So I've had a pretty cool Thanksgiving weekend so far... in spite of not being able to find myself together with any biological family. My sweet roommates cooked an awesome feast on Thursday and we played PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii and ate all day. It was laid back, delicious, and cool. Many friends were over and a good time was had by all. I hope each reader enjoyed nice food and company too. =)
Then yesterday, I got up way early (5am) to drive a friend to work down in San Jose before I headed to work myself. I got a little done but I mostly participated in GT-Adults discussions as they are more interesting to me than my current testing framework tasks and I had a huge backlog of posts to catch up on. I left the office in the afternoon to help my college buddy pack his truck so he can move down to southern California. He got a new job and will probably be much happier back home. We finished up and had a nice sushi dinner together that *was* better than turkey! ;) Then I met up with some of my motorcycling friends down the San Francisco peninsula, picked up my car, ate more (rice, salad, tofu, and kimchee), chatted some about upcoming snowboard and motorcycle racing seasons, and then headed home.
Once home, a friend was over playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess at our place and I watched him play for a bit. We chatted about some games. I criticized how Excite Truck starts squirrely and annoying and then hits a sweet spot of fun in the middle where you have learned to control the truck and the tracks are pretty interesting and then how the title decends into repulsively degenerate gameplay when you get into the later tracks because they're so full of trees and other unyielding obstacles that you spend more time mashing the buttons to get some turbo boost back after a crash than you do actually driving at all anymore. As I watched, he proceeded to pick up Rupees (in-game currency) in obscure locations but he had already reached the 300-Rupee maximum threshold so he couldn't carry more and was unlikely to return to such dungeon depths again. This made these Rupees a total waste of time and no nice prize at all but somehow a newly resented (at least by me) element of the game. We joked that he simply needed to buy a larger wallet... which would of course cost the full 300-Rupees.
I was stoned off some potent screw weed and got carried away musing about how funny it would be if a game otherwise just like Zelda were filled with shops where the only thing you (as the player) could ever purchase were larger wallets and where each one cost the price that would fit into a full wallet of the previous size. You could view all sorts of goods, weaponry, armor, etc. and you could rotate the items, view all their relevant statistics, maybe even their prices too... but then the merchant won't sell any of those to you because your wallet is too small. ;)
Maybe yours could become so large that you must drag it behind you by the wallet-chain.
Maybe later in the game, you see even computer-controlled characters lugging around gigantic wallets in the world too. Yours could get so large as to over-shadow your player. Maybe the gem-like currency could actually occupy consistent virtual space so your giant wallet-bag actually has thousands of pointless glimmering lumps in it. I thought that would all be quite silly and a fun joke.
Then I spun off thinking about all sorts of parody. Weird Al has always been a mastermind in the art. I recommend listening to his latest White and Nerdy (of Ridin' Dirty) if you get a chance. There's all the Mel Brooks movies like Space Balls and Blazing Saddles. There are Spinal Tap and Fear of a Black Hat. A few games have parodied movies, like the Monkey Island adventures and Conker's Bad Fur Day. My friend and I couldn't think of any video games that directly parodied *other games*!
I am now convinced that this is a whole niche genre just waiting to happen. It would be tremendously fun to take the worst gameplay elements throughout gaming's history and abuse them for humorous purposes. The worst cliches of storyline or character stereotypes could be further exaggerated. The frustrating and emotional scenarios could be relived and perverted. Poor translations could be intentional (in homage to All Your Base Are Belong to Us).
If a fully parody game had been constructed, instead of hiring top movie actors and actresses to perform character voice-overs, stand-up comedians could be employed and given free reign. Let them just play the game and make up any voices, dialog, sound effects, etc. for the characters. Most of it could be done improvisationally according to what occurs from spontaneous interactions between everything. No censorship. No holds barred. Maybe no real guidelines either. Just tell the comedians to play and record whatever they say. Just make fun. =)
It might only take reverse-engineering a small segment of a game to get a rich joke across. There's so much material to draw from. I was thinking of making fun of the word "parody" itself by making it "DD" as in a pair-o-dee. It could even just be big boobs for a more sensual (vulgar?) representation of Parody Games. Entertainment software titles could be made under this banner that span every existing gaming genre. I seriously think a real pornography game genre needs to be established too. It's ludicrous that we don't have anything better than Leisure Suit Larry and Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball yet. Quality porn games *alone* would probably be overwhelmingly lucrative. Princess Peach could do a lot more than just bake a cake for Mario. Chun Li could help Ryu on his journey, so-to-speak. ;) Anyway, back to parodies, some DD titles could be focused on making fun of just all the platformers or just all the role-playing games. I think we should call some in-game currency "Grupees" (which my friend said should stand for Gay Rupees).
So I thought of a few characters. The first is END (Elf Ninja Dragon). Pointy ears. Wears a mask (with fire-breathing port). Katana. Shurikens. Wings. Long tail. Pointy shoes. ;) The second is START (Soldier Troll Archer Racer Thief). Then there's PIMP (Plumber Indian Monkey Princess). WHORE (Witch Hedgehog Ogre Rogue Elf). FUCK (Fairy Unicorn Clown Killer). DRUG (Demon Rockstar Umpire Gorilla). You're probably getting the idea. A bunch of characters that have acronym names conveying the amalgam of game stereotypes that they embody. Some could be real-world racial, sexist (misogynistic), flamboyantly gay or homophobic, etc. too. Whatever. Maybe characters and topics could be similar to those dealt with in South Park. There'd be ridiculous side-kicks in many games. Maybe they could all be in a classic fighting game together. The games could be titled: END Game, Press START to Continue, PIMP's Crack, etc.. In an adventure game, there'd be a giant flashing red door that actually require the more distant yellow key to unlock (as your random side-kick may have informed you). Horrendous control-schemes. Unskippable cut-scenes that are drudgery to endure... and self-aware in presentation. Map systems that are worse than useless. Save spot mirages on the horizon. Reconstructing all the classic forms of gamer torture.
I was thinking that this whole idea could have great synergy with Emergent's long-term plans (which is where I am currently working on contract for hopefully at least another couple of months). The company wants to make great general-purpose game-development software tools. The eventual idea is to allow development studios to easily plug in whatever design ideas and content they have into our rendering engine, tool-set for analysis and tuning, servers for simple online multi-player, etc.. It might be a great demonstration of the capabilities of such tools to give away (or cheaply sell) little downloadable parody games which incorporate all the elements of traditional commercially released titles and demonstrate some of the more remarkable capabilities of our engines and tools. Maybe I'll suggest all this if a good opportunity presents itself... or maybe I won't have to if my co-workers read my blog. ;)
P.S. The idea for END, START, PIMP, etc. was an outgrowth of the song Retarded Midget Monkey Ninja from the hilarious Short Bus Soundtrack. "They knew the monkey was retarded. They knew the monkey was a midget. But what they didn't know... is that the monkey was a ninja!" =)
