Being an avid fan of 2.5D ray casting engines, I have a strong fascination with Ken Silverman’s Build Engine, which was the foundation upon which Duke Nukem 3D was built. That somehow led me to William Shatner’s TekWar.

Despite Duke Nukem 3D being what made the Build Engine famous, it wasn’t the first game released on it. There were a? few that came before it, and Capsto?ne was responsible for more than one of them.

Capstone Software is a kusoge topic in itself, as much of their catalog is either crap or sub-crap. While researching DOS games to cover in this column, many of their games rose to the top thanks to the preservation efforts of SNEG. However, a good many of Capstone’s worst games were based on terrible licenses, so they are no longer available. One of these unavailable titles is 1995's William Shatner’s TekWar which, for a multitude o?f reasons, I’m pushing for having it r??e-released. Come on, Nightdive.

William Shatner’s TekWar is based on a 1989 novel called William Shatner’s TekWar by William Shatner (ghost-written by Ron Goulart). In the early �?0s, William Shatner’s TekWar was picked up for comic book?s, a TV series, and this game as a way to prove t?hat William Shatner’s face was an effective marketing tool to sell garbage.

It was poorly received, but people are still trying.

If you don’t know who William Shatner is, he played a small role in a niche 1960s TV series called Star Trek. Since then, he’s coasted on that success and recognition, mostly in the aforementioned effort of selling garbage. Today, you might know him from shows like Weird or What and The UnXplained where he tells you that, while it’s just a theory, Alien Nazis definitely built the pyramids. Aliens just love pile?s of stone and use them to refuel their invisible spacesh??ips. His entire existence now seems to be thrashing against the forces of irrelevancy, and he will tell you anything you want to hear if you’ll just make him feel important.

Unsurprisingly, William Shatner’s TekWar star??ts ??with an ad for the TV show, William Shatner, elaborate logos, bad CGI, and William Shatner. 

You’re an ex-police officer who is awoken from cryosleep imprisonment by William Shatner. It’s maybe the 2043, and there’s a new drug on the market called Tek. It’s an ??addictive experience that puts its users in a blissful simulated environment where they can briefly feel happiness until the drug kills them.

That may have sounded nefarious in 1989, but these?? days, it sounds like the next product that Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg would take credit for.

In the future, the cure for a drug problem is murder. William Shatner forces you to use your police skills of assassination to take down seven drug lords and stop?? their plan to spread addictive happiness through the internet. You’re judge, jury, and executioner all in one, and rather than try and get to the societal root of addiction, you’re just going to kill the people supplying the demand. Law and order 101, baby.

You’re given the choice of seven “TekLords�?to take down, and I d??on’t know why. Judging by William Shatner’s lectures and the environmental storytelling, there’s a chronological order by which you’re supposed to tackle the levels. Nothing fancy, just left to right, but I’m not sure why they bothered giving the option.

Not that it matters. You absolutely can tackle the levels in any order. Aside from William Shatner trying to tell William Shatner’s TekWar in a linear fashion, there’s no real difficulty curve. Each level starts you off on a subway platform with your pockets emptied?? down to the bare essentials. Every time you enter a level, you have to rebuild your arsenal. Only keys carry between areas, and they get taken aw??ay when you go after a new TekLord, anyway.

I don’t even know how I would quantify difficulty in William Shatner’s TekWar. Every level has you entering a city area. Yo??u’re supposed to avoid causing too much commotion, and if you keep your weapon holstered, rent-a-cops will ignore you. However, it won’t take long before someone who doesn’t like your face just starts blasting at it from some unseen corner of the map.

One of the best parts of the Build Engine is its handling of map sectors that allow level designers to create the illusion of verticality without true room-over-room. This enabled the creation of levels that resemble real-world environments, which was something that games were pushing for in those days. So, William Shatner’s TekWar features areas that, in superficial ways, feel like urban environments. However, Capstone fell into the pitfall of those early games, which is that the levels are designed to feel like real places first, and how they function as the setti??ng for gameplay is a distant second.

As such, many of the rooms and areas you enter are entirely pointless. Much of William Shatner’s TekWar is pointless.

You’ll undoubtedly find yourself circling areas trying to locate the chosen TekLord without success. That’s because, while each TekLord drops you in what seems to be the same subway platform, the levels are often brok??en into different stops. So, one TekLord might require you to disembark at one spot, scour the level, and then, when you find yourself stuck, return to the subway to move to another platform and repeat the process.

But, li?ke I said, the only items with permanence here are the keys. So, you might think that you need to search for the keys on earlier platfo?rms to take them to the final area and unlock the door to the boss, but that’s not always the case.

There are only two unique keys: red and blue. When searching for any given TekLord, there are always multiple places these can be found, and often there are copies in the area where said TekLord is located. This means any earlier levels are pointless. You can’t ev??en use them to load up on munitions because, like I said, guns get dumped when you transition to new areas.

It’s so distressingly confusing. It feels necessary to search the earlier subway stops just in case there isn’t a required key in the last area. I don’t trust that William Shatner’s TekWar won’t just reload all the enemies again.

The baffling mission framework would be bad enough, but William Shatner’s TekWar i??sn’t fun to play to begin with. As I said, the levels are designed more for looks than function. They’re confusing mazes filled with areas that would be pointless, even if you were allowed to take your toys with you.

The enemies are just left to sort of roam the environment. Anytime you enter an area, they’ll start blasting at you indiscriminately. Since they just fire bullets that don’t show as projectiles, your charact?er just begins taking damage. There’s no way to avoid it. Your screen starts blinking red, and your life bar starts depleting slowly. Very slowly. In the meantime, you need to try and hunt down everything in the vicinity that is making your screen flash.

In any other game, taking such constant, unstoppable aggression would mean you die a lot, but I didn’t see the game over screen too often. That’s because, in order to balance the difficulty, Capstone just piled on the health. Even while taking continuous damage, your character’s healthbar is massive. Rather than meticulously place enemies to create a fun and challenging experience like a video game is supposed to do, Capstone kept tweaking play?er health until you had a fighting chance. That’s, uh, a very unique way of doing it, I suppose. I mean, it feels god-awful to play, but it’s a way to ensure the player can suffer their way to the finish line.

Speaking of which, each TekLord you kill awards you with a symbol. At some point, you’re supposed to take thes??e symbols into the Matrix (the virtual internet, of course) and put them into slots scattered throughout. I wouldn’t recommend doing this until the end, but re?gardless, it’s one of the worst sequences of gameplay I think I’ve been subjected to.

To its credit, William Shatner’s TekWar does a decent job of presenting a virtual world within the Build Engine. It differentiates itself from the rest of the game quite well. Unfortunately, it’s filled with inescapable traps and obtuse puzzles that take forever to solv??e. While I was trapped in this part, my partner asked me what I was playing. I told him.

He cringed and asked, “And how is it?�?/p>

“I’m in Hell,�?I replied.

It feels almost merciful after you complete the Matrix section and you're dropped back into normal gameplay. It's a short fight and then William Shatner tells you what a good job you did. Speaking of merciful, there was never a William Shatner’s Tekwar 2.

I’ve discovered that playing Build Engine games as they were released is next to impossible for me. The lack of mouselook feels awkward to hands that have been trained with that control style, and I can never find keybindings that feel right. Thankfully, there’s a Build source branch called BuildGDX that supports William Shatner’s TekWar, much like eDuke32 enables Duke Nukem 3D to run on modern setups. I’m not sure how thankful I should be that someone made William Shatner’s TekWar ??more accessi??ble to me, but at least I didn’t struggle with PGUP and PGDN to move my virtual neck.

One of the reasons I like playing bad games is trying to analyze the decisions that make them so terrible to play. William Shatner’s TekWar, for all its ineptitude, seems to have come from a place of ambition. 3D environments �?even fak?e ones �?were a new frontier in video games, so the playbook was still being written. When the trail hasn’t been worn, it’s easy to wander off in the wrong direction and be unable to find your way back.

If I had to imagine the design document, I’d say that the initial idea was that they’d drop players in an environment, and then they’d discretely have to find their way to the target and eliminate them. The problem there is that it’s difficult to then throw obstacles in their way, and it creates a lot of variables that need to be planned for. Eventually, when all th??e loose ends n?eed to be tied together, your player winds up with a towering health bar.

We get so caught up populating pedestals with games that set precedence that we miss out on the other half of the story. But while a soufflé that successfully rises looks much better, I’m more interested in the one that collapsed after the house was shaken by a Buick driving through the front door. Anyone can succeed, but it takes talent to fail as hard as William Shatner’s TekWar.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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In the early �?0s, Hulkamania stopped running wild as Hulk Hogan pursued his dream of acting and testifying at trials about steroids. The result was godawful stuff like Suburban Commando and Mr. Nanny. However, he also had a short-lived TV show called Thunder in Paradise.

I have never watched Thunder in Paradise. It’s not because it’s something I ??wouldn’t wa?tch �?I’ve intentionally watched tonnes of terrible things �?it just hasn’t been a priority.

But then I learned that I could satisfy my job, my passion, and my chronic Hulkamania with one swipe, thanks to 1995's Thunder in Paradise Interactive. That’s right, the Hulkster’s show somehow had a video game. Appropriately, it came out on the maligned and ridiculed Philips CD-i. I don’t own one, but the game also came out on DOS because one platform ??can’t hold back the most powerful force in the Universe, brother.

It took some DOSBox magic to get running. I’m not sure if it was particularly picky about hardware back in the day or if DOSBox just wasn’t prioritizing compatibility with Thunder in Paradise Interactive for some reason, but I had to pull out the big guns to get the glorious mixture of boats, bikinis, and 24-inch pythons?? on screen. I felt really smart after I cleared thos??e hurdles, but then I burnt my hand taking a pizza out of the oven.

If you’ve never seen the show, it features Mr. Hogan as “Hurricane�?Spencer and Chris Lemmon? as Martin “Bru�?Brubaker. They are two guys with a boat who spend time on the beach and fight people. That’s about all I know.

For the interactive version of the show, you play as Zack, who might be the nephew of Hurricane. I’m not sure why he’s hanging out with two slabs of testosterone ?and?? beef. The game is a typical FMV game based on the episode “The M.A.J.O.R. and the Minor.�?I’m not sure if Zack was always a character in the show, but I do know that he was in that episode. Here, he stands in as the player character.

The game opens with Hurricane Hogan strapped into a neural link thing that is maybe supposed to allow ??him to control a steroid-infused slab of human beef with wires coming out of his dick. It’s not really well explained.

After nearly frying the Hulkster’s brains, the eponymous M.A.J.O.R. stomps off. I can’t remember if it’s really explained what the M.A.J.O.R. wants to do, but apparently, having him on the loose with only half a brain puts the former WWF Champ’s daughter in danger. So, they get in their boat to chase him and strap the child into t??he brain-scrambling device so that he can control their boat’s weaponry.

I’m aware that the further I try to explain this, the more questions get raised, but this is what happens in Thunder in Paradise Interactive. This weird sort of augmented reality angle comes up as well since Zack is using a “soft gun�?to shoot dudes. I imagine that this is so they didn’t have to sh??ow a minor murdering a bunch of people, but once again, it raises a bunch of questions. What are the stakes here? Does the robot man also have a boat?

These questions may have been answered by watc?hing the episode, which I didn’t do. That’s how I live my life: ignorant and uninformed. The CD-i version came with a disc that had the episode on it, but I don’t think that was the case on DOS.

While the cutscenes hurry you through the episode’s story, it gets interrupted in three parts to provide you with gameplay. It’s routine FMV cursor shooting, sort of like Corpse Killer. The first part has you protecting the Hulkster’s boat from missile?s and flying cubes. You have a normal energy gun, rockets, and maybe a shield thing. It’s just marked as “Q�?on the? HUD. There’s a database menu after the first battle that tells you what Q is, and I know I watched it, but my brain rejected that information.

Either way, your rockets are limited, Q only has a few uses, and your energy gun takes a long time to charge up. I did not succeed here on any of my attempts. Every so often, the game would cut away so I could watch?? Hulk Hogan and Chris Lemmon tell me what a disappointing piece of s??hit I am and how I should be humiliated for sucking so badly.

When you lose, the scene ends so the heroic duo can further explain how you l??et the whole team down, and then it proceeds to what looks like a luxury beach resort.

In this section, it’s another cursor-based shooting section, but it’s more like House of the Dead or, more accurately, Area 51. Guys in hazmat suits po?p out from cover and try to kill Zack, and your job is to click on them with the cursor to make them stop. I would swear that this section always had the first dude take off half my health, and then, no matter how well I did after that, Zack would get worn down over time.

Once again, Hulk Hogan would interject and chastise me for not saying my prayers and taking my vitamins. Eventually, after getting shot enough times, Zack coll??apses into a pathetic heap in the sand. This results in Hogan’s daughter being k?idnapped for some reason. You’re essentially told that they soft-pitched you the hero role, and you still swung and missed somehow.

So, the whole team goes to some industrial factory or something. All the vats make me think it’s a brewery. Once again, the big strong dudes set off in one directi?on while sending the questionably armed kid with the egg scrambler glued to his head in another. This leads to another shooting section.

While the slow panning around of the luxury beach resort was pretty boring, the factory is even lamer. Thunder in Paradise Interactive seems to realize this because the bad guy (who we learn now is actually Rampike and not M.A.J.O.R.) eventually sends you to a virtual reality city. For some reason. Again, I don’t get the virtual reality angle here. So then you watch the camera slowly roam around the city, stopping to let guys shoot at you. This is marginally more fun than the brewery because you get to play “Guess the City.�?/p>

That doesn’t last because eventually, you’re sent back to the factory to fight because Rampike wants in on the laser tag. Despite the fact that now Rampike sometimes pops out from cover instead of the hazmat dudes. I was able to take him down once, and then I was sent down?? to the basement, where Zack wa?s killed instantly by the M.A.J.O.R.

Zack then wakes up from a coma, looking up at Hulk Hogan and Chris Lemmon. They’re just like, “Since you were busy dying, we had to do everything ourselves, idiot.�?Then after Zack passes back out due to intense shame, it cuts to Hogan and Lemmon telling you, the player, that you embarrassed yourself but at least you ca??n try again.

I did try again—a few times—and I always lost every game. Every once in a while, the actors would tell me I was do??ing great, but I think those instances were just glitches.

At one point, I learned that you can skip? the boring, camera-panning sections by pausing and un?pausing the game. After that, I learned that your gun recharged during these moments, and I ran out of ammo and just died quicker.

T?his was some best-effort gameplay, too. I was using all of my neurons to try and figure out what I was doing wrong, and it got me nowhere. I just kept getting ?told I’m an embarrassment by a guy who managed to combine a racist rant and sex tape in a single scandal.

Aside from that, Thunder in Paradise Interactive isn’t the worst FMV game I’ve played. However, whenever you set your expectations to “FMV game based o?n a show nobody remembers,�?it’s really not hard to be pleasantly surprised.

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Look, my chums, it’s Raya Systems! They’re the ones who brought us Packy & Marlon and Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon; everyone’s favori??te health-related edutainme??nt games.

This time, I’m finally sticking a finger into Captain Novolin to check the temperature. Back in the youthful days of the internet, when making fun of bad video games was still considered a thing done by cool people, Captain Novolin was often a target of ridicule. I’ll admit that the concept is definitely a weird one, but I’d argue that Rex Ronan was much more fertile ground for jokes.? Unless you li??ke making fun of diabetics.

If you don’t know, Novolin is a brand of insulin. Captain Novolin is an edutainment game meant to teach diabetic children how to balance their diet, teach them about diabetes, and it also suggests ??exercise. This is back when people could actually afford insulin, obviously.

Doctor codes

I personally don’t know a whole lot about diabetes, so definitely don’t take any medical or dietary advice from me. Most of what I know comes from Packy & Marlon and my first-aid training. As I’m ?sure is common, I know people with diabetes, but not in my immediate family. I have my own health-related issues, but nothing chronic that I know of. Unless you count my depression, anxiety, and debt.

But that’s what Captain Novolin is for: education. Except, it’s probably for people who have actually been diagnosed with diabetes. The first screen prompted me to “Enter the code your doctor said is best for you.�?I don’t even know what that means. I didn’t realize that diabetic people use secret codes. Thankfully, it provides the helpful tip that “If you don’t know your code, use 000.�?I was tempted to use the code 007, but I always listen to m?y doctor.

I think the number you put in might relate to the amount of insulin that the eponymous superhero administe?rs to himself.

You play as the super-hero Captain Novolin, who has the superpower of�?diabetes. I’m not saying someone with diabetes can’t be a super-hero, that’s ridiculous, but that’s literally all Captain Novolin has going for him aside from a speedboat and comfortable socks. He can’t even throw a punch, though th?at would be admittedly off-message here. I’m just finding out that he can stomp on enemies, wh??ich would have been good to know before I spent two hours just avoiding them.

World domination

The narrative has Mayor Gooden being captured by aliens and taken to the peak of Mt. Wayupthar. The aliens are disguised as junk food. I don’t have confidence in my own plans for municipal domination, but I’m not sur??e that dressing up as a sundae would improve my chances. They’re not even trying to tempt Captain Novolin to eat them and throw off his blood glucose level. They?? mostly just try to bump into him. Maybe they’re trying to taunt him, but I don’t think the pharmaceutical company-sponsored superhero is self-conscious of his condition.

The Mayor is also diabetic and only has enough insulin to last for 48 hours. With this knowledge in mind, your job is to walk briskly (because, remember, Captain Novolin has no superpowers) to the mayor’s rescue. I ??suppose it doesn’t matter if the mayor is undergoing some kind of alien brainwashing or intense probing during those 48 hours. The Captain is just going to take his time and make su??re he eats a balanced diet along the way.

That’s literally the goal of the game. You start out? in the morning and are given breakfast advice from a doctor. You have to balance your blood glucose? levels by grabbing food in the correct amounts. If you overeat, your blood glucose will rise, and if you don’t eat, it will drop. 

While the doctor gives you very specific things to eat, that’s really all that appears within the level. That’s a good thing because he only tells you at the beginning of the level, and I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast, let alone what I need to collect and avoid based on a short message. I found that, as long as you only collect one of each item, you can generally keep your glucose levels in the ideal range. However, I think the best strategy is more about pacing your eating, but I?’m really not interested in experimenting. On my successful run through the game, my glucose level only went too high or low a few times, so I was obviously doing something correctly.

Hyperglycemia

Surprisingly, the fluctuating glucose levels supposedly affect how the Captain performs. He’ll slow down if it gets too high or low, which isn’t something I re?ally experience because I’m amazing at playing bad games. That’s actually kind of neat.

However, the real risk here is death.? The aliens are playing for keeps, and Captain Novolin can only stand to be touched by anthropomorphic cereal boxes so often. You can take four hits before the super-hero will take a dirt nap. You start with three lives (more can be gained t??hrough points), and if you lose them all, it’s back to the start for you.

It’s pretty brutal, actually. A lot ??of the aliens have movement patterns that are designed to throw you off. There’s a cookie, for example, that has a low bounce that it uses to move, but the moment you jump, it takes a high bounce to deliberately block you. In order to?? get past them without being hurt, you need to leap at the last moment so you’ve already cleared them by the time they take their big bound.

Of course, I can do that ??????????????????????????just fine with?? my seasoned, meaty thumbs. I’d expect that a child would have more trouble.

It still took my beef thumbs a few attempts before I reached the final boss, Blubberman (heh). The cookies, for example, would sometimes travel in pairs, and I never found a good strategy to avoid both. It doesn’t help that the hit detection enthusiastically sucks. There was one part in the mountain stages where a h??ole in the ground extended far past its boundaries, so I kept jumping too late and falling to my death.

Hello, Ranger

To be fair to Captain Novolin, it at least seems like a decent way of framing diabetes for children. There’s advice from giant doctor heads, it makes all the care required for the disease seem normal and che??erful, and, as is law in edutainment games, there are quizzes to help you learn more.

It is a pretty funny way of presenting a super-hero, however. I had to laugh when he walked up to a park ranger, and the first thing out of his mouth was, “Hello, ranger. I?? have diabetes.�?I mean, sure, it’s a good ide?a to let people who might soon be rescuing your ass know that you have certain needs, but I’m not sure it will do much good when they’re pulling your alien-mangled corpse out of a ravine.

It may seem like containing all this information in a bad game would seem ineffective, but let me tell you something about the �?0s: we’d play whatever we had. You couldn’t buy 50 games for $5 on a digital marketplace at the time, so if your well-meaning mom bought you something educational from the store, you’d play it because it was that or running through Super Mario World for the 80th time. It gave games like Captain Novolin a chance to be a fond memory instead of just a bad game. That’s something that might n??ot happen in today’s content-glutted world??.

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Final Fantasy VII?? was released in 1997 on PlayStation. In those days, the NES, despite Nintendo only?? discontinuing it in 1995, was considered practically ancient. Things aged faster in the �?0s.

By the time the PlayStation had passed into antiquity in the aughts, the denizens of Web 2.0 became aware of a Famicom/NES demake of Final Fantasy VII. Since Final Fantasy VII was still fondly remembered and the retro gamer identity was reaching its maturity, this was a fascinating topic of con?versation. Just hearing about it took your imagination to interesting p?laces.

It was certainly fascinating to me. I didn’t know enou??gh about the backend of video games to really have an idea for how this was possible; a 3-disc epic on a diminutive cartridge. What radical magic!

I never took the time to play it, however. At the time, I hadn’t spent much time with OG Final Fantasy VII, so I didn’t have any attachment to it. In the spirit of the coming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I felt it ??was time to finally try it. And try it, I did.

I tried what I could before it crashed.

The Final Fantasy VII Demake wasn’t strictly some fan endeavor; i?t’s a Chinese bootleg. While the breadth and quality (compared to common Chinese bootlegs) suggest that its creator(s) had some affection for the PS1 title, they either didn’t have the time or didn’t care enough to really make a convincing 8-bit facsimile.

Final Fantasy VII Demake, like so many other knock-offs, is made from the parts of other games. Music, sprites, the battle system; they’ve all been taken from other games. Typically these come from other games in the NES Final Fantasy trilogy, ??but some are pulled from a variety of other sources. One thing I haven’t been able to identify is an ac??tually unique asset.

The game?? itself supposedly covers much of the PS1 game’s story but is filled full of notable omissions. I wouldn’t know for sure because it won’t let me precede past the part when you arrive in the Sector 7 slums. I can make it ?to 7th Heaven, but then the game freezes, often throwing the NES�?typical garbage scramble into my face.

I thought this might be a one-off glitch??, an issue with my hardware setup, or maybe just a corrupt version of the game, but no matter how I approached it, the result was always the same. I ran through the opening section three times, and it still refused to allow me past the bar. I blame Tifa.

In my troubleshooting, I found other people having the same issue, so I know it’s just not me. In 2013, fans hacked the bootleg and replaced all the stolen assets with ones that actually resemble the original game. 10 will get you 20 that the newer patch wouldn’t have the same problem with crashing, but I feel like tha?t defeats the purpose. Fans spending four years to make something better isn’t as interesting as s??ome developer cobbling together a vague facsimile of a popular title to sell in an inconsistent market.

The Final Fantasy VII demake wasn’t technically for the Famicom. It was actually for a series of bootleg?? “Famiclones�?that were produced under the Subor name. While Subor would start making clones of more powerful hardware, for a long time, they created different configurations of Ninte?ndo’s famous 6502 console.

Final Fantasy VII wasn’t the only game to get demade for the bootleg market. The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap, Harvest Moon, Resident Evil, and Chrono Trigger are among the titles to get backported to the system. Beyo?nd that, they’d? mash things together or make sequels to games that never received one. Before you get too excited, however, most of them are of extremely shaky quality. Most of the assets are just recycled from other games, and there wasn’t a whole lot of quality control.

Still, it’s quite the rabbit hole that isn’t well documented outside high-profile discoveries like the Final Fantasy VII bootleg. Most Chinese bootleg games are just copies of existing games released in massive compilations. It can be an adventure. Just because it says 50-in-1 doesn’t mean that you’re getting 50 unique games, as often they’d just be duplicates with, if you’re lucky, the difficulty tweaked a smidge. It might have Super Mario 64 on the cover, but it’s probably just Super Mario Bros. 3 on the PCB. Other times, it will just bafflingly mix up art by having, say, Little Nemo: Dream Master on the cover with Pokémon written over top of it. Wild stuff.

For that matter, the Final Fantasy VII demake came on a cartridge labeled Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which, if you’re not savvy, was the game’s sequel movi?e. No, none of the movie’s story makes it into the game.

The part that? I did play was a bizarre experience. The story, or at least the translation, is almost verbatim from the original. However, Midgar has a lot ??more brickwork than I remember. The environments are a mishmash of medieval fantasy tilesets. The Mako reactor that Avalanche blows up in the beginning is a dragon’s head. The slums look like an idyllic forest village rather than shanties cobbled together in a desolate, sun-deprived wasteland.

The monsters that show up in random battles are a similar mishmash. What’s worse is that the variety of them in just the first area is extensive and not balanced. One fight could be a group that goes down with a few swipes of Cloud’s large scimitar (the original bootleg had no buster sword), while the next could be a grueling battle against armored foes that have healing spells. The reactor boss itself isn’t much of an issu?e, but it’s all down to luck if you make it to them at all.

You need a combination of extreme patience, a good imagination, and extensive knowledge of the original to really appreciate the Final Fantasy VII Demake. With no real cutscenes, memorable moments are kind of glossed over or omitted entirely. This is something that only existing fans would really appreciate. That, and people who don’t have access to?? the PS1 version.

This is just how some children in China experienced video games growing up, so many have nostalgia for the bootleg games and consoles that they had access to. It’s a unique way to experience the industry; chewed up and provided in whatever way they could manage. I’m almost envious??.

When the Final Fantasy VII bootleg was discovered and proliferated across the internet, some considered it an incredible achievement for the NES. On some parts of that, I disagree. The cartridge used a large PRG ROM to store everything, then moved CHR data to RAM. This is pretty much exactly how the Famicom version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as some other titles, did it. The scale of the game is also not much more impressive than something like Dragon Quest IV.

However, what was impressive is that a bootleg developer known mostly for hack jobs went to the effort of such an extensive remake. Demakes are a bit more prevalent today, with games like Bloodborne and Dead Space getting the PS1 treatment. Even then, those efforts usually just stop after a small, reimagined portion. Shenzhen Nanjing Technology probably could have done Midgar and called it ?a day, but to actually go beyond that shows some dedication beyond just wanting to fill a cartridge with a recognizable knock-off. That’s a weird sort of respect to show when you’re cobbling something together from stolen assets.

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I don’t think it’s really ?possible to quantify the “worst game of all time�?or even compare kusoge that well. There are so many ways that a game can be deficient,? and it’s hard to say what the worst way is.

A game could be disappointing. It could be technically deficient for its era or mechanically lacking compared to others in its genre. For my money, the worst kind of kusoge is the boring kind. A broken game is at least fun to analyze, but an uninteresting game is just exhausting. As excruciating as it is, I would rather play Hoshi wo Miru Hito than, say, Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum.

But then there are the games which you just can’t believe anyone tried to charge money for. 1994’s Club Drive for the Atari Jaguar is one such title. It’s just not�?anything. It is a college student’s I?ntroduction to 3D Design mid-semester project submission that someone stuck a price sticker on. Or, at least, that’s how it feels.

Cat loaf

The Ata??ri Jaguar was a spectacular failure during a period of spectacular failures in the console market. Many people in North America like to neatly believe the �?0s were largely the SNES vs. Sega Genesis followed by the PS1 vs N64 (and the Sega Saturn, if you’re being charitable). However, the early �?0s saw a lot of consoles try to break into the market and fail, such as the 3DO Interactive Multipl?ayer, Phillips CD-I, Amiga CD32, or the Neo Geo CD.

Atari was still trying to bank on the name recognition it built in the �?0s and early �?0s, and the struggles of the Atari Lynx had taught them nothing. In late 1993, they trundled out the Jaguar, which they marketed as the first 64-bit console, inadvertently making themselves another casualty of the “Bit Wars.�?A laughable 50 cartridge games came out for the console before it was discontinued in 1996. As bad as the library was, there were some unfortunate casualties, like Rebellion’s Alien vs. Predator.

Club Drive was not an unfortunate casualty. In fact, its inclusion in the Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration means it isn’t even a casualty at all. It was, by some accounts, supposed to demonstrate the c??onsole’s 3D capabilities, and it failed substantially.

A game, I guess

It’s kind of hard to describe Club Drive as a game. There are three modes: collect, race, and tag, with the latter being relegated to 2-players. Collect has you collecting, uh, Everlasting Gobstoppers or maybe Koosh balls. Or, y??’know, I guess they could be unstable molecules. In any case, you drive around four environ?ments picking up some of these�?things.

Race is pretty self-explanatory. You drive around a track and try to cross checkpoints as quickly as possible. In single-player, you’re going for the best time. There are no AI opponents. In multiplayer, it’s actually a race, which is the closest Club Drive gets to being an actual game. However, the tracks themselves are really just suggestions. One track has you driving around a big house. It tells you the route you’re supposed to take exactly once and then lets you ?loose. I became instantly lost but eventually blundered over the finish line.

The last mode is tag, which is a mode, I guess.

It doesn’t matter what you pick. You’re mostly just left to drive an ugly car (that has several color options) around mostly flat??-shaded environments. The cars control like lobotomized shopping carts, the physics and collision detection are mere suggestions, and the levels are small and painful to look at. Thankfully, you can see all of it in less than an hour. If you have a friend, you rented the game, and it’s still 1994, you might be able to trick yourself into enjoying it for a weekend, but otherwise, I’m sorry for your luck.

Sedative

The fact that positive-ish reviews for the game exist is pretty staggering. Although, a writer at GameFan said, “Some nice static screens and smooth play help, but besides cruising ar??ound the house, this cart is the equivelent [sic] of a sleeping pil [sic],�?before adding, “zzzzz.�?That’s what I look for in my games, “static screens.�?Yet despite those hurtful words, the writer gave the game 69/100.

At the time, some critics seemed impressed with the 3D graphics, which might just be them trying to soften their criticism. 1994 was the year that Stunt Racer FX hit the SNES. To be fair, Club Drive does run reasonably smoothly, and it outputs at 640x480 resolution, which was quite high at the time. These are both things that Stunt Racer FX can’t c??laim. Yet, the framerate still tanks when you ad??d another player.

However, Stunt Racer FX is actually a game. It also has multiple modes beyond? just racing, but these are actually designed well enough that I can recognize it as a finished product. Yet?? the SNES wasn’t as powerful as the Atari Jaguar. The game was just better designed.

That, in itself, is pretty unfortunate. Club Drive was designed in-house at Atari where the d?evelopers should have?? been the most familiar with the hardware. If that was the case, they didn’t really put it in a good light. 

Deck chairs, etc.

There’s really little else to say about Club Drive. It feels like one of those E3 demos that console makers put out to try and demonstrate what their new hardware can do. Something like Nintendo’s Super Mario 128, which highlighted the Gamecube’s horsepower, but wasn’t actually a game that was intended to ship. But not only did Club Drive make it into stores, it doesn’t really feel like a good representation of what the Jaguar is capable of. I’m not certain there was ever a game that fully took advanta?ge of the hardware.

I have to wonder what working for Atari was like in those days. The company had been in decline for about a decade, and it seemed like there was no escape. As Paul Rose put it, “Between 1993 and 1995, a significant portion of Atari's income had not derived from Jaguar? sales, but from a patent infringement lawsuit victory over Sega. The writing was on the wall.�?Sure enough, that iteration of Atari soon ceased to exist in 1996. In �?8, the name and properties were sold to Hasbro, then later to Infogrames, who rebranded into the current Atari.

What I like most about current Atari is their acceptance of their past. Club Drive is an almost meritless game for a failure console, but they chose to include it in Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. Unfortunately, there’s no supplemental material to explain the game’s nightmarish deficiencies, which would be a feature presentation to someone like me. They also kind of gloss over the Jaguar’s failure, which is too bad. It refers to Club Drive ?as an "interesting historical artifact of the early days of polygonal gaming," which I suppose it is. The industry is built on successes. The failures are far more interesting.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Between 1989 and �?6 was the best time to be alive. We ate sugar for breakfast, groceries were affordable, and the internet as we know it today didn’t really exist. Mark my words, the world started going to shit after American Gladiators went off the air.

The show almost feels like the embodiment of how excessive and unself-aware the time period was. Big ‘roided up guys and ladies in spandex with radical names battling the general public in colorful and ridiculous feats of strength. I barely remember it, and I still think it was awesome. I was a bit too young for it, but my sister and I would watch Gladiators 2000 (the children’s version of American Gladiators) some mornings before school.

Those are some cozy but very hazy memories.

I’d say that’s why I picked up 1991’s American Gladiators for NES, but that would be a lie. I figured it would be bad, but I couldn’t predict?? it would leave me nostalgic for a s??how that I barely remember.

If you’re not familiar, American Gladiators was sort of a proto-reality show where a number of contestants from the general public would try to win?? a tournament against each other. Most events also involved battling against the “Gladiators,�?who were essentially game show bosses. 

So, for example, “Swing Shot�?has the contestants try to grab balls and bring them back ??to their hoop while attached to a bungee cord that allows them to leap around. The Gladiators are just there to frustrate them by slapping those balls right out of their hands. That was the typical setup; the contestants tried to score points while the Gladiators tried to prevent that.

I say “general ??public,�?but really, most of the contestants are pretty fit in their own right. They just aren’t drinking steroid shakes for breakfast, so they’re usually dwarfed by the Gladiator??s themselves. 

The NES version (other console ports are different) of American Gladiators has five events from the show: The Wall, Human Cannonball, Assault, Powerball, and Joust. It supports two? players if you have friends, or just one player if you’re like me. However, it’s alternating multiplayer, so you’re not going to be directly jousting your friend. Instead, you simply compete for score with one person wearing blue and the other hot pink.

To complete one of the game’s four levels, you have to succeed in each of the five events without losing all your lives. This is terrible, because if you choke on one of the events, you have to complete the rest all over again, and some are much harder than others. Each of the mini-games is completely different, so I’m going to go through them from easiest to most ??di?fficult.

Powerball

In Powerball, you find yourself on a field with five holes you need to drop balls in. There are three Gladiators trying to slap your balls, so you need to avoid them. You start with one ball, and each time you either get slapped or sink a ball, a new one appe??ars on the opposite end of the, uh, Powerball court (or whatever). You win if you fill all the holes.

This one isn’t so mu?ch the “easiest,�?but it’s just the one you don’t “lose??.�?If you don’t succeed in jamming up the holes with your balls, you still just proceed. The event is marked as complete. You just don’t get as many points from it. So, regardless of whether you win or lose, Powerball is essentially a gimme.

Assault

In the show, Assault was probably my favorite event. The contestants had to shoot a target with a variety of Nerf guns while a Gladiator with a much bigger Nerf gun tried to snipe them. It was fucking awesome.

The 8-bit interpretation is, I think, a reasonable representation, even if they had to take a different approach. You run up a vertically scrolling screen, while the Gladiator slides side-to-side in a gun-chair. You just have to avoid their shots until you make it to cover, where you find a little rocket thing, which enables you to shoot at the Gladiator. You only get a couple of shots, and the Gladiator takes a few to knock out. This varies as you proceed through ??the levels.

It’s not exactly how it works in the show. For example, the Gladiator doesn’t usually die in a fiery explosion when the contestant wins in the show. However, I think it does a decent job of capturing th??????????????????????????e general challenge of the event.

Human Cannonball

This one sounds completely made up, but it really existed in the show. A contestant grabs a rope and tries to knock a Gladiator off a podium by swinging into them. It sounds like a good way for someone to get injured, so I looked it up. Apparently, there was a documentary about the show made last year, and one of the Gladiators, Malibu, says he had his head split open on his first day on the show during this event. The official American Gladiators YouTube channel apparently had a clip of this listed as the �?a href="//www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4UJLvRLpa4&t=33s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer no??opener">Hit Of The Century,�?and it got taken down some?time after the documentary was released. Yeah, the context kin?d of changes how impressive the hit might have been.

So, it’s a bit, erm, interesting that whenever you knock a Gladiator down in the NES game, they em?it a rather high-quality digitized scream. Like, a real terror scream and I’m pretty sure it’s stock audio that I’ve heard before.?? It’s shockingly hilarious.

The event takes some getting used to, but it’s not too bad when? you get a feel for it. You just have to lea?rn to time your jumps so you grab the end of the rope and let go when your ass is basically right in the Gladiator’s face.

Joust

Most people probably remember American Gladiators for the Joust event. A contestant and a Gladiator would battle it out atop these tall pedestals with giant cotton swaps. In contrast to Human Cannonball, this event looks the most safe. As safe as, say, Sock’em Boppers, which I’m pretty confident concussed ?a few children.

The NES version kind of sucks in a way that reminds me of China Warrior. You kind of just flail at the Gladiator while trying your best to figure out whether it’s the high, mid, or low attack that is most effectiv??e. You can read their movements to an extent, but it’s hard to tell if the collision detection is bad or if you’re just not hitting your foe correctly. As long as you’re hitting them more frequently than they’re hitting you, you can generally gain ground until they fall off their podium (screaming, of course).

A??fterward, you do some quick platforming to the next podium to challenge another Gladiator. It’s not impossible, but it is rather unpredictable and hard to co?ntrol.

The Wall

The Wall is just�?Oka??y, deep breath here. In the show, The Wall is, like, a recreati?onal climbing wall. In the NES game, however, it’s about a mile high. And sometimes, it also goes sideways. The goal is to reach the top, and every so often, a Gladiator shows up to try and knock you off.

To move, you have to rapidly tap A and B to move your left and right hand to different positions. The climbable area is essentially just a grid. To its credit, it makes it pretty easy to tell where your hands are and if you can grab a certain spot.?? However, getting your hands on the same horizontal level is another matter. And if you don’t actually grab that grate, you’ll fall. There are some extremely narrow spots where you need to be very careful of where your hands are. Maybe I was missing something here, but sometimes my dude would grab too high, and then I was screwed.

Most of the mechanics here are fine. The Gladiators can be avoided by putting an ungra??bbable spot between you and them. Hitting A and B rapidly while having to slow down for trickier spots works decently, and it only hurts your carpel tunnels a lot. However, the fact that I couldn’t get my hands to cooperate and one mistake made during this m??assive journey meant losing a life, the whole experience quickly became frustrating. And physically painful.

And this is where I got caught up. I could rarely win all five games within five lives, especially when it came to The Wall. I managed to complete the first and second levels, but I gave up on the third because I hit a part in The Wall that I couldn’t figure out how to get around. After the rage subsided, I watched a video of someone playing through it, and I don’t even know what the hell they’re doing at that part. The spot they fit through is one tile too narrow to climb, but they manage it by doing a weird, one-handed shimmy. Is that a mechanic or an exploit?

When I started playing American Gladiators, there was a really weird glitch. On T?he Wall, if I hit the A button, my dude would just fall to his doom. Just drop. It confused me to no end. I read the manual, and it just said, “B button for left hand, A button for right hand?.�?However, that just wasn’t working for me.

And then, on Assault, I’d press a button to start the round, at which point it would instantly end and start tallying up my time ??bonus. Pretty sure that isn’t how the game is played.

I thought I was doing something wrong, so I just moved on to other events? while checking Assault and The Wall every so often to confirm the bug was still happening. Eventually, through no effort of my own, it just fixed itself. A started functioning on The Wall, and Assault didn’t just instantly hand me?? the W.

It’s kind of ironic that the real barrier for me to make progress in American Gladiators was literally The Wall. Aside from its unreasonable expectations, it’s not really that bad. I think that if I played it with save states rather than on origina?l hardware as I did here, I’d probably take the time to p?lay through it.

No, wait, scratch that. I’d still have to figure out how to magically shimmy through that section of wall. Gosh, I think I just really want to like the game, so I’m forgetting that the third level actually requires arcane knowledge to complete. It’s just so close to being a�?well, okay, maybe not a good game, but one that would be worth a weekend rental. Agh, it’s so unfortunate. We could all use a little more Nitro in our?? lives.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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I earmarked China Warrior for this column because of its prominence in the manga Hi-Score Girl. However, while it holds some sentimental value to the main characters, they don’t actually say if the game is good?. I will intervene: It is not.

While a North American copy of China Warrior would run me $40 or so (with case and manual), I got the Japanese version, The Kung Fu, alongside Genpei Tōma Den and Susanoo Densetsu for roughly the same price because nobody wants The Kung Fu. Okay, that’s not actually true, it probably has more to do with the fact that it was one o?f the first titles released for the PC-Engine and, therefore, most likely had a massive print run, so supply greatly outweighs demand.

The North American price mostly relates to the fact that the Turbografx 16, the North American analog to the PC-Engine, crashed and burned in North America, leading to a low print run. Maybe. The col??lector’s market prices are pretty dumb over here.

One thing I can tell you, though, is that it’s not because it�??�s good.

China Warrior puts you in the shoes o??f a kung-fu guy named Wang, who stands s??tiff and erect at all times. Wang must journey to the right side of the screen, punching and kicking his way through rocks, sticks, and non-violent protestors. Three times in a stage, he faces off against someone who can defend themselves and must cheese them to death.

I said this about Zombie Hunter a while back, but China Warrior doesn’t look like a real game. It looks like a �?0s TV show’s interpretation of a video game; like something you’d see in the earlier seasons of The Simpsons. Wang?? stands impressively tall, literally as tall as half the screen, and th??e obstacles you battle against are so laughably ineffective it just doesn’t seem real. It is a spectacle, if nothing else.

Giant sprites of man-beef were a big draw in �?0s video games. Hardware at the time was rather limited when it came to the size of sprites it rendered, so having big, detailed muscles on screen was something of a flex. It led to some pretty awful experiences like Altered Beast and the “Big Mode�?levels in Genpei Tōma Den and Predator. As I mentioned, China Warrior was released close to the launch of the PC Engine in 1987 (it’s actually branded as Vol. 1 on the cover), so the best way to sell the hardware was to show i??t rendering a massive slab of man-beef.

So, the priorities for the development of China Warrior had “massive shirtless dude�?at the top of the list and then nothing below it. Everything that couldn’t flex just happened because they needed to m??ake a game out of it.

There are four levels in China Warrior, and they all involve punching your way from left to right. The only underlings you run into are these robed cultist dudes who just walk towards you. Their hands are cro??ssed in front of th??em, so they’re not even trying to attack you or defend themselves. You just kick them aside because Wang is a hammer, and everything looks like a nail to him.

Three ti??mes each level, you have to fight a boss. In the first level, it’s Sgt. Slaughter, Sgt. Slaughter, and Sgt. Slaughter with a severe sunburn. These battles become a bit more varied, but by my count, there are only five unique bosses, and one of them is just Wang w??ith different severities of skin damage. But no matter who you’re fighting, it’s mostly just a matter of finding the best way to cheese them. 

Sgt. Slaughter, for example, doesn’t do well if you just ram yourself against the left side of the screen and kick him whenever he gets close. The ballerina lady in the second level can’t really defend herself if you just push her?? to the edge of the screen ??and punch her to death. The cheesy strategy changes from boss to boss, but there’s always some way to overcome them with a cheap tactic.

Getting through the actual walking part of the levels, however, sometimes comes down to reactions, sometimes relies on memorizatio??n, and always requires you to spam your fists. It’s not too difficult to get through a stroll through a level, but if you want enough life left over to cheese the bosses?? with, it helps to know what’s coming up.

Wang gains more life by kicking what are apparently boxes of oolong tea(?) but look to me like cartons of cigarettes. However, you can also gain extra health by punching very specific projectiles. Sometimes, this is a rogue arrow that zooms by overhead, but other times, it’s one moth in the middle of a line-up of ??20 or so. In later levels, it’s important to try and find these and remember their location so you’ll be able to stand up to your opponent’s feeble attempts to overcome your cheap tactics.

This is especially important because China Warrior doesn’t give you all that man??y lives and no continues. Or so I originally thought. As it turns out, it’s one of those games where you need to know a special input to continue. In this case, it's holding a??ny direction on the D-pad at the title screen and pressing Run.

Even with that, you’re going to be repeating levels quite a bit. While you’re inevitably going to cheese the bosses because the combat sucks, it will probably take you a few attempts before you figure out the right way to do it. And while it took me a mere hour and a half to get through China Warrior, I quickly wanted to clock out and turn it off. I thought to myself, “Maybe if I was paid hourly, I’d put in the effort to get through this.�?Then my dog fell asleep on me, so I was trapped with China Warrior.

By the time he woke up and went off to sleep elsewhere, I was on the last level. I figured, at that point, I’d play until I lost all my lives again, then call it a night. However, the Gods of Completionism heard my despair and chose to prolong my suffering. I m??anaged to somehow finish the game on that continue, at which point, the cave you’re in collapses on Wang as he stands in defiance of death. He manages to survive, at which point it starts up “Act 2,�?which is just replaying the game but harder.

I wound up clearing a full two levels of Act 2 on my remain??ing lives, at which point I finally released myself from my self-imposed torture.

China Warrior is kind of interesting from the fact that it’s prolifically bad. It drew people in with its towering, legally distinct Bruce Lee. If you played it at the time, you’d probably remember it as the most mind-blowing graphics ever depicted on your TV screen. Nowadays, if you know it at all, it’s probably as the game th?at everyone made fun of when it came out on Wii Virtual Console. Either way, I just hope today we can all look upon Wang and laugh.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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One of my oldest memories is of a time when my sister wouldn’t let my Ghostbusters action figures bust ghosts in her Barbie doll?? house. The exclu??sion was my only major exposure to the toy.

I did watch the hit 2023 ?movie, which I enjoyed. I think it was a fun idea to focus on the generational impacts the toy had on women rather than try to contrive some sort of hero’s journey out of it. Wait�?it was a hero’s journ??ey! That structure shows up in the strangest places.

Anyway, that’s not the reason I bought 1993’s Barbie Super Model. I did it because I’m still recovering from one of the worst games I’ve ever played. I need some comforti??ng shovelware. Gosh, did I get it.

If you're a supermodel, what's your super power?

This may surprise?? you, but I am not a supermodel. I know very little about fashion in general. If I’m not going anywhere special on a given ??day, I’m usually wearing one of a variety of colors of the same tank top and a pair of jeans. I only really learned to match colors and patterns as a teenager, and it’s something I still have a shaky understanding of.

Barbie is a supermodel, on top of being an astronaut and a veterinarian. She’s been invited to compete in “the National Super Model Competition,�?which seems like a strange sport but probably actually exists. To compete, she has to travel the country and memorize things. “A sup??er model has to look her super best all the time. You never know? when a photographer is going to take your picture!�?Barbie says in the instruction manual.

Gee, Barbie, that sounds time-consuming and exhausting. Wouldn’t you rather just order in and play Streets of Rage all evening?

Don't you tell me to smile

I wasn’t really sure how you’d make a game about being a supermodel, but suddenly, my mind is flooded with ideas. Most of them are more in line with the Princess Maker series, but Barbie Super Model is more like Paperboy if it constantly interrupted you with quizzes.

A level starts off with Barbie making her way through a location, going toward the right-side of the screen. As you drive her pink Ferrari down Hollywood Boulevard, weaving through tra?ffic like a self-centered cannonball, you eventually come across a handbag lying in the road. Like any woman would, you drive up to it to see if it’s designer.

You’re instead presented with a magazine cover with Barbie on it. She’s wearing some outfit, and it’s your job to memorize exactly what it looks like. You’re then put in a change room and need to put together that same outfit as accurately as you can. You first slide Barbie behind a privacy screen, and she then appears about an hour later in a different garb. These range from lavish dresses to what I’m pretty sure is the outfit the Beastie Boys wore in the Intergalactic Planetary music video. You change the three main colors of the??? outfit and then get to see how poorly you did.

Then it’s back to ?reckless driving. You continue imperiling pedestrians until everything suddenly stops, and you’re taken into a studio to practice your, uh, posing routine. Your catwalking? I don’t know. You need to guide Barbie along a path and press the correct button for each of the four nodes on it. Once again, this is memorization more than anything. You just need to remember the walking code.

A supermodel's super memory

Keep it i??n mind, as you speed back down Hollywood Boulevard back to the left side of the screen. At about the halfway point, you see a camera on the ground. Run it over! It takes you to yet another magazine cover, which depicts Barbie in a hat. Once more, memorize it within the half-second it remains on screen. You then need to replicate the hat she was wearing, the earrings she accessorized with, and the color of her lipstick, eyeshadow, and nails.

Then it’s back to driving until you’re abruptly dropped on the catwalk. Remember the code from when you were in the practice studio??? Now’s the time to copy that. From memory.

You’re then given your score, and you’re sent to your ne?xt destination. You find yourself rollerskating in Hawaii. It plays exactly like the Ferrari sequence but with less chance of vehicul??ar manslaughter.

T?hen you do it again while walking in Vail (Colorado, apparently).

Then you do it again in New York.

And then you’re done. That’s the whole game. By the time this article is posted, I will have spent more time writing, editing, and preparing it than I did actually playing the game. I completed the game twice. And then there was also my first a??ttempt, where I got to Vail and died because I had trouble judging the trajectory of rogue snowballs and slipped on the ice repeatedly. This is all on the highest difficulty, I should add, because there are only two. The second one says you’re a ?“Junior Model,�?and I am way more capable of memorization than a mere junior.

Don't give up, kid

I find it really amusing that so much of Barbie Super Model comes down to memorization. Isn’t a sharp memory what all little girls dream of? But what really tickles me is that it actually manages to create an interesting challenge from trying to remember images and sequences you saw mere moments ago. The fact that it gives you the runway sequence to remember, then forces you through another t?ravel sequence interrupted by yet another memory game, is actually a compelling challe?nge. I mean, assuming that you don’t just write down what the sequence is.

You get scored based on how well you perform in the various mini-games and how many bonus pickups you grab along the way. Shockingly, there’s actually a score threshold to whether or not you win the game. Yeah, there’s a bad ending that encou??rages you not to give up on your dreams of super mode?lry and to try again. Me? I only got the good ending. I have the impeccable memory of a supermodel.

I only know the bad ending even exists because, while researching the game, I heard it mentioned in passing. It sounded so bizarre that I had to look further into it and discovered someone speedrunning the game to ??get the bad ending, completing it in less than f??our minutes.

Don't ask me, I'm just a girl

Hi-Tech Expressions is the publisher behind Barbie Super Model, and that logo is still burned into my mind from playing the DOS Mega Man games. Tahoe Software Productions is credited as developer, but according to MobyGames, Bonsai Entertainment also did work on it. I can confirm this because Bonsai’s site is still up, and while the company still seems active on mobile platforms, they obviously haven’t updated their website since the early 2000s. I love this so much. It’s like op??ening up a time capsule to a si??mpler time.

Wait, what the hell is this:

It’s runn??ing in Windows 3.x, but I can’t find any evidence of a game called “Zeram.�?It has a suspended ceiling with fluorescent lights and what looks to be a tile floor, but the walls next to the protagonist depict store facades. It’s incredible. I feel like I? need to play it. Maybe I should email the company.

Anyway, back on topic. Barbie Super Model is, unsurprisingly, mere shovelware. At this point, that can practically be considered as praise coming from me since at least it wasn’t torturous to play. The only friction I hit while playing the game was, ironically, when I kept slipping on ice, but I’d argue that Barbie’s immense cushion of hair would have protected ?her from any head injuries. That required me to restart the game exactly once, which, as I mentioned, is maybe 15 minutes long. Though, obviously it will take most children longer to see the ending, since girls don’t know how to play video games.

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The Famicom can be perceived as the birthplace of kusoge. While bad games have existed since the creation of the medium, the origin of the term itself is ??murky but?? generally is believed to have been coined in reference to a Famicom game.

Hoshi wo Miru Hito, translating roughly as Stargazer, was one such game that rose to the rank of kusoge no densetsu (crap game of legend). It’s easy to see why. RPGs blew up in Japan following the release of Dragon Quest in 1986, and here is a game that was quick to capitalize on that with one set in a sci-fi environment. It even predated Phantasy Star by roughly two months, but not Ultima, which had been doing sci-fi since 1982. Nonetheless, Hoshi wo Miru Hito wasn’t short on inventive ideas for the genre.

It’s just too bad they're buried beneath indescribable s?uffering.

Aaaargh!

This look comes with the help of the fan translation started by KingMike and finished by brandnewscooby. If it?? adds any glitches that weren’t pres?ent in the original unpatched version, I really wouldn’t be able to tell.

You are dropped, without explanation, in a forest. Having no initial context is hardly exclusive to Hoshi wo Miru Hito, but it’s the sort of situation where your Dragon Quest experience really pays off. You’ll know that your first order of business will be to find the closest town. That town is actually one square to the West, but you’d have no idea just by looking a??t the screen. It’s invisible. It doesn’t show on the worl?d map. If you didn’t immediately go West, you wouldn’t know it’s there.

This game is about space ??psychics maybe Hot-B thought you might be psychic too!

There is someone who states that the town is hidden by the combined psychic power of its citizens, and I don’t know if that’s an excuse or if someone actually thought it was a good idea to have an invisible starting city. It’s honestly hard to tell with Hoshi wo Miru Hito, because there are already a?? tonne of design choices that leave you wondering if it comes down to laziness,? poor programming, or just baffling intention.

The hardest part of starting out isn’t even finding the first city. It’s actually surviving the first few battles in order to level up. There ?are, depending on your definition, three overworld areas, and each one has its own individual shuffle of enemies. In the first area, whether you face off against a foe that your underpowered pr?otagonist can actually take on or a team of three more powerful bullies ready to pound you into the mud is completely random.

In a normal RPG, you’d just be able to run from battles where you were overpowered, but fleeing in Hoshi wo Miru Hito is a skill (Teleport) that you don’t learn until you reach level six or find the second party charac??ter. You also need to be cautious, because Teleport is used on each char??acter individually, and it’s possible to leave behind the party members who can’t Teleport.

Aiiiieeee!

If you go to the Northern town of Deus, you learn some nonsense, but one helpful piece of information is that your first party member is far to the south. This is where it really sinks in that Hoshi wo Miru Hito isn’t merely ??an RPG; it’s also an excruciating ordeal.

This begins the moment you leave the second town. Instead of appearing in a tile adjacent to Deus, you find you??rself back where you started the game, one tile east of the Mamus, the starting town. You loop back around, then begin your t??ravel South, at which point you’ll invariably fall down a hole into a small dungeon. However, you don’t need to traverse the dungeon. You can just turn around and go directly back out the door. You then find yourself�?back at Mamus.

That little trap-door dungeon appears randomly throughout the forest in your p?ath to the southern reaches of the overworld. It’s extremely difficult to avoid it, so you’r?e constantly just sent back to the beginning to start the journey over. If you’re astute, you might notice that your protagonist learns to jump as they level up. This basically means that if you walk them into an obstacle (what kind of obstacle is seemingly arbitrary), they’ll leap over it for a set number of spaces. In the beginning, this allows you to take a shortcut over the water next to you, which is some sweet relief, however minor.

This doesn’t let you pass the pitfalls, though. I learned ?to get by them by going slightly north, then moving all the way to the Eas?t coast before heading south. There seems to be a shorter path where the trap doors happen.

N-Nooooo!

You go South, and eventually find another dungeon. Within that dungeon, you finally get the second party member, Shiba, who can jump higher than your original party member, Minami. However, I’m a bit confused about how the doors work in that dungeon. If you exit the door you enter from, you emerge from the other side of a wall. If you then go back into the dungeon, you enter from a different door, and exiting from that puts you back w?here you started. I think that someone got the spawn points wrong, and then never fixed them.

So, that’s the first part of the game. In the second part, you start fighting more difficult enemies, and that kind of takes you back to square one, where you sometimes get into combat against enemies you can easily take, and other times you’re extremely outmatched. Plus, some of them can paralyze your characters, which you can’t heal until far later in the game. If you manage to win with your remaining party memb??er, you can return to a healer, but they take damage for every step along the way and might die. In order to resurrect th??em, you need to brew a potion, take it to a different healer, and they’ll bring them back. Ugh, I feel frustrated just trying to explain it.

In the second area of the game, you quickly get your third party member, but you’re not done until you get the fourth. To do that, you have to talk to a few very specific people, and they’re all behind locked doors. The locked doors are just kind of incredible. You need a keycard to go through them, but that doesn’t just unlock the door. The key?card is immediately used up, so to pass through it again, you need another. If you’re just carrying one key and you enter an enclosed area, you become perpetually trapped. You have to save and load your game.

And that’s where I wouldn’t want to be playing Hoshi wo Miru Hito on original hardware. Saving just generates a password. That’s not out of line with how the original Japanese version of D?ragon Quest saved. However, it starts you off with only a rough approximation of the gold and XP you saved and sends you back to Mamus. Not being able to easily save before going through a locked door would drive me insane. I would just str?aight up eat the cartridge before too long.

Ugggghhhh...

Not that my sanity was entirely safe. To get the keycards to just test a door, you have to buy them, and their prices are completely insane. You’re going to be hammering the save state button just so you don’t waste these precious cards. Even then, you’re still going to have to grind like a stripper for?? the money you need.

To give you a sense of how much grinding is in Hoshi wo Miru Hito, I initially planned on having this write-up done last week, but I needed more time so I could do mor??e grinding.

It would take me a very long time to explain all the ways that combat is an excruciating chore. From t??he absolutely atrocious balancing, to the mes??s of a UI, I feel physically nauseous when I think back to playing it. It�?it hurts.

If you can believe it, I actually played Hoshi wo Miru Hito to completion. After endless grinding and talking to random people for a while, you eventually go to the third area. There are, thankfully, a few tricks in this area that enable you to get through ??it a lot quicker.

You go into space, which is depicted as a few pieces of floating debris against a starry backdrop. But weirdly, you can just wal?k through empty s??pace. I don’t mean jump, like you can over certain barriers and bodies of water. Your characters just straight up walk normally through the starfield. You can then bypass a lot of combat by walking on walls, and then it’s just a matter of trekking across Hell’s half-acre to talk to some porpoises.

Hrmph!

Don’t worry about not being leveled up enough for some grand end-game encounter because there isn’t one. The finale of Hoshi wo Miru Hito gives you dialogue with three options, and then you’re? just given an ending based on your selection. You literally just choose your ending.

There’s a lot more that can be said about Hoshi wo Miru Hito and just how horrendously awful it is, but this write-up is?? already a l??ot longer than I usually aim for. It’s just�?incredible. The best thing I can say about the game is that the music didn’t make my ears bleed.

This is quite possibly the worst game I have ever played, and I’ve been writing a column on bad games for nearly three years. I own Action 52 on the NES, and while that collection of games is equally �?if not more �?inept, at least the pain is relatively short-lived. Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken, Japan’s kyuukyoku no kusoge (ultimate crappy game), is at least compellingly terrible. Playing Hoshi wo Miru Hito was a mistake. It’s not just terrible; it’s designed to prolong your suffering. Any merit it may have is drowned out by the screams of its victims. I think it might violate international l??aw.

It was recently ported a??nd re-released on Switch, but only in Japan. Hopefully, we’l??l get a localized version in the West, but for now, we can torture ourselves with the fan translation.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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When navigating the squalid wastelands of video games, I often must turn to reputation to figure out where to stick my fingers. In the West, few games have a reputation for being awful quite like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

This is entirely because of the Angry Video Game Nerd, who I respect but isn’t always the best source since he’s primarily aimed at providing entertainment through a schtick. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been s?ingled out by him as one of the darkest spots in the NES library. I have to disagree.

Oh, it’s definitely awful. Don’t assume that I’m here to defend it. It’s as boring as a lecture on the history of terrycloth (did you know it dates back to before 4000 BCE?) and as tedious as chewing through a concret??e brick. However, what you might not expect is that, when examined through autopsy, a lot of it feels very deliberate, even if many of the decisions seem misguided. A game that tries to blaze its own trail and fails is a lot more interesting than one that just ineptly follows in another’s footsteps.

Blazing its own trail

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was created by the creatively named Advance Communication Company and released on the Famicom in 1988 as Jīkiru Hakase no Hōma ga Toki, or just Hōma ga Toki on the title screen. The full title roughly translates to Dr. Jekyll’s Hour of�?something. I often see the trans?lation of “wandering demon�?or “wandering evil,�?which I think is correct, but the combination of kanji seems a bit obscure.

As the name implies, the game is (very loosely) based on the 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. The NES/Famicom didn’t really have a good track record when it came to adapting classic literature. Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the first that comes to mind, as well as Frankenstein: The Monster Returns, Ganso Saiyūki: Super Monkey Daibōken, and, the most classic of them all, Where’s Waldo? More games probably should have just gone off the deep end when it came to interpretation, like Castlevania did. 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde didn’t really have a lot of action and was largely a guy trying to use science to cure himse??lf of being a jerk. It doesn’t work, and he permanently becomes forced to say the quiet parts out loud. There are ways you could make a game around curing shame with science. Instead, Advance Communication Company made a game about a dude walking through crowded streets, trying to contain his super-powered rage.

Immersive frustration

To celebrate human duality, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has you playing as Dr. Jekyll as you make your way across town, apparently to be wed. Along the way, he’s assaulted by birds, barrels, dogs, and dickheads. Once he’s tired of being pooped on and b??lown-up, he transforms into Hyde.

Hyde fol?lows in Jeky??ll’s footsteps. The levels are reversed and turned into darker interpretations of themselves, and you walk to the left. Your goal as Hyde isn’t to just upend polite society with rudeness and murder. Instead, you fight monsters. As you work out your aggression by blowing up monsters, you fill up your goodness gauge and eventually turn back into Jekyll. This is narratively completely unrelated, but strangely faithful to the themes of the book.

The key to the Hyde sequences are that you’re trying to change back to Jekyll before Hyde can reach the same spot in the level where Jekyll transfor?med. If he passes Jekyll, he drops ??dead on the spot, and it’s game over.

The biggest issue with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is that it’s based around the idea that, as Jekyll becomes frustrated with rude ??people and terrorists, his stress builds, eventually turning into Hyde. Advance Communication Company decided to communicate the frustration that Jekyll is experiencing by actually making the player frustrated. It’s so incredibly effective in its immersiveness.

The damage of everyday life

While you’re walking as Jekyll, you’re constantly under assault. Kids hit you with rocks from slingshots, dead birds fall on ?your head, and guys drop bombs at your feet. Every hit you take knocks you back about a kilometer, and there are no invincibility frames. Once you’ve made contact with something you shouldn’t, you’ll fly backward and take damage until it eventually disconnects.

What pushes this into excruciating territory is the random movements of enemies. While you can eventually memorize when and where certain foes will spawn, there’s a lot that can’t be predicted. Spiders, for example, hang from a tree, and rise and fall on a thread. In a normal game, they would rise and drop at a constant rate, but in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde they move at different speeds and to different heights on their own whim. A spider may hang unavoidably in your path for ages. Then it might slowly climb higher until you can pass under it, before quickly falling the moment you step forward?. This will, again, bounce you backward a few meters. You can’t just brute force your way through.

This isn’t so bad with birds and slingshot kids. They launch a projectile that does move at a consistent speed that you can react to. However, there are singing ladies who will spew musical notes in your way at random intervals and at differing am??ounts and distances. If you have the ?cash, you can pay them to stop, but first, you have to actually reach them.

The bombs the dudes drop have fuses of differing lengths, so you have to learn when you need to trigger them to drop their cargo and then retreat quickly, and when you can just push forwar??d and get out of th??e blast radius. What’s worse is that the bombs have really small explosion graphics and huge hitboxes, so you can’t tell when you’re still in the danger zone. It can be agonizing.

Cut out all the good parts

While both the Famicom and NES versions have six levels, Hōma ga Toki has six different levels, while Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has a couple that repeat. This also me??ans that some en??emies just don’t appear in the NES version at all.

Originally, I thought this was a lazy way of balancing the game. The Japanese version starts in a city level where you’re already up against some of the game’s harder obstacles, whereas the NES version has a more gradual difficulty climb. However, while I was thinking about it, I came up with another theory, which is that the regional publishers chose different hardware for their cartridges. I was going to look them up to compare, but thankfully, The Cutting Room Floor has a write-up explaining the discrepancy. 

It�??�s a little technical, but essentially, the Famicom cartridge was able to store a bunch of its graphical data in the PRG ROM, and move what was needed to the CHR RAM. However, in the North American release, they used CHR ROM instead of RAM, which ??meant all the art needed to be stored directly on the ROM, which was smaller by 16KB. This led to two of the levels being rather lazily axed.

It’s unfortunate because one of the few strengths Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is its art. The backgrounds are very detailed and scenic, and seeing them twisted and destroyed in the Hyde sections is actually pretty enjoyable. The two levels that were cut are, arguably (if you want to), the best-looking in the entire game. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a game that needs all the redeeming factors it can get. This just ??m??akes a bad situation even worse.

Despite the immense frustration, it’s entirely possible to complete Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In order to accomplish this, you simply need to make sure that Jekyll gains as much of a le??ad over Hyde as possible over the stretch of the six levels. There are infinite continues, but using them means that Hyde gets scooched right up behind Jekyll, and that actually makes things more difficult, because you have less opportunity to recover when things don’t go your way. This means that you may need to repeat parts of the game more often than you’d like, but at least it makes success possible.

Not that I’m recommending it. I just feel it’s important to contextualize Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fairly. I had planned on having a write-up of Hoshi wo Miru Hito ready for today, but as I was pushing through it over the weekend, I realized I needed to allow myself more time to c?omplete the game, otherwise I was condemning myself to spending my whole Sunday to suffering. So, I decided to pivot to a game I kne?w I wouldn’t have to spend the entire day beating my head against. I know how to self-care sometimes. 

And I think that sums things up well: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde isn’t very good, but I’d much rather play it over Hoshi wo Miru Hito. In fact, I’d much rather play it than The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Where’s Waldo? I have a lot of games in my library that are much worse than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and for some of those games, there aren’t things that I can point to and say, “See, this is actually interesting.�?/p>

The qua??lity of an experience isn’t a duality of g??ood and bad. It’s not a scale, nor is it a checklist. It's all about engaging with the senses, but unfortunately, most of us can sense pain.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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I talked about Pachio-Kun some time ago for my Famicom Fr?iday column because I thought the idea of an anthropomorphic pachinko mascot was amusing. Back then, I noted the staggering number of games in the series: at least 12.

I own more of the Famicom titles, but I wasn’t planning on making a thing of Pachio-Kun. It was fun to spit facts about the Japanese gambl???ing industry, but I couldn’t possibly do that for multiple articles. But then I got the Analogue Duo.

When reviewing it, I wanted to get disc-based games to test, so I ordered a bunch from Japan. They didn’t arrive in time. In fact, they arrived mere hours after my review went live. Typical. I was looking for cheap games and came across two Pachio-Kun titles that confused me. Why does a pachinko game have cutscenes, I wondered. Why is there a weird hammer dude on the cover? I can never find much information ??on the series online, so I had to find out for myself.

You're patchinkan daioh!

Pachio-Kun: Maboroshi no Densetsu was released in 1991 on? the PC-Engine CD-ROM². It starts out much like th?e Famicom games, where you take your spherical self out to a pachinko parlor to try and win big.

I’m not going to go into the background of Japan’s gambling pastime in this article. I did that (poorly) the last time I talked about Pachio-Kun, which you can read here. Or maybe read this article from Business Insider?, which is possibly more insightful. All you need to know is that its popularity exploded as a way to get around Japan’s strict anti-gambling laws. It’s kind of a cross between a slot machine and pinball. You pick the force the balls get launched and try to direct them into various scoring holes to win more balls. The goal is to ??drain all the balls out of a machine.

Balls

So, yeah, the rest of Pachio-Kun: Maboroshi no Densetsu is traveling from parlor to parlor, playing pachinko. Each one has a set number of copyright-infringing machines you need to suck the balls out of before you’ll be given another piece of the plans. The number for each location? feels arbitrary to me. Each parlor stocks a variety of different machines that get repeated throughout the game, and there’s no rule saying each of your wins need to be on different setups.

Not every machine is the same, even when they’re the same theme. I found I had an easy time clearing a table called Telephone, but not every Telephone machine is friendly. The pins are bent in diff?erent directions, and that affects where the balls go. You can inspect the pins up close on each table, and initially, I had intended to learn the ins and outs of reading them. Not far into the game, however, I found it easier to ju??st pump in about 50 balls to test if they’d go where I needed them. If not, I’d move onto the next one.

Some machines I found to be generall??y more willing to payout. As I mentioned, Telephone was one of them, but essentially, any machine where you can trigger little jackpot timeframes has a tendency to give the goods. Like the one where you need to get? your balls between a monkey's legs. Inversely, I hated the ones where getting balls in a certain hole would trigger a slot machine. I’m not sure if the odds are different in each of these machines, but I don’t think I landed a jackpot once.

Thunderhards are go!

Even once you’ve got a feel for how to win at pachinko, actually completing a machine requires a lot of time. And during this time, you’re going to spend a lot o??f it making fine adjustments to the lever and then�?watching the balls fly. I��m not a gambler myself, but I didn’t find this very stimulating.

However, it’s surprising how much context can lend to a game. I mentioned that I completed maybe three machines in the original Pachio-Kun, but I finished a great deal more in Pachio-kun: Maboroshi no Densetsu. I kept wanting to see more of the absolutely bonkers story and see what new location would unlock next. And really, there is a lot of variety when it comes to parlors, even though they just h??a??ve a different mix of the same machines.

Not gambling

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We’re friends, right? I can be honest with you. I know it. I was going to follow up my earlier list, 10 bad games you should play, with a similar list around the same time of year. However, I don’t have a kusoge chambered for today, so I’m bumping it to a ??year-end list??.

Do you know how difficult it is to play a bad game every week? Not just finding, playing through, and then writing up while also covering other responsibilities, but the mental toll it takes on a person. So, even though the column is informally called “Weekly Kusoge�?(not related to Hardcore Gaming 101’s “Your Weekly Kusoge�?, I skip a week whenever playing ba?d games just isn’t enough motivation to get out of bed.

With that?? in mind, I did 36 Weekly Kusoge articles in 2023. Here are the 10 “best�?games I covered this year.

Award for At Least Being Interesting - Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness

I covered Castlevania 64 and Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness back-to-back to show some love for the series�?more maligned attempts at 3D translation. And really, I can understand why they haven’t been ported, but their reputation as blotches on the series�?record is maybe not as apt. At the very least, they’re more interesting than, say, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

Legacy of Darkness is sort of the updated version of the vanilla N64 Castlevania. It includes the narrative campaigns ?of the earlier game, improving some things, but cutting a few features due to space. Personally, I think it’s still better, but there are some who prefer the original or, alternatively, suggest you should play both. That latter point, I can agree with.

Award for Kusoge that I Love - Paperboy (64)

Going into the article, I already knew that I liked the N64’s 1999 revisit to Midway’s Paperboy series. You shouldn’t be ashamed that a bad game can click with you. It’s not a matter of whether or not you can recognize the flaws alongside the strengths. Kusoge can be meaningful. Behind a?ll the bro?ken mechanics and unfulfilled ambitions, there is still human expression that can be connected with.

For the 3D update, Paperboy captures the bizarrely dark world presented in the arcade original and gives it?? a uniquely lo-fi art style and weirdly enjoyable music, then dumps a bunch of technical limitations on them. But all the fog and audio compression in the world could stop it from being an infectiously bright experience.

Award for Biggest Dumb - Final Fight: Streetwise

A sad swansong to Capcom Studio 8, Final Fight: Streetwise was reportedly mired in development difficulties before being released in a poor state. The developer originally had a more vibrant game planned that would be more true to the classic arcade original, but mar??keting alleged?ly wanted something more marketable. Ergo, a game that was like what was popular at the time: gritty and edgy.

The result is something that is just so, so dumb. As I described it, “an edgy teenager’s take on Yakuza.�?The story has Kyle Travers trying to save his brother, Cody (from the original), from drug addiction. The enemies? They’re also addicts, but the inhuman kind, I guess, so they can eat buckshot. It’s that sort of daftness that makes Final Fight: Streetwise constantly entertaining, even when? the gamep?lay is a letdown.

Award for Most Brilliant Kusoge - Tecmo’s Deception

There were a few commenters who were ardently offended that I referred to Tecmo’s Deception as kusoge, even though it’s one that I really enjoyed. Listen, I’m sorry if it upsets you, but the game is just an endless parade of “good enough fixes�?and blatant failures. Being entertaining doesn’t stop it from bein??g an oversimplification of comp??lex ambitions.

On the other hand, it does feature some great atmosphere and a wizard named Wizbone. There’s a lot in Tecmo’s Deception that I wish was built upon, fixed, and refined for the sequels, but instead,?? the developers went in a mostly different direction. I’m not saying the sequels are bad (I haven’t played them), but the spots of brilliance in otherwise bad g?ames are still worth preserving.

Award for Most Lovable Train Wreck - DinoRex

DinoRex is like Primal Rage if it were acted out in a playground sandbox using bargain-bin toys. It has dinosaurs fighting each other, but ??they appear more like toothless pugs fighting over a hotdog. Incredible. Just incred?ible.

It plays ho?rribly, with unresponsive controls, bad hit detection, and a senseless lack of depth. But then it gives you a bonus round where your portly pal gets to march through a modern city, and all is forgiven.

Award for Most Compelling Torture - The Genji and the Heike Clans

You and I could sit down with The Genji and the Heike Clans (Genpei Toma Den as it’s called in Japan) and just rattle off all the things about the game that just doesn’t work. It has major issues like its sloppy “big mode,�?cobbled-together platform??ing, and its horribly unfriendly difficulty curve. Despite this, it is a somewhat-beloved game in its home country of Japan.

I’m really not sure I get why. I don’t think this is like Spelunker where it’s considered kusoge, but still sells well. I don’t think Genpei Toma Den is considered kusoge over there at all. And yet, I can’t see it as anything but. Yet, despite that, I find it intensely charming. It’s very unique in its hostility, and the culture shock of its themes based on Japanese h??istory and folklore just highlight that. Forget that it isn’t much fun to play. T?here just isn’t much like it.

Award for Artistic Merit - Mad Panic Coaster

I described Mad Panic Coaster as a cross between F-Zero and a rail shooter. You play as a pair of children who are strapped into a perilous roller coaster, and you have to keep? them on track whil??e also eliminating hazards in front of you by throwing bombs. It’s madness. It’s way too fast for its own good, and I had a lot of trouble putting it down.

What was most compelling for me, however, was that it seemed to have come from nowhere before just disappearing into obscurity. The company that supposedly developed it was an advertising business that very briefly touched on video games. Yet, Mad Panic Coaster isn’t an advertisement. Instead, it’s an aesthetically well-executed and strangely fun game that is built on a nauseatingly unique premise. It’s not the best game (it’s on this list, after all), but the tangible passion behind its creation ma??kes it worth playing.

The Kyuukyoku no Kusoge Award - Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken

Sometimes referred to as the “kyuukyoku no kusoge�?or “ultimate crappy game,�?Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken was something I had to play for myself ever since it was featured in GameCenter CX’s “Ring Ring Tactics�?segment. It’s a game that is so ineptly designed that it defies comprehension. To challenge myself, I played through it using only the tips that callers had given host Shinya Arino in GameCenter CX.

I did wind up completing it, which just consummated my love of kusoge. This year, I felt something snap in my brain that gave me the ability to just unironically love bad games. Super Monkey Daibouken is probably what caused me to break inside. It has elevated me to a higher plane of t??hought. Or a lower one.

The So Bad, It's Good Award - Escape from Bug Island

Speaking of being broken inside, Escape from Bug Island is a game that has been living in my head since the early days of the Wii. The only thing I knew about it was it was apparently a very bad game, so I had to circle back and? play it.

What I didn’t expect was such a hilariously bad set of characters going through an absolutely terrible narrative. I also didn’t expect such sexy lizard ladies, so that was a bonus. However, Ray, the lady friend he single-mindedly dro??ol over, and his shotgun-phile friend all won my heart. I just can’t believe this is a real game. Simply captivating.

The Actually Awesome Kusoge Award - Cool Riders

Cool Riders is like Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: it looks like kusoge, but it’s built over the bones of a great game, so it manages to b??e fun to play. But while the bizarrely composed assembly of photo-manipulated actors and scenery make the ga?me look like it was pulled from the murky depths of a bargain bin, it comes together in a hilarious and fascinating way.

In what is essentially Outrunners on various motorcycles, you cruise across a world that resembles a travel magazine after it has been eaten by a camel. The world whips by you at light speed, but it’s impossible to look away as you might miss some of the bizarre scenery. It looks like the dumbest game imaginable, but when you actually accept it into your heart, it will block up a?ll your blood vessels and drag you down inside to spend eternity. I mean, you should play it.

Wrap it up

Maybe it's just my brainworms talking, but I definitely think you should play bad games. Video games are a lot like cheese. A lot of people �?most people, probably �?will stick to the cheddars and swiss of the world, and maybe if they're feeling adventurous, they'll try a gouda. Some are even happy just eating pre-packaged American cheeses. Anything with a recognized brand, probably one that is ?mass-produced, and that's as far as they'll go.

But if you really want to connect with cheese �?if you're truly a lover of cheese �?you explore. You try artisan cheeses, aged cheese, and cheese from animals aside from cows. You eat the moldy kinds, the smelly stuff, and every once in a while, it can be extremely unpleasant. Eventually, the unpleasantness doesn't matter because it's not about eating cheese, but exploring the complexity of?? its flavor. Normal cheese becomes boring to you, but at that point, it doesn't matter. The passion you've built and discovered is more fulfilling and meaningful, and your life is enriched because of it.

Playing kus??oge gives you perspective. It enhances your connection with the medium and lends it depth and meaning. You most certainly can stick to the supermarket cheese aisle and eat out of bags of pre-grated cheddar, or you can travel outside your comfort zone and gain a true appreciation of cheese. I mean video games. I'm hungry.

The post The Golden Kusoges 2023: Best of the We??ekly Kusoge appeared first on Destructoid.

On paper, 1995’s Cool Riders sounds great. It was the follow-up to 1993’s Outrunners, which itself was a multiplayer follow-up to 1986’s Out Run. Only this time, it’s on motorized bikes. Then you see it, and you realize Cool Riders is one of the least cool games to exist.

Let me back up a sec here. Cool Riders is absolutely one of the best retro games I’ve been introduced to this year. It’s a year where I feel something finally snapped in my head, and I’ve come to legitimately enjoy a lot of kusoge. But the thing about Cool Riders is that it certainly looks like kusoge, but it doesn’t play like it. 

It’s sort of a Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game situation. While the game’s graphics give you that whiff of kusoge, the mere fact that it’s built on the bones of a better game means that it’s still enjoyable. Better than enjoyable, actually, Cool Riders is a riot.

The fat is in the fire

By 1995, following some tentative hesitation, Sega was well into its conversion to 3D arcade games. Cool Riders is a bit of a strange latecomer. It was one of the last games to use Sega’s Super Scaler effect, pairing it with your typical raster effect to create 3D visuals. To put this into perspective, that year would have it competing against Sega Rally Championship for floor space. It was also the only game to be produced on the Sega H1 Board, which meant that the MAME community had quite a struggle getting it emulated properly.

The strangest part of Cool Riders, however, is the game itself. I’d love to see what the development pitch was like. It looks like something that was thrown together, but when you really dig into it, you realize that the whole thing was deliberate. A whole bunch of digitized actors and photo manipulation to create something that looks like an unholy union of Katamari Damacy and early �?0s animutation.

It’s a bizarre maelstrom of ideas, with drivers that include a lady on a Vespa, a cowboy, and a devoted father. It’s obvious that the developers at Seg?a AM1 weren’t taking this very seriously, but how such a mish-mash of ideas came together, I’d like t??o know.

Seriously, I would like to know what the development of Cool Riders was like. There’s precious little behind-the-scenes information I could find. Not that it’s usually easy to find background information on �?0s and �?0s arcade games unless they’ve made a massive im??pact, but I’ve never been this curious before.

Grandpa Is Still Alive

What separates Cool Riders from Outrunners and, well, most games at the time is its use of digitized photography. That wasn’t entirely rare at the time, with Mortal Kombat famously utilizing this approach. But games like that and Pit-Fighter were earnestly trying to look good. Futuristic, even. The art in Cool Riders obviously isn’t ??trying to ??achieve that. It fully embraces its ridiculousness.

People who have worked with porting the game have said that it uses a lot of assets from Outrunner, but I would never believe that the?? two were related. It’s hard to really describe the visual style.

It’s like if walkedoutneimans decided to travel back in time and get a job at Sega. It’s like someone dropped a travel magazine in a blender and hit Frappe. It’s like a Bible game tha??t gave? up on Jesus partway through development.

The game’s premise is essentially the same as the Out Run games. You’re given a time limit to reach the checkpoint on a continuously splitting sprint. This time, however, you have the option of?? traveling West or East across the world or just keep your journey in the Americas. However, the world is depicted th??rough the eyes of someone on psychedelics who never left their apartment.

Here Come Queen of Hurricanes

Even Japan, the country this game originated from, is depicted with sprinting ninjas and old castle??s. One of my favorite courses is the East Indies, where you travel across the ocean floor while flanked by sharks and giant octopi. You zoom through these stages at a blisteringly fast speed near the edge of control??. Part of the challenge is just being able to read the obstacles that are constantly streaming by the edge of the road.

The drivers are incredible. A backstory for each of them is hinted at, and they’re given a lot of fanfare for characters we have never met before. There’s the aforementioned woman on a Vespa who is aided by official-looking dudes in suits. There’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a robot and an old man riding a souped-up, old-fashioned moped. One that I mentioned is this biker??-looking dude who rides on a tricycle with his two children. Who are these people?

The game opens with Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf, which sounds like it fits more with a Harley Davidson stuffed in the corner of a movie theatre. Then you get into the game, and each of the characters has their own theme, and they frequently feel completely divorced from what is happening on-screen while also being kind of good.

The cabinets usually came in a pair, allowing you to race against a friend or unwelcome str?anger. It doesn’t really affect much in gameplay, as the timer is your primary adversary, but whoever wins in any leg of the race gets to choose which branch is taken next. It’s a nice but unnecessary addition.

A Little Good

I’m not sure I can really express how much fun Cool Riders is. I got into it ??mostly because I love exploring Sega’s Super Scaler games, but I quickly found myself hooked. I played it over and over, trying to reach the game’s absurd finale. I’m no doubt going to pick it up again after this.

It’s an absolute sugar rush of a game, with bizarre, eye-catching scenery flying by. Endless basketball players in Chicago, Dracula in Romania, Mount Rushmore in the Rockies for some reason. It’s incredible it begs you to try and explore all the tracks, to test out every driver, to dive further and further into the mind of a broken genius. It helps that it was built on the bones of Outrunners and is made better because it is absolutely in?? on the joke.

The fact that Cool Riders has never been ported is a travesty. Nothing on the Sega Saturn, not even a nod anywhere else. It feels like Sega doesn’t even know it exists, buried deep down in its back catalog. For that matter, Outrunners hasn’t been ported outside of an absolutel??y abysmal Genesis/Mega Dr?ive version. 

I don’t have much hope for it getting ported now, especially given how much trouble it gave MAME developers, but I’m going to make it my mission. At every possible opportunity, I’m going to bring up Cool Riders. I’m going to talk about it until everyone knows about it. Whenever I’m face-to-face with a Sega rep, I’m going to bring ?it up, searching for that spark of recognition or watching them squirm as they try to figure out what I’m talking about.

Cool Riders must ride again.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Primal Rage maybe wasn’t the best fighting game to hit arcades in 1994, but I have some fond memories of playing it with friends. I wish we could get some sort of re-release, or maybe even a release of the canceled (but apparently finished) Primal Rage 2. But we’re not talking about Primal Rage. We’re here to look at DinoRex.

Released by Taito in 1992, DinoRex has a lot in common with Primal Rage. There are dinosaurs animated by stop-motion and humans in the foreground. I would use that same description for both games when trying to explain them to someone who hadn’t played them before. However, while Primal Rage is an “okay, not great�?game, DinoRex is more of a “so bad it’s kind of good�?kind of game—the very best flavor of kusoge.

It is just incredible.

Ancient Anger

DinoRex is a fighting game where you play as a mostly-naked dude in a mask. He’s got a whip, but it��s not what? it looks like, I swear! Your dude wants to become the DinoRex or something, which supposedly means being the best at forcing a dinosaur to fight another dinosaur. While you’re stuck with being a buff naked man, there are seven dinosaurs you can pick from, ranging from chubby to annoying. Each one is extremely different to control, so maybe don’t try to switch midway through a game. It’s like learning to roller skate ag??ain after a severe head injury.

Apparently, there’s a part of the world where archeologists apparently have never been, where dinosaurs existed well after their alleged extinction. Long enough that people were able to ride them. DinoRex sees humans doing what humans do,?? as we take these critically endangered creatures and make them fight for our amusement.

There’s a prize for whoever manages to coerce their dinosaur into wi?nning the tournament; they get to become King. I think. The text crawls that try to tel??l the narrative are hilariously mistranslated to the point where I don’t think I fully understand what’s going on. There’s some sort of queen involved, but I don’t really know how she plays into this. I think it might just be an excuse to have a woman in a loincloth on the attract screen.

I’m not even being facetious or disingenuous here. DinoRex has more exposit??ional cutscenes than?? you usually see in this sort of arcade game, and I still can’t really tell what’s going on. It starts out simple enough, then you blink and find it rolling down the steep slope into madness. I still can’t tell if the Queen is some sort of overlord or a prize for winning at dinosaur abuse. It’s very eager to tell you nothing at all.

Primitive Fury

It’s also really difficult to describe the gameplay. It subscribes to the general idea most fighting games following Yie Ar Kung-Fu did. You hold ??a direction, press a button, and your dinosaur does a thing. However, I’m not sure how many different moves each one has or how they relate to the combination you’ve pressed.

Here’s how you win, ??though: find the button/direction combo that makes your dinosaur latch onto its opponent’s throat. Keep doing that until someone dies. You win.

If you want to cinch the win, you can force your dinosaur to do its special move. Your special bar is segmented into three pieces. You fill it by holding up, which makes the dinosaur throw its chubby head back and give a mighty roar. Then, once it’s filled, you can hit the special button and then just walk away. So long as it doesn’t get interrupted, your dinosaur will pull off one attack for every segment of the bar you have filled. So, if you have one bar filled, it will knock its opponent back once. If all three are full, your dinosaur will hit the other dino once, wait until it stops skidding along the ground, hit it a second time, wait for it to stop skidding aga?in, and then �?you guessed it �?hit it again.

The three-hit process takes literally 10 seconds, which, when put in the context of arcade games in general and figh?ting games specifically, is approximately a decade. In these 10 seconds, no one needs to press a button. The sequence c??annot be interrupted. You are a slave to the dino-combo.

Primordial Animosity

On the other hand, the special combos are kind of cool. If there’s one thing that DinoRex does legitimately well,? it’s the destruction of its environments. Amazonians scatter, cages are crushed, and dust flies up as structures give out under the ample bodies of the dinos?aurs.

It’s not the absolute best part, however. The best part is that every few battles, there’s a bonus stage. These are framed as being dreams, but they involve your portly pal marching through modern cities and wrecking buildings. These don’t really play any b?etter than the fight scenes, but the mere fact that you’re kicking army dudes and knocking helicopters out of the sky makes them worthwhile spectacles.

There are two city bonus levels, but t?he? last one is kicking Amazonians for some reason.

Weirdly, the dream sequences seem to tell a side story. Your dino pal is wrecking up Ho Lee City??, which is run by Mr. Ho Lee. Beyo??nd just running a city, Mr. Ho Lee also has some sort of tower that he’s really protective of. He hires the police and military to protect that building in particular from the rotund reptile wreaking havoc, so your ultimate goal is to knock it over.

What that has to do with anything, I have no idea. H?owever, succeeding, you’re rewarded with the “Collopse of?? the cIvIlIzatIon�?[sic, obviously]. Simply incredible.

Uh... Past Vexation

At the end of the fight, for absolutely no reason, a pterodactyl swoops down and snatches up the Amazonian dude as they grieve the loss of their best dinosaur friend. Sometimes, they just fly off with the guy, but every once in a while they’ll just swallow them whole. This sort of p??layer shaming was what made thi?s era of arcade games the best.

It’s hard to tell if the developers were in on the whole ridiculous spectacle �?if it’s intentionally humorous or accidentally funny. There are times when it seems like they were trying to make something cool that might pull people away from Street Fighter II, but other times, it’s just too ridiculous to be accidental. Exactly like Deadly Premonition, is what I’m saying.

And like Deadly Premonition, I absolutely love DinoRex. For a long time, it was never ported. It did land on a Taito compilation for PS2 in 2007, but only in Japan. I probably wouldn’t have discovered it if it hadn’t landed on the Taito Milestones 2 collection for Switch. More recently, it’s also avail??able as a standalone Arcade Archives release.

Every once in a while, I come across a kusoge that just is so fascinatingly inept that I practically fall in love. DinoRex was one of these games. I’m so enthusiastic about its terribleness that this is the third time I’ve written about it and each time, I extoll how incredible it is to experi??ence. This is one of the best parts about art across all media. Whether something is well-executed or not doesn’t matter in the least. What matters is how well it connects with you.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Money is really depressing to me. Not only have recent events left me with a deep anxiety about finances, it seems that a lot of people are struggling, and the best you can hope for is to struggle less. I don’t want to discuss this on a deeper level, so instead, let’s talk about Wall Street Kid.

Wall Street Kid is actually known as The Money Game II: Kabutochou no Kiseki in Japan, meaning that, yes, it’s the second in a series, with the first game never seeing a release outside of Japan. You could also look at the games as a spin-off of another Sofel series, Casino Kid, but?? they’re not actuall?y related aside from sharing a developer.

I want to note off the top that I wouldn’t consider Wall Street Kid to be kusoge. It’s really not that bad, and Sofel did a great job localizing it by basically rebuilding everything to be more Western-friendly.?? It’s just such a bizarre game that I didn’t see myself covering it a??ny other way, and it fits best in this column. I’m mad with power.

The game looks easy, that's why it sells

Wall Street Kid places you in the leather wingtips of the eponymous protagonist as he’s informed ??of the death of a family member. Apparently, your distant uncle has passed and left you his absurdly colossal fortune, but only if you prove that you’re already privileged enough to ??deserve it. Uncle Benedict has some pretty specific demands that you carry on the family name with undeserved dignity.

You’re given $500,000 of seed money, and you need to play the stock market to build up your life. You need to buy a house, get married, honeymoon on a yacht, and then re-obtain?? the family castle. For some reason, you ne??ed to do this in four months. Otherwise, the $600 Billion (wtf!?) in assets goes to�?I don’t know, probably some greedy charity or something.

Those are some pretty incredi??ble? demands from a dead guy with too much money and no children.

Essentially, it means that you have to have enough money to pass certain milestones. At the end of the first month (April), you need to buy a $1 million home. T??hat’s pretty funny nowadays with an out-of-control, overpriced housing market. 

Kicking, squealing Gucci little piggy

What’s funnier is that, at the start of the game, Mr. Kid already has a fiancée, and you’re now obligated to keep her happy in order to receive your absurdly massive inheritance. That means she’ll keep coming to you wanting you to buy her expensive things and will leave? you if you don’t. Ah, true love.

She must know about the inheritance because this is practically extortion. She can demand anything she wants because if you don’t give in, she can just leave, and you can kiss that money goodbye. It’s a hilariously effective and cynical approach to a relationship. Every time the phone would ring, I’d fin?d myself cha??nting, “Please don’t be my girlfriend,�?before advancing the text. Video games have always been great at teaching children about adult relationships.

To be fair to the fiancée, you ca?n say no to some of her demands and still succeed. It’s just if you don’t give in occas??ionally or ignore her outright that you lose.

Failing upwards

Games that simulate the stock exchange weren’t uncommon, even when Wall Street Kid hit the market. The concept is already pretty abstract and rooted in mathematics, so it’s a perfect fit for a video conversion. As such, there were attempts at stock exchange simulations before video games even left mainframe computers.

The milestones you have to reach are perhaps the only thing that really makes Wall Street Kid stand out. The day-by-day task of betting on stock is pretty boring. You get the newspaper in the morning that tells you what stocks are doing well, and the best way to succeed is to just put your money into one of the day’s top performers. I never had one severely crash out on me, but for that matter, I never lucked out and won b??ig on something. It’s a rather predictable market.

Actually, I’m not sure if there’s even much room for skill here. The best strategy seems to be buying as much high-performing stock as you can at the time. When it stops performing, you just sell your stocks and trade over to something else. Whether or not that stock continues at that rate or not is kind of just random. S?ometimes, not much of anything would rise in the market for me, so it wouldn’t m?atter what I picked. Realistic? I don’t know. I’m not an investor.

Since there’s ??a newspaper, I would have expected that it would cover events that impact certain stocks. Something like a worldwide telecom outage that affects the prices of ATNT or a war breaking out that boosts steel prices. There’s none of that. Categories of stocks just do well some day??s, and that’s about it.

Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew

At the end of June, you get to bid on the Benedict family castle, and by the end of July, you need to have enough money to pay it off. My playthrough video of Wall Street Kid is clocked at over 2 hours, but I accidentally said “yes�?to something I shouldn’t?? have in my first attempt and lost in the first month and had to start over. Really, you could probably put a bow on it in an hour if your wheeling is up to par with your dealing. And you don��t accidentally select the wrong dialogue option.

I failed at the end, falling a hair short of afford??ing the castle.

So, I guess I don’t?? “earn�?the astronomical inheritance. How heartbreaking. I guess I’m just going to have to live the rest of my life as a failure with my wife, dog, million-dollar house, yacht, and $2.5 million in assets. All that hard wo?rk for nothing. Why must I suffer?

But I'll star??t over, and this time, I will have that inheritance that I deserve. Then, I will rub elbows with the other elite of this world. The champions who reign above average humans. And then I will gradually lose touch with the common person and form a spiritual hole where my humanity used to be. I will try to fill it, and when that doesn’t work, I’ll just hide it behind dead eyes, an empty smile, and a passionless relationship. I’d obscure it by establishing a charity for some popular c?ause. I'd show it to those beneath the heel of my boot that I still have a soul �?some sort of compassion �?while at the same time using it to dodge taxes and funnel money into my other corporate endeavors before it lands right back into my pockets. Not one drop of my money should be touched by the disgusting sorts of people who seek charity. What have they done to deserve it?

Not like me. I earned every dime. I played Wall Street Kid.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Let’s take a moment to show some appreciation for the publis??hers who have the guts to keep kusoge available for purchase. Ziggurat. Nightdive. Thank you for giving me a megaphone to cry for help. Hop?efully, someone will hear my pleas.

I’ve been fighting a losing battle to try and get Extreme Paintbrawl working on a modern PC. That game has the reputation of being the absolute worst game ever built in Ken Silverman’s wonderful Build Engine. While the engine was home to games like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood, it also had a lot more questionable games. Last week, I covered 1998's Nam. This week, we’re looking at another game by the same developer, World War II G.I.. Maybe next week, we’ll look at William Shatner’s TekWar if I can get it working. Let’s hope not!

The kids have to learn about TekWar sooner or later

Released in 1999 �?one year after Nam �?World War II G.I. is pretty easy to discern just based on the name on the tin. Once again, we’re taking Duke Nukem 3D’s Build Engine and transplanti??ng it to another place. This time, it’s France during World War II rather than Vietnam.

At least with this setting, it’s one of the rare wars where intervention seemed necessary, unlike the Vietnam War. I still don’t really want to talk about it, though. That’s how exhausted I am from keeping up with the ongoing real-world wars. To sum up the backstory to World War II G.I., it’s 1944. The Axis still ?have control over most of Europe, and the Allies are launching a seaborne invasion of Normandy, France.

More importantly, the game was developed in 1999, a year after Saving Private Ryan hit theatres. It was a few months before Medal of Honor would start the avalanche of WW2 games that would become a hallmark of the era. The time was right, but there are plenty of reasons why few remember World War II G.I. Heck, at this point, Medal of Honor hasn’t been a household name in nearly a decade.

I hope I don’t get these screenshots mixed up with Nam

It’s bold for World War II G.I. to open with D-Day. Medal of Honor: Frontline in 2002 would do the same, and it’s an effective but extremely unfriendly way to introduce players to a game. What makes matters worse is that World War II G.I. did it without thinking it through. It’s not that D-Day is the best way to open a WW2 game, and it’s not that the devs considered how to implement it in a way that gave a good point of entry; it’s here because they really liked that scene in Saving Private Ryan.

It really sucks. This is not just because the Nazis are defending a fortified position but because your squadmates will gladly shoot you in the back. Constantly. You might not even realize why you’re dying, at first. It will probably take some time for you to figure out where you’re getting shot from. But let me tell yo??u, your fellow soldiers really ha?te your guts.

Thankfully, friendly fire isn’t quite the problem it was in Nam. The game had your allies raining artillery shells and bombs down on your position, and there was little you could do to avoid exploding. World War II G.I. tones this down a lot. It’s still there. You’ll still ran??domly explode. But it’s nowhere near the problem it was in its predecessor.

Meanwhile, there are also fewer mines. The undergrowth of Nam was littered with landmines ready to separate you from your legs. Again, World War II G.I. still has landmines, and they’re just as annoying, but they’re generally clustered in positions that are off the path. I mean, not to tell the Nazis how to do their job, but I feel like this is the opposite of how you want to plac?e landmines. Still, it makes for a much more e??njoyable experience.

Operation: Quicksave

For that matter, the experience in World War II G.I. is, in general, leagues better than Nam. That’s a pretty low bar to step over, and it’s still not a very fun game, but you can tell the team is more experienced. Levels are a bit more intricate while also being more realistic about what the Build Engine can actually do. It still looks like a mod for Duke Nukem 3D, and the edges are still very rough, but it’s still a lot better than Nam.

Still, your quicksave button is going to get quite the workout. It still has a lot of the same problems that Nam had, especially because the developers liked to hide Nazis in the trees. The maps are still too big an open, so your gun’s spread is a constant obstacle that has no easy way of being overcome. Simply spraying your Thompson in the direction of where you think there might be Nazis is actually a workable strategy. Ammo is abundant, so why not just spray and pra?y?

Because of this, it has the difficulty curve of a buzz saw. It shoots up whenever there’s a tank on the field??. These Panzers fire high-velocity shells and very rarely miss. On top of that, explosives are extremely rare, and most of them require?? you to walk straight up to the tank to place them. Whenever I could, I usually just tried to avoid the tanks entirely.

Wunderwaffe

And weirdly, the S.S. soldiers emp?loy some sort of invisible Nazi shield. I don’t get it. I could fire at point-blank range, and the dudes would just keep coming at me. I’d watch as the bullets would hit the wall directly behind them. Other times, they’d take two shots and drop immediately, so it’s not just that they’re wearing body armor. I really don’t understand what’s going on with them. I often just hucked grenades at them because it was the only way to get a sure kill.

Speaking of being baffled, one thing that World War II G.I. has added to the Nam formula is the need to actually patch yourself up. Health packs go into your inventory, and to use them, you need to stand stationary while it gradually adds to your health count. You can shoot, but if you take one step, it cancels the whole process and wastes the remainder of the medkit. It’s absurd. I think most of the time I spent playing this game was crouching in a corner, waiting fo??r my dude to finish putting a band-aid on.

I get that’s sort of more realistic since it would be really difficult to suture a bullethole while sprinting across the battlefield. However, one of the weapons you can pick up is dual Colt 1911’s. I’m pretty sure dual-wielding isn’t covered in b?oot camp, but what do I know?

Meanwhile, your commanding officer starts off most missions by telling you what you’re supposedly doing on that stage. However, like in Nam, it is invariably drowned out by ambient gunfire and music. I started listening super hard to figure out what he was saying, and all I got was “In clear violation of the Geneva Convention.�?Guy, this is 1944. If you’re wor??ried about the Geneva Convention, you’d best be sitting down when the war ends. Some of the atrocities will floor you.

KNIFE

I feel like I need to say something nice about World War II G.I.. Okay, I have something: you can attack with your knife whenever you want, even if you’re holding a gun with both hands. It never stops being funny. Especially when you’re holding a Browning Assault Rifle. It looks li??ke you’re pulling a violin bow across your gun. Literally, fiddling with your weapon.

As I said, World War II G.I. isn’t quite as bad as Nam. However, that is pretty far from praise. But on the other hand, it’s kind of neat to see a WW2 game in th??????????????????????????e Build Engine. It would be a lot cooler if it was Duke Nukem fighting against Nazis, but�?Actua?lly, there’s no "but" to that statement.

It was fun, though. Like I said with Nam, the games harken back to an early era of the first-person shooter, where experimentation was rife, and failure was just as frequent. Even if a lot of these games aren’t fun to play, and others might not even be finished, it’s interesting to se??e amateur developers leaving their fingerprints ?on new frontiers.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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I keep a mental list of kusoge I want to cover in this column, and near the top of them is 1998’s Extreme Paintbrawl. Supposedly the worst game to ever be cr?eated using Ken Silverman’s Build Engine.

The Build Engine may not get as much attention as the splinters from the Doom Engine, but it was, out of the box, a pretty great 2.5D ray-casting engine. It became best known for being the foundation of Duke Nukem 3D, but it was also used for a number of less notable games. Duke Nukem 3D came bundled with a suite of editing tools, so a strong modding ??community sprang up around it.

Unfortunately, Extreme Paintbrawl came out during a very awkward time in terms of compatibility. That is to say, it was during that point when Microsoft was trying to bury DOS under Windows, which is, anecdotally, the hardest era of games to get working on new hardware. It either works or it doesn’t, and despite my best efforts, Extreme Paintbrawl doesn’t. EDuke32 doesn’t seem to support it, nor ??can I find any offshoot that does. I’m not done trying to find solutions, but for now, I’m out of luck.

Thankfully, it was hardly the only bad game built on the shoulders of Duke Nukem 3D, so let’s take a look at 1998’s Nam.

War never changes

As the name implies, Nam is set during the Vi?etnam War. With all the wars going on in the present, I’m pretty exhausted on the subject. However, if you’re unfamiliar, it was a war between Communist North Vietnam and the U.S.-backed South Vietnam. This was during the Cold War, so the U.S. went to great lengths to t?ry and stop the spread of Communism.

It was disastrous. Not just politically but also for the soldiers involved and the citizens of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, who, to this?? day, need to deal with extensive environmental damage and buried unexploded munitions.

Phew, okay that’s out of the way.

Nam began its life as a mod for Duke Nukem 3D before GT Interactive picked it up to publish. Despite the publisher backing and retail release, it still feels like a mod. There are still a tonne of assets left over from Duke Nukem 3D. That’s not to say that Nam doesn’t do its own thing. It’s just that most of what it d?oes is unfortunate.

Historical accuracy

Nam is a game about shooting at bushes, stepping o?n mines, and getting killed by friendly fire. From the sounds of it, that makes it an accurate portrayal of the war itself. The only difference is that you have a quicksave key, and you will be making extensive use of it.

While Duke Nukem 3D but in Vietnam doesn’t sound like a bad idea, the developers tried reaching for realism. Making things more realistic was a common carrot chased by developers in the day. First-person shooters were new, and they made it feel like video games were converging with r??eality. But while a lot of developers knew when to pull their punches and sacrifice realism for the sake of fun, modders would push the mechanics as close to reality as possible.

So, Nam takes place in a jungle, and it’s surprisingly well done for being built on the bones of Duke Nukem 3D. It’s ugly, sure. You can easily see all the shortcomings of the 2.5D engine. However, you can tell it’s a jungle. There are lots of pillars that look similar to trees and numerous sprites lining the ground to give the impression of undergrowth. An actual 3D engine from the time period would struggle with this (see: Jurassic Park Trespasser), s?o, in a lot of ways, it’s an impressive effort.

Watch your step

On the other hand, it really sucks. Enemies can see you through the foliage long before you can see them. Even when you do see them, you’re often left guessing whether whatever obstacle is between you will block bullets or not, because it’s never clear. Even at the best of times, enemies are often set at a larger range than you’d ever really see in Duke 3D, but like in Duke 3D, your weapons aren’t very accurate. This is fine in close-range situations, but those are rather rare in Nam. Even if you ?fire in short bursts, you can’t improve your accuracy, so you’re kind of stuck.

Despite you character's difficulty aiming, explosive weapons have perfect accuracy. The grenade launcher, for example, doesn’t arc like you’d expect. It behaves like the RPG in Duke Nukem 3D. Because it is.

However, that’s not the worst part about Nam. Where it really hits the skids is with all its instant and unavoidable death. This is often due to friendly fire, since in order to simulate a battlefield, bombs and artillery constantly rain down from the sky. The problem is, there’s no way to know where or when all that will land. So, you might just be walking through the jungle, and ??suddenly, your torso has departed from your legs.

Then, to compound the issue, the ground is littered with mines, which are hard to spot through the undergrowth. To offset this, you’re given a mine detector, which will beep when you’re close to the mine. However, you have to be paying close attention to even realize you have it. It appears as a crate in ??your inventory, and when you scroll over it, it reads “Inventory Item.�?So, that’s pretty unhelpful.

Getting in the way

The music is also bizarrely unsuitable for the? theme. Most levels start with you getting briefed on your mission, but when your commanding officer starts talking is usually when the music kicks into high gear, completely drowning him out. It doesn’t matter anyway. You’re often just required to reach the extraction point

The game i?s currently sold bundled with DOSbox, which provides a pretty excruciating control scheme. Thankfully you can run it using the Eduke32 source port which, among other things, gives it modern controls. Unfortunately, it’s not Eduke32’s job to fix the friendly fire, so you’ll need to make good use of the quicksave if y?ou want to survive to see the Fall of Saigon. That’s actually that last mission, I’m not kidding.

There are two campaigns that are roughly seven missions long. Then there ar?e two multiplayer campaigns, but they aren’t really campaigns. They’re just various competitive s??tages.

Perfectly preserved kusoge

The developers went on to create another game after Nam called World War II G.I, which was also on the Build Eng??ine. I’ll be looking at that next week, but I can only hope that there’s less friendly fire. I’ve got a bad feeling about it.

The funny thing about Nam is that, even though it is a pretty awful game, it exemplifies the modding scene at the time. There was a tonne of ambition and a dearth of experience. A lot of stand?ards, especially around the first-person shooter genre, were still being set, so people were essentially making things up as they went along. The modding community was where a lot of experimentation happened, and experimentation inevitably leads to some failures.

This is the sort of thing that Slayers X: Term??inal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer tried to evoke. It felt like there was a chance that your mod would be the next big thing, if only you could get your idea to fit within the confines of technical limitations. Oftentimes, this pursuit was misguided, and that’s how we ended up with Nam.

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The early days of reality television were embarrassing for all of us. Actually, no, reality television is still embarrassing for us. Every time I visit my parents, where they still have cable, there’s some show about detailing cars or antiquing that is on TV. Fear Factor was? something special, though. I don't mean that in a good way.

Fear Factor was a game show that was advertised as a show about people overcoming fear to both humiliate themselves and win money. I’m pretty sure people just tuned in to watch the c??ontestants eat bugs, which was almost invariably what they did in the middle of the three events. But there are so many times you can air people cringing as they eat insects before even the least discerning audience gets bored, so the series only ran from 2001-2006. I say “only�?because there are reality shows based around cooking that are still running today.

During this time, there was a Game Boy Advance game released in 2004 called Fear Factor Unleashed. Upon discovering this, my first question was, “how?�?followed closely b??y “why?�?Now that I’ve played it, I have the answer to the first quest??ion, but I’m not sure there will ever be an adequate explanation for the second. It's probably just money.

The AI's turn

Fear Factor Unleashed follows the show’s formula of having six contestants compete in thr??ee challenges to see? who survives to the end. There are twelve mini-games that get shuffled into the mix. Most of these involve being tied up or eating bugs, which are both things I am already very experienced in, so that’s possibly why this game was such a cinch for me.

The conformity to the sh??ow�?�s structure is one of the most aggravating aspects of the game. This is mostly because it tries to show each of the AI-controlled contestants trying to complete the minigames. I can hardly think of something I desire to do less. You can skip the performance, but the game always loads into them, and when you skip them, it makes you click through the results. It takes way too long, and there is no option to fully turn off AI turns. I cannot express how little I care about how well Sassy and Snake overcome their fears.

Well, okay, on the other h?and, it’s helpful to se??e the games played if you’ve never done them before. However, I’m not sure it’s necessary to watch them five times. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to. You’d have to be an intensely boring person.

Even if you did want to watch them, the success of the AI is always pre-planned. So much so that there’s one particular mini-game that has you driving a dune buggy on a track suspended high above the desert, and the computer-controlled players just couldn’t do it. Ever. They always die at the first obstacle. You watch them fall to the desert floor, a cloud of dust and a crater being the only remaining indication that they ever existed. And yet, Fear Factor Unleashed just says “Good job, Peaches! You completed the track in, let’s say, 2:40.�?/p>

They couldn’t even be bothered programming AI that could complete their challenge, so they just cheated their way around it. I expect better from the developer of the 2006 classic Hannah Montana for the DS.

Fine dining

There are 12 games in all, and each of them are so simple they’d embarrass Mario Party. They also get pretty creative with what they make the contestants do. In the show, they’re never really in danger. Even the more out-there stunts like, I don’t know, playing piano while dangling fro?m a helicopter, are done using a lot of impressive safety gear.

The developers didn’t want to deal with all that reality, so they came up with some spectacularly stupid minigames. This includes piloting a helicopter through narrow passageways and the aforementioned high-altitude go-karting. I should probably not speculate too much on what challenges were actually in the show because I really never wa?tched very much of it. Maybe they did tie people to train tracks and motivate them with a speeding locomotive.

Two of the games involve solving the exact same lock puzzle, so I’m not sure if they should eve??n count separately. The two eating games are entirely different, however. One involves carrying maggots from one end of the room to another using only your mou??th. The other has you dunk your head into a bucket of bugs, masticating them, and then swallowing them as three separate actions with mysteriously unresponsive controls.

Other games incorporate the fury of nature, such as one wher?e piranhas nibble on your tits if you look too delicious. In a?nother, an eagle will attack you just because it wants you to plummet to your death.

Keep it up!

You might wonder how the “fear�?aspect of Fear Factor Unleashed factors into this since it��s not actually your own mouth getting crammed full of cockroaches, and therefore there’s no real stress. There’s a bar at the bottom of your?? screen during every minigame that you have to keep balanced with the shoulder buttons while you complete whatever task you’re doing. Your character even has an assortment of skills you pump points into at the beginning and a specific phobia that supposedly gets factored in. I could absolutely not tell what difference these made whatsoever. So, it's a neat idea, but I’m not sure it was ever even implemented.

Speaking of your character, you actually cr??eate them at the beginning, but regardless of how you set them up, they’re always some fit person in their underwear. I’m not sure why they’re invariable half-clothed, but I��m guessing it’s a kink thing. We don’t kink shame here at the Destructo??id Institute of Critiquing Kusoge.

I also feel like I ne?ed to note the voiced comments that are made in reaction to what you’re doing. They’re essentially just “you’re doing great�?or comments about the f??ear creeping in. These are really annoying (the only option the game provides is to turn them off), but sometimes they’re just hilariously not in sync with what’s going on. I watched the AI eat bugs once, and while they were barfing on the floor, the voice said, “Keep it up!�?Oh, geez. Is that a kink thing, too?

Speaking of kin??ks, there's hotseat multiplayer for up to six players. That's a lot ?of suffering!

Kink thing

What’s amusing about this production is that usually, when I’m looking at shovelware, I’ll drill down into the credits to see who has moved onto bigger and better things. In this case, pretty much no one has aside from the audio/music guy Steve Szczepkowski, who became the audio director for the Eidos Montreal Deus Ex games. Everyone else has continued to make shovelware. The creative director seems to exclusively make shovelware. It’s incredibl?e.

To be fair, Fear Factor Unleashed was a needed palate cleaner. I feel like I’ve been appreciating the kusoge I play too much recently. Thankfully,?? shovelware tends to be a pretty reliable sou??rce of unlikable kusoge.

However, Fear Factor Unleashed manages to be, at least, innocuous. Unless your thumbs have been replaced by breakfast sausages, you can probably complete all the difficult levels within, like, 45 minutes. Unless you’re watching the AI’s turn. None of the minigames are outright painful to play, but you’re going to spend more time navigating the menus than actually playing them. And that’s too bad because I could have made a pun like, “The only fear that this game has unleashed is the fact that we’ve hit the bottom of the dumpster and now have to live with the cockroaches.�?/p>

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We’re a lot closer to living in the future that RoboCop predicted than we are to the one in The Terminator. Sure, some sma?rt, rich people say that we have to watch out for AI killing us all, but I’m pretty sure ?they’re just trying to make their new tech seem more impressive. All we’ve seen it do is put together some bad prose, resurrect dead celebrities, and give us pictures that invariably look uncomfortably off. Humans can’t build a printer that can reliably put ink on a page, and we don’t need a machine’s help to wipe ourselves out of existence. We’ve got that covered.

RoboCop basically thought we’d flush ourselves down the toilet with our own greed. We’d gradually become less and less human the more we pursue our own hedonism. Profit and status before people were one of its big themes. It was extrapolating on a trend, and 35 years later, it’s on??ly gotten more accurate.

Speaking of profit, in 1992, Dark Horse published a comic book miniseries that combined the two extremely marketable cyborgs above. RoboCop Versus The Terminator was a concept every kid in the schoolyard dreamed about, bringing together two protagonists from their favorite R-Rated movies. While a movie based on the concept never materialized, there was a game released for popular consoles at the time. Three games, actually, as the SNES, Game Boy, and Genesis/Mega Drive versions were all different. You luck??y duck, I’m going to look at all of them.

The Comics

But first, let’s talk about the comics. If the stories I’ve heard are accurate, Dark Horse was about to lose the RoboCop license, so they decide?d to go out with a bang by creating a dream c??rossover. They tapped Frank Miller to write it.

While Miller is perhaps best known for The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, he actually had a hand in writing the screenplay for RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3. Unfortunately for him, the studio and director made significant changes to his scripts, to the point that the experience was so sour for him that he stopped working with Hollywood. However, he also dipped his toes into RoboCop comics, which resulted in a nine-issue adaptation of his original RoboCop 2 screenplay and RoboCop Versus The Terminator.

I’m pretty ambivalent toward Frank Miller. I could take or leave him. I enjoyed Sin City, but I haven’t found anything else by him that I appreciate quite as much. However, RoboCop Versus The Terminator isn’t great. Alex Murphy is turned into Miller’s favorite type of protagonist �?a violently efficient hero with an overt death wish �?and the whole time paradox card gets pulled in some of the worst ways. Like, once the timeline is a??ltered, everything really slowly begins to change, and e??veryone is completely aware of it. So, there’s this really awful back-and-forth between the good guy team and Skynet.

When the plot was selected to be adapted into a game, most of that was swept aside. The idea is the same: RoboCop is used to give self-awareness to Skynet. He’s not exa??ctly happy with that, so he, uh�?Well, he tries to stop it, but it’s more complicated than that.

Sega Genesis/Mega Drive

The Genesis version of RoboCop Versus The Terminator was done in-house by Virgin Games. It sure is a RoboCop game. It’s a pretty basic sidescroller, with a bit of run-and-gun mixed in. You can hol??d the shoot?? button down and just keep firing, which is a pretty good strategy. Beyond the obligatory appearances of ED-209 and, you know, Terminators, RoboCain shows up for some reason.

There are ten levels, five in the near future and five in the future of the future. Some of them have objectives like destroying all the things or rescuing some people, but I’m not sure how necessary those are. In stage 3, I’m? pretty sure I didn’t destroy all the cameras but was still able to fight the boss. I lost, so maybe they’re stronger if you don’t destroy everything? But during the rematch, it didn’t seem weaker. I just came packing a bigger gun.

There isn’t a lot to say about RoboCop Versus The Terminator on Genesis. It’s an extremely routine game that I have no strong feelings ??about. It’s not terrible, but it isn’t good, either. In fact, that’s exactly why I’m covering the three versions here, since otherwise, I’d quickly run out of things to say. 

I will say this, though: the soundtrack sucks. Most of the tracks just seem like directionless Genesis noodling, and it all blended together for me. This is probably because it’s focused on one track that has the word �??�Terminator�?repeated in it for some reason.

Super Nintendo

This one’s my favorite of the bunch for a number of reasons, but it’s still pretty mundane. The Super Nintendo version is the closest to the comics, with its cutscenes be??ing presented in panel-style facsimiles of what’s in the comics. The comic has a woman from the future initially trying to kill RoboCop before he can be plugged into Skynet, and unlike the other versions, this is actually reflected in th?e gameplay, with Flo taking shots at you as a silhouette from the background.

The first level? is visually strong, in general, and it includes an actual lighting effect where?? Murphy’s sprite is gradually illuminated as he approaches light sources. I’ve never seen anything quite like it in a 16-bit game. I also give this one props for being the only version that has RoboCop making a “thud thud�?sound as he walks. I feel that’s key to his “forklift on legs�?persona.

Beyond that, however, this is? another routine sidescroller. Well, that is aside from a first-per?son vehicular Mode-7 section. It’s also really easy for most of the game, then when you go to the future’s future, someone realized that kids shouldn’t be able to beat this during a rental period. Then, the enemy placement goes from bad to malicious, and the levels get confusing. 

Still, it’s not awful. I even would have thought that this version was the flagship of the group if it weren’t for the fact that Interplay developed it?? while Virgin just used their own studio for the Genesis one. That version even got ported to the Game Gear and Sega Master System.

GameBoy

I thought the Ga?me Boy version w??ould be funnier to cover since I expected it would be a completely slapdash port. It is, but it’s also a fairly capable slapdash port. I’m not saying it’s good. It just doesn’t have any of those specific issues that are fun to rant about or bang on.

It’s short, sure. Definitely. The level design is weak, it looks kind of dumb, I can’t tell what some of the enemies are, it’s extremely easy, and it has no narrative exposition at all. A lot of the mechanics, such as the weapon switching and pole hanging, are still present, they’re just scaled back. If I played it as a ??kid, I wouldn’t be angry that I got tricked into buying it, I’d mostly just be annoyed that I completed it before the car trip was over.

Oh, and spoiler alert, but the end boss is, like, a flying brain. It doesn’t? make sense, but at least it’s memorable. I don’t even remember what Skynet was depicted as in the comic, which is concerning because I just finished reading it this morning. I think it was just a... input slot or something.

Which failed the hardest?

Out of all the adaptations of RoboCop Versus The Terminator, the one that was most fun to analyze was the comic. Considering my profession and what this column is even about, that’s pretty disap?pointing. Going into this project, I figured that the comic would be surprisingly good, while the games would be complete butt. Instead, all of them are just kind of mediocre, with the comic failing in the most interesting ways.

There were supposedly talks of bringing the concept of RoboCop Versus The Terminator to film but nothing ever came of it. Really, if it did happen, I’d hope that a different plot was developed, which would be a funny way to piss off Frank Miller again. Really, though, RoboCop Versus The Terminator?? happened at the height of both franchises�?popula?rity and is one of the most �?0s concepts imaginable. If they did something like it now, it would probably be more kitschy than impressive. I'd be okay with that.

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Classification is a major endeavor at the Destructoid Insitute for Critiquing Kusoge. Before we can critique, we must first establish what is and what isn’t kusoge. That is to say, a crap game. Even though I am the foremost and sole member at the institute, it can be quite a challenge, as was the case with the Carmageddon series.

Carmageddon has a lot of the facets of kusoge. Each game invariably controls like garbage. Its vehicle physics is detestable. And the mechanics are very loosely tied together and wobbly. However, as I was doing the legwork?? to establish the series as kusoge, I realized that, while they are concept-first ??games, they are fun to play under their own merits.

However, there are (at least) two exceptions in the series. The first is Carmageddon 64, which is not only the undisputed worst in the series. The second is Carmageddon TDR 2000. On its Steam store page, it’s actually advertised as “the turd game in the Carmageddon series…�?If this game is the turd, then what does that make Carmageddon 64.

'90s design enters the new millennium

We always assumed that rich people would bring about the end of the world, but I doubt anyone thought it would be so literal. The opening cinematic of Carmageddon TDR 2000 lays out that all the privileged folks moved into isolated communities and then nuked everyone else. That’s we?ird. Who makes the coffee in these communities?

You play as someone outside these communities who is pretty angry. I thought the idea was that you’re trying to raise hell inside one of these perfect cities, but apparently, that’s not it. Instead, you’re just trying to get into Paradise City. Along the way, you also participate in your typical Carmageddon setup.

If you’re unfamiliar, Carmageddon is a series that sells itself on the fact that it’s a game about running over pedestrians, or “peds�?as the games refer to them. It’s an incredibly �?0s concept; a time when pushing the limits of taste was a marketing strategy, and we celebrated characters for being assholes. But while scaremongering politicians and news publishers would say that games like Grand Theft Auto would award you "points" for killing people, Carmageddon actually does that.

Each “race�?gives you three ways to win. You can either go through all the checkpoints and complete laps, run over all the peds on the map, or ?“waste�?all your competitors. Even if you want to just drive carefully and run the track, you’ll find yourself with a deficit of time. You’re essentially required to kill people to succeed.

The most boring sociopath

The fact that this is a sufficient selling point to ensure the series�?endurance might be a bit disconcerting, but there’s no denying it’s put to good use. Even though the games invariably have really terrible driving physics, the freedom of choosing whether you explore for more victims, have a demolition derby with your competitors, or just drive along the golden path works really well. The addition of explorable environments also tickles that part of my brain that liked hunting for the keys in San Francisco Rush.

Killing all the peds may seem like the most fun way to clear a track, but even in the most sparsely populated environment has hundreds of people roaming it. Sometimes, the peds aren’t even conveniently on sidewalks or crossing the road. Carmageddon TDR 2000 puts potential roadkill up on high ledges and hidden in small nooks. The timer that counts down your freedom caps out at four minutes, which means you don’t have a lot of time to try and find some jerk hiding in a cupboard. The ?only people I see trying to win this way are some really boring sociopaths.

If you’re not that specifically unique, you’ll either want to run the checkpoints or kill your competitors. Unlike Carmageddon 64, I’d weigh these choices equally. Your competitors don’t wander as aimlessly as they do in Carmageddon 2, but they’re also not as eager for slaughter as the N64 port. While they respawn in your region if they get too far away so they always turn up eventually, the combat is extremely unsatisfying, so just d?riving the route while taking in the scenery isn’t a bad alternative.

Time I'm never getting back

In terms of what makes Carmageddon TDR 2000 the “turd�?of the series, well, that’s pr?obably a bit of a reach to make a joke about it being the third game. The statement kind of makes it seem like the rest of the titles were solid gold, which they really aren’t. They’re invariably sloppy, held together by an enjoyable concept with clever execution.

I guess Carmageddon TDR 2000 was the breaking point for some people. It was handled by a different developer, but while the finished product isn’t great, it doesn’t feel like Torus phoned it in. The core concept is still here, and I actually enjoyed the game’s environments. I think what really demonstrates that the game isn’t that bad is that I spent a huge portion of my weekend pla?ying ??through it. Something like 14 hours.

The whole production is extremely rough. The physics are even wonkier than they have been in the past. I had instances where parts would fall off my car, then get caught in the collision model and start floating around it at high speeds. This usually resulted in my car getting torn apart by its own estranged fender. Other times, I’d get stuck in the level geometry at crucial moments. You can respawn your car at any time with only a mode??st fee from your deep wallet, but that won’t help you if you run out of time because you get stuck inside a guardrail.

For that matter, while I find the environments to be fun and detailed, the way they’re used in missions is aggravating. There’s a surprising amount of verticality to many of the stages, which has you climbing up ruined skyscrapers and making jumps over various sizes of gaps. These gaps often don’t take into account the braking speed or acceleration of the various vehicles, so you might be ?mashing the respawn button.

Precious oxygen

The races in between the missions were like being given a breath of air between getting waterboarded. Each time, I’d brace myself. Would this be a simple mission like running over 20 mutants, or am I going to have to fight a shark while grappling with terrible underwater physics? Would I have to assemble a bomb for the 15th time ?or land a jump on a small patch of terrain under an extremely strict time limit?

Then, there are the power-ups that are liberally scattered across the environments. While some of these are very helpful and sometimes even necessary, they share a random mix with ones that directly hinder you. There are power-ups that turn your suspension into jelly or reverse your controls, and there's no way of telling them apart. I largely learned just to avoid them entirely; it wasn't worth it. That was easily the most painful part of Carmageddon TDR 2000.

Actually, not quite. The worst part of Carmageddon TDR 2000 is the fact that it is a PC game from 2000. I always hate going back to this era, because even if it runs in a modern OS environment, there are always issues with modern sound hardware or screen resolutions. Carmageddon TDR 2000 required some tweaking just to look right while running, but then a lot of the text and menus got cut off. Even the confi??g menu �?completely separate from the game proper �?only let me access the left half of the menus. ?If something doesn’t look as good as it should, that’s why.

I never even got to see the mission text unless it was long enough to run past the black aspect bars. That made figuring out what I needed to do even more difficult. I didn’t even r??ealize it lists the objectives in the map screen until way late in the game. There was also no music, which is related to the Steam re-release, but I think I’m happier because of its exclusion.

This isn’t really a problem with Carmageddon TDR 2000 or an issue with the developer. I just really wish it was easier to run early Windows without having to perform an arcane ri??tual.

TL;DR 2000

I really didn’t hate Carmageddon TDR 2000. Oh, it irked me plenty of times, but it was fascinating to play. It made me think really hard about what the breaking point is in Carmageddon’s formula. How come I could tolerate this but not Carmageddon 64? Is it just minor details in the game’s quality? Was it Carmageddon TDR 2000’s notable lack of techno music? Is it the added experience and trauma that has resulted from me writing these arti??cles for over two years?

If anything, Carmageddon TDR 2000 has given me a powerful urge to spend more time with the better-loved entries in the series. So far, I’ve only taken shal??low dips in the first two games. It�?�s maybe about time to fix that.

Shout-out to Stainless Games and THQ Nordic for putting Carmageddon TDR 2000 back on sale with a store page that directly says that ?it isn’t very good. I truly wish more publishers would do this. Just acknowledge that few ga?mes have a perfect track record and embrace all the missteps. It’s easier to appreciate the clean air from a series�?peak if you’ve first taken a dip in the cesspools below.

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After the Wii’s release, we went through a period of denial. We were promised that it was motion controls �?not the next generation of graphical splendor �?that would carry video games into the future. But while Wii Sports was fun, we wanted to see what motion controls could do outside a set of family-friendly minigame compilations. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess didn’t make very good use of the controls, but it was really a port of a GameCube title. So, we just needed to wait a bit longe?r, and the vision Nintendo promised us would eventually arrive.

Sometime before, we just gave up and realized that motion controls just kind of suck in general, Escape from Bug Island hit the shelves. The only thing I really knew about it was that it was terrible. Even during a software drought that would only be relieved by Virtual Console games and Metroid Prime 3, I knew not to touch Escape from Bug Island. And I never did.

Since 2007, I’ve been building Escape from Bug Island up in my head as my own personal densetsu no kusoge (crap game of legend). From the moment I started doing this column, I knew I wanted to take on Escape from Bug Island. But somehow, despite having seen it staring at me from all kinds of discount bins and bargain racks over the years, I couldn’t find a copy of it. Unti?l now.

I wish I could make a joke about it being glitchy

First off, I want to say that Escape from Bug Island frequently crashed my Wii U whenever I tried to launch it. While the case for the game is yellowed, as if it sat in a dingy rental place ??for a decade, the disc is immaculate, almost as if it has never been played. But it’s like my Wii U was offended I was feeding it this game. Three out of the five times I trie?d launching the game, it crashed the whole system. The Wii U wouldn’t even shut off if I held the power button. I had to unplug it to reset it. Incredible.

Escape from Bug Island is a somewhat inaccurate description of the pr?emise of the game. There’s a boat docked right in the starting area. You could leave so damned easily. But the dude you play as is just so damned desperate for sex that he’s willing to overcome an island filled with his worst nightmares to reunite with a girl that he sort of, kind of likes.

I think Escape from Bug Island carries a title similar to a B horror movie because Eidos knew it was terrible. It was originally released in 2006 in Japan under the title Necro-Nesia and, accordin??g to Nintendo Power (Vol. 214), was so bad that it prompted the publisher to ask for some changes before releasing it in the West. These are largely token and superficial tweaks that did nothing to save the overall prod?uct.

But what the title did get right is that it does take place on an island filled with bugs. Giant insects, to be precise, but it�?�s also filled?? with massive frogs, giant gorillas, and sexy, curvacious lizard women. The plot goes into detail, saying that a strange force on the island is causing its wildlife to evolve at an accelerated rate. Frankly, I think the frogs and lizard babes should be on your team since you all have the same goal of bug destruction.

Agh! My back!

Escape from Bug Island is the Wii-est game I’ve ever played. It’s murky and shallow, and I think all the waggling did lasting damage to my wrists and back. Each level takes place in small pockets of wilderness enveloped in fog. I think it’s also supposed to be night, but whenever you turn on the flashlight, all it does is push the fog back another few feet. It is the saddest flashl?ight. I didn’t even really use it because I read a journal entry that suggested bugs are attracted? to the light. I’m not certain that’s true, but the flashlight is so worthless that I don’t feel I made my journey any more difficult by keeping it in my pocket.

Fighting is oftentimes not even necessary. A lot of the bugs are mostly just ground cover, and running ??through them seemed like the most expedient way of bypassing the lot. Even some of the bigger baddies can�?�t keep up with your lust-driven gait, so I only got into fights when it was necessary, or I needed to break up the monotony.

You have melee and ranged attacks. To hit bugs with a stick, you hold the B button and swing the Wii Remote. Then, you try to ignore the pain building in your wrists. To throw rocks and bags of sand, you go into first-person view and then swing the Wii Remote. Then there’s your typical ?balancing by tilting the controller and panicked flailing whenever something attaches itself to you. This is especially hard when a lizard woman wraps her scaly legs around you and presses her cold body against yours. Nnng. Life or lizard cu?ddles. I feel like Ray, of all people, should understand my dilemma.

Stupid sexy lizards

Despite all that I’ve said about the gameplay in Escape from Bug Island, it’s ?actually really awesome. I’m not just talking about the strangely well-equipped reptile ladies, either. The narrative is absolutely genius because no one in it gives a shit about what’s going on.

T?he whole thing starts off with Ray, Michelle, and Mike taking a trip to th??e eponymous island. Despite not knowing of any actual danger, Mike brought his beloved shotgun and cocks it repeatedly during dialogue. However, his heart is big enough for two, so he starts trying to get into Michelle’s pants, even while knowing that his best friend, Ray, is trying to work up the confidence to admit his feelings for her.

Mike and Michelle venture off to find a place to swap ge?netics, and they don’t come back. So, Ray sets off to find them. Along the way, ev??erybody dies. Everybody. And yet, every time he manages to bump into Michelle, all he wants to do is talk about how much he wants to invite her to the bone zone.

Meanwhile, you collect notes from some guy whose group arrived before yours. He cares even less about what’s going on than Ray. He talks about his girlfriend wandering off and how his friends keep dying but is quick to point out that he doe?sn’t like them anyway. He even makes a joke about how crickets laid their eggs in this one guy. Then eventually, he finds his girlfriend, but she’s run off with the infuriatingly fuckable lizard ladies. I don’t blame her.

Then the guy throws sand in his girlfriend’s face and escapes. He later wr??ites �?and I’m not making this up �?that they “didn't part on the best of terms�?and he’d rather “take [his] chances with the sand monster.�?Yeah, guy. She was banging lizard ladies, so yo??u hit her in the face with a bag of sand. I will agree that those aren’t particularly good terms.

Someone's mom's idea of a horror game

So, we’re kind of going into spoiler territory now. However, the back of the box reveals this, and I doubt you’re really thirsting to play Escape from Bug Island, so I’m going to tell you anyway.

After everyone dies a??nd you climb Bug Mountain, it turns out that the peak of the mountain is home to a wormhole that takes you back in time. A character flat-out says that this is not how wormh??oles work without even breaking the fourth wall, which makes it sound like the person who is writing the dialogue overtly hates the person who came up with the scenario. Again, I’m not joking, it’s the funniest shit.

Nonetheless, you go back in time to t??he start of the game. Ray is a bit slow, so even after it has become excruciatingly obvious that he ?wasn’t dreaming, he still thinks he imagined the whole first part of the game. Nonetheless, he goes to some effort to ensure that there are fewer casualties on his journey.

However, you’re still going to have to just repeat all the areas you already went through. It is so brazen about recycling the whole game just because the first journey was so short. It’s so overtly inept that it almost looks like the staff just ?accepted how bad their game was. It almost looks intentional.

Spit that sticks with you

This would explain how such talented staff produced such weapons-grade garbage. Escape from Bug Island was directed by Nobuyasu Motoki, who seems to be better known for their 3D modelling, but also was a planner for AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative. There’s the possibility that this is mistaken identity, but the Direction Design also went on to work from that game. Even beyond that, a lot of the staff has had prolific careers, with a number of them going on to work on things like the Danganronpa series.

However, I think the more likely explanation is that someone wanted a game that could be released during the Wii’s launch window, so the team just kind of spit something out. Escape from Bug Island certainly tastes like spit. On the other hand, it’s spit that sticks with you. Even before I played it, Escape from Bug Island had already rented space in my brain, and I ?think that’s just going to get worse ?now. When I close my eyes, I’ll remember those alluring lizard physiques.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Escape from Bug Island for Wii is at the breat??htaking peak of garbage appeared first on Destructoid.

Quest for Camelot isn’t the first kusoge that Nintendo has put on one of its Nintendo Switch Online retro catalogs, but it may be the strangest. I mean, was it that easy to get permission from Warner Bros? Surely, no one asked for this. No one at Nintendo could? have possibly been looking at a list of GBC games and zeroed in on this as something that absolutely needed to be on the service. I think every game, regardless of how bad,? deserves to be available on modern platforms, but from a business sense, why would anyone choose this game?

What actually convinced me to play it is the fact that it’s developed by the bane of my existence: Titus. As I always say, “It ain’t no fun if there’s a fox on the box.�?But, more strangely, it was published ??by Nintendo themselves. That may be part of what helped it get its spot in the Switch’s Game Boy Color channel, but it also raises more questions.

We eat ham and jam and spam a lot

Quest for Camelot is a 1998 film that I remember existing. I rem??ember watching it, but ?I don’t remember anything else. So, I did what any games journalist would do: I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. As it turns out, the game (also released in 1998) kind of sort of follows the plot.

You play as Kayley, who dreams of following in her dead father’s footsteps and becoming a knight. Meanwhile, Ruber has his own ambitions of stealing Excalibur from King Arthur. Mistakes happen, and Excalibur falls into a Forbidden Forest. Kayley then embarks on a quest to obtain the enchanted cutlery and defeat Ruber, becau??se revenge would just be so sweet.

The game itself borrows heavily from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which is probably the nicest thing someone could say about it. The inventory works largely the same, with you mapping?? specific items to the two buttons. It doesn’t use the same world design, instead choosing a level-based structure with a lot of very context-specific items. I guess what I’m saying is that it doesn’t benefit whatsoever from copying a better game.

The second nicest thing that could be said is that its moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t that bad. You hit?? things with your sword, and those things die after a few hits, and it feels okay. You ga??in experience and level up, but there’s no way to view how close you are to the next level. And that’s about it. That’s the moment-to-moment gameplay. Everything beyond that is awful.

Real cinema

I don’t often expect much from movie tie-in games. There are certainly examples of some good ones, but they’re crowde?d out by the more common cash-gra??bs. It’s not difficult to understand. Developers often work under strict deadlines to meet the movie’s release, publishers can have some unreasonable expectations, and it’s hard to get excited when working based on a license they might have no interest in.

Quest for Camelot largely exudes that. It is such a slapdash game, that I had to use a guide to figure out its logic. For instance, at the end of the first level, you fight Ruber. After swatting him enough, he starts spinning on the spot before launching toward the top of the screen. I followed him, only to see him give another pirouette before disappe??aring entirely??.

Then I was left standing there. Nothing had happened. I waited for the level to end, but it did?n’t come. I circled the room, looking for a way out, but there was none. So, it was off to find ?a guide. As it turns out, I had to walk to the very bottom of the room, then a hole would open up, and I was supposed to fall into it. Oh, right. Obviously.

Further on, after one of the worst top-down platforming sections I’ve yet to encounter, I had to collect dragon eggs. I was sure that I had them all, but the dragon just kept telling me to go get all of them. Closer inspection of the guide was necessary. I had to exit the cave I was in and then jump right to an exit that look??ed like it shouldn’t exist. There was no spot to land. It looked like any other non-specific barrier in the game. I would have perpetually wandered in circles before even thinking to jump over there.

Missingno's revenge

These sorts of moments crop up throughout the game. There’s one level where you have to backtrack from one end to the nex??t just to get a horse so you can return back to where you were. One of the worst moments involves a boss that requires you to use a stick to harm it. However, the collision detection for the stick requires you to get within a single pixel of the boss in order for it to detect. It’s excruciating.

The moments where you’re not having issues like these driven beneath your fingernails feel so refreshing. That’s despite the fact that Quest for Camelot is crammed with technical issues. I’m not certain if these exist in the original release, but the Switch version has visual glitches (like when my entire inventory turned into Missingno) and noticeable load times. Generally speaking, it's not bad looking game. ??Although, Kaylee seems to walk with a limp that I ??don't think was intentional.

It’s always bizarre to see loading times in a ROM-based game. But while simply going back and forth between levels leads to a few seconds of waiting, talking to a character involves some hesitation as well, just to bring up the dialogue box. These aren’t terribly long, mind you. However, it does make Quest for Camelot feel a lot?? more sluggish than just about everything else of the era.

Sweet mercy of death

Death in Quest for Camelot is also pretty nasty. There’s no checkpoint system, so the only way to continue is to do so from a ?save. The save system, however, is tied to an item in your inventory. ?That’s no so bad, but then you have to pay 30 gems just to use it. Then you have to wait for all the loading screens, so eventually, I just turned to using the Switch’s save states. It’s kind of neat that you can’t even rely on the bare minimum when it comes to Titus games.

In general, Quest for Camelot isn’t the worst movie-licensed games I’ve played. I still can’t believe I played through the entirety of Total Recall on NES. However, it’s still not very good, and it’s based on a license that wasn’t great to begin with. The only reason I see for it being on Switch’s Game Boy Color channel is that it was initially published by Nintendo, but that still means they’d need permission from Warner Bros. I’m guessing they’re not all that protective of the l??icense.

Titus was also planning an N64 game based on Quest for Camelot but canceled it in 1999. I feel like that is probably a blessing, but at the same time, I’m always curious to know the answer to the question, “Just how bad could it possibly be?�?/p>

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Quest for Camelot o??n Game Boy Color is exactly as bad as you think it is appeared first on Destructoid.

One of my methods of preliminary research for my kusoge column–my dumpster scouting, if you will–involves searching through old forum threads of people describing bad games they played. You kind of have to sift through the obvious mentions of Too Human and the philistines who say something like King’s Field, but sometimes I come across something I’ve never heard of, and I go into it larg??ely sight-unseen.

A brief synopsis, the claim that it’s terrible, and bonus points if someone says “for some reason.�?This can be, “The game is about X, for some reason.�?Or, alternatively, “My friend and I couldn’t stop playing it, for some reason.�?/p>

Mad Panic Coaster was one of those games. Developed by a company not known for game development, released only in Japan, about a concept that hasn’t had its time in ??the spotlight. ?It’s perfect.

And it also happens to be my favorite kind of kusoge (crap game),? the kind that I really get into.

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Victim of gravity

Mad Panic Coaster was released in 1997, exclusively in Japan, by a company called Hakuhodo. Normally, Hakuhodo is an advertising company, but they seem to have very briefly dabbled with game publishing. Aside from Mad Panic Coaster, they did 1999’s Himiko-Den Renge. However, they just published that one. Mad Panic Coaster doesn’t have a development compa?ny listed, and most of the people involved aren’t really linked to any other company.

If it was developed in-house, it’s pretty strange subject matter to pick. Essentially, Mad Panic Coaster is a reverse of Roller Coaster Tycoon. Someone has designed a roller coaster for ??you to die on, and you’re probably going to. You should have waited until a safety rating was established before you got on the ride, but you didn’t.

The story told in the manual (with some great-looking art) tells of a guy who wanted to create the world’s best roller coaster for his child. An acciden?t leaves him horribly disfigured, and also his child grows up to be a disgusting rich person who is no longer interested in roller coasters.

That’s it. That’s what I got. I felt like I was missing a couple of pages, but they’re numbered and definitely all there. To fill in the blanks, I’m going to guess that the heroes, Bakuyan and Kyako, were kidnapped and are being used as surrogate-children-slash-crash-test-dummies. The pair is placed? on some hellish murder coasters, and simply have to survive. Which would probably be easier if the cart was actually on a track.

[caption id="attachment_399671" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

White knuckles

Mad Panic Coaster kind of feels like a cross between F-Zero and a r?ail shooter. The whole thing moves at mach speed, and you’re constantly fighting to keep yourself from sliding off the edge of the track. Meanwhile, enemies and? other hazards drop in ahead of you, and you need to either avoid them or blow them up.

It a great mix of amazing and disturbing. The game moves so quickly, and the hardware never slows down. You can attack by throwing bombs and avoiding obstacles, but you have so little reaction time available that it’s difficult to hit anything. Bombs are thrown at three different distances, and gauging distance in the short amount of time between the enemy appearing, a curve obscuring them, and your cart simply smashing into them is very difficult. Just staying on the track is a huge struggle at first??.

When you start, the whole thing can feel impossible as you’re tossed around helplessly. Eventually, you might get the feel for it. However, the further I got into the game, the more I relied o??n just mashing the attack button to try and take out enemies. It’s so difficult to aim, but if an enemy drives into an explosion, they die.

[caption id="attachment_399672" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The way the Gods of Momentum intended

It’s the aesthetic that really makes Mad Panic Coaster worth checking out today. Both the art and music team obviously had a real passion for the title. The whole thing kicks off with a monster-led concert. The characters are extremely e??xpressive, and every level has an unnecessary number of unique enemies that you bare?ly glimpse as you speed by.

While the environments are l??argely rendered with 3D polygons, the characters are all stylized 2D sprites. The hazy backgrounds and sporadic, nightmarish scenery really capture the feeling and spirit of a carnival ride, while the characters have an edgy, cartoo?nish style to them. It also looks distinctly PS1. I feel like, if a sequel was ever made, trying to upgrade the graphics to something cleaner, the whole game wouldn’t work quite as well. It needs that unpolished look.

The music is a thrashy punk sou??nd, and while it’s not typically the sort of sound I listen to, I can’t help but think it’s the most appropriate??.

[caption id="attachment_399673" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Don't blink

I thought Mad Panic Coaster would be a pretty quick game to get through, but that’s definitely not the case. There are 15 individual tracks to make it through across 5 different zones. Each zone is capped off with a boss?? battle, which are kind of the low part to the entire game.

Largely the reason why I figured that it would be a very short experience is because Mad Panic Coaster feels like something that was meant for the arcade. Sort of similar to Incredible Crisis. Something about the short levels, the quick a??ction, a?nd the need to frequently retry the same sections repeatedly feels like it was meant to eat quarters. It would have been right at home in one of those full-body experience cabinets that you could sit in. Maybe they could have even had you lean to control it. Unfortunately, it never made it off PS1.

If there’s one part of the whole experience that I d??on’t like, it’s the fact that you start off being towed up a hill, like you would on an actual roller coaster. It’s a goo?d idea to give a sense of anticipation, but considering that death comes frequently in this game, you’ll probably be sick of seeing it after the third time. It’s completely unskippable.

The difficulty is also all over the place. Up and down. Like some sort of�?amusement park ride. The place I got stuck for the longest was actually the first level in the second world. The track is icy and slippery, which proved to be extremely difficult to adjust for. Every once in a while, I’d ace? an entire track, while others I’d beat my head against. It can be harsh.

[caption id="attachment_399674" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

One hell of a ride

While Mad Panic Coaster is a somewhat clunky game because of its im?possible demands for fast reactions, it’s hard to get past the team’s obvious affection for the project. If anyone in the company was predicting it would be an extremely obscure title that?? would never leave Japan, it definitely doesn’t show. The concept is beyond bizarre and extremely limited, but a lot of passion and effort was poured into making it unique.

It’s unfortunate that it has never made it off the PS1, or even out of Japan. For that matter, actually getting a physical copy is a rather expensive endeavor. Considering Hakuhodo isn’t really in the video game business anymore, I have to wonder how hard it would be for a developer to license it for a re-release. Would? it be worth it? I just feel like it’s a tragedy that something so bizarre yet fascinating ?isn’t more accessible.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Mad Panic Coaster for PS1 is a death trap worth strappin?g yourself into appeared first on Destructoid.

I have an unhealthy fascination with advergames. Well, advertising in general, but advertising has gotten s??o boring since we started expecting companies to tell the truth and not try to kill us too blatantl?y. Advertising games in general aren’t super common anymore, usually relegated to browser or mobile platforms.

It’s not that I expect them to be good. Outside of a few exceptions, they’re usually not. At the very best, they’re inoffensive, but at worst, we have Mr. Pibb. Otherwise known as Mr. Pibb: The 3D Interactive Game. It might potentially be the worst first-person shooter I’ve ever played, but to truly confirm that, I’d have to delve through the fog of repressed trauma, and I don’t thin??k it’s worth it.

[caption id="attachment_397812" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The brand that failed medical school

Mr. Pibb is essentia??lly Coca-Cola’s version of Dr. Pepper. Or it was. It’s now sold as Pibb Xtra. I don’t think it was ever really sold here in Canada, or if it was, it ??was like Mello Yello in that it was only briefly marketed here.

For a short while �?and this is all stuff I’m essentially learning right now �?it was marketed usi?ng a character with the obvious name of Mr. Pibb. I’m curious to look up an old commercial, but I’ve heard his voice enough playing through this game, and I really don’t want to subject myself to it any further.

Released in 1998 it is, as far as I can find, the first game created by Brand Games, a company that is still around today. Unsurprisingly, their current webpage makes no mention of Mr. Pibb or even having ?worked with Coca-??Cola, so I’m very happy to highlight their past abomination. Among their PC titles, they also created advergames for Taco Bell and Gap Kids, both of which are a bit more hilarious, but I decided to go chronologically here.

[caption id="attachment_397813" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The mascot in my brain

Mr. Pibb was built on the ACKNEX Engine, which is now better known as 3D Gamebuilder. It’s awful. It feels like it kind of belongs between Doom and Duke Nukem 3D’s build engine. There are moments of ??clever mathplay in the engine, like a single bridge across a room or sections where you go underwater. However, I imagine this is built into the engine since the game design is otherwise, uh, rough. I don't have much faith in the technical side of the development team, is what I'm saying.

Apparently, your school was taken over by a mad scientist and everyone was turned into zombies. Everyone except you and Mr. Pibb, who I guess lives in your head. You cure people from their zombification by burping at them. I guess that carbonated beverages make you burp, so that’s your weapon. That sort of sounds like something someone would bring up as a joke in a brainstorming meeting. It truly stretches the meaning of the phrase “There are no bad ideas.�?/p>

Beyond the gassy main character, the only other real link to the s??oft drink that I know of is its presence in the game as a health pick-up. Of course you gain health by grabbing a t??all glass of Mr. Pibb. And each time you do, the eponymous character will scream at you the typical �?0s-sounding slogan of “Put it in your head!�?It’s really, um, unique.

[caption id="attachment_397814" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Yep, that's a school

If there’s one thing that Mr. Pibb does well, it’s in its environment. The school looks like a school, which sounds really bare minimum, but environments t?hat actually look similar to the real world weren’t really guaranteed in 1998?.

However, the level design is hardly suitable for some of Mr. Pibb’s eccentricities. Enemies, for example, can’t just be passed through. You’ll always collide with them, which isn’t n?ecessarily unusual. However, once you cure them of their zombieism, they still just stand there, unwilling to give ground. There are a lot of choke points like doorways, and? there were a number of occasions where I was alternating between jumping and ducking to try and get past someone.

You can burp at them, but that just makes them sass at you and causes y??ou to take damage. It’s not ideal.

On the plus side, however, the whole game is just one big(ish) level. It took me 45 minutes to complete the whole game, and that inc??ludes time spent getting stuck behind immovable students and dying in the worst platforming section imaginab?le at the end of the game. Your main objective is to gather keys to get to new areas in the school. It’s not very unique.

[caption id="attachment_397815" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Eeeew, it's sticky!

Even at 45 minutes, I can’t believe I went to the effort of completing Mr. Pibb. The last section of the g?ame is somewhat obtuse and entirely created to be as frustrating as possible. You have to traverse caustic slime using moving platforms, and every time you step onto on??e of them, Mr. Pibb exclaims, “Eeeew, it’s sticky!�?This is regardless of whether or not you actually touch the slime.

If you do slip off a platform - and that’s extremely easy to do - there’s a good chance that you won’t recover and will just die. I made slow progress through the final stretch of the game. I heard “Eeeew, it’s sticky!�?so many tim?es that my husband screamed out from the bathroom how much he hated that "kid."

It doesn’t help that the same awful song loops for the entirety of the game. The only time?? this changes is during the final boss battle. However, it just plays a tune over top of the existing music, and I swear that it is one of the worst compositions I’ve ever heard in a video game.

Picture this: You’re in a store that sells musical instruments. Someone has left their child unattended. This child is walking around the keyboard section, mashing keys. That’s what the celebratory e??nding song sounds like. It’s like the composer had left on vacation, and they really needed someone to fill in before the deadline. So, one of the programmers, with no musical knowledge, tried their best. It’s incredible.

[caption id="attachment_397817" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Advertrauma

The only thing that kept me playing Mr. Pibb was my constant amusement at how badly designed it was. Not that it surprises me that a game based on a drink that is 90% high-fructose corn syrup is not very good. It’s most shocking when an advergame turns out to be decent, like in the case of Cool Spot. It’s hard to? tap into someone’s passion when you tell them their objective is to sell sugar-water.

At the same time, there was a certain value to advergames in the �?0s. You may think that it’s an incredibly bad idea to chain your product to a horrible experience, but as a child in the �?0s, we’d basically play whatever we could get our hands on. These days, you can really stretch your dollar and get thousands of games? for less than $5, or even for free, but in the formative days of the internet, it wasn’t so simple.

If you gave a �?0s kid a free game, it’s almost certain that they would play it. Once they've played it, you’ve managed to put Mr. Pibb in their he?ad. And that's the sort of trauma that can only be dislodged with expensive therapy that children ca??n't afford.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Mr. Pibb: The 3D Interactive Game probably isn’t something you want to put in your head appeared first on Destructoid.

I bought my Sega Saturn back when I was in college. Before that, I didn’t know a single person who had ever owned one. It had only been off the market for a decade, but games for it were tough to come by; still are. It sold nearly 10 million units. I have no hard numbers on this, but anecdotally, it seems to have barely made a ripple in Canada. Even knowing that the platform was mostly just popular in Japan, I would think I’d remember a section for Saturn games in Zellers.

Of the games I was able to sweep up in those early days, I mostly played Virtual On. However, a more absurd game got the second-most slice of my attention, and that was Street Fighter: The Movie. Or, as my roommates called it, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game. As it turns out, a sub-par port of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo plus a ridiculous �?0s movie is the formula? f?or magic. Embarrassing, nauseating magic.

[caption id="attachment_396632" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Educational television

If you didn’t see 1994’s live-action Street Fighter, I’m not sure I can make a recommendation. It’s a typical bad �?0s adaptation of a video game, ??and sometimes it’s decent, sometimes it’s so bad it’s good, and then other times it’s just boring. For being based on a fighting game and including Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile, you’d think it would at least have some great fighting sequences, but it seems almost a??fraid of putting fists in front of a camera.

On the other hand, Raul Julia as M. Bison is transcendentally fantastic. Sadly the actor’s last role, he brings incredible life to the character. It’s a dude who’s evil just for the sake of being evil, but Julia really makes it seem like a dude who loves evil. Absolutely fantastic. You could have just made a sitcom involving Raul Julia playing M. Bison in his ev?eryday life, and I would have been glued.

Actually, there’s this scene where Chun Li is giving this big expositional monologue, and Julia completely steals the scene just by taking ?dismissive glances over at?? her while she talks. Incredible.

But even though it was already based on an extremely popular game, the licensing machine demanded that the movie have its own game. I mean, it probably helped that Street Fighter was one of the hottest licenses of the �?0s, so putting it on anything was essentially printing Bison dollars. But, it didn’t just get one game; the console and arcade versions were completely different. The Saturn version of Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, as noted earlier, is based entirely on Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

[caption id="attachment_396633" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Quick! Change the channel!

Essentially just being pasted over an already good game is a pretty safe bet, and sure enough, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game is not bad. It’s maybe only ??worth playing as a curiosity, but it’s nice that it’s also mostly enjoyable.

The big difference here is that all the characters have been replaced by digitized versions of their actors. Well, not all. Raul Julian and Jean-Claude are substituted with their stuntmen, unfortunately. Also, you can’t really tell if they’re the original actor because the graphics are so grainy. So, like, sure, I can believe that’s Ming-Na Wen as Chun-Li. I’ll take your word for it, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game.

It also doesn’t have all the characters because someone at Capcom?? or Acclaim was a coward. T. Hawk and Dhalsim were both in the movie as characters with spoken dialogue, but no one was brave enough to give D?halsim yoga-stretch powers or make any human stand in T. Hawk’s idle pose.

In their place, we get Sawada, who had maybe three lines in the entire movie. Sawada is kind of like Fei Long, but is dissimilar enough to count as a new, exclusive character. Lucky you, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game.

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It was Tuesday

The big addition is a story mode where you play as Guile (the all-American hero with a Belgian accent) as he tries to take down Shadaloo. T?here’s a branching route to the finish line, but you’re essentially just choosing who you’ll be fighting against next.

Let me make it clear, though: you can only play as Guile in this mode. This suited me fine in College when Guile was my main, but I’ve lost my touch when it comes to his flash kicks and sonic booms. It’s a bit of a bummer that they didn’t wri??te out narratives for each character, but I guess anyone who uses Guile as their main will be satisfied.

But seeing human actors trying their best to replicate the poses of the Street Fighter II characters is the real charm here. This isn’t like Mortal Kombat, where the characters' mo??ves are based more on okay poses for humans to take on. This creates a ridiculous effect where two characters will interact in?? a way that looks like deep kissing or nipple tweaking.

It doesn’t help that the Saturn version of Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game has a lot more slowdown than the??? arcade. You get a lot of time to really appreciate Zangief sticking his tongue down Deejay’s throat.

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Why do they still call me a warlord?

Every time I pick up Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, I’m surprised by how much I don’t hate it. I think that’s a testament to Street Fighter 2’s gameplay. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous the characters and backgrounds a?re or if the music is so unspectacular that it’s barely there. It all gets held up by one of the greatest fighting game systems created.

My roommates and I played a lot of Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, right up until I found Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for PS2 and migrated our fisticuffs to that. It’s a decent substitute, and the digitized actors lend an entertaining whiff of kusoge (crappy?? game) to the whole affair. I’m not?? saying it should be picked up by EVO, but�?No, actually, that should happen. I would totally watch that.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post St??reet Fighter: The Movie: The Game for Sega Saturn is worth every Bison ??dollar appeared first on Destructoid.

I want to preface this Weekly Kusoge by saying that I absolutely love Tecmo’s Deception, but it is complete shit. I was inspired to try out the Deception series by community member Kerrik52. My only previous experience was watching a roommate try out 2005’s Trapt. However, upon looking at screenshots of Tecmo’s Deception, I fell in love.

Released in 1996, Tecmo’s Deception is just so PS1. While it established the foundation of the long-running series, it mostly failed spectacularly at everything it attempted. However, its King’s Field style first-person perspective and boxy, pixellated graphics just feel so cozy. A lot of what it failed to do was dropped by subsequent games in the series, which almost mak??es me feel like I won’t like them as much.

I will continue to send mixed signals throughout this article, I assu??re you.

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Invitation to kusoge

Tecmo’s Deception start??s with you, a prince, getting your idyllic life fucked over by your hilariously evil brother. You were set to marry?? the love of your life and take the throne of the kingdom, but that dick got jealous and framed you for murder. Typical little sibling.

However, you’re saved from the gallows and whisked away to the Castle of the Damned, where, in return for your assistance in resurrecting Satan, you’re given the power to exact your revenge. As a player, you’re not really given much choice in the matter, so thankfully, it just feels so good to be evil. It helps that the people visiting your castle are hapless at best and giant walking cola-douches at worst. And they’re usually at their worst.

The story is probably one of the legitimately best-executed facets of Tecmo’s Deception. Like many games of its era, there isn’t a whole lot of depth to it, but the fact that you play as a fallen hero doing evil stuff is pretty tantalizing. Your character isn’t really given any lines of their own, so their actions and? reactions are largely up to your own imagination. For me, it was a lot like being an evil homeowner and trying to keep everyone off my damned lawn. Homeownership is a great fantasy for my generation.

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Get off my lawn

You’re able to customize the Castle of the Damned at a great degree of depth. You can change the corridors and room placement as much as you want to make it feel more like home. You can, but there really isn’t much point in doing so.

Home customization is among the many, many undercooked features of Tecmo’s Deception. It sounds like a good idea on paper, and it still seems like a good idea when it’s presented to you. But then the gameplay gets applied to it, an??d you realize there’s no point.

You’re only ever invaded by a maximum of four intruders at a time. You deal with them by drawing them into traps that you set around the castle and activating them at the right time. However, I feel like the wo??rd “trap�?implies a certain amount of automation, but there is none. Really, they’re spells that you set on the ground. You wait until someone steps on them, then manually activate them while the person is about five feet away. Satan should have just given you a powerful kick.

So, with the limited number of invaders and the fact that you have to be close enough to count an intruder’s nose hairs, you don’t really need a big castle. For most missions, I only used the room that intruders spawn in and the directly adjacent corridors. It actually would have been most efficient for me if I just shrank the overall footprint of the castle down as small as possible. The intruders aren’t after anything. You aren’t protecting something. They’ll just wander the castle until you choose to deal with them, so giving them less land to graze on ??would just expedite the process.

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Our house, our rules

Yet, you don’t really need to reach for any sort of exploit in Tecmo’s Deception. Everything is already extremely ske??wed in your favor from the beginning. It's unlikely you'll run out of gold or MP since it’s given to you so readily. You're eventually given the ab?ility to upgrade your traps, and there’s no reason not to.

On the other hand, there’s very little reason to use most of the traps. At the start of the game, I experimented with confusion traps as a way of making it easier to kill or capture intruders, but I quickly realized that it didn��t really increase the chances of success much. ??Later in the game, I only used capture traps because they seemed mos?t effective, and I could use the captured person as a building block for a monster.

Monsters are another great idea that was badly i??mplemented. You collect the bodies of captured intruders and can turn them into various types of beasts who can collect experience and level up. You don’t get this ability until muc?h later in the game, but it basically just removes the last threads of usefulness from the kill traps. With the traps, you have to lead someone into them and activate them at the right moment. Monsters you can just drop in whenever you want, as long as you have Block Orbs available.

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Monster problems

If you run out of Block Orbs, you can invite a merchant to your castle. Despite them being instantly aggressive once they see you, they’ll gladly open up shop if you walk up to them. You then have to kill them afterward, but somehow they’ve banked all your money. I guess if you could just buy whatever you want and then steal back your money, that would be going too far. As if Tecmo’s Deception is any stranger to pushing the margins of accep?tab??le game design.

When you really get down to it, most of your time in Tecmo’s Deception will be spent grabbing the attention of an intru?der and dodging their attacks as you lead them over a trap. Enemies don’t have any real willpower beyond walking directly toward you, so there’s very little strategy. Later games in the series would address this by having you create combinations of traps, but that is absolutely not the case here.

And then, just to cap everything off, I defeated the last boss within seconds by plac??ing a trap directly next to them. The trap activated immediately when the mission started for some reason. There was no showdown. It was just over. A? brilliant way to end the game.

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If you have to fail, fail spectacularly

Yet, for whatever reason, I loved the time I spent with Tecmo’s Deception. There’s an earnest effort to innovate beneath all its failure and I find that really endearing. There was a lot of ambition driving it, and it feels like the team put their full effort into all these different features before eventually realizing that the pieces weren’t fitting together. But a product eventually has to ship, and everything was hastily crammed into a box and pushed o??ut the door.

Or, at least, that’s how I i?nterpret it. I haven?’t been able to find any details on the development through interviews or elsewhere.

However, the thing with failed experiments is that very few are willing to try and replicate the experience. The Deception series would continue using the foundation of Tecmo’s Deception but would excise a lot of the parts that didn’t work and fine-tune the ones that did. In doing so, it lost a lot of what makes Tecmo’s Deception truly unique.

So, the moral of the story here is: if you want to truly stand out, fail like no one has ever failed before. Fail so spectacularly that your failure is i??ndelibly burned into the memory of every human on the planet. Because, as anyone who calls themselves a pickup artist will tell you, pity is a type of love.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Tecmo’s Deception for PS1 is an unforgettable cluster of failures appeared first on Destructoid.

Home ports of arcade games can be a bit of a gamble. Often, they’re running on much less powerful hardware, and that can reflect in many different ways on the game. It might have less action, more slowdown, or it could just be a lot uglier. Other times, the home port of a notorious quarter-muncher might be rebalanced for the living room, as is the case with Super Smash T.V. or the NES Contra.

Old ports are also interesting from a design standpoint. Many were done by people who weren’t associated with the original production and didn’t have any access to the original code. They were, in a way, just sketching the closest facsimile they could to the original version. The faithfulness of the port was, therefore, all down to the analytical skills of the developer, as well as their access to the original source material and how many fucks the?y were willing to part with. Were they actually interested in the work, or were they just trying to get a project done before a deadline?

Pit-Fighter is an interesting example of this, as back when it was released in arcade in 1990, it wasn’t unpopular, but it also wasn’t 1991’s Street Fighter II. So, it was a bit of a cra?pshoot as to whether or not it was ??going to get a single decent port. There were a lot of them, and we’re going to take a look.

For simplicity, I’m going to look at the console and handheld ports. There were a number on the various home computer platforms at the time, but after struggling with the Commodore 64 port and having it crash on me midway through a loading screen, I cut my losses. Shame, the ZX Spectrum version is a thing of beauty.

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Sega Genesis (1991, Tengen)

The Genesis/Mega Drive version of Pit-Fighter is probably the best of the bunch, and I’m not sure that’s really a compliment. I think my fascination with it is more t?hat it makes the game look magnitudes goofier. The digitized actors have lost a lot of fidelity, so it loses much of the oily BDSM club imagery. However, in its place, the quality and quantity of animation frames haven’t been increased, so everything has this delectable veneer of jank.

You only get three continues in this version, but the combination of easily exploitable moves and the relative passiveness of the opponents make it possible to get to the end. If you had to play a home console port of Pit-Fighter, this one at least meets the “so bad i??t’s good�?threshold. It kind of proves that a bad port of kusoge isn’t necessarily just a bad game; it might ju??st be a new flavor of kusoge.

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Super Nintendo (1991, THQ)

Pit-Fighter on SNES had to have been rushed. It released the same year the SNES did, which k?ind of demonstrates an effort to get it on the market during the fevered euphoria of a new console release. It doesn’t even try to replicate the UI, instead opting for something that looks like it’s from a development build.

The most egregious part about it is the AI, which seems to just be mashing various inputs. They’re extremely aggressive, and then when they get near y??ou, their movements make no sense. They’ll jump randomly and start throwing attacks with no rhyme or reason. Then, once they knock you to the ground, they’ll continue to do little hops between stomping on you. It’s bizarre.

There are also no continues. I ?had absolutely no hope of making it to the Chainman. I’m not the only one, either, as complaints about the port’s difficulty seem rather pervasive. I se??arched to see if there was a buried continue input and instead found the advice to just keep mashing R while using Ty to win. Weirdly, I think this is the absolute worst of the versions listed here.

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Atari Lynx (1992, Atari Games)

I have a soft spot for the Atari Lynx. It was a battery-sucking handheld you could land a harrier jet on. However, a huge portion of its library was coin-op ports, and that’s kind of what the system was worst at. Nowhere is this more apparent than, perhaps, Pit-Fighter.

The screen is far too low resolution to really depict the game’s digitized actors, but they tried it anyway. As a? result, the sprites are pretty dopey looking, and it uses a palette that is largely just greys and beiges. It does try to get the sprite scaling in there, though. As you move further back from the front of the arena, the fighters appear smaller. It’s better to fight closer to the screen since then you can at least make out what things are supposed to be.

Thankfully, that’s an option, since the AI is dumb as rocks. Each fighter’s special move is mapped to the Option 1 button, which means you can ju??st spam it, but I found thi??s to be unreliable. The best way I found to fight is to just stand still and hold down the kick button. It uses a turbo function so once one kick is complete, your fighter immediately launches another one. There are only 6 continues to get you through to the end of the game, which didn’t even come close for me. However, try as I might, I couldn’t find a better strategy than just letting them run into my foot.

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Game Boy (1992, THQ)

The port for Nintendo’s monochromati?c wonder, the Game Boy, is not as bad as you might think. It plays better than the Atari Lynx version. The AI is more dynamic and closer to the arcade version, and the moves feel more responsive with better hit detection??.

The problem is with the graphics. They still try to use the digitized actors, but when you cram too much information on the classic Game Boy’s limited palette, you just get a fuzzy mess. What’s worse is th?at most of it blends into the background, so the best way to track the combatants is by their much darker pants. It’s like playing a fight between a pair of disembodied? pants.

Pit-Fighter is practically incomprehensible on an original model Game Boy. Using a Super Game Boy or Game Boy Advance makes things better, b??ut still not all that great.

I initially thought this version was really difficult. It doesn’t allow you to continue without a code (Hold down and hit A on the game over screen), and when the AI gets the advantage on you, it can really lead to a pounding. But then I once again discovered the technique of letting opponents walk into your outstretched foot. I also iterated on this by pulling off a super kick while an enemy started their animation to get up from being knocked down. They’d stan??d up right into the kick. It carried me right to the end. That’s how effective it was.

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Sega Master System (1991, Domark)

For whatever reason, the Master System version of Pit-Fighter was the one that finally decided to get creative with the graphics in order to better serve the gameplay. It shrinks down all the characters, and the tweaked color palette makes things more legible. The handheld versions probably should have done this, but here we are. It’s a shame? that this foundation wasn’t tweaked for a Sega Game Gear version.

On the other hand, it’s not really that much fun to play. I think this is largely because my exploitative strategies don’t work here. The legs of your tiny fighter are much too short to keep their opponent at bay for too long. The Master System controllers only have two buttons (no start or select), so?? your repertoire is more limited than other platforms. I was at least able to make it up to the Chainman’s stage. I needed to find out how his underwear looks in this art style.

Only released ?in the UK, the Master System version also has this weirdly enjoyable soundtrack that is credited to “The Doomsday Machine.�?It sounds inappropriately chirpy compared to the subject matter, but considering most of ??the other ports sound horrible, I’ll take it.

A sketch of kusoge

Arcade ports like we saw in the �?0s and �?0s are rather rare today. I mean, for one thing, in this part of the world, arcades are practically extinct. But then, they also tend to have more universal hardware powering them and are built on common engines, so it’s less of an issue ??to transplant them accurately to other hardware. Older games are a different story, as they require some form of emulation. Still, a developer is more likely to release something accurate than to take liberties with a game.

I’m not exactly nostalgic for those days. I hate having to worry about whether or not I’m playing the definitive version of a game. However, there’s a weird creativity that arose from the challenges of transplanting games. Ganbare Goemon on Famicom, for example, was initially an attempt to port Mr. Goemon ??from arcades and instead mutated into a sprawli??ng series.

More often than not, you just took the version for whatever was your favorite platform at the time. Then, you had to hope that the publisher cared enough about the game to provide you with a reasonable facsimile. Will a version of Space Harrier provide you with a fun experience, or will it be a janky cash grab? That little gamble is often more fun than the version you eventually wind up with, especially in the case of Pit-Fighter.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post It’s time to oil up with the ports of Pit-Fighter appeared first on Destructoid.

Totally Studly

I have an affectionate fascination with video games that look fictitious. Whenever a TV show, movie, or even cartoon wants to depict a legally distinct video game for their characters ?to play, they always show something that looks familiar but is entirely wrong. It’s like the uncanny valley of video games.

It shows a charming unfamiliarity with the medium. However, when it happens in an actual game, you realize that couldn’t be possible. Someone who has to be familiar with other? games made this. Looking like an accident was, in fact, an accident.

1990’s Pit-Fighter has an excuse. It was one of the first attempts at using digital images of actors in a video game, a technique that would be made popular by 1992’s Mortal Kombat. There is also an excuse for it being about as much fun as eating a bowl of glass. It was released before Street Fighter II came along and demonstrated how fighting games should be made. On the other hand, I’m not sure what its excuse is for looking like a tournament held at the local neighborhood sex dungeon. Someone in 1990 thought Pit-Fighter looked cool, and they were tragically wrong.

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Awesomely done

Pit-Fighter is about an underground fighting tournament. A tale as old as time. What makes it stand apart is its hairless, baby-oil-slathered protagonists. You’ve got three choices: a kickboxer, a karate guy, and a wrestleman who looks like he pooped himself. They’re macho in the ??way that bodybuilders are macho. That is to say, not at all, but I wouldn’t say that to their face.

Meanwhile, your enemies are a bunch of leather daddies and one woman who has decided to fight in thigh-high stilettos. The big bad boss is literally this big dude in a leather mask and bondage harness. I’m not one to kink-shame, but I feel that Pit-Fighter must have confused th??e development of a lot of young tee??nagers.

You fight your way through 10 rounds. This doesn’t last long, but Atari Games made sure to create it in a way that necessitated pumping in a few quarters throughout its pla??ytime. You only have one health bar for the entire game, so unless you can somehow manage to never get hit, you’re likely going to need to slot a few more coins if you want to give Big Daddy Masochist a spanking at the end.

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Confusingly erotic

A lot of Pit-Fighter's actual mechanical issues are related to the timeframe it was released in. 1990 was pretty early for its digitized graphics. As such, there is absolutely no artistic flow to anything. There are few frames of animation, so there’s a jerky quality to everything. It uses a lot of sprite scaling to make things more dynamic, but it just makes things even more sickly and fake-looking. I never really liked the method of digitizing actors for games, even when it was done well in games like Mortal Kombat, but they had to start somewhere.

The whole product is just so viciously ugly. There are levels where cars are parked in the arena (for some reason), and you can jump on them and crinkle their hood. However, these are very plainly drawn and not digitized pictures, and boy, can you tell. They look like they were ripped from Top Gear?? and clash against the more realistic crowd and fight??ers.

Meanwhile, Pit-Fighter was a pre-Street Fighter II fighting game, so fun had yet to be incorporated into the genre. In many ways, it reminds me of 1989’s Street Smart, but somehow even tackier. It’s a three-button setup, and all this oily muscle bashing takes place on a 2.5D area. You can combine button??s to create fancier moves like grabs, but there’s so little reason to do so. It’s extremely difficult to hit an enemy without them immediately hitting you back, and likewise,? they have no defense against you. You sort of just chase them around the arena and hope that you deal more damage than you take.

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Leather daddy

And then there’s Mad Miles, who looks like someone who won a bet and forced the developers to put them in. Unlike some of the other beef mountains you fight against, this guy looks like my dad could take him in a fight. I think maybe he’s supposed to make up for that by being kind of crazy, but that never comes across in the game. Instead, he just has a mustache that says, “My ex-wife won custody of the children.�?The way he flops on the ground, I kind of feel sorry for him. He also only turns up in one fight, which makes him feel like an accident. Or a secret mode, like when you beat up the car in Final Fight. He’s not threatening, he’s just?? not welcome in th?is BDSM dungeon.

Then, once you finally climb a mountain of shaved cattle, you fight the biggest bottom to frequent this particular establishment. Pit-Fighter isn’t the only piece of media to think that wearing nothing but boxers and a leather harness? is a sign of toughness, but that is absolutely not what ??it communicates to me. Especially not when partnered with a leather mask.

If you’re playing multi-player, you have to fight all your te??ammates to decide who gets to top the competition. I’m not sure why this is necessary, aside from the fact that maybe they didn’t want to palette-swap the leather daddy to make things fair. So the losers of this match pumped in all those quarters and don’t get to end the day as king of the S&M club. That’s a confusing sort of disappointment.

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Brutality bonus

Just to top this whole, writhing container of oiled flesh, Pit-Fighter also has an awful fascination with money. It’s as if Smash T.V. wasn’t exaggerating the depraved depths of human greed. Instead, your fighter gets to stand ??on a wooden skid as money is piled beneath t??hem. Then at the end, you get the typical view of scantily clad women clinging to your leather beef sack.

Pit-Fighter is just a hilarious and unfortunate amalgam of all the worst parts of �?0s style. All those embarrassing things that people once thought were cool are stuffed into this game. Because the internet came along and has told us all what those leather harnesses are actually for, Pit-Fighter just looks like a c?luster of uncomfor??table eroticism.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Pit-Fighter? sure looks different in the li??ght of an internet-connected word appeared first on Destructoid.

I'm a superstar at the cracker factory

Corpse Killer on the Sega 32X feels like the ultimate luxury game. You were already a rich kid if you owned Sega’s 32-bit Genesis/Mega Drive add-on, but to also have a Sega CD? Gosh, your ??parents must b?e pretty big wheels down at the cracker factory.

But those were the requirements for Corpse Killer on 32X. It was right there on the cover of the game: Sega CD 32X. You needed both of the system’s expensive attachments to play this super-deluxe version. Otherwise, you had to just buy the Sega CD version. Don’t get them confused! If you’re unsure, just ask the sleep-deprived clerk at K-Mart for the Sega 32X version of Corpse Killer. I’m sure they wouldn’t make that mistake.

So, wow, a game that requires two very expensive add-ons just to play. That must be one extra-special game, right? No, not at all. I was going to make a joke about how it’s “special�?in the way a mother might use the word to explain to a relative how you can remember the names of 151 Pokemon, but can’t correctly spell Saskatchewan or remember its capital city. But even then, its brother, the Sega CD version, is just as “special.�?So, I guess the only way that Corpse Killer on 32X is extra-special is in the way that it’s extra-special? disappointing, because it’s an extra-specially pointless way ??to play a bad game.

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Full-Motion Vomit

The era of FMV games was pretty embarrassing. We probably should have known by the rise and fall of the LaserDisc arcade games that this style of barely interactive movie games is better as a curiosity. However, I still sort of respect developer Digital Pictures for giving it their all. They were behind Night Trap and Ground Zero Texas, and while their videos were in the sub-basement of B movies, they ?obviously had some effort behind them.

Released in 1994, Corpse Killer is a Digital Pictures game that maybe most resembles a video game. While it makes heavy use of live-action footage, it’s largely a shooting gallery. However, this isn’t in the same style that 1991’s Mad Dog McCree went with. While Mad Dog McCree just showed you a video and then judged if you pulled the trigger while your lightgun was pointed at the correct part of the screen, Corpse Killer has a slow pan of a background and then super-imposes people in their pajamas w??obblin?g across the screen.

In 1995, versions came out for the 3DO Interactive Mutliplayer and Sega Saturn platforms, and they seem to better capture what Digital Pictures was going for. Not only does the actual video portion of the game take up more of the screen, but the actors also look much clearer. Even with the bottomless power of the 32X, the actual zombies look like the film crew wandering in front of the green screen while it was being filmed with a Game Boy Camera. When you look at a better version and what they should look like, it all makes sense. But the versions of Corpse Killer that run on Genesis appendages look rough, to say th??e least.

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Powered by the Sega Slab

One of the things that drew me to Corpse Killer beyond having a use for my Sega monstrosity is its use of lightgun periphera?ls. However, for some reason, Digital Pictures only chose the Menacer and the “American Laser Games�?Gamegun.�?I own Konami Justifiers for my Genesis, which is fine, because I didn’t want to truck my Sega Stack into another room to plug it into a CRT. However, I did try it with a Sinden, and it didn’t like that. So, eventually, I gave up and just went with moving a cursor with the gamepad.

That sucks?. I??t would probably be okay if the movement was smooth, but not only is the cursor choppy in the most ideal of conditions, but the game constantly hitches whenever the Sega CD has to seek anything on the disc.

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Must not accidentally type �?i>Corpse Party�?/h2>

However, a lack of lightgun is the least of Corpse Killer’s discomforts. The game, in general, just vociferously sucks. A lot of this comes down to the fact ?that the gameplay and the video exist in separate rooms. It doesn't explain many mechanics well, such as the difference between enemy types.

Every so often, a mean-looking zombie or one that’s enveloped in the flashing lights of a rave wander on screen. Shooting the walking personification of a meth-infused party will cause it to die the same as any zombie, but sometimes it will hurt you, and other times it will kill everything on screen. The game tells you to shoot it when it’s glowing, but what the fuck does that mean? It’s always just a single flashing color. It is always glowing by my def?inition. However, it gets maybe, like, more saturated. That’s what it means, apparently. Shoot Captain LSD when he’s the most colorful.

And then there are the more mean-looking zombies who fly at you. They’re impervious to bullets, and the game doesn’t tell you why. It just lets them hurt you as your shots ricochet off. You need to use Datura-infused bullets on them because�?Because. However, these bullets are always in limited supply, so you need to scrounge for more, and Corpse Killer does a poor job of telling you that thes??e are required. And considering you can only hurt bosses with these bullets, you’d better not waste them.

And you might. You have four different ammunition types, and you swap to them by hitting B. However, Corpse Killer doesn’t give you any convenient times to do this. You’re always being swarmed by zombies. You never know when these reaper guys will ju??mp out, and to see what bullets you loaded, you have to take your eyes off the screen. It’s easier to remember that your Datura bullets require three presses of the B button, then hope that the video hitching doesn’t interrupt a press. If you choose an ammo type that you weren’t intending, it will swap right back to regular rounds if there are no shots remaining.

This means that Corpse Killer requires you to observe an enemy that requires a special type of ammo, look away from the screen to ensure that you’re selecting the right ammo, then aim and f??ire within the two-or-so seconds you have before taking damage. I??t is absolutely ridiculous.

Oh, and if you’re using a li??ghtgun, you need to shoot the tiny text at the bottom of the screen to select your ammunition. It is not, in any way,? a better choice.

[caption id="attachment_391014" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Plastic anatomy

Underlying this is a campy B-plot about a government cover-up. You play as some hapless jerk who parachutes onto this zombie-infested island and is immediately b??itten before getting saved by a stereotypical Rastafarian. Said Rastafarian, Winston, is played by Jeremiah Birkett, who I’m reasonably sure isn’t actually Rastafarian. He puts on a good performance, but you can tell he isn’t comfort??able with the accent. Even if he was, half his dialogue is indecipherable beneath the act.

You’re there to stop an evil mastermind, Dr. Hellman, played by the late Vincent Schiavelli. He hams it up as a mad scientist who has unlocked the secret of resurrecting t??he dead. You’re assisted by Bridget Butler as Julie, who is given absolutely the worst lines in the script. She’s a reporter who is trying to prove that the Pentagon was ?behind the zombie project, which is pretty obvious from your briefing material.

All in all, it’s bad, but in a way where Corpse Killer seems to know how bad it is. There’s the one scene that ??I’m a fan of where Dr. Hellman has a little action figure rigged into a model electric chair. He pulls the switch to execute the action figure, and after a few seconds of blue lights and smoke effects, the toy is replaced by a little plastic s??keleton. Genius.

[caption id="attachment_391017" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Double down on trash

If there’s one thing that Corpse Killer does well, it’s allowing you to move about the island on your own. If you abort during the initial raid on Hellman’s fortress, you can take on side missions, build up your supply, and prepare yourself for another raid. It would be a worthwhile addition to a gallery shooter if it was a better one than Corpse Killer.

Overall, though, Corpse Killer holds up as an awful curiosity. It’s really the fitting embodiment of kusoge (crap game in Japanese). It’s dopey and painful to play, but in an interesting way. That’s perhaps why Limited Run Games decided to re-release it. You can now get it on Switch, PC, and PS4 through Corpse Killer: 25th Anniversary Edition. ?This is thankfully not just a port of the Sega CD and 32X versions, so you can see what the enemies should look like, but also it s??adly loses that bit of trash appeal.

I don’t know why you’d want to play Corpse Killer with less trash. Corpse Killer is all trash, so you might as ??well double down on it.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Corpse Killer for Sega 32X is trash for rich kids appeared first on Destructoid.

You Fool!

I’m not looking to start a fight here. When The Genji and the Heike Clans was released in Japanese arcades by Namco in 1986 as Genpei Tōma Den, it was generally well-respected. However, here at the Destructoid Institute of Critiquing Kusoge (DICK), we have a saying: If it walks like Kusoge, quacks like Kusoge, and smells like Kusoge, it’s definitely Kusoge (crap game). So, are you going to take the word of Japan, the ?experts on Kusoge? Or would you rather be daring and listen to the ??brash, upstart DICK?

I don’t know why I’m so hesitant to talk about The Genji and the Heike Clans with the perspective of it being a bad game. If someone trots in with Altered Beast, I’d be the first one to stand up and tell them how much it sucks. It’s perhaps because, culturally, I understand Altered Beast. The Genji and the Heike Clans shows me that I understand Japan as much as I do deep space. I may think I know a lot, but then I see all sorts of things I ??don’t understand.

[caption id="attachment_389859" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Big Bushido

You play as the?? resurrected Taira no Kagekiyo, and you’re kind of pissed off that your clan lost the Genpei War, so you’re off to take Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first Shogun. It’s all right. This isn’t just revenge; the guy is more evil than the history books let on, so there are demons and stuff. Kagekiyo must travel across feudal Japan to Kamakura to get their revenge.

The Genji and the Heike Clans boasts three different modes of play. There’s side-scroller platforming, “big mode,�?and a top-down view. You’re most often going to?? find yourself in the normal side-scroller view, with the other two peppered in.

Big mode presents Kagekiyo in huge detail as he traipses across the screen. It reminds me of my old nemesis Predator on the NES. It might actually have been influenced by The Genji and the Heike Clans, since I think it called it big mode there, as well. They both present the protagonist as impractically big, showing off some nice detail but not moving much room ??for maneuvering. As such, it’s as clumsy as a newborn deer on an escalator. It g??ets even funnier when Kagekiyo picks up a scroll and just starts swinging his sword around like a windmill.

[caption id="attachment_389860" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Orgy in a tumble dryer

None of the modes work particularly well. The Genji and the Heike Clans�?approach to enemy placement is to just stick a bunch of spawners around and have them dumping bad guys on you. You take so much unavoidable damage as you make your way to the exit and the hit dete?ction is just terrible, so it’s more chaotic than an orgy in a tumble dryer.

The worst part is the platforming. There are a lot of moving platforms that you?? have to traverse, and Kagekiyo just doesn’t stick to them. If there’s one that goes up and down, he has trouble jumping because he’s technically falling the whole time. Whenever a?? platform moves horizontally, he doesn’t move with it, which is just so, so strange. If you land on one, you have to physically keep moving with it to stay on top, otherwise, it just slides out from underneath Kagekiyo.

If you fall in a ho??le, you don’t die instantly. You fall into Yomi, where you then have to fight your way to a circle of crates. You open the crates, and you’ll either be killed instantly or respawned at the last level you were on. I’d rather it just kill me outright. This probably made more sense in the arcade, where luck of the draw would spare you a quarter, but playing it on a console just highlights it as a nuisance.

[caption id="attachment_389861" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

One last Heike

I first learned about The Genji and the Heike Clans from Game Centre CX. The host, Shinya Arino, played the PC-Engine version, which is considered to be a pretty faithful conversion of the game. He failed to clear it so hard.

Part of the problem is that, after you hit the mid-point of Kyoto, you start b?ack there whenever you die, rather than the last level you made it to. He came nowhere near Kamakura, and having played it now, I can absolutely understand why. It’s brutal, and that ??is completely uncalled for.

For starters, it has a mystifying health system. It’s measured in candles that get burnt down, and you can increase the maximum number of them. However, you get a certain number restored each time you start a new level, but I couldn’t tell you why it gives you that amount. I’m also not totally clear on how much each pick-up gives you in? terms of extra health. Generally, this was just a game of trying to ??blast through a level as quickly as possible before I died.

Your sword also has health, and this gets depleted by hitting “hard�?enemies. ??What constitutes “hard�?is less clear. Skulls are pretty soft. Caves that are clearly made of stone don’t weaken your sword. But when Benkei blocks your attack, that’s hard. What a block looks like, that’s another matter. However, ther?e’s a lot of importance put around strengthening your sword. Not only does this make it more powerful, but if your sword gets depleted, it gets bent and can’t do much damage at all. It’s just�?ugh, it’s so dumb.

Part of Arino’s strategy was to just focus on buil?ding up his sword gauge. This makes bosses a lot easier, but you can also lose your entire gauge by falling down a hole and getting a bad pull in the lotter??y. So, really, I'm not sure if that actually makes the game any more beatable. It’s just so slapdash.

[caption id="attachment_389862" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Culture shock

I think a lot of the praise toward The Genji and the Heike Clans is aimed at its graphics and sound. There are a lot of voice samples mixed in there. For a 1986 release, yeah, it looks pretty good. I just can’t explain why it plays so badly. Castlevania a?lso came out in 1986, and it had figured out platforming ?just fine.

It does have a unique visual style, I’ll give it that. It draws heavily from Japanese history and folklore. You’d need to be pretty deeply familiar with both of those things to understand half the references found mixed in here. Even still, it’s?? pretty trippy and nigh??tmarish. Especially when a towering Minamoto no Yoritomo pops up in the background and smacks you with his powerful spoon.

There are also multiple routes you can take to Kamakura, which kind of makes the fact that it changes the rules of continuing past the game's mid-point. It’s still going to suck the quarters out of kids, and there is a decent amount of replay value that comes from plumbing it for secrets, so why go to the extent of making it impossibly difficult. It just makes The Genji and the Heike Clans feel even more slap-dash.

[caption id="attachment_389865" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Indispensible crap

It first got released over here as an unusual inclusion in Namco Museum Vol. 4 on PS1. It was rather perplexing to contemporary critics at the time. However, nowadays, you can get it on PlayStation and Switch platforms as part of Hamster's terrific Arcade Archives series. There was also a sequel released on PC-Engine/Turbografx-16 called Samurai-Ghost. It only i??ncluded big mode, and I’ll have to report back on that when I finally pick up a PC-Engine. I’m not paying the h??undreds of dollars for a TG16 copy.

As I said in the beginning, The Genji and the Heike Clans was well-received when it came out in Japan. I think this has to do with the palate of Japanese arcade gamers at the time that just didn’t translate in the West as we recovered from the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Pl??aying it today as a North American, thou?gh. Oof. It is just so bad.

But it’s also the good kind of bad. It’s an absolutely loveable bit of suffering?? to endure. It’s this painful mess of poor execution and culture shock. I sort of love it.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post The Genji an?d t??he Heike Clans is a lovable bit of suffering appeared first on Destructoid.