battle trying to convince people that Drake of the 99 Dragons has gotten a bum rap. Without it being readily accessible anymore on Xbox or PC, it was all that more difficult to convince folk to actually give the game a shot for themselves. But now seeing it land on the largest games digital distribution platform in existence, I know the time has finally come. The story of Drake’s revenge and redemption begins now, and I stand beside him as a devoted member of the 99 Dragons Clan. I may not have the firepower to back him up, but I like to think that the pen can be mightier than the sword.
Today on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, I will legitimately attempt to defend what some have referred to as one of the worst games of all time; a title which has earned itself a permanent home on Wikipedia’s “List of video games notable for negative reception.” And before we get started, I feel compelled to state that my love for this game is in no way ironic: I genuinely love this flawed little game for what it is, and my hope here in writing this article is to convince you, dear reader, to consider giving Drake of the 99 Dragons a chance for yourself… with a major caveat. But more on that later. For now, it’s time to rock the dragon.
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Bad Rats: the Rats’ Revenge
Smash the Cat
“This game is a piece of pure fiction, actually we think all animals are great!”
It didn’t always used to be this way. There was a point in time where Steam had something resembling some measure of quality control — where 90% of the contents of their digital games store wasn’t low-effort asset flips and interchangeable RPG Maker anime boob simulators. There was a wonderful era where seeing half-baked releases on the service felt something like a novelty, rather than them comprising the vast majority. And for as much as I love so-called bad games, there’s no denying that browsing Steam in this day and age can be a bit disheartening, even for me.
Before all the three-cent trading cards and gambling for gun skins, Valve had to make their money mostly on the back of actual game sales. And before users had their choice of thousands of one-dollar games to gift to their friends as a “joke,” they may have had to spend a little more and pick from a much smaller selection. For many consumers, the bad game du jour ended up being 2009’s Bad Rats: the Rats’ Revenge — more commonly shortened as Bad Rats.
According to Steam’s own achievement tracking, only 12% of players have played the game long enough to unlock what should seem to be its most easily-attainable achievement (beating 10 of the game’s 44 levels). If we’re being generous here, it’s still very likely that less than 80% of players who own the game on Steam have ever even bothered launching it. Because Bad Ratsisn’t a game you’re meant to actually play: It is simply gifted and traded as a gag — an entry in your library that you can’t get rid of, and are meant to pass on to others like a plague.
… But what if you do play it? Could it really be all that bad? Is it fair for folk to judge this book by it’s cover? There’s a chance that Bad Rats may simply be a victim of circumstance — unfairly maligned based on its premise alone. There’s a very real possibility here that Bad Rats isn’t quite as bad as it’s made out to be. So, let’s try our best to clear our heads of preconceived notions, and give this game the benefit of the doubt it so rarely seems to receive.
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Hong Kong 97
I Love Beijing Tiananmen
“Wipe out all 1.2 billion of the red communists!”
There’s not really a sense of mystery as to “how games get made” any more. On the AAA level, it’s all pretty straightforward: A developer is tasked with producing a game, said developer develops said game, and a publisher makes sure it lands on store shelves. On the independent level nowadays, you probably picture smaller teams pouring their hearts into their passion projects, before selling and marketing their own wares online via itch.io or Steam or wherever else have you. Of course, it isn’t always quite that simple. And back in the days before modern distribution methods? It was neverthat simple.
For years, the origins of the infamous Super Famicom title Hong Kong 97 seemed to be a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. There are some who believe that it never actually existed in any sort of purchasable form — that it only ever existed as a download on ROM repositories and whatnot. Others might actually believe that it was somehow stocked alongside the likes of Super Mario World on store shelves, left wondering how the hell it could have wound up there? Naturally, neither of these theories are quite right, as we’ll discover together over the course of this article.
This is the story of one of the crudest, most amateur video games ever sold. But it’s more than just that: It’s also a story about the spirit of the indie developer, a history lesson on video game bootleggery, and a parable on how there are some bells that can’t be unrung. It’s a story I’m actually almost hesitant to write, given that the man most closely associated with the game has recently been quoting as saying that he would prefer that it fade into obscurity once again (and for good reason). But it’s also a game that mined shock value and racism for comedy, so I’m plenty content to say “heck it, let’s rake it over the coals.” This is the story of Hong Kong 97.
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Fight Club
Let’s See How Tough You Really Are
Ladies and gentlemen! Introducing; the chocolate starfish, and the hot dog-flavored art by @StarPyrate.
Fight Club as a film is not meant to act as a blueprint for how to live your life. The Tyler Durden persona has all the makings of a sociopath and is not meant to be emulated. Yes, consumerism sucks, but so do cults of personality and hyper-masculinity. Fight Club is a work of satire that a number of people have somehow taken at face value, while also somehow completely ignoring the best lesson it teaches: We’re all slaves to capitalism, and we must break free of our shackles. Now, can I interest you in spending sixty dollars on a Fight Club video game?
Of all the video games based on movie licenses, this feels like it might be one of the strangest. Not because the concept of an underground fight club doesn’t inherently make sense as a fighting game, because that part obviously does. It’s more to do with the fact it’s a 2004 game release based on a flop 1999 movie** — the underlying moral of which is to dissuade the toxic masculinity on display, and the plot of which is based around a character whose philosophy is that you shouldn’t blindly buy every product that’s advertised to you. It’d be like, making a 1987 NES game based on Platoon, where the only takeaway the developers seemed to get from the movie was “guns are cool” while completely missing the real message that “war is hell.” Thankfully, that never happened.
So yeah, I’m already going into this game with a fair bit of skepticism. I’m not really a fighting game aficionado to begin with, and I’m not particularly a fan of the film it’s based on. Of course, I’ll do my best to remain fair and impartial, but come on guys: It’s a movie-based game from 2004! I’m pretty sure the only movie game that came out that year that didn’t suck was The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, and that only sort of counts. But who knows? Maybe Fight Club is a diamond in the rough that’s just been waiting for its chance to shine. Oh, who am I kidding? We all know that this one is gonna — wait, what’s that? You’re telling me I can play as Fred Durst in this game?
… Man, forget whatever BS I was talking about, and let me tell you what I’m gonna do now: We’re gonna get this review of Fight Club rollin’, baby!
** Yes, the film eventually managed to earn a tidy little $10 million in profit. But that was after a failed theatrical run, and some more years after making its way to home video. I don’t believe poster sales count towards this profit total, but if they did, you could probably tack another couple million dollars to that tally thanks entirely to those damn things. I swear, I don’t think I visited one dude’s dorm room in college that didn’t have a picture of Brad Pitt holding a bar of soap on their wall.
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Ikki
Challenge Stage, Start
Sowing the seeds of rebellion, one gold koban at a time.
You know, it occurs to me that we don’t cover nearly enough classically-recognized kusogē on this website. Obviously, this is something I should be working on remedying. But if we’re gonna dive deep into the world of Japan’s “shit games” scene, we should probably start somewhere around the beginning; with the game largely recognized as being the one which inspired the very term itself.
For slang that gets tossed around so frequently (especially on the Japanese side of the web), it’s kind of astonishing that there isn’t really a concrete source on where the term kusogē originated? Best guesstimates seem to point to an unspecified 2002 issue of Famitsu magazine, in which illustrator and author Jun Miura seemed to coin the term while writing a retrospective essay on 1985’s Ikki for the Nintendo Famicom. A conversion of an arcade game released earlier that same year, the major complaints would seem to stem from the fact it’s not necessarily a great conversion of that existing game. Then again, I can’t be entirely sure of this, since nobody seems to be able to actually provide a scan of that original Famitsu article. But hey, if noted kusogē historian Heidi Kemps seems to sign off on this being the point of origin, that’s good enough for me.**
In any case, Ikki seems like as good a place as any to begin our descent into the wild world of Japan’s worst video games: It serves as a fairly early title in the Famicom library, predating other such titles as Takeshi’s Challenge and The Transformers: Mystery of Convoy by as much as a full year. It has an arcade counterpart that we can directly compare it against, so we have ourselves a nice little point of reference there. And above all else, it most certainly has the reputation for being one of the original kusogē titles, which more than makes it worthy of review here. So, get your homing sickles ready, folks: The rebellion begins now!
** Heidi, by the way, is also a wealth of information on other aspects of Japanese games history, as well as being super cool in general. You should probably follow her on Twitter and watch her PAX panel dedicated entirely to the subject of kusogē — appropriately titled “Kusoge! Japan’s Awesomely Awful Videogames.”
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Sonic Jam (Game.com)
Keep the World a Safe Place and Defend the Floating Island
Rolling around with one-channel sound. Tails-riffic art by @Spalooncooties. (Full-color variant available here!)
Say what you will about modern Sonic the Hedgehog games, but at least they understand what is arguably the blue blur’s biggest selling point: He’s gotta go fast. Whether you actually have much input over said speeding or you’re simply made to sit and watch as the game handles most of the steering for you, that velocity is still something like a series staple that the franchise does not fare well without.
In a previous article covering Sonic Labyrinth, we saw what happened when Sonic was stripped of his running shoes and made to move at a more leisurely pace. But even that game had its moments of high speed — barely controllable speed, yes, but speed nonetheless. So, howsabout we remove the variable entirely, by moving to a game system completely incapable of even conveying speed? A system that – despite coming out nearly seven years after Sega’s Game Gear – could only produce four colors in a monochrome palette and run at a top speed of what feels like five frames per second?
I only had a handful of paragraphs with which to briefly describe Sonic Jam in our retrospective of the Tiger Game.com. But it’s a game which warrants further inspection: A Sonic game so completely devoid of any mechanical fluency or merit, it’s incredible that it was ever allowed to see release. Taking its name from the Sega Saturn compilation of Genesis Sonic titles (including 1, 2, 3 & Knuckles), Sonic Jam on the Game.com sold itself under much the same premise, though lacking the content from the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Unfortunately, those who bought the game would soon discover that it was lacking far, far more.
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The Guy Game
Ounces of Bounces
Boobs: There are folk who would go to great lengths for a mere glimpse at a girl’s gorgeous gourds, even going so far as to pay money for the privilege. In the days before easily-accessible internet porn, you had a handful of options if you wanted to drop some dollars for digital breasts on-demand: You could take the walk of shame into the back of a video store, dial up a 1-800 number and have something like a Girls Gone Wild tape delivered to you, or possibly even pay for a premium TV channel dedicated to “adult content.”
But of course, there was one more route you might elect to go: Adult-only video games. Yes, as early as the days of the Atari 2600,** there were games designed with that most explicit of content in mind. While I would contend that early such titles were made more with novelty factor in mind than arousal, they paved the way for the perverted pioneers to come, who would persist in pushing pixelated promiscuity past the point of “proof of concept” and into full-fledged porn. Advancing past the technical limitations imposed on the likes of Leisure Suit Larry and Lula, it was inevitable that games would eventually come to incorporate photography and full-motion video of real nude folk.
With a focus on the female form, The Guy Game would be among the games to take full advantage of this technology. What followed in the wake of its release came critical indifference, public repulsion, and perhaps most notably; legal repercussion. Today, we’ll be examining the contents of and circumstances behind one of the most infamous adult-oriented games in our industry’s history.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a review of a straight-up porn game, y’all. A game I’ve gone ahead and added additional censoring to, yes, but a porn game nonetheless. If you’re not of legal age to look at this garbage, please don’t?
** Possibly even earlier, perhaps courtesy of some primitive ASCII rendering on an old model of industrial computer or something.
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Nintendo Virtual Boy (1995-1996)
Was This Their Intention? To Crash my Dimension?
"It's Not Playin' Around: It's For REAL!" Wholly immersive virtual art by @morkitten.
Nintendo as a hardware manufacturer is commonly associated with gimmickry -- pairing [typically] underpowered consoles with novelty controllers or whatever other oddball peripheral have you. From the early days of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s “Robotic Operating Buddy” to the core design of the Nintendo Switch of today, Nintendo seems as committed as ever to setting their consoles apart from the competition in non-traditional ways. And in markets where there isn’t already existing competition, Nintendo dives in headfirst and sets the standards that latecomers will have to try and follow.
In the early 90s, there was a brief boom in the field of “virtual reality” technology. Though this fad would be short-lived, with public and corporate interest beginning to wane by 1994, Nintendo had already committed to plans to bring virtual reality into the consumer living room -- potentially even on the go. In mid-1995, the Nintendo Virtual Boy was released to a public whose enthusiasm for VR was already exhausted, and only for the console to be discontinued within a year’s time. The Virtual Boy remains one of Nintendo’s most notable “failures” in the games industry, if not one of the most notorious flop consoles of all time.
Most folk who follow the games industry seem to have no difficulty pointing out “what went wrong” with the Virtual Boy; making it look like its issues should’ve been obvious, and that it never stood a fighting chance. But the stories behind failed games and consoles are rarely as cut-and-dry as they are made to seem. Look, I’m not gonna tell you “what you think you know about the Virtual Boy is wrong,” or claim that the console was some sort of secret success. But over the course of this article, I am going to try my best to give the console a fair shake, demonstrate its range as a games console, and to extol some of its several virtues.
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Spy Games: Elevator Mission
Get In! Get Out!
This mission has no code. My own attempt at an homage to this classic Elevator Action arcade flyer
I cannot think of another major console which lent itself so naturally to first-person shooters as the Nintendo Wii. In spite of whatever technical shortcomings the hardware may have faced, you can't take away how intuitive the Wiimote worked as an analog for a firearm. Unfortunately, the Wii is not remembered as much for forwarding my favorite genre as it is for enabling so much shovelware: For every gem like Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, there were two TV game show adaptations, three licensed kart racers, and a half dozen mini game compilations there to “balance things out.” Of course, as a purveyor of bad games, these shovelware games had their own appeal to me as well.
On occasion though, these two worlds would collide into one another, and leave fascinating bits of digital debris in their wake: Shovelware FPS titles. I was a connoisseur of the “Chicken Trilogy” (Chicken Blaster, Chicken Riot, and Chicken Shoot), prospector of the Mad Dog McCree Gunslinger Pack, and an unfortunate victim of Target: Terror. But there was one holy grail that had eluded me in the time before I ultimately bricked my original console -- a game I had heard legends about, but was unable to track down and try for myself.
I’ve heard several folk put forward the claim that 2007’s Spy Games: Elevator Mission might possibly the worst game released for the Wii. That's quite the claim, considering some of the competition for that dubious distinction. My assignment: To determine whether or not Elevator Mission is a contender for that title, and to try and figure out where the game went wrong.
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