Category: A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words: Red Ape Family

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Red Ape Family

NFTs, or “Non-Fungible Tokens”, were one of the most shameless fads of all time. Unlike previous market bubbles like tulip bulbs or Death of Superman comic books, these offered no practical value. In fact, what they even are is hard to explain. The closest normal person equivalent is a receipt.

So normal cryptocurrencies are “fungible” in the sense that as long as they’re in circulation, one dollar bill is functionally the same as another. Non-fungible means distinct, like say, an explicit receipt. Why would you spend a million dollars on a receipt for a transaction of a picture of a badly drawn monkey? The answer is a combination of get-rich suckers and wash trading (despite the name, not directly money laundering).

But I digress. So Red Ape Family, about a family of bored red apes who steal a drive full of the most valuable NFTs and go to Mars, is…. to call it a toy commercial would be an insult to toy commercials. More like a get rich quick infomercial made by someone with no talent whose sense of humor was a single episode of later Family Guy.

The existence of this is more interesting than any of the “gags” itself.

A Thousand Words: NARC

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NARC

The 1988 Williams arcade game NARC is probably the most 1980s piece of interactive media developed. Playing as super-cops in biker helmets Max Force and Hit Man, you blast your way through a drug empire of hobos, dealers, weed-growing Rambos, prostitute-kidnapping clowns, henchmen who couldn’t decide if they wanted to dress like mobsters or construction workers, and attack dogs, ruled by a giant biomechanical head-worm. None of that is exaggerated or false.

There is nothing subtle or easy about this game. It’s meant to have you win solely by pushing in quarters. (Who’s the addiction inducing dealer now?) But it is fun and is well, incredibly 1980s.

A Thousand Words: Heading Out

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Heading Out

I saw “road trip” themed games and got Heading Out on a lark. I want to say that it was a worthwhile playthrough simply because of the feelings it generated and how at the very least it was interesting. But to be honest, this is a game where the messaging actually felt insulting to me.

So the gameplay itself is moderate roguelike resource management between driving set-pieces that control like a second-rate arcade racer from the mid 90s. I think it says something about its interest that I turned the difficulty down at the first chance. Beyond that, the best strategy is to frequently cut off road, which doesn’t feel right. Which unfortunately meant I had to experience the plot. Oh boy, the plot.

You’re a faceless figure on a trip of reckless driving in the 1970s USA. Through a series of not-exactly difficult deductions, it’s revealed the player is stuck in a Groundhog Day loop after being tricked into a deal with the devil. Is it real or metaphorical? I know it’s pretentious. As they go west to face the “world’s greatest driver” (an instant obvious hallucination), they develop a reputation as the “Interstate Jackalope” and various people comment on them (and other things) over the radio. This is the worst part of the game. The music itself ranges from serviceable to very good, with a lot of guitars and early 1970s electronics (think electric organs).

The “talk radio” is not. It is what happened if someone took the anti-American axe-grindiness of Grand Theft Auto at its worst but with none of the goofiness, and (even?) worse quality all around. It’s honestly one of the most mean-spirited pieces of fiction I’ve seen. Like the overwhelming theme is of some bitter underemployed elitist screeching at everything and everyone. You have the screaming right-wing host who is designed both to be completely wrong about everything while also being sanded down to the point where he can’t be as vile as a real George Wallace-era figure of that time and place would be. There’s a ripoff of the movie Network desperate host broadcasting and two liberal women who are supposed to be better than Mr. Right Wrong but who you’re also supposed to sneer at (see what I meant?), and the literal (drug?) devil who’s providing social commentary that is still supposed to be profound but ends up being the ramblings of someone who just read A Peoples History of the United States while listening to turn of the millennium whine-rock.

Also the story scenes/adventure book style choices you encounter are variations of: “I don’t really care because this is all a time loop/crazy drug-induced hallucination anyway” – “the same bitter nihilistic things you had to listen to now you have to read and watch” and, in my least favorite scene, treating immigrants who are sincerely in awe of America’s wealth with barely concealed subtext of them being naive fools and not, you know, people who actually have firsthand knowledge of what real poverty and oppression is like.

Anyway, I spited the game by ramming into as many things on the road as I could while giving my character the least sympathetic backstory in the choices allowed. (He was an adulterer who was driven to despair and rampages out of boredom).

…Whoa, never thought the plot of a rougelike would invoke this much reaction in me.

A Thousand Words: Gone Home

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Gone Home

A 2013 game about a young woman exploring her now-deserted family home, Gone Home has been pretty controversial back in the day, being one of the first video games classified as the dreaded “Walking Simulators.” Now that I’ve played it, it’s weirdly better in terms of actual gameplay but worse in terms of central plot than I’d expected it to be.

So the game is not just “hold forward to win while listening to some pretentious narration” like too many of its successors were. It’s really atmospheric, you have to do some exploring even if it ultimately boils down to “go everywhere and interact with everything”, and it’s no worse in terms of kinetic gameplay or lack thereof than say, the classic PC adventure Myst. That’s the good part. It’s still just a short fun experience but there’s substance to it.

The not so good part is that the “secret” hidden is a melodramatic teen drama where I saw every twist and development coming despite not really knowing the game before I played it. The first world problems of upper-middle class America here just aren’t that intriguing.

That said, I have to give this a positive overall score. It is better than the firebreathers have made it out to be.

A Thousand Words: Knuckle Bash

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Knuckle Bash

One of the weirdest Final Fight descendants, Knuckle Bash is a very strange game. Yes I know I repeated myself. But it is. That it was made by the same people who made Zero “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” Wing explains some of it, including the plot which involves pro wrestlers fighting a group called the “Bulls” (well, Michael Jordan was at the height of his power when the game came out…)

The game is janky and poorly translated (to put it mildly) but the best/worst part is the enemies. For instance, the first stage is outside a hotel. The enemies there include hotel doormen. Then a later level as sunglasses wearing tourists alongside the typical thugs.

This isn’t good by any means, but it is memorable. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of video games.

A Thousand Words: Lex Imperialis

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The second major DLC for the Rogue Trader RPG, Lex Imperialis brings in the galactic police, the Arbites, as well as pets (ok, “familiars”). The pets are the most fun part of the DLC. But for some reason, I considered this worse than the previous one, Void Shadows. Not unplayable or not worth it, but not as good. Maybe it’s just I wasn’t the fondest of the ingame stuff, but I think the biggest reason is the plot.

Void Shadows centered around a horrific cosmic nightmare (genestealers). This centers around…. tax evasion. Everything involves an investigation for unpaid or stolen Imperial Tithes. I don’t mind lower-stakes stories, but this is just too mundane. It’s almost Postal 2-esque.

That said, many set pieces are good and the music is probably the best I’ve heard in the game.

A Thousand Words: Tough Turf

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In 1989, Final Fight revolutionized the arcade brawler. In that same year, a game called Tough Turf showed just how much Final Fight revolutionized the genre. The game has… no story. Just a well dressed person beating up a bunch of less well dressed people.

Do you like stupid arbitrary game-over restrictions even by arcade standards? Controls terrible even at the time? Platforming that Final Fight mercifully stopped? Then Tough Turf is the game for you. About the only good thing is the jumpy upbeat music. That and the weird conclusion where the would-be damsel in distress is actually the final boss and the ending is just a picture of her slumped body.

Just play Final Fight instead.

A Thousand Words: Titan

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Netflix’s Titan

Netflix’s new documentary Titan is about the submarine that sank near the Titanic in 2023. It’s a well-produced film with many heartfelt interviews. However, I felt it wasn’t as good as it could have been, with one small thing the filmmakers did have control over and a much larger thing that they didn’t. Let me explain.

I think the film could have gone into more detail on showing what a proper deep-sea submersible looks, sounds, and feels like. It would have highlighted Rush’s obsession with making the nautical equivalent of the Bonney Gull even more effectively. While I can understand why they might not have wanted to get too technical, I also think i could have been explained in ways a non-scientist could understand.

The larger issue is that the cause of the disaster really wasn’t very complex. Disasters typically have a ‘swiss cheese phenomenon’ where a bunch of ‘holes’ in the countermeasures all align. So even if the initial catalyst was simple, the situation where it could become catastrophic was not. This isn’t the case here. The carbon fiber hull was fatally and fundamentally flawed, and Rush was a megalomaniac who believed his own propaganda.

That said, this is a worthwhile movie and some of the non-technical parts are actually the most interesting and telling. The CBS crew falling for Oceangate’s potemkin village is a perfect example of how the media can get strung along by people who seem like they know something. I found the host being assured by their safety checks interesting-it’s the kind of thing that seems right and would be if the hull was fundamentally sound, but the equivalent of an early Comet isn’t going to care if the fuel gauges are moving correctly. The other thing is how we see Rush trying to put women who had no seafaring experience into being the pilots of the submarines because he wanted to stand out in the media-another strike against it.

For all my nitpicks, this is a worthy documentary about a real-life terrible person who did terrible things.

A Thousand Words: The Simpsons Wrestling

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The Simpsons Wrestling

Simpsons games have a reputation for a few hits (Hit and Run, the original arcade game) and a lot of misses. One of those is The Simpsons Wrestling, one of the last Playstation 1 games released. By this point, a lot of wrestling games had been made. A lot of 3d and 2d fighting games for it had been made. A lot of Simpsons games were just low-quality knockoffs of the big popular genres, from skateboarding to platforming.

This is at least interestingly bad. It’s a 3d fighting game whose only actual “wrestling” is a pin incorporated in the final knockout. The characters are laughably imbalanced, and the action is unhinged (and not in a good way). Simpsons characters with crude early 3D models pinball around the wrestling ring. Yet the worst thing is the moveset. You have only three attacks, something that Street Fighter 1 had more than twice of.

But if “it’s interestingly bad” is the best one can say about this, then… it’s bad.

A Thousand Words: Aqua Teen Hunger Force

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Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Now Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the most misunderstood show on television. See, most people perceived it as a crude, absurdist, and surreal Adult Swim animation that made South Park look highbrow and subtle. A place featuring the strange happenings of straight man (or straight hovering box of french fries with a beard) Frylock, delightfully immature meatball Meatwad, and idiotic troublemaking drinking cup Master Shake. And their human neighbor Carl.

No. They have it all wrong. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is actually a nature documentary showing viewers the hidden, wondrous and fearsome at the same time place known as New Jersey. People don’t get it, but they just don’t get that this is what Jersey is like.

Seriously, it’s great for what it sets out to do.