Whacking off

So I've been preoccupied by Whacked! over the last few days and it's been taking up too much of my time. The minute I saw the cover art for the game was drawn into the stylistic world that it portrays. It's a bit of a relic and touted poor reviews but it's got some great characters and environments. Maybe this has something to do with one of their animators.

The game is shaped around the concept of a fucked up game show and in between levels there are 5 to 30 second commercials. Imagine my shock when I saw this:

Look familiar at all? Dan Paladin, the man behind the art of Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid, worked on this baby right as he was putting the finishing touches on the flash version of AH. His unique style alone was enough to keep me going for the game.

However, it seems that lead designer Phil Saunders was the man to shake hands with for coming up with great ideas like a psychotic rabbit name 'Lucky' who has stumps for hands because he's been harvested for good luck charms or a pirate ship floating in the middle of a bath tub that has a dead and twitching giant foot protruding from the water.

The game is definitely not without it's faults however. It plays like the hyper-active cousin of Twisted Metal (that was the only game I could think of right now) and the action gets pretty hectic. You go around killing your opponents for stars and you try and reach 100 or 150 or whatever the quota is. Problem is that the game is so unbalanced, especially in solo mode, that once you're close to reaching the amount of stars you need to pass, suddenly the computer comes at you will billions of different weapons and special stage modifiers that suddenly you're now in last place with you star total.

However, any game that has a character like Lucy, immediately has my attention because I'm apparently an adolescent boy.

I love how she makes a social commentary on the age range for the game show... ie the video game... ie many video games. The fact that they play with the fact that she has bars over her goodies just takes the whole character design to another level.

Ideas are intertwined in Whacked! which gives a great feel of the world the game inhabits (for instance, the Asson ad that you saw before is connected to a level that has a broken oil pipe in a subarctic climate and is also connected to the creation of one of the characters, Toof, who is a orange eating-machine that Asson apparently developed to eat oil particles). I give a nod to the writing 'team' on this one.

But going back to the sex which means going back to Lucy, which also goes back to the title of this post, I've been reading a book (what... that thing full of word thingies? what does that have to do with video games you ask?) called Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and other sexy games changed our culture (ISBN 978-1-932595-36-9) and I've found it to be a fascinating look at how sex permeates into all aspect of culture and pop-culture, including video games.

Damon Brown is the author and has written for non sex related publications like Playboy. While Brown's objective writing and history of sex and pop culture is a very interesting read, I was immediately drawn to the forward written by Jon M. Gibson who apparently was the co-founder of the Nerdcore label of calendars and stuffs.

His musings on the immaturity of the video game industry regarding sex really hit a note with me as I have a inherent interest on sex, video games and sex in video games. I'm not going to go into too much detail as this post is already long enough, but I will share a quote from the forward to Porn & Pong:

It's the foreplay videogames lack. They just skip right ahead to the fucking, on an express to orgasm. Evidenced by horny-boy fluff like Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Playboy: The Mansion and The Guy Game, boobs and booty - the McDonald's drive-thru version of sexy - are the only things that seem to matter.

This is very true but man did it work like a charm when I was younger. More on that later...