#bad games

My favorite combatant is Ty the kickboxer..

This is admittedly a janky and shallow game in hindsight but one should put it into perspective that the fighting genre was in its infancy and so were we as players so it wasn't yet established how fighting games should play and we hardly knew different because it was all button bashing to us! 😅

It also introduced a gritty more adult aesthetic when games were still considered kiddy for the most part that made it stand out from the crowd at the time.

It also benefits for me from being one of the first games I played to completion when I was finally allowed to go to the arcade as s kid!

I bought the book for the lols, but it was unironically a good read, and now I am an unironic Balan Wonderworld fan. Oh, well. I've been in stranger fandoms.

Just look at it.

You have what appears to be (and is) an accountant being menaced by boobalicious vampire women twice his size, so he's got Ethan Winters beaten to the punch by 34 years. But don't be fooled. One glance into his 30-yard stare and its obvious why only Mr. Weems can stop these sinister She-Vampires:

Weems is dead on the inside yet still living, where the she-vampires are animated from within with life, while dead.

He is their antithesis.

So yeah, a pile of jank with a fun name crossed my path, and now you all have to hear about it. If you're not hitting 'J', you have no one to blame but yourself.

Released on a scad of systems, but mostly the ZX Spectrum and the C64, The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems & the She-Vampires is a sort of 'Gauntroidvania'. It's also trying to push the limits of how titillating a pre-NES era game could be, though the C64 port's interface missed that memo.

The hacked c64 version was the one I played, but giantbomb had a lot of gifs from the ZX verison that I've upscaled for demonstration purposes.

The only bit of story is from the back package. Weems wants to feel something, so he's decided to take on the Great She-Vampire or die in her buxom grasp. Fair.

This game is not recommended for people with epilepsy, dignity, or in general.

Mr. Weems has a garlic gun to defend his ever-dropping blood supply (vampire hunter is an odd professon with anemia) and destroy the baddies...

All three of them, which are all introduced on the first screen!

You've got bats, they pop out of pots and attack you.

The manual says these guys are Frankenstein's' monsters, but they're clearly the giant from Twin Peaks trying to warn you that you've bought a dud.

On the C64, the lesser she-vampires are clearly based on Dracula's brides, whereas on the ZX, they're more like ghosts with big naturals.

Which means that to get both kinds of vampire babe from the secondary cover, you'd have to buy a cassette for your c64, and and for your ZX. And I don't mean a cartridge, I mean a, Cassette tape.

If you manage to stalk your way all the way to the end and find the gear you need to destroy her, the Great She-Vampire awaits:

There's no boss fight, but there is a 1 pixel nip, at least on the ZX spectrum.

From there you book it back the way you came, only every screen now has a she-vampire chasing you in a murderous rage. Make it out, and you win. Or maybe you didn't, because just like the Dungeon of Fear and Hunger, you can never really escape Mr. Weems & the She-Vampires.

Only Weems increases the immersion by truamatizing you, the player. Mr. Weems is fine. You don't have to worry about the Weems.

So...

Is it a good game?

Not remotely, but that isn't the point in the slightest.

It's temping to say this is the Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies of video games, but that's not quite right. Weems has promise and ISCWSLaBMUZ doesn't make promises. It issues threats.

Mr. Weems has the charm of a concept that's all potential and zero execution. A dead-eyed accountant gunning his way in a Gauntlet-esq blitz through a vampire-babe infested castle is a fun idea, more-so with all the secret passages and 'gather items and backtrack to the boss' aspect. It's just everything else that goes wrong.

Garten of Banban Fanart/ Expression Sheet #1 - 3

I like sh^ty games and sh^tty movies because they make it so much easier to take and mould into what I want (or need). Garten of Banban for example is a pretty bad game for multiple reasons (disjointed plot, annoying mechanics, horrific 3D models (not to be confused with horrifying 3D models) to list a few). But for me, it has potential. Characters are easy to make into something fuzzy and smushable.

So, the working title for this is Garten of Banban - Fluff Version. The characters are genetically engineered fluffy and child-friendly mascots with (dubiously given) consciousness and feelings. But, the head scientist in charge of creating them, like so many parents, was an emotionally distant workaholic. After discovering that he would have to care for or teach the creatures of his own creation how to process such icky things as emotions, he closes the front of the lab (the kindergarten), discontinues the project and locks all the creatures in the abandoned building.

I know there was a lot of discourse regarding "Child Horror" or "Mascot Horror" like Poppy's Playtime or Rainbow Friends, and this version would probably not make things better on that front. But, hey! I am not pitching a new horror game, I am making a softer version of a bad story in which the main character can fix things.

The MC in question is a patient called "23", who, after escaping a medical facility nearby and breaking into the abandoned kindergarten, shrugs and becomes a Janitor of the facility, trying to fix the place and its occupants. At the beginning, he gets killed. A lot. But, since he was a medical escapee, turns out, he has super healing. Neat! Now Banban can feast on his favourite pancreas without feeling bad about killing someone!