games with stupid names

In The Lord Of King, you play some beardy dude who pulls a magic fire axe out of a stone, becoming, in the process, a king. But not just any king. Oh no… You’re the Lord of King! Gooowaaaaarggghhh! The rest of the game sees you waddling about hacking at weird mantis-creatures, skeletons, cruel wingéd … Read more

Hello, yes, it’s me, Tim Clare, inviting you to watch my strange, infrequent ritual of poking a shotgun muzzle into a barrel of writhing pilchards, then squeezing the trigger. What’s that? Some old video games don’t hold up to close aesthetic scrutiny? No shit!! What incisive, necessary reportage! You should, like, be given a job … Read more

Pity the swollen ranks of crap comedy superheroes – every Goitreman and Ochre Bagpiper, each Super Wafter and Captain Brasso, even The Amazing Mr Narcolepsy – and their attempts to amuse by being mediocre. They are all but wisps of bumfluff against the majesty that is Mustache Boy. Mustache Boy is a vaguely Einsteinish hirsute … Read more

The Amazing Adventures Of Mr F. Lea can’t blame its title on some over-enthusiastic foreign programmer’s bad English – unlike most of the other games I’ve covered in this hall of shame, it’s just a really crap pun. Appropriate really, since the entire game is basically a succession of weak jokes, as gentle and poorly-executed … Read more

Of all the video game titles we’ve encountered so far, The First Funky Fighter is the most semantically problematic, colliding various contradictory images into a single, on the face of it ludicrous, claim of primacy. One definition of the word ‘funk’ is ‘the smell of sexual intercourse’, thus making the protagonist ‘The First Fighter Who … Read more

‘Story:In the early part of 1950’s in USA, a game called “Violence Fight” was in vogue among Mafia, reckless drivers and general businessmen.The “Violence Fight” was the game to struggle for “No.1 Quarreler” with fighters who were gathered from all parts of the USA speaking boastingly of their strength.And of course a lot of winning … Read more

Diet Go Go belongs to that rare class of video game, the ‘issue’ title. The Oddworld series – Abe’s Oddysee, Abe’s Exoddus, Munch’s Oddysee, etc – all foreground an ecological/animal welfare message, Cannon Fodder claimed to be anti-war, although how many players actually picked that up, and to what extent pleading ‘satire’ provided a convenient … Read more

Since today marks the 25th birthday of Tetris, I thought meh, why not, I’ll chuck in a ‘bonus’ post. There have been many variants of Tetris over the quarter century since it first appeared, but none quite achieve the status of ‘Hatris’. Yes. It’s Tetris but with hats. WACKY. Playing Hatris is like waking to … Read more

Cotton Boomerang (full title Cotton Boomerang: Magical Night Realms) is a side-scrolling shooter that takes the hypercolour cutesy aesthetics of games like Pop n’ Twinbee and Parodius, dials back on the self-consciously wacky elements, adds a touch of R-Type, then finishes with smatterings of that deliciously cultish shoot-em-up sub-genre, ‘bullet hell’, to create a game … Read more

Appoooh is an early attempt by Sega to capture the excitment and sweaty, balletic majesty of pro-wrestling, without actually forking out for the rights to the WWF franchise. This 1984 button mashathon sees you limp and jerk around the ring, punching, kicking and grappling your opponent into a stupor before going for that all-important pin. … Read more

Tinkle Pit is the kind of hyper-cutesy epic bananas-ness that peaked in video gaming around the late 80s and early 90s. For the most part Taito had this market all sewn up, with the Bubble Bobble franchise, New Zealand Story, Don Doko Don, Rodland and Liquid Kids amongst others. Namco clearly decided they could go … Read more