|
|
|
Your Weekly Kusoge
|
The full index of Your Weekly Kusoge entries |
|
Noby Noby Boy (のびのびBOY) - PlayStation 3 / iOS (2009) |
|
PSN Cover |
Noby Noby Boy |
Noby Noby Boy |
|
Keita Takahashi became something of a darling in the industry after creating Katamari Damacy for PS2, one of last generation's most original and whimsically enjoyable games. So when Noby Noby Boy was announced there was good reason to be excited - except it turned out to be one of the worst examples of The Emperor's New Clothes ever seen in videogames. The premise is you control the eponymous Noby Noby Boy (a cross between a slug, a dog and some form of mutant Teletubby), in a surreal world resembling The Yellow Submarine during a bad acid trip (which sounds redundant, yet somehow isn't), while attempting to stretch his length in order to impress the character known only as Girl. She looks like an enormous female version of Noby that lives in outer space. After Noby has become suitably elongated, his sausage length is converted into "love" which Girl then eats, increasing her own length in order to reach the moon, Mars and other planets. If this sexual innuendo wasn't bad enough already, in common British slang the word "nob" means "penis", making Noby Noby Boy sound like a diminutive way of saying Penis Boy, which is how I'll refer to the game from now on (Oh no you won't! - ed). Furthermore, stretching Noby too much can result in him snapping in two, allowing you to control his head and derriere independently; the only way to rejoin them is by literally eating your own arse. Vulgar jokes aside, there's not much else to say. You stretch Noby by tilting the joysticks in opposite directions, wrapping him around bits of scenery that are procedurally placed. You can also eat pretty much anything, as long as you start small and work your way up. None of this matters though since the most efficient way to increase length is to ignore everything and just keep the sticks pressed apart. The gimmick is that every other player around the world also contributes to the growth of Girl, since the game is meant to be played online. It makes it a bit like some kind of global capitalist bukakke session. Viewing the online leaderboard, which charts every player's stretching regime, with Girl now reaching the planet Saturn. Not that it makes a blind bit of difference to what is essentially a nonexistent game. The problem is there are no goals and absolutely no structure to Noby Noby Boy. In fact there's nothing at all, beyond a slightly uninteresting tech demo which creates a randomly generated landscape, randomly filled with pre-defined objects. It doesn't even have the experimental fun of something like Pocket Physics on Nintendo DS, since physically controlling things is nigh impossible, leaving you to flounder. A quick butcher's at Metacritic shows that it scored reasonably well, with even the harshest critic saying it was worth a go because of its $5 price. Clearly they're all deluded, which leaves me in a quandary, since to criticise the game implies I don't like fun or sandbox gaming. Keita Takahashi has regularly commented on wanting to build children's parks for a living, and this is essentially that. A kid's playground which may entertain infants for a time, but lacking any substance or even a decent physics system which might appeal to those who no longer have an irreconcilable desire to eat paste. You can view the surreal world that's created each time it loads, but there's not too much you can do in it - and there are plenty of other ways to do absolutely nothing while still having a good time. |
Noby Noby Boy
Noby Noby Boy
Noby Noby Boy |
|
The Blues Brothers: Jukebox Adventure - SNES / IBM PC / Game Boy (1993) |
|
European SNES Cover |
Blues Brothers (SNES) |
Blues Brothers (SNES) |
|
The Blues Brothers: Jukebox Adventure is your typical mid-90s movie licensed platformer. It's not particularly bad, but also not very good, uses 2nd tier euro style graphics, and of course has nothing to do with the movie safe for the two heroes and bluesy music, which still sounds kinda funky, horribly mutilated as it may be. Despite the ridiculous story of Jake and Elwood being drawn into a magic jukebox full of trampoline mushrooms, steroid cakes and crazy unrelated enemies like living beartraps and killer robots, this would be a pretty boring entry into our Kusoge column if it wasn't for its 2-player co-op mode. Whoever thought New Super Mario Bros. Wii was in any way innovative with its multiplayer can go straight back to first grade of Hardcore Gaming school. (Oh, wait! That's right here!) While the majority of games at the time which allowed co-operative play effectively placed each player on a separate two-dimensional plane (with both affected by their surroundings and enemies but not directly affecting each other), Jake and Elwood can carry their respective brother on the shoulders, bump into each other, and even catch the other's thrown records (the main weapon in the game) out of the air for ammunition exchange. Balancing on the many platforms and chains, while a breeze in single player, becomes an almost impossible challenge when Jake pushes Elwood into his death or vice versa each time both try to go on at the same time. On the other hand, they can't just wait for the road to clear as they're sharing the same narrow screen. Perfectly timed jumping intervals become a necessity for survival. And that is before the stages turn into such crazy deathtraps that would even drive a single player insane: Factory halls become fatal hurdle races of instant kills. Even the "harmless" enemies might just as well have killed you when they end the brothers' roided-out form (achieved by eating the aforementioned cakes) when it is the only means to make the next jump towards the finish line. And just wait until you have to ride the dragon. The stupid lizard rushes around the air like crazy until tamed by jumping on its head, and even then remains hard as hell to keep under control. Touching anything while on the back of the dragon causes the borderline suicidal musicians to drop to their deaths immediately. Oh, and did I mention that there's only space for one on the dragon's head? Needless to say, most of the time it's much more fun to throw your "friend" into enemies or down a pit than actively trying to progress. One's frustration is the other's delight. Remember some old games that would drop you back on the world map when pressing Start and then Select? Well, Blues Brothers doesn't have a world map, so the command just kills. Both players. Behold as whole sessions end after no more than mere seconds because both players tried to be the fastest in screwing over their rival. You die first? Start-Select! Your friend's being an ass? Start-Select! Your not-so-good-friend-anymore just Start-Selected you? Start-Select! Too bad it's pointless, since it always kills you too. Unless, that is, you're the one with one extra life more, then you can Start-Select the hell out of the other player to kick them out of the game and continue alone on the easier path. That's right, the game even acknowledges how barely playable its multiplayer is by cutting out about half of the levels and replacing some with easier ones. The best way to experience The Blues Brothers: Jukebox Adventure is on the SNES (it dropped the subtitle on that platform). The Game Boy port, besides having the disadvantage to look and sound like a Game Boy game, doesn't have the two player mode and is thus completely worthless. The PC version should have it, but be sure to get a copy with a manual, or you'll never find the keys to activate it. You probably wouldn't want to share a keyboard with your future worst enemy, anyway. |
Blues Brothers (SNES)
Blues Brothers (SNES)
Blues Brothers (SNES) |
|
Koneko Monogatari (子猫物語): The Adventures of Chatran - Famicom Disk System (1987) |
|
Cover |
Koneko Monogatari |
Koneko Monogatari |
|
The publisher Pony Canyon had a reputation for making terrible games for the Famicom, and Koneko Monogatari is no different. Like many terribly programmed games for the platform, it features sluggish scrolling, awkward physics, boring level designs, and music seemingly composed with little thought to how it might actually sound to the human ear. To be fair to the game, it is sort of adorable - you play as a cute, wide-eyed kitty cat as he walks forward and jumps over stuff. Said stuff include pants-wearing mice, beetles, and fish that appear to have been sprite-ripped from Super Mario Bros. Even the clouds, which leak drops of watery death, appear with bemused grins. In the upper right corner of the screen, there is either a sun or a moon, each smiling down upon your journey. Unlike many platformers, Chatran can't kill enemies by jumping on them, but instead must ruffle through various trees branches to find items like apples and eggs. (They can also suddenly spawn beetles, spelling your demise.) The only way to kill enemies is by jumping over them and dropping eggs on them. There are only two level themes - night and day - which cycle over and over, although the level designs are different. To be sure, this game is not enthralling. So this is a bad game, but what sets it apart is its license. Yes, "licensed games" and "awful" share common ground on the great Venn diagram of video game canon, but most licensed properties during the mid-80s were aimed squarely at boys. Koneko Monogatari (which translates to "Kitten Tale") is the original Japanese name for the movie known in America as The Adventures of Milo and Otis, wherein two talking (sort of) animals take on an adventure through nature. This obviously has a wider appeal than the usual shounen manga and anime properties, thus giving it some appeal to girls, or perhaps even the whole family. But what a terrible experience it must be to be someone playing a video game for the first time, starring an adorable little kitty cat, and then happen onto this shoddy trainwreck. This may not have been first such instance - the Famicom also saw games based on Licca-chan, the rough Japanese equivalent of Barbie - and it certainly wasn't the last, but it's a really depressing thought, especially since this seems like the sort of thing that would make a likely present from a clueless relative. |
Koneko Monogatari
Koneko Monogatari |
|
Blomby Car - Arcade (1994) |
|
Blomby Car |
Blomby Car |
|
Blomby Car, which is an incredibly stupid title for anything, was made by the practically unknown companies ABM and Gecas, and is an extremely rare arcade game that also happens to be extremely bad. It's a racing game with an extremely zoomed in isometric perspective, giving you a birds eye view of the car at all times, while never being directly above the car. Gameplay consists of driving through winding roads in Madrid, Gibraltar, "Tombouctou", and eventually Dakar. On these tracks, you drive until a turn or obstacle comes up. When a turn comes, a road sign will flash what the turn will look like, usually in some kind of impossibly strange direction. Just to frustrate you, the turns will sometimes go in a direction completely different from the one in the warning. Obstacles are mostly small rocks, puddles, parked cars or ironically, first aid trucks, lying in the middle of the road, waiting for you to crash right into them. Theyfre usually easy to dodge, though. One of the things that make Blomby Car so laughably bad is its horrible sound. There is no background music in this game, only the loud screeching noises that your car makes whenever it turns, slows down, speeds up, or does anything for that matter. The backgrounds are very repetitive, as the only thing that differentiates one part of a track and another is the obstacles and crazy turns. It also makes memorizing tracks more difficult than it should be. Furthermore, there are numerous digitized phorographs used between races, but they seem to have been digitally converted by someone who was color blind. What really brings Blomby Car down however, besides the bad sound and repetitive graphics, is its physics. Your car can go from 0 to 200 kilometers per hour in the span of a second, which completely impossible even with souped up formula racers and all. Turning involves skidding like an ice skater. To top it all off, according to Blomby Car's physics, a car barreling straight into a brick wall at 200 kph will not crash. Instead, it will spin backwards and do a triple Lutz before stopping and promptly return to normal. That same car hitting a small rock will catapult it across the landscape and land in a tree. As one might expect, it looks fundamentally ridiculous. Blomby Car's rarity may be a reason why it is not a go-to game for mockery, and the fact that, from looking at screenshots or watching videos, it doesn't look immediately terrible. But anyone who's played any similar game, like, say, R.C. Pro Arm or Rock n' Roll Racing, will find that something just feels wrong with it. It was only released as a conversion kit in extremely limited numbers and never received any ports to consoles. Curiously, Flash conversions can be found everywhere on the internet, so someone somewhere must've been amused by it. |
Blomby Car
Blomby Car |
|
The full index of Your Weekly Kusoge entries |