NBA Jam

Here’s what I think about telepathy: it’s up to no good. Whenever I feel like someone might be attempting to communicate with me using only their mind, I do the responsible thing and leave the room immediately. I just don’t want to be a part of that sort of tragedy. It starts off innocent enough; someone raises their eyebrow at you meaningfully across the table, either to indicate that they want to love you like it’s the 60s (or 70s, even) or that they are about to say something Oscar Wildeish — something churlishly witty. Something like: “More people every day succumb to the madness of Marriage. Luckily for me, I’m a dandy and that sort of thing really doesn’t fly in this time period.” And then you reply with something scathing like: “Well, dandyism was a common trope among literary figures of the late 19th century. To associate it with homosexuality, and the pertinent ban on sodomy, is putting the horse before the well-adorned cart, so to speak. Perhaps you meant to say that, being an alleged homosexual, Oscar Wilde was unlikely to experience marriage in the traditional sense. But that would actually be incorrect, as Oscar Wilde married a woman named Constance Lloyd in 1884 and had two children with her. Really, you are just revealing yourself to be a dunce of the first degree.” And then your friend will likely begin to gesticulate wildly with his left arm, indicating that you should really STFU. That’s where you draw the line, my friend. Leave the room at once. Have none of this so-called non-verbal communication. It leads to the horrible road of telepathy. What we have in NBA Jam is a perfect example of a couple of gents who let the whole mind reading business get a bit too far. It is to the point where, without any communication at all, one player (you) can tell the other player (him) to throw the ball (round) into the net (also round, but only when viewed from the top or bottom). This is completely unnatural, and I wont have anything of it. For the longest time in this game I was sure that I was controlling both players, like you do in the sports games these days. But then I realized, I was actually only one of them! First – disappointment. Then – HORROR. MIND CONTROL.

GIVE... IT.... TO...... ME.... *excitedly rubs temples*

The other was nought but a zombie at my disposal. This is the equivalent of realizing that the person you have loved for six years is really just an extension of your body – say a nipple. At first, I thought I was controlling both the nipple and myself, but at different times. Then I thought that the nipple was a separate entity altogether, and I loved him for it. THEN I realized that the nipple was attached to my man-boob!!

NEVER AGAIN WILL I BARE MY CHEST!

Satan is at work here, I know this!

Otherwise, the game is pretty dickery-doo. I played this one as a kid so it made me all nostalgic.

It’s also pretty boring, like real basketball, once you realize that the teams basically score each time and if you go in for a dunk you will never bloody miss.

The moral of this story is this: never trust anything with anything related to NBA. It probably has something to do with mind control.

Mr. Nutz

Mr. Nutz is a rappa. I know because I saw him call me to throw down… ya know? He went, “chiggy” with his wrist all “whaaaaaaat?” and I was like, playa, no!

You know those guys who like to whip their hand forward as if they are about to spit a verse but never get around to it? Those guys who think they’re Fred Durst all cleaned up and looking for love tonight in a lonely city? These are the same guys who crack their fingers against their other fingers to display that they enjoy something. I think Mr. Nutz is one of those guys…

If you aren’t holding anything and you press the throw button, he does, like, a little “puh, whaaaat,” if you know what I mean. I find this entertaining. I jump on those little plum-style grapes and make ‘em melt like they do and then I go, “oh, no… no I didn’t!” But it’s cool, cause I’m being ironic. And so is Mr. Nutz. He’s the kind of guy who would know all the lyrics to the song “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind because he’s just SO 90s like that. But he’s also the kind of guy who likes nuts. He likes them so much, he’s willing to jump on anyone to get some of them.

As is usual with platformers, the enemies are enemies only insomuch as they unwittingly collide with Mr. Nutz. I put to you, if you were walking along, and some dude jumped on your head, would you know ask the question, “why me?” Well, unfortunately for you, it was because you were a purple plum and you were underneath some treasure. Sure, Mr. Nutz could have avoided you, but that’s not the point of the game. Actually, you may argue, as those who defend the GTA series do, that you could actually go through the game without hurting any of these poor plums. On the other hand, you wouldn’t get nearly as much coin. I mean that in the non-countable way. Coin as the plural. Like sand.

Anyway, the point is, I like to jump on things. And when I’m not jumping on things, I’m watching Mr. Nutz jump on things.

As a concluding thought, I’d like to mention that Mr. Nutz is perhaps a fitting name for an anthropomorphic squirrel that fights wasps at the same time as walking fruits. Mr. Nutz is right. More like Mr. Freudian Nightmare.

MLBPA Baseball

Here I was, all excited to do a review. And… BAM! Baseball game. Stuttering shit-poo!

I know. We’re going to play a bit of a game. I’m going to make some predictions about this game before I play it, and I’ll see how many of the predictions come true. Folks, you can follow along at home!

1. There will be a dragon in this game.

2. This game will contain, not one, not two, but three references to eighties era David Bowie.

3. One team will be dressed in grey, the other in blue.

4. The “PA” part of the title stands for Pineapple. Major League Base-Pineapple.

5. Singing the national anthem will be our very own Shinia Twain, daughter of Mark! She will show you why her last name is often glossed as “cut-in-two” as she startles the audience by cutting herself in two! Just like in the songs!

6. As I play this game, I will die inside a little.

Okay, Gang! I’m going to play it and report back!!

Well, as it turns out, the only one that came true in the five minutes I played this wet-wipe was number 6. I’ll be honest, not tuberculous (as if that’s an adjective!): I hate this crap. The whole time I was playing that game the crowd kept on chanting, “ohh ha hoo ha… uh hu!” I’ve been to baseball games, and there is some dumb shit that goes on (7th inning stretch = barf) but I’ve never experienced that chant. Also, the camera angle is so dumb… oh my god. I want to murder whoever thought that this game was playable. Whenever the ball is hit, at first you think you know where its going, but then the game farts up a Louise and drinks so much Kool-Aid that it busts out of a wall and goes “OH YEAH!” and it changes the camera angle so hard that you can pretty much just see the ball. You know how you tell where the ball is going? Well, you don’t! All you can do is look at the mini-map on the bottom of the screen and wiggle your penis until the game mercifully ends!

What a dog of a game! Actually, no. I like dogs. What a worthy addition to EA Sport’s lethargic catalogue.

Mickey’s Ultimate Challenge

If you think hard enough, all your dreams will come true.

- Mickey Mouse. The Secret.

Dear Issac!

If you look at a penis long enough it becomes a Mickey Mouse! This is significance that Darwinists everywhere refute, but it is true! Do you believe it?! Even YOU can be a religious person!

If God does not exist how can Mickey Mouse look so much like a penis?! The Lord himself once said: “Give me thine hands… oh, fuck! I mean ‘penis’!” Actually, maybe that wasn’t the Lord.

Now we made a game so that you can play as Mickey the Mouse for free! You can be as one with the Mouse as I am. All the time. My spirit bleeds with songs of golden showering gold! I eat heaven cereal for breakfast! I eat snakes like YOU for breakfast!!

We made this game with YOU especially in mind, Issac! Issac, your mother came over for dinner last night and told me all about your school and how no one likes you at your school and then we had social intercourse! Not you and I! I and your mom! Your mom thinks that this game is great! I told her all about how you can be a mouse and how you walk really slowly. She thought that was the best part! She likes it when mice walk slow because I think she is afraid of mice and I think that she wants a man around the house to be there for her and to hold her.

I don’t know how to tell you this but……….. In this game, you have to do some really stupid shit. I made this game so hard! One place in the game: you have to make the same farting sounds that the little ducks do! That’s how you lower the drawbridge! You know what they give you when you do that, Issac? They give you a shoe!

Issac are you listening!

I want you to think really hard about what I’m saying to you! I’m telling you that this game is for people who want to engage in philosophical discussions!

LIKE!

Why does it matter if you can’t dust the pictures off before the lamp light runs out? It seems like a completely arbitrary contest.

Well, time is ticking on into the future and a learned man like me needs to get back to the old grind!

Tah Tah!

ben

Metal Combat

Here come more robots!

This is the easiest game I have ever played. It’s so easy I’m bored of it.

The training portion of this game lasts a whole 5 levels and takes almost 10 minutes. First they teach you how to shoot one energy ball. Then they teach you how to shoot a bigger energy ball. Then they teach you how to shoot an even bigger energy ball. Then they teach you how to use the bomb. And they teach you how to block shots (you shoot them!). All of this doesn’t matter. The whole game can be won without any difficulty by shooting the bad guys in the chest repeatedly.

They make it impossibly easy for you. The bad guys don’t even fight back when they’re being shot. The energy bolts seem to disrupt their energy systems. I was able to take them all down without even taking one shot.

And after they have exploded several times, they, in traditional Japanese fashion, berate themselves at having lost with horrified looks on their faces. They looked so pitiful. I didn’t have the heart to keep disappointing these poor men. They would say things like, “I am the best ever!! How could I have LOST????” And I would titter and say, “Poor baby.”

But then again, I only got about halfway through the game, to where they reveal the mad twist (the main bad guy isn’t actually the main bad guy!! Sheeeeeee-). So maybe later the enemies figure out a way to counter the just-keep-shooting-them strategy. I dunno though. It seems pretty unbeatable.

The dialogue is also pretty funny:

Don't we all feel like that sometimes?

Mechwarrior

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

I

There is nothing

Fire

Mechs

The mechs are rising in the east like the sun did

Once

I took my shoe of the cab

“My dead friend wished you to have this”

“No thank you”

Katie never liked flowers; she gave me hers

Rosebuds in winter gardens.

II

A bit of frost on the belly of the giant robot sings like a flag in the wind

There is manliness

Only manliness

I scream: “WHAT THE FUCK! HOW DO I CONTROL THIS?! WHAT DOES THIS BUTTON-”

Silence

Press restart;

I sit across from a shell – an empty sack of garbage.

Ross says to Rachel, “We’re pregnant?” But it’s not funny.

Zoroaster is burning

Oh dem be the brakes. Oh dem be the brakes. Sin me to Georgia, oh dem be the brakes!

I chew it with one hand

III

Manliness

In my own body the blood curls around lips that I knew before

Sonic and Knuckles Adventures

Thorton Winfrey waits for his moment in the sun

I shoot

“There’s no shame in it, son”

Grapes hang from a tree. I pluck

Yelling.

The Matrix; the last scene when that dude is shooting everyone and he’s angry

Neo.

Satan falls below the earth at last

IIII

Mechwarrior is the cruelest game

Feeding a little life with dried tubers

Mark Davis’ The Fishing Master

This fish is about to be violated... up the ass.

Wikipedia lists eight sportspeople with the name “Mark Davis.” Not one of them is a quote-unquote “Fishing Master.”  In fact, none of them have been anywhere near a body of water, save, perhaps Mark Davis the English Golfer. I can only assume that this game is a result of a mistake made by the company handling the making of The Fisting Master, a game featuring Mark Davis the adult film actor who, by the way, is 7 inches tall and is uncircumcised. Oh wait. They’re talking about his penis.

Mark Davis has won many awards. In 1994 he won his first XRCO  “Best Anal Sex Scene” award for Butt Banged Bicycle Babes, which also won the Griffin Poetry Prize for naughty alliteration that year. The film’s sequel (I presume), Butt Banged Naughty Nurses clinched 1998’s AVN “Best Anal Sex Scene, Video” award, the “Best Anal Sex Scene, Audio” award going to Nanny Fran for Tapes for the Anally-Inclined.

In Mark Davis is The Fisting Master (as the title should read), there’s very little of the anal sex that made Mr. Davis the famous, famous actor he is now. There is, however, plenty of fisting. Unfortunately, most of it is done to fish, which I find a bit disturbing, but hey! Whatever works for you! The premise of the game is that you follow the very horny Mark Davis as he quests for fish to fist by fishing. That’s right: fishing!

You have several options about where you’d like to look for fish to fist. You can choose the season – Spring, Summer, Erupting Volcano, or Night, the latter being an obvious reference to Madden NFL 96 (a game featuring Night as a weather condition), and the Erupting Volcano being very inspired indeed. I chose Night, not because it wasn’t a season, but because I firmly believe that fisting is an after-dark activity. I also decided that it should be snowing, something I was sure would mean that only the hardiest fish would come out to bit the lure.

"You simply cannot fist a flimsy fish!"

Much to my dismay, the snow only made it impossible to catch anything, let alone a hardy fish. I got so frustrated that I overcast my cast, which broke my lure and caused Mark Davis to shout, “Uhhhnuh!! Dad gummit!” something I’ve only heard him say once before, and it wasn’t when he lost a lure, if you know what I mean.

This game is pretty terrible, despite the explicit sexual fishing. If you’re looking for something similar, but better, check out Jimmy Houston’s Ass Tournament USA.

Magical Quest

MICKEY DID IT!

For those of you who aren’t nearly cynical enough to play every SNES game, here’s the back story on this one.

Mickey Mouse has murdered his dog. Now it’s your job to convince the crown prosecutor that he’s innocent. Will you be able to stand up in the face of what is right to argue a point?

Not in this game you wont. This game takes place outside the courtroom scenes we all remember from our childhood. It takes us into the mind of the mouse who murdered his best friend.

Mickey’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Ken Dickens, wrote the novel upon which this game was based. He titled it Holy Fuck, I Have PTSD because he just couldn’t give a care.

Here’s what he had to say about his role in the development of the game:

In the opening sequence, Mickey is at what will later become known as scene zero. It is here that he commits the murder, sending his life into the downward spiral that ended in his young death. You see, when he witnessed the cruelty and finality of his own actions, his mind became like tissue paper – he blew his nose in it. The snot from his nose created a world of hallucinations. That world is recreated here, albeit insufficiently. If one truly wants to experience the dramatic shift that Mickey did, one should take some morpheme, some acid, and then have a three-legged race with your grandparents. Your partner in the three legged race must, of course, be the carcass of a recently murdered dog. It is the only way to get the true effect.

In these early scenes, the viewer has no control over the action. He or she must watch as Mickey sends his own dog careening over a cliff. The ball bounces past him, followed closely by Pluto. Mickey stares after. Soon Goofy comes and waggles his ass all over the place. Mickey says again and again that he “lost” his dog. Goofy, a gentle soul with not much of a mind at all, giggles off to find him, but no! The dog is not lost, Goofy! It is dead! Off a cliff!! Curse you your innocence and your naiveté!!

Mickey loses his marbles right about then. In a delusion, he imagines himself jumping off the same cliff upon whose face Pluto perished. This is known, in the business, as transference. Sometimes it is true suicide, while mostly it is just a half-assed vision kind of thing. Mickey imagines that his dog has been captured to avoid the strong emotions he feels on the matter.

Mickey Mouse died last year at the age of thirty-five in his home after a long battle with mental illness and self-stabbing. He leaves behind two children and a puppy named Pluto II.

Madden NFL ‘95

I really just wanted to play Batman...

I work at a place where I see a lot of international folks. The first question they always have for me is, “What is American football?” I usually say something like, “It’s like European football with more thigh muscles” or, “It’s like like capture the flag, but no one’s having fun, and some older men with headphones are angry.”

Football: I don’t recommend watching it.

And I especially don’t recommend playing it. This is not the kind of game that you just pick up and go, “Ball goes over there. I got it.” A realistic video game based on football is always going to be about as simple as sheering a sheep (which you’d think would be simple, but is not).

This is what it says when I've been bad.

So this game lets you pick where you play and who you play and what you do when your band-aid falls off in the middle of the game (I chose “Bleed on Someone”). I set my game in Los Angeles in a snowstorm. Or I tried to, but the game didn’t snow at all. So, two options: either it did snow and the game doesn’t have any weather effects (which makes the whole thing kinda pointless) or it didn’t snow because the game was like, “Bitch, it don’t snow in LA; shut it down.”

Coincidentally, one of the weather settings you can select is “Night”. Is that really weather? Does the weatherman go, “Today it will be cloudy and sunny and maybe it will rain and tonight it will be night”? I rest my case.

The best part of this game by far is the way you can shout out orders to your teammates as they give you the collective moon some men find so inspiring; you press the B button and your dude shouts out some fucked up shit!

Here’s what my guy said: “GREEN GREEN GREEN RED BLUE RED BLUE…. 41!”

What does that mean?

At least he says it in a manly voice.

You know who has a manly voice? Batman. Let’s see what he’s up to…

Lock On

Hold me closer, tiny dancer

So, flu season has struck to the heart of this writer, dear reader! Alas, I am struck to the heart, with flu, and symptoms thereof.

I’m all delirious and shit. I think. I’m not quite sure if any of this is real, actually.

A moment ago, my space-plane was zooming after bitty hexagons on the horizon and blowing them to hell. Now I’m writing about it, like a war hero/journalist coming back from the front lines only to be ridiculed because he/she didn’t bring back any jam for tea. WTF! I brought back marmalade, that’s almost jam!

Everything has to be about war! WHY? And why is war so fuckin’ easy? Is American space-plane technology so good that they can ram a warhead up a womp-rat from a distance of eighty light-years? Probably. Yeah, unlike every other game created for this system, this game is pretty easy. All you gotta do is shoot missiles all the time and blast your laser like it’s your favourite drug. The bad guys come at you four at a time, but no problem for you, cause you have a secret weapon: a little blippy thing that comes out the back of you and makes the missile go, “I’ve grown tired of life,” and blow itself up.

Count the headlights on the highway

Seems like a waste of a good missile, really.

And this is so much of a flight sim that you can’t even crash. It’s actually impossible. You can try, but your super-techno space-plane will gradually ease back on the stick in its papa-knows-best way. “Why won’t you let me end this??!” sprach Jared to the sky, with foaming mud rolling down shoulders so cold. “I have no God but the one who meets my needs!”

AND THE GODS HAVE MERCY! My ship, gorged on fuel, sinks low. The screen, he sayeth, “fin,” and I believe.

Narrator: Without any fuel left, Jared cannot continue his reign as the Freddie Prinze Jr. of the skies. He is stranded, alone and hungry, on one of those many repeating islands below. This one is called “England.”

Now England is a tall and funny sort of nation, with butter and bread and cats-up (what the fuck is cats-up??).

Jared: If you’ll take the time to examine Scott’s review that he wrote while he was sick, you’ll see that I’ve done a terrible job. In fact, I’ve only been able to accomplish two of the tasks on his checklist, you jimmy-wimblers, nancy-boys, charlie-nogoods.

Oh, here’s a try for the last one: what do when you mix a man and a woman who love each other very much? A child with many of their characteristics.

CHECK!