Old Hickory (Or, "Orudo Hikori")

I'm doing a long version and a short version — the former for anyone who'd actually like to hear me reminisce about arcade games and the latter for those who could give a shit and would rather I just spill the weird bit of pop culture what-the-fuck. For you short attention-spanners, here you go:

There's a video game. It has fighting samurais. It's called Samurai Shodown. (I know, I know, no "w.") I liked it when I was a kid. It takes place in the late 1700s. Apparently, it's now in its sixth incarnation. This newest version features an American character named Andrew, who is based off Mr. Twenty Dollar Bill himself, noted dead American president Andrew Jackson. He fights with a bayonet. I find this hilarious.

Andrew (the Samurai Shodown fighter, not the presidential corpse) looks like this:


You may be more familiar with him looking like this.


That is all.

And now, the version in which I take forever to get to my point.

A good chunk of my elementary school pizza parlor birthday days experienced a renaissance a few months back with the arrival of Metal Slug Anthology for the Wii. Metal Slug is a hand-drawn shoot-'em-up that came from Japan but more than likely appeared in any given American pizzeria in the mid- to late-90s. It's also an absolutely brutal game that will probably wipe out all three of your little army men before you have time to blink. (In that sense, it's an ideal arcade moneymaker.) When it came to my home console, however, the seven Metal Slug games became a much more affordable proposition, and I beat them without having to spend my lifesavings in quarters. (Another plus: non-greasy joysticks.) Total surprise ending, too. When you kill the aliens, the earth is saved and you see the credits!

Today, I read that SNK — the company that made Metal Slug and the Neo Geo arcade system, the ones where you could scroll through three or four different titles in a single cabinet — has announced at the Tokyo Game Show that it will also be bringing another beloved childhood series to the Wii: Samurai Shodown. As I mentioned just a few days ago, this game — which even today makes me instinctually spell "showdown" without the "w" — rocked my prepubescent brain back in the day. Whereas Metal Slug was one of those run, jump and shoot numbers, Samurai Shodown was a two-dimensional one-on-one fighter in the style of Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat. What set Samurai Shodown apart, however, was its style: hand-painted backgrounds that look gorgeous even today, music that played like the soundtrack to some lost Akira Kurosawa epic, and combatants who spoke — spoke! — full sentences. Sure, this speech was in Japanese, even for characters who didn't come from Japan, but the overall effect was nonetheless stunning on an eleven-year-old who had been weaned in then-cutting edge 16-bit home systems.

Research into the series later in life taught me an additional virtue: I found that a good handful of the characters in the game were based on actual, historical personages. Hanzo Hattori — whose name might seem familiar from Kill Bill — also appears in Samurai Shodown, as does a valiant samurai named Jubei Yagyu. The game's villain — an effeminate, demonic priest named Amakusa Shiro Tokisada — is based on a historical Amakusa Shiro Tokisada, who was once touted by leaders of the Shimbara Uprising as being destined to Christianize Japan. (He failed, of course. You know what they say about who gets to write history books? Well, those same people apparently hold grudges and make video games.) Sure a lot of historical timelines were fudged to get these various sword-wielders to duel — blue-eyed, blond-haired ninja Galford, for example, hails from a portside metropolis San Francisco long before the city actually existed in that state — but the sense of history always appealed to me.

Now in its sixth incarnation, the game now boasts an additional American: Andrew, a bayonet-toting solider modeled after Andrew Jackson. How a bunch of Japanese game designers ever chose Jackson, of all dead presidents, to take on sword-wielding samurai is beyond me, but it amuses the hell out of me that I will soon be able to play as a reasonable facsimile of Andrew Jackson the next time I return to the some video games re-imagining of late 18th-century Japan.

I can only hope that the below political cartoon — which features Jackson battling a dragon representing the banking industry and which acually looks like it could have been printed on some old piece of currency — played some role in inspiring Andrew's inclusion.


It's a close call, but this has to be a weirder convergence between pop culture, American history and Japanese video games than when I found out that the "Zelda" in Legend of Zelda is a reference to Zelda Fitzgerald.

A Fistful of Quarters

Ultimately, when it comes to video games, the people who play them trump any pixel or electronic blip in terms of importance. A few recent examples notwithstanding, any video game is just a looped attract mode until a body bothers to step up and take the controls. It makes sense, then, that The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters focuses more on the two nuts who've devoted large chunks of their life to chasing to all-time top score of the 1981 arcade classic Donkey Kong than the game itself.


That's a good thing.

After all, anyone who's played Donkey Kong knows that the game doesn't waste a lot of time on exposition. Donkey Kong (the inexplicably named titular ape) steals a girl (known to the Japanese as "Lady" and to Americans as "Pauline) and waits atop a construction site for the hero (originally the carpenter "Jumpman," later retconned to be the plumber Mario.) Mario leaps over barrels and rescues Pauline, and then D.K. nabs her again. Much like the attract mode of an unplayed arcade game, the whole ordeal loops again and again. (Though not, as we learn in King of Kong, to infinity. More on that later.)

In a sense, that cycle could represent the trials of Steve Wiebe, who essentially serves as the documentary's hero. Arguably, director Seth Gordon does a fair job letting the real-life events play out without too much interference, and, thus, Wiebe's earnestness shines through during his struggles. Much like the little man hopping over the barrels, he repeatedly strives for a goal, we learn — being an athlete, being a musician, and finally becoming the world champion of Donkey Kong — only to have victory snatched away at the last minute. Ubergamer Billy Mitchell — who at the film's start holds the top score and who, at the time I'm writing this review, has reclaimed it once again — festers with creepiness as the film's antagonist, whose seeming reluctance to spar with Wiebe one-on-one lends him a certain sadness. The film practically begs the viewer to ask why, if Mitchell is truly the greatest player of this bygone video game, he won't prove himself in live competition with Wiebe.

I have to wonder if Mitchell really is the creepfest the film makes him to be. It makes sense to set the story up that way. Selling a documentary about gaming at all, much less about such a gamer niche culture, is tough, but putting an likable face like Wiebe's in the story helps. Like many of the people who are watching this film, Wiebe likes video games but doesn't seem like the retrogaming nerd-insider that virtually all of the other champions do. On that note, it seems plausible that Gordon could have just manipulated story to frame Mitchell as a villain, but I still can't discount the fact that Mitchell compared the controversial rivalry to the abortion issue. Yikes.

For those who don't know Donkey Kong from Q*Bert — and yes, Q*Bert comes up — King of Kong almost works as an anthropological study into a fringe society that puts video game mastery up there with feats of strength and academic excellence. These people are devoted more than most religious people I know. The utter amazement on these people's faces as Wiebe reaches the Donkey Kong kill screen — the glitch that prohibits a player from venturing more than five seconds into the twenty-second screen — makes me simultaneously proud and ashamed to love video games. Fortunately, the film offers a character who seems to share most of the world's bafflement with the game-crazed: Steve's Kristen Wiig-esque wife, who doles out well-intentioned but backhanded compliments as she attempts to understand her husband's obsession with Donkey Kong. (Also, as if to mirror the contrast between Steve and Billy, their respective wives could not be more dissimilar. If Mrs. Wiebe is Betty Hapschatt, then Mrs. Mitchell is Elvira. It's amazing.)

If you're like me, then you respect Donkey Kong for being a game that helped put Nintendo on the map and that gave a certain Italian plumber his break into video game history. It's a tough game, but beautiful in its simplicity. A certain geek endorphin kicked in when I saw those pixels projected onto the silver screen in a scale I haven't seen since The Wizard. It's great to see something that the rest of pop culture barely remembers being brought into the mainstream in such a creative way. And, for me, it was good to know that no matter how deep into geekdom my love for video games may take me, there's always someone geekier, at least as long as the guys from King of Kong are around.

That being said, I want to close with a random pop culture footnote that I find too hilarious to pass up. Mrs. Mitchell amuses me not only by virtue of being Mrs. Wiebe's polar opposite, but also in her resemblance to Pauline, the girl whom Donkey Kong kidnaps. In the 1981, when the game first came out, Pauline looked like this:


However, as time passed, the Princess usurped Pauline's place as Mario's main gal. She looked very similar, being skinny, blonde, Barbie-like and every bit the kind of damsel most men would want to rescue. As a result, Nintendo gave Pauline a makeover so people could tell the two characters apart.

First this:

Then this:


Finally, in the most recent Donkey Kong game — one released for the Nintendo DS last year — Pauline looked like this:


Everything, it seems, is not so easy for Pauline. And if Mrs. Mitchell were to be translated into video game form, the above woman would be her: the hair, the make-up, the very un-Nintendo-like giant boobs. Whether this was the result of careful selection on Billy Mitchell's part or mere coincidence, I find the resemblance eerie. And hilarious.

Courtroom Sketches

Yesterday, I sat in on the News-Press/NLRB hearing. Given that it's a legal procedure focusing on the one event that has been the focus of the Santa Barbara journalism world for the last year, you'd think it would be riveting. It's not. This dull write-up being proof, it's actually more boring than a water district meeting, and I've been to more than my fair share of those. Seriously, it would have been more interesting to write an article on the linty contents of my belly button.

Nonetheless, I went and reported, in a fashion my editing duties do not often allow. While I was there, the legal happenings frequently paused so the lawyers involved could chat about their strategy or ensure that the document they had was the same version as that the other side had. This happened a lot. Eventually, I made a game for myself: draw a picture, and think if I could finish the picture in the same the break would provide. Below are the results.

A happy ostrich!

A demonic umbrella!

An unfortunate woman with a beehive, apparently falling. (I'm calling her "Inez." Also, this was done in the longest break, hence the detail.)

Vagina Dentata in the Mushroom Kingdom

It's late, but I'm seized by the urge to write. When this mood strikes me hard enough to pull my mind away from sleep, strange things that I haven't fully processed fly to the front in ways that make me think something may be a good idea when, in fact, it's actually not worth committing to type or even worth wasting mental energies on. Regardless, I'm awake now, and this is being written. So there.

As I mentioned before in the admittedly strange post on the faux-Greek goddess from a bygone video game, I've been following the progress of an upcoming Nintendo title — tragically saddled with the very Japanese title Super Smash Bros. Brawl — that, for all intents and purposes, will exist to delight me and solely me. It's a Drew fantasy — a culmination of pop culture crossovers the likes of which haven't been seen since Battle of the Network Stars blessed airwaves. In short — for those of you who don't remember or were so turned off by the depths of my geekdom that you simply refused to read either of the two Palutena posts — there will soon be a game which, upon insertion into my Wii, will pit the various Nintendo mascots, famous and little-known alike, against each other in battle, making for a kind of fanboy dream match in the grand tradition of the Flash-versus-Superman footrace debate. Masahiro Sakurai, the game's design director, has been giving daily glimpses of its progress on a blog — a brilliant marketing ploy that the brains behind TV shows, movies, music albums might want to consider — and I, like the entertainment-addled sheep drone I am, have been happily reading each post.

A little more than a week ago, Sakurai posted images from the game's story mode, which I imagine will attempt to make some sense of why these disparate characters — each with different body types and rendered in different artistic styles — would be interacting with and then beating the stuffing out of each other. (Example: Why would Donkey Kong have any reason to fight Link from Legend of Zelda? And if the fight has to happen, why wouldn't Link just stab the ape and be over with it?) The snippet of the story mode that Sakurai provided focused on the first boss character revealed so far, a giant, eyeless, lumbering, anthropomorphic plant monster named Petey Piranha.

Meet Petey.

braah! i should make you feel weird for so many reasons!

(A quick break: God, I love the Japanese. If it weren't for them, I would have never had a need to type out the phrase "giant, eyeless, lumbering, anthropomorphic plant monster.")

A relatively newer video game character who hails specifically from the Super Mario Bros. games, Petey is actually a hyped-up version of a minor monster that may be familiar to anyone who played the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES. Remember those strange Pac-Man-esque plants who hide in pipes, only to nip Mario's behind, cause him to die and drive many an inept seven-year-old to throw down their controller in frustration?

proto-Petey

Yes, those things. The age of video games has advanced quite a bit since 1985, at least graphically.

Anyway, Sakurai's post details that Petey has somehow grabbed a hold of Peach and Zelda — Nintendo's two leading ladies and arguably the two most famous damsels-in-distress in the history of video games. Not only does this herbofreak nab them both, mind you, but he also has trapped them inside two princess-sized birdcages, with one each held in one of his leafy "hands." The heroes then fight him, which you might think would be easy, given Petey's lack of eyes. Aside from lunging with his toothy mouth, Petey's main form of attack is swinging the cages — at you, at the ground, or directly into each other.

That last sentence forms the essential "what" of this post — the moment when mere pop culture nothing goes to strange levels and, at least in my head, demands examination. I've always said that there's something to video games. There has to be. People make them. Those people come from cultures with perspectives on life, death, sex and overall existence and something — something, I'm arguing — must filter into the final product and, thus, into the brains of the children and twenty-five-year-olds who play them. Personally, I think the scene Nintendo is offering with this bizarre fight is so laden with blatant, Freud-ready sexual metaphors that I laughed out loud when I first read of it.

First off, let's look at this wasabi-induced nightmare they're calling Petey Piranha. I'm initially drawn to his "head," which consists of big, rounded lips and a fringe of colorful petals. And let's not forget the very human pink insides. Despite that his name is "Petey," this plant monster, to me, is a passable example of the vagina dentata or "toothed vagina" motif. Observable in art and folklore to the point that it calls up quite a few results on a Google image search — one that is not exactly safe for work — from various world cultures, the idea of a ladyparts that can violently snap off a misterpart is, as far as I remember from Prof. Waid's class, a representation of a man's fear of sex, at least on its most basic level. Add to this gynecological symbolism the fact that Petey is, on his most basic level, a flower and the fact that he wears bikini bottoms and you get something spawned in the depths of a repressed gardener who's mother didn't love him enough. (Hide the shears.)

Now that we're on the same page as to what Petey is, let's look at what he's doing. First off, he's not being friendly. That fearsome roar clearly comes from a guy who has showed up specifically to cause trouble. He has also somehow imprisoned the two princess — demure, pretty, dress-wearing ladies who, especially in the early age of video games, took the passive "save me" role — and locked them up, effectively separating them from the male characters. (In the clip, Mario even gets cannonballed into the distance, leaving only the asexual, pink puffball Kirby to fight it out. Whatever happens at the end of this mess, nobody will be getting laid.) Then, as if to hammer the point in, Petey uses the imprisoned feminine characters as weapons, creating a situation where his opponent has a choice between being seized on by his toothy vagina mouth or being beaten silly by the imprisoned epitomes of video game femininity. And that's not even touching on the literalization of the porn premise "banging chicks in cages."



Fuck. They make this stuff for kids?

Screw Grand Theft Auto. At least that game is blatant in its attempt to corrupt the youth. This game is taking beloved, trusted video game icons and placing them in some of the most subversive, psychosexually suggestive situations I could dare to think of.

And I love it.

I just can't believe it happened, is happening, and will happen. Is Nintendo just trying to mindfuck their loyal customers? Or are the game's developers merely trying condemn the practice of passive femininity by literally knocking two princesses senseless? I suppose I should also mention the small bit of video game trivia I've picked up over my years of playing that might further help someone interested in trying to explain exactly what is going on with all this: In other countries, the character of Petey Piranha is known as "Mutant Tyranha" and is female. Does that make this all better? Or worse?

And seriously, if Banging Chicks in Cages isn't already the title of a porno, then it should be.

Belated Christmas Present From Sanam

I realized this never made it to the Back of the Cereal Box. Near the end of last year, Sanam posted on her Archivolt blog something titled "FOR DREW." The posts consists on just one image, which I've posted below.


Of course, it's not one of my beloved anteaters. It's an aardvark, or "dirt pig." Confusing the two is like calling a Kiwifruit an Aussiefruit, but I'll forgive Sanam. I'm assuming this aardvark is a pup, though if he's actually an albino midget aardvark who's been denuded through some terrible turn of events, that's the saddest thing ever. Why do so much things that I associate with Sanam make me feel happy and sad at the same time?

Here's a quick lesson that should help everybody tell the difference between the lovable anteater and the lowly aardvark, so no one makes the same mistake Sanam did.


Here's an anteater, being adorable and politely extending its paw upon meeting a new person in accordance with the ingrained anteater sense of manners.


And here's an aardvark, slyly trotting away after having mauled a toddler. He's eyeing the cameraman only because he doesn't want to leave any witnesses and he's therefore memorizing the camerman's face. Note the obvious "criminal" posture with which this slovenly creature carries itself.


Here are two anteaters re-enacting a scene of the Holy Mother and Jesus Baby. Anteaters are devout Christians with a flair for the visual arts.


And here's an aardvark. Thought it might look like it's in a zoo, but it's actually in prison. This aardvark stole money from war widows. The spots on its forehead are actually gang demarcations.


Here's a saintly baby anteater, resting up after having cured several blind children. Performing such miracles drains even the considerable will of the noble anteater. To certain indigenous South American peoples, the anteater is known as the "jungle doctor" in recognition of its well-documented medical miracles.


And here's an aardvark. The picture doesn't properly convey it, but this aardvark is shouting a horrible racial slur that I won't taint my blog by printing here.

Now let's see if we can keep these two animals straight from now on.

Smiling Despite

When I first saw the below photo — some accidentally hilarious snapshot that's no doubt made the rounds on the internet for some time now — I thought it was funny, though I couldn't put my finger on what seemed strangely familiar about it.


Then I remembered a slide ID I had to learn back in Art 1A.


This photo, by Weegee, depicts a drowned man at Coney Island. Despite the grim situation, however, the woman in the photo's center is smiling. It's not a genuine smile, I don't think, but more of the kind of automatic facial expression that people so often make when you stick a camera in front of them. Given the woman's proximity to the recently deceased, I'd bet she's either a relation of his or part of the rescue crew. In either case, it's totally inappropriate for her to be grinning — unless, of course, she really didn't care for him and she's not afraid to let everybody know about it.

The top photo reminds me of the Weegee in the sense of people being programmed to perform a certain way when being photographed — smiling or throwing your arms around your friends in order to make it clear to anyone who sees the photo that you are, in fact, a group. In the bottom photo, the contrast between the men's genuine reactions and the woman's artificial one makes for art. In the top, the result is three girls determined to blankly hug and smile for a photo regardless of what's happening around them — namely the pooling of freshly spilt beer. Just as the Coney Island woman probably didn't anticipate how strange she would look if she smiled for the photo, the girl in the middle clearly threw her arms around her friends without realizing that putting her arm at that angle would spill her beer and make her look foolish.

Strange what people will do in a photo.

[ Source: El Toilet ]

Whatever Happened to Space Xena?

Remember back in 2005 when scientists found those two new celestial bodies? And they called one Ceres? And they called the other one Xena? And for a little while people were saying we might get eleven planets in our solar system?

But then, horrifically, they decided instead that not only were Ceres and Xena not planets, but Pluto wasn't anymore either?

Remember that?

ol' what's-her-name

Well, I do. And I thought of that recently and decided to find out exactly what became of the "Xena" nickname, since I couldn't remember. Fittingly, for something that had a shot — however small — at being named a planet but was ultimately demoted down to "dwarf planet," Xena eventually took the name "Eris," after goddess of spite and discord. It's no "Xena," but it at least beats "2003 UB₃₁₃," the name it was initially known by International Astronomical Union while its members sorted out the various taxonomical rules that govern the naming of space rocks. Reading up on the subject on the Wikipedia, I found that the astro-researchers who initially found Eris nicknamed the body after the titular character from Xena: Warrior Princess for the following reasons:

We chose it since it started with an X ("Planet X”). It sounds mythological (OK, so it’s TV mythology, but Pluto is named after a cartoon, right?). And (this part is actually true) we’ve been working to get more female deities out there (i.e. Sedna). Also at the time the TV show was still on TV, which shows you how long we’ve been searching!

spite, as always, wins out

Interesting. (Sedna, by the way, is another would-be planet that may one day qualify for dwarf planet status, depending on how the International Astronomical Union chooses to define the term. She takes her name from an Inuit goddess.) Before the official designation, Persephone was also tossed around as a possible official name for the tenth planet, in reference to its proximity to Pluto's, but Eris was ultimately selected, as the Wikipedia puts it, in reference to "the discord in the astronomical community caused by the debate over the object's (and Pluto's) nature."

"Persephone" actually topped the list of reader submissions printed by New Scientist back in the day. That list also included "Xena," as well as "Galileo," "Rupert" (after A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), "Titan," "Nibiru" (a Babylonian goddess), "Cerberus," "Loki," "Bob," some variation on the number ten. (The best: "Bolero," which was so adeptly used in Bo Derek's Ten.)

lucy, in the sky, without laws

Easily the best thing I learned in all this research into this, however, has to be the epilogue that gives poor Xena another shot at astronomical celebrity. Shortly after Eris herself was discovered, so too was a moon that orbited her. While the satellite had been initially nicknamed "Gabrielle," after Xena's sidekick on the show, it eventually earned the name "Dysnomia." In mythology, Dysnomia is Eris's daughter and the Greek representation of lawlessness.

That is, like Lucy Lawless, the actress who played Xena.

That pseudo-Greek heroine made in into the sky after all.

EDIT: And then another time I bitched about celestial names.

The Virgin With Green Hair

As someone who has faithfully played video games since his single-digit days, I've been following the progress of Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a title for the Wii that functions basically like a Nintendo version of Battle of the Network Stars, only with punching and kicking instead of athletics. The last time I blogged about this game — the third in the series so far — it was to celebrate the fact that Nintendo had finally chosen to include the bygone mascot of the Kid Icarus series, from which my former on-screen alias and the URL of this blog get their name.

Last Friday, the production team's official development blog posted more screenshots of the game-in-progress, including the following image:


The figure in the background is Pit, the hero and essentially the namesake of Kid Icarus. He would appear to be facing the game's damsel — a pseudo-Greek goddess who, in the style of many female characters created in Japan, has green hair. We can't see too much of the woman, but the hair, the toga and the armor are a dead giveaway she is Palutena, whom longtime gamers like me remember from back when she was more crudely pixilated.

Palutena as she appeared in the original game's ending.


And as she appeared in the instruction manual. (In retrospect, this piece of art may have been one of the first examples of manga-styled drawing I ever saw.)


Palutena already represents an amazing cross-section of my fields of interest — video games, things Japanese and Greek mythology — but what's especially interesting to me about this rather obscure Nintendo character is her name. (Names, of course, are also one of the subjects I tend to fixate upon.) People who make Japanese games draw upon a wide variety of source materials when they decide what might look cool reduced down to colored dots that move in concert with each other. Books, movies, religions, mythologies, world history and freaky robots join together in a mishmash. The names of these elements often recall their national origins, but they can sometimes become unrecognizable once they're translated into the Japanese syllabary and then into English. (There's a long-running sidescroller series Castlevania, for example, that features several generation of the monster-fighting Belnades family, which I just recently realized is intended to have the more common surname "Fernandez.") Anyway, if you think about what "Palutena" might have originally been intended to sound like and look at the way she's dressed, you'll realize her name is a variation on "Parthenos," an appellation that sometimes preceded Athena's name to signify that she was a virgin goddess. As in Athena's temple the Parthenon. As in the scientific term parthenogenesis, or virgin birth.

That's Pa + Lu ("r" becomes "l" and a vowel bridge gets added) + Te ("th" doesn't exist in Japanese) + a feminine ending to make her sound properly goddess-like.

In short, this silly, insignificant video game character is actually a representation of Athena, one of the more important deities in Greek mythology. So there, was that interest-spanning enough? I've been trying for new heights. If it still needs a nudge over the top, here's one last bit: Palutena's arch-rival goddess is Medusa. Triple score!

EDIT: Despite Palutena's previously mentioned obscurity, she has a Wikipedia page. I don't know why I'm surprised.

Abject Horror

More cell phone photography:


In an effort to avoid drawing the wrong kind of attention to this blog, I won't recount the story that put this expression on Dina's face. However, I will drop a few keywords: "first time," "seafood," "filled," "it went everywhere," "guy videotaping in the closet" and "she ran out with the bedsheet just stuck to her body."

The All-Night Nippon Retrogaming Extravaganza

The three of you I've managed to retain for the last two months may remember a post I wrote on Penguin Kun Wars, a game released for the Famicom — Nintendo's Japanese version of the original NES console — that I was only able to play through the beauty of Nintendo8.com. I've since revisited the collection of Japan-only ROMs available at the site. No single title managed to recapture the frustrating delight of Penguin Kun Wars, but below you'll get a good cross section of downright infuriating.

First up: Cool World. Yes, as in the 1992 Ralph Bakshi film, which I've always wanted to see even though it's notoriously bad. Though the film was released in the United States, the Nintendo video game version of it never made it out of Japan — and with good reason.


Well, that's a copyright for Paramount Pictures. That means it's at least officially sanctioned... by the movie house that made a bad, bad movie.


And then there's the title, right there on the very game I'm playing! That's encouraging!


Oh! A map! Well, "Cool World Street" seems as good as anywhere else to start.


This eight-bit monstrosity, as near as I can tell, is meant to be the film's female lead, Kim Basinger. I don't think even Alec Baldwin ever wished a fate on Basinger so unpleasant as being reduced to as crude a pixelated representation as this. I mean look at her — she lacks any facial structure and what features she does have float on her self-tanner face. It's just creepy.

And you don't think I can stop you, Ugly Pixelated Kim Basinger? "No way"? Way, Ugly Pixelated Kim Basinger. Way.


Okay, now I'm playing. Apparently I'm playing as the film's main character, Gabriel Byrne, thus making this the only video game existence or even future existence in which you can play as Gabriel Byrne. Also, poor Gabriel is apparently in a city with purple cobblestone streets. Like in the movie, I'll presume. Also, the streets of Cool World are apparently decorated with architecture depicting grimacing demonic faces and lined with nondescript anthropomorphic rodents, all of whom apparently want to kill me. Maybe I don't want to see this movie.


More mean faces. Also, rodents attacking me with pea-shooters from second-story windows. And a strange empty glass vial that I can't get to. Did I mention that I didn't have access to an instruction manual? Even if I did, it would presumably be in Japanese anyway. Jumping is difficult and I'm quickly growing weary.


Ooh! A club! Surely some patron inside will impart valuable information to me — and by me, I of course mean Gabriel Byrne. Also, let's hope they speak English. Oh, what's that? No combination of pressed buttons will open the door? Awesome! And I can't reach the police badge sitting up on the ledge for no apparent reason? I suppose that makes sense, given that the badge would probably grant my little guy some sort of invincibility or — God in heaven! — a weapon. Did I mention that Gabriel Byrne can't attack? That even Super Mario Bros.-style stomping doesn't seem to affect all the things that want to kill me? The rodents, by the way, are both relentless and identical and I don't understand why they won't leave me alone, aside from the fact that Gabriel Byrne is clearly not a rodent.


Well, okay. The rodent seem to have abated. I'll just walk around in this suspiciously rodent-free street. La tee dah, I'm Gabriel Fucking Byrne. And then—



BAM! In case the above screens don't properly explain the sequence of events, Gabriel Byrne was struck by a runaway black car, causing him to face forward and leap off the screen — a Super Mario-style death for a game that permits none of the fun or logic of Mario's universe.

Upon my initial failure, I immediately became discouraged with Cool World: The Video Game Based on the Hit Motion Picture and decided to switch to a different title. Fortunately, a new title arrives with just a few clicks. Given the crappiness of what was a mildly familiar video game-based-on-movie selection, I decided to go for new and different.

My pick: Jesus — Kyoufu no Bio Monster. Anything that includes the words "Jesus" and "Bio Monster" in the title has got potential, you have to admit.


Start please!


In the opening cinematic, the above monster leaps across the black background once or twice. When I say "leap," I just mean the static image of it — which, by the way, I'm assuming is the Jesus Bio Monster — slides across the screen in the style of cheap Flash animation, which of course hasn't been invented in 1989. So I'll forgive it. For what it's worth, it looks pretty good, considering the age of the game.


Okay, first real screen of the game. That awful man appears to be choking on a submarine sandwich. And he's nonetheless talking. In Japanese. I press the button. More text. Button. Text. Button. Text. Perhaps he's asking for medical assistance? After all, he does suffer from the unique condition of having an entire sandwich crammed into his bastard mouth. Button, button, button. Text, text, text.


Oh, something else. I assume Mr. Sandwichmouth passed away. Apparently I'm on some sort of space station. It certainly looks like the kind of place someone would name a Bio Monster after my lord and savior.


I can read that! Something is 20,000 years old. Maybe that's the year? Maybe that's a cost? Must I collect 20,000 submarine sandwiches to kill the fat man? To kill the remaining crew? Am I the true monster? And is that my mane of unruly scarlet hair? I'm the anime Brendon Small. I'm the Captain of Outer Space.


Oh, hello! A new man to talk to. You seem stern and powerful, like Dennis Franz. Again, so much talking. But at least now I have three choices. I'll be lazy and pick the first one.


Shit. That first option was apparently Japanese shorthand for "Please, I'd rather speak to another obese member of the spacecrew, only one without a sandwich humorously lodged in his mouth." And boy can this one talk. I think I've realized how the Jesus Bio Monster was allowed to wreak so much havoc on the good Space Station Japanimation: Everyone sits around blathering on instead of following the example of every other video game ever and just killing the thing. How diplomatic. Button, button, button. Text, text, text. At this point, I've been playing for nearly ten minutes.


Finally! Not a man! That pink, fanny-shaped hairdo leads me to believe this lass is my lady love. And what a girlfriend to have! I suppose beggars can't be choosers and those stuck in space need to jump on the first thing that isn't choking on a sandwich. Rather than treat me with a conjugal visit, Princess Fanny Hair seems to be talking a lot. Button, button, button. (By the way, I would make fun of her outfit, but I think I saw something remarkably similar being sold at American Apparel today. That's not a joke.)


WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?! Fanny Hair leans in for a kiss and there's some kind of robotic big fuming at our feet? Seriously, what is that thing? I want to kill it. I want to kill something. Hell, I want the Jesus Bio Monster to eat me. Also, nice leg warmers, Fanny Hair. I'll pick the first available option again, and hope that one translates as "Kill the horrible thing."


FUCK! It's Dennis Franz again. Goddammit, I'm beginning to think this endless series of text windows is the game. Like, maybe the choices offered lead you through the game Choose Your Adventure-style. Of course, with all the text in Japanese, I am unable to make any sense of anything. Fine, you fooled me, Jesus — Kyoufu no Bio Monster. I mistook you for a game when you were actually a stupid book masquerading as a game. Utterly defeated and angry, I decide to give one more untranslated game a shot, suspecting that the game totally would have gotten good had a persevered over another dozen conversations.

A last shot, picked only because it was directly above Bio Monster: something with the tragic name Ikki.


Just one player for me, thanks. Also, this blog cannot reproduce sound, but anyone reading this should know that selecting "one player" resulted in a cheery, very Japanese and unexpectedly long intro jingle. I'd imagine they were trying to compensate for the fact that I didn't have anyone to play along with. And I appreciate that, Sunsoft.


Yep, that's right. Just me. I'm getting ready.


Oh! I already died! See, there I am in the bottom right quadrant of the screen, with a little halo over my head. How sad. The little man who doesn't move the way I wanted him to and only throws boomerangs in the direction the computer wants him to was somehow slain by marauding ninjas mere moments after setting foot into this lovely Japanese garden. Well, surely my Ikki skills will improve with another try, right?

I mean really — what the hell was that? That wasn't a game. I derived neither fun nor joy from Ikki. Six hundred lousy points and little men slain by ninjas in less than three minutes? Gah. GAH!

And then I stepped away from the computer for a few moments and collected myself.

This has been the second installment of Drew being frustrated by Japanese games intended for Japanese children. If any of you all think you'd fare better braving the Japanese psyche, I encourage you to test your skills at Nintendo8.com.