Very unsexy nudity? Very unsexy nudity.
[Getting Weird with Wes is a series meant to highlight all the bizarre shit floating around out there in the gaming universe. I hate normal things. Join me in celebrating the strange.]
Ask any woman (or man) who’s ever seen me naked and they’ll confirm that I am extremely easy to please. That’s why the slightest little deviation from the normal can take me from six to midnight in the blink of an eye. And honestly, I’m so jaded, hardened, cynical, and shitty in most other parts of my life that I feel ok in granting myself the slightest indulgence in soaking up the goofy garbage that litters the video game world.
The weird is the dumpster, and I’m your friendly neighborhood dumpster diver giving new life to the things once thrown out. You want some fried chicken I found behind a Food Lion? How’s about some bread that expired five weeks ago? Just take it. You can throw it away once I leave.
NBA Jam is one of, if not the, greatest sports titles of all time. It distills basketball down into an easily digestible, fun excursion that gets rid of the rules that slow the game down and highlight everything that makes it fun. Now, imagine some crazy asshole took that concept and boiled it down even further until the stock was basically inedible, but wholly and terrifyingly literal.
Dunk Lords does just that. Normally I’d bullshit a little more right here to pad these features out, but holy shit you literally turn into a jar of jam in this game. Dunk Lords takes “over the top,” puts rocket skates on it, runs it downhill on a luge, and beats the preteen world record for jumping over a pumpkin on flat land. Combining street basketball with sidescrolling beat-’em-ups, this game is to sports what Miles Teller is to not having a punchable face.
A. Jar. Of. Jam. You turn into a jar of jam. Like, a real container of jelly. I’m sure there’s a gameplay reason for that beyond harkening back to its arcade roots, but I’m so over the edge at this point that I don’t really give a damn. Give me cats running on giant balls getting punched by bodybuilders while people turn into preserved fruits any day.
It beats the hell out of trying to make sense of the real world around us.
Bizzarioware Support Access Teaser from The Strangest Interactive on Vimeo.
Bizzarioware is something I’m pretty sure is banned under the guidelines of the Geneva Convention. Imagine all the fun microgames of the WarioWare world but on acid. And shrooms. And weed. And meth. And there’s only a black light in the bathroom. What you’d puke up in that rancid pit of horrors is what we got with Bizzarioware.
I kind of don’t even want to describe any of it. You can watch the trailer. You can learn for yourself.
Be a parrot as it, uh, does things. Fry shrimp in a frying pan as it, uh, nourishes people. Tee off into the goddamn apocalypse, because, uh, apparently the people who made this game didn’t give a shit about the laws of God or man or physics. Have you ever hit a golf ball into the nether? Neither have I. But this game really wants to challenge the few religious values we have in this country, starting with the sacred bond between a man, a stick, and some speckled balls.
So speckle those alternate reality balls good and hard, Bizarrioware. It’s what Jesus would have wanted.
Now this? This is what I’m talking about. Remember the days of Custer’s Revenge and Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em when it was all about making erotic themes as unbelievably unsexy as possible in a video game? Lust for Darkness continues that tradition with aplomb.
This game has everything that should be titillating. There’s wanton sex with masked freaks. There are a couple of doors that look like armed vaginas. I think I even saw a monster that looks like a wiener! But in classic, video-game-sex tradition, everything is so mechanical and lifeless that it comes across as Christian-rooted Tool cover band. Or as some call them, P.O.D.
Like, honestly, you expect this:
It’s kinda sexy and mysterious, right? Like, it shows just enough to pique your interest, but still leaves a little something to the imagination. You’re like, “Whoa, this is something I’ll play after mom and dad go to bed so they won’t know I’m doing weird sex shit in a game,” which is totally understandable. But then you fire it up and get this:
My mom was in the dining room absolutely cringing when I took that photo, by the way.
If a video game featuring the raw sex appeal of two Barbie dolls rubbing laboriously against one another while someone makes slapping sounds with a raw piece of ham against a wet plastic tub, then, by all means, get in on this game! Just be aware that you’re going to see a lot of naked, grown men covered in mustard along the way.
See any weird shit out there lately? Send it my way, tacos@destructoid.com. Nothing is too weird.
