Loading ...My interest in these games isn’t simply part of my well documented love of the perverse. I see these for what they truly are – warning signs.
When you catch a child tormenting animals or repeating lyrics from a Jonas Brothers song, you are rightfully terrified. Time and again serial muderers later demonstrated these juvenile behaviors might further devolve. You know you’re responsible to be vigilant of them or at least drug them into a well-behaved stupor. Now imagine that child is actually 127 million Japanese people.
If you were going to shit your pants in abject terror, this would be the time to do it.
When a society promotes an arcade game that simulates playful sodomy, they are sending an important message that you ignore at your own peril. Here’s 4 more warnings to carefully heed.
Muscle March
This game actually has a premise, but I’d prefer to let the crazy flow freely over you before explaining it:
Each of the game’s three levels involves bodybuilders tearing after a thief who has pilfered their communal tub of Human Growth Hormone. The chase leads them through a section of Toyko where the buildings are contructed exclusively from styrofoam, allowing the lead character to crash through walls without any Roid Rage powerups. The resulting holes are cartoonish silhouettes of various poses, which the player must match with the motion-sensing remotes to permit passage.
The premise builds upon Japan’s mutual love of Human Tetris and festively colored banana-hammocks.
For those not fluent in Japanese, the characters read “This man is not a deer. We find this humorous.”
Japan’s fascination with body builders is an extension of their embrace of hyperbolized western characters and campy humor. As mentioned before, their notion of camp is several exponents more extreme than the camp frail Americans are accustomed to. This is why the Japanese enjoy Bob Sapp so – he’s equal parts bodybuilder camp and Blackzilla:
Mr. Mosquito
Mr. Mosquito received its first exposure in America when it was featured in the highly controversial and ultimately unsuccessful pilot for the National Geographic television series ”What The Fuck, World?”.
In this game you play as a mosquito cruising around a home, trying to feed on the inhabitants blood often enough to survive the winter. Oddly the mosquito was kind of an afterthought, since the original game was called “Maybe This Chick In The Bath Will Show You Her Cans”, but the developers thought it needed a slightly more dynamic playing experience.
This game was originally only slated for a Japanese release, but with West Nile Virus being the new hotness in the states gamers actively petitioned to make this available in the U.S. It was a shining example of Democracy in Action. Never underestimate the power of the people when pursuing their most ephemeral needs.
Love Death 2
In truth, very little of this game has anything to do with love or death. Unless you count the slow death of your soul when you find yourself playing it
The Love Death series is from a genre of Japanese games targetted at stress relief. This would be particularly effective if every antagonist in your life also happened to be chirpy-voiced anime nymph. If you’re not clear what is going on, take a look at the inventory panel on the top right of the screen and match it to the actions taking place center stage:
You have the option of partially undressing the girls, but that seems less geared at sexual gratification than ensuring the soccer balls you’re hurling produce bigger welts.
This probably builds upon a Japanese fetish called houtai (or kegadoru) which finds arousal in injured women. I don’t know if that fully applies here since that fetish is more enamored with already bandaged women rather than the process of putting them in the ER, but I wanted to mention it to give the impression I know stuff.
Katamari Damacy
Imagine you are a tiny prince from a tiny celestial world. Your father, The King of the Cosmos (who bears an uncanny resemblence to the guy from Digital Underground)…
…accidentally destroys the universe during a drinking spree. He tasks you with a mission to rebuild the stars, constellations and Moon using a sticky sphere called a Katamari to collect matter. Since you don’t have the sack to explain that a star is massive luminous ball of plasma that can’t just be cobbled together with 2×4s, you decide to quietly make a wasted effort to go to earth and collect random crap. At this point the earthlings think the heavens have evaporated and End Times are upon them anyway so it would be hard to do too much more damage. So lets have some FUN with it!
The game play is mostly you rolling the ever-inflating Katamari, chewing through earthly infrastructure and toppling society. It is occasionally interspersed with drunken abuse from your judgemental patriarch.
Here’s a few other examples of mental torture that are pretty funny:
You Call That Torture? (Part 1)
You Call That Torture? (Part 2)
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