Fight Club

Posted on February 11, 2018 by Cassidy

“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, with all that being said: Could I interest any 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 the year 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 “he said, she said” bullshit 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 (NES)

Posted on January 31, 2018 by Cassidy

“Challenge Stage, Start.”

Sowing the seeds of rebellion, one gold koban at a time.
Japanese box art.

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 Family Computer. 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)

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Cassidy

“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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Bad Game Music #10

Posted on January 25, 2018 by Cassidy

In another unintentionally “themed” update, this batch of Bad Game Music features three songs with incredibly repetitive vocal stylings. Also, I may have had a little too much fun editing one of these videos in particular.

  1. Hong Kong 97 (SNES) – “I Love Beijing Tiananmen”
  2. Spider-Man (GEN) – “Theme of Spider-Man”
  3. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus – “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Veilröth
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The Guy Game

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Cassidy

“Ounces of Bounces.”

guygame_cover

Welcome to a hell of boobs, beer, and Ballz.™
North American PlayStation 2 box art.

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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