On the subject of men in their underwear...

I picked up a used Game Boy Advance recently, which, as it turns out, was perhaps not the smartest financial decision I've ever made, because, as it also turns out, some time in the winter, under the belief that I'd never actually get around to picking up a used Game Boy Advance, I went ahead and gave away all my old GBA games, so for most of the week, the only thing I've had to play on it was that Breakout, Centipede and Warlords cart, and a copy of Final Fantasy V Advance that I'm saving for later.

(... hey, ever notice how you just about always see FF games named with fancy roman numerals in their titles? What the deal? Is the franchise too good for regular numbers? Did Dynasty Warriors use them all up?)

So, long story short, I've had to go on another shopping spree in order to pick up some more games just so that the money I spent on the damn thing might be slightly less of a complete waste. The truly funny part is that all this comes on the heels of having a serious discussion about the dangers of getting into game collecting. Yeah, let's just say that saving money was a very expensive activity that week.

Let's Muscle

Digital distribution is the future of Kusoge; if not the present.

For a while there, it was the minigame collection, which consistently delivered on the promise of giving you a whole bunch of mid to low quality games in a single package, but there was still the whole thing about manufacturing and shipping physical copies.

Now, I'm not an economist, but I saw one on TV, so let's take a moment here to talk shop. Video games cost money to make, physical commodities cost money to produce and distribute, and of course, liquor and prostitutes cost money to procure. Now, the cost of developing a video game depends on the amount of man hours (time X size of staff) spent on it. The bigger a game is, the more time is needed to finish everything; the better a game is, the more time is needed to make sure everything works properly.

Now, this being a kusoge discussion, let's go ahead and throw quality out the window. The game need only not crash or have crippling bugs in it to be considered complete, so the cost of your game scales up entirely based on how big it is, so the further you scale back on this, the cheaper it is to fart your game out onto the world... hence the minigame collection.

The official lazy filler post, episode 1: linking to other people's articles.

Well, between work, school and a laundry list of scratch tests and vaccinations (given my reputation, you might assume that last bit was a weird joke... but no, I got me some needles coming up, I'm not happy about it) I haven't really had a lot of time to get any work done of new posts... and considering how very little actual work goes into running a site like this in the first place, that's pretty dire.

Cave Story and Pokemon aren't helping.

But anyway, I do have some more write ups brewing in my head, but they might be another week or so away, depending, so in the meantime, I'm going to revert to the standard internet plan b for when one doesn't have any content to provide.

I'm gonna link to content that already exists somewhere else.

This is from the article breakdown on Hardcore Gaming 101, and the articles that specifically refer to kusoge, which might provide some insight into a few of the more infamous examples of the kusoge movement, as well as saving me the trouble of having to cover the same ground. Thus, if you were just champing at the bit for a Hydlide article, for instance, I can guarantee you'll get no better Hydlide article than the one posted on HG101.

Incidentally, at the top of this list, for purely alphabetical reasons, is my own article on Action 52. I'm more than a little embarrassed about the writing quality on that one, though in my defence, I was primarily writing reviews for GameFaqs at the time; I thought I was pretty hot shit for knowing how to separate text into more than one paragraph. I've always had it in the back of my mind to rewrite that article, but since I'm clearly not getting anything done on my own site, this will probably remain a "one of these days" project for the time being.

Good Game, Kuso Box Art: Demon Attack

This is an idea I had the other night for a regular feature, which will appear whenever I get around to doing it, in which I examine the spectacularly "so bad it's good" box art for a game that is actually pretty good, if not at least solid. For the feature's debut, we're gonna look at the box art for the classic Atari 2600 game, Demon Attack.


Demon Attack was developed and released by Imagic, a company formed by the second group of Atari programmers to jump ship and form a third party 2600 development studio, not long after Activision set the precedent. Imagic cranked out a surprising number of games in only a few years, including several pre-crash classics, like Atlantis, Cosmic Ark, Laser Gates and Riddle of the Sphinx, but their most successful title was Demon Attack.

The Cat Game

Since I'm not generally on the down low when it comes to things going on the internet or around the world, it's perhaps no surprise that I missed this by a few months. But hey, this absolutely deserved canonization, as soon as possible, so we might all feel the feline love.

The game is called Sukeban Sachou Rena Wii, which, according to the description in some random Wii Now blog post, means President Rena. Rena, apparently, is some sort of mascot for something, and according to the game fiction, president of Cat Queen inc. Hence the game generally being referred to as "the Cat Game," sometimes modified as "that Japanese Cat Game," so as not to get it confused with all those other cat games currently available for the Wii

Welcome to Camp Kusoge

Well, I'm gonna keep the intro short and sweet; so, welcome to Camp Kusoge.

... (ahem)...

Okay, fine, let's go slightly longer, and a little more sour:

Kusoge, for those of you who don't know (sometimes written Kuso-ge) is a Japanese term that translates as "shitty game." Thing is, if you've ever been a player of video games, then there's a good chance that, at least once, you've been the player of a shitty video game; it's one of the dirty secrets of the industry, that most video games kinda suck.