Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Dark Dungeons🌭

Jack Chick was kind of a low rent missionary. A street preacher for shut-ins. A televangelist for people who live in vans. He’s what happens when you successfully convert a nerd, and why nobody tries that anymore. He writes insane tiny comic books warning people that don’t exist about things that never happen. He is at his very best when he’s talking about something he is utterly unqualified to discuss, which is everything, but especially Dungeons and Dragons. Back in the ‘80s, the Satanic panic saw nervous church ladies desperately afraid of dorks for reasons nobody could exactly pin down, and so Jack Chick stumbled in to explain the real problem with role playing games in…

For the cover, Jack Chick thought of the scariest thing he could imagine, which was a man with pinkeye in a sheet. It doesn’t succeed in setting an ominous tone, and it also fails as a reference to set up the content of the comic: There are no sheet ghosts in this tract, just like there are no sheet ghosts in D&D. Not unless you’re playing a sorcerer who uses their abilities to convince townspeople they’re a ghost in some kind of fantasy Scooby Doo scenario. Which is actually a solid idea, so I call dibs.

Jack was willing to trudge all the way down to the comic book store to glance in on a game of D&D, so he knows it involves a screen and miniature figures. But the last time he asked unattended children what kind of magic they believe in he spent two weeks in a county jail trying to trade wee comic books for toilet Fresca. He’ll often get a sense of how a thing looks, but will never ask a single question about how it works.

Dice are completely absent, as are character sheets and gameplay. This is how he thinks Dungeons and Dragons works: You go to a “cool” divorcee’s house and she tells you about the traps you’ve fallen into, not including this one. If she informs you the game is over, you are escorted out of a nice living room and then lose all of your friends. That is literally the opposite of D&D, which begins in a dank basement and gets you friends your parents hilariously insist you can do better than. Everything about the Chick scenario is wrong, unless Marcie was a murder hobo who kept rolling to molest NPCs and the group had a meeting about her. Then this is a pretty solid representation, actually.

This was genuinely a worry about Dungeons and Dragons during the Satanic Panic. You saw it all over the place. Christians were legitimately afraid that if their dorky children played enough D&D they would level up so much they’d get actual spells from the devil, which is both incredibly stupid and the absolute best way to sell something to a nerd. 

Intense occult training? The only intense training Dungeons and Dragons gives its players is in advanced scheduling and how to deal with disappointment when advanced scheduling fails. 

Also you named your elf Elfstar? 

What a fucking Debbie move.

This… this is actually pretty solid, Dark Dungeons. 

If you gave a D&D nerd the real power to manipulate minds with spells, they probably would blow that ability just getting their dad to drop a couple hundred on Dungeons and Dragons stuff. Which gets you what, two books and a pewter dragon? Debbie may look like a rat trying not to sneeze and she’s the only bitch Debbie enough to rock a Member’s Only jacket in the House of Satan’s Ex, but she is keeping it real.

Debbie can’t come to the phone right now to talk to a friend. She’s playing Dungeons and Dragons by herself, fighting a single zombie. Alone. As both player and DM. Debbie, this is so fucking sad I’m going to need you to roll a Charisma check against dying alone. No, I know you still have a long life ahead of you to potentially reform and find love. It’s a valid check. You will take a -6 penalty. You have disadvantage. 

“My loser daughter told me she failed her ‘real Death Saving Throw’ or some shit and I just cannot speak dork anymore today. Debbie, you’re almost as sad as my shitty daughter. You’re going to lose your virginity listening to Styx with a guy who pulls it through the hole in his tighty whities. You two are peas in a pod. Be a dear and go tell her she can dwarf up another life or something, please.”

You actually wrote your D&D character into your suicide note? I know there’s no publication process for suicide notes, but this is rejected. You’re not allowed to kill yourself over a board game. It’s like dying to the mouse trap in Mouse Trap. Your mother is going to tell people you died on the toilet so they won’t ask followup questions. Marcie, when you get to hell the devil’s going to seat you with shoe-sniffers who died from sinus infections and unbaptized toddlers who ate Lego men. 

Look I don’t want to side with Ms. Frost, Satan’s disgruntled Head of Dork Recruitment, but I gotta agree. Even your single player D&D game is more important than Marcie’s life. Changing out a urinal cake takes precedent, honestly.

“I would never have thought this was possible, but Elfstar is cooler than you. I would honestly rather hang out with somebody named Elfstar — and tell others about that fact — than with somebody that goes to pieces over Marcie “Boggle Suicide” Rosenblatt.” 

“Debbie, I don’t know how many times we’ve gone over this. Jesus. The answer is always Jesus. Literally whatever the problem is, I’m going to say ‘Jesus.’ Unless it’s ‘one can only lie and one can only tell the truth.’ Then I’m going to answer ‘I ask what the other would say,’ because everybody knows that, Debbie. Everybody. Except Marcie, and that’s why she’s dead now.”

There was a time in the 1980s where literally all you had to do was successfully beat a Dungeons and Dragons addiction to ensure a long speaking career on the church circuit. “I was once a lowly NPC like you,” you’ll tell the kids, “but now I am a cleric in Christ’s holy party, and the only Nat 20s I need are Leviticus 20:20 ‘If there is a man who lies with his uncle’s wife he has uncovered his uncle’s nakedness; they will bear their sin. They will die childless.’ Can I get an amen?!”

If you ask a man with a mustache for help with your “dungeon problem” and he starts talking this much about bondage, he’s not going to lead you to salvation. He’s going to lead you into the basement of a laundromat. You’re not going to wind up in heaven. You’re going to wind up in a VHS they can only legally sell in Thailand. 

“No, Debbie. I’m sorry. That’s not enough. You let a friend suicide so you could solo a zombie. That’s fucking 50 XP, Debbie. You told people to call you Elfstar in real life. It costs more to save your soul than it is worth. You are spiritually totalled.”

“Debbie, you had once given your life over to a long and ridiculous collection of books full of trivial rules that dictate how to behave, but often contradict one another. That’s absurd. Have a Bible.”

This is the good ending, by the way. The ominous silhouette in front of a raging inferno is considered an uplifting image to end on. If you’re holding your finger on page 19 because you weren’t sure that following man-perm to the bondage bonfire was the right move, you can quit fingering this Chick now. 

…
This post is dedicated to our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, NickH: the reason they now put escape handles inside the Mouse Trap net. RIP.

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REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: The Year! In Review!

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Shotgun or Sidearm?

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: How to Become Good at Knife Fighting

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FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Gabriel Byrne’s Hottest Sex Scene 🌭

It has been said that I’m not a very erotic writer, even though I type the word “fuck” 600 times every day just to keep the muscle memory in my fingers fresh. Most of my Fucking Days are about gross, messed-up things that are adjacent to sex crimes, like Quentin Tarantino. So for a change of pace let’s talk about something genuinely sexy that also changed our culture forever. I refer, of course, to…

If you’re not familiar with Gabriel Byrne, he’s an actor, an author, a cultural ambassador, and was very nearly a priest. He conducts himself with a sort of quiet dignity, and has been formally recognized as one of Ireland’s greatest human treasures.

And he was also the star of Cool World, a movie whose entire hook was whether or not Gabriel Byrne should bone down an animated Kim Basinger.

A man wrestling with his own sinful desires can make for a compelling emotional conflict to center a film, and Ireland’s 17th greatest actor, Gabriel Byrne, portrayed it with exactly the sort of somber gravitas you’d expect.

I recognize every inch of that posture. I did that same move to the remote control the first time I saw Star Wars. I wanted more than anything for it to work, for it to be real. That is the posture of a man desperately trying to force-pull some titties loose.

Let me walk you through the scene in question:

Kim Basinger plays Holli Would, who’s basically a fuckable Pinocchio – she wants to be real, and believes the only way to do that is to bang a human being. That’s why she lures Byrne back to her crazy high-rise apartment — so they can get rank.

Just outside, all the cartoons are going about their normal wacky business.

But when the two of them start grinding, everything in the world freezes. This entire animated universe was built with the innate ability to sense Gabriel Byrne’s confused erection, wherever he might be:

The original cast of The Gorillaz feels this impending sexual cataclysm more than anyone:

And they decide they really need to be there to watch the birth of the bodypillow industry. So they set to work building a sort of Tower of Babel for sexual voyeurism. A lesser writer would call it something cute, like the Tower of Babel, but I’m not going to debase myself like that.

And that’s all the setup you need to — oh wait, The Leaning Tower of Pussy! Yeah, there it is. Woo! We did it!

And that’s really all the setup you need to make sense of the most important scene in cartoon-fucking history. Without further ado, here’s the moment 17th greatest Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne, penetrates a cartoon:

And thirty seconds later, here’s the moment 17th greatest Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne, prematurely ejaculates inside a cartoon:

If you’re doing sex boring, you might find that massive explosion at the end unusual.

That’s because the premise of Cool World is that cartoons exist in their own dimension apart from ours, and while we can cross over to their world, we can never fuck them, or the barrier between the two universes will be broken. It’s your classic Romeo and Juliet romance – you know how Romeo can never bust inside Juliet or Italy will burst into flame? It’s like that.

That’s how Cool World explains the rules anyway, but that’s not quite right. We just saw it: humans can fuck cartoons and the barrier will stay intact. The world survived all 28 rollicking seconds of the Gabriel Byrne ride; the universe only broke when they hit the splash zone. It is specifically cumming inside a drawing that’s forbidden. If Gabriel Byrne had settled for a handie, or even just pulled out and ruined that toon’s pillowcase instead, our world would’ve been safe. But no, 17th greatest Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne, got greedy. 17th greatest Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne, insisted on rawdogging a cartoon to completion, no matter how many people had to die because of it.

Anyway, that’s the important part of Cool World, and the first thing you should remember when anybody mentions 17th greatest Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne.

But there’s more weirdness in Cool World. It also stars a lil’ baby Brad Pitt.

Look at that wee Pittlet. This movie is actually why we have Brad Pitt. This was his first starring role  in a big budget major motion picture. It wasn’t his breakout role — that was his bit part in Thelma & Louise — but this was what he did with that momentum: Starred as a guy who also wants to fuck cartoons, but doesn’t for the good of the world. Don’t feel bad for his character, though. He dies at the end and becomes a cartoon so he gets to fuck as many cartoons as he wants. That’s his happy ending.

And I know this whole thing looks like an FMV porno parody of Dragon’s Lair, but Cool World was indeed a big budget major motion picture. The studios went all in on this, much like 17th greatest Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne, does to cartoon pussy.

The marketing team behind Cool World even briefly modified a national landmark just to promote their animated spank flick:

There was serious money on the line here. And that’s because the 1990s struggled with one major philosophical argument above all others. From Jessica Rabbit to Holli Would to Lola Bunny, the one question the ‘90s wrestled with the most was “is it okay that we want to fuck cartoons?”

Apparently they settled on “yes, but don’t cum in them, or you’ll break the universe.”

And 17th greatest Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne, didn’t listen, which is why our broken world now features comments like this on the YouTube clip of that time 17th greatest Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne, creampied a cartoon.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Marvel Questprobe’s The Hulk 🌭

Text adventures were the video games we made before we knew how to make video games. They had all the thrills of reading a short story written by an unedited maniac, combined with the epic adventure of guessing syntax. A few were great, most were boring, some were war crimes waged against coherence. Please keep all of this in mind as we explore Marvel Questprobe: The Hulk.

Questprobe was a series of text adventure games tied to a Marvel comic of the same name, and their first one — their very first entry in a series of text-only games — starred The Incredible Hulk. There are eight hundred million Marvel characters to choose from, and they picked one who can barely speak and is famous for solving every riddle with punching. Here is the only logical way a Hulk text adventure game could play out:

YOU ARE HULK. YOU ARE IN ROOM. EAST IS EXIT.

>go east

NO

>look room

NO

>smash?

YES HULK SMASH

…

Here’s how the game starts:

It brags about how very advanced the interface is, introduces you to some basic commands, then begs you — begs you in hands-and-knees purple — not to punish the author for wasting a year of precious life on this. All of these things will be important. Please make note of them in your Questprobe Quizzler Quest Qhronicle now.

The game starts with Bruce Banner in bondage, and for a game that just bragged about knowing every command, it comes up immediately short.

Okay, so you’re the Hulk. When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you are a Hulk, every problem looks Hulk-foot shaped. We gotta Hulk the fuck out.

Huh. See, the Hulk is famous for getting mad at fucking anything. Insult him, you get a hulking. Attack him, definitely a hulking. He sees you leave a carton of milk in the bread aisle instead of putting it back, that’s an especially brutal hulking. I mean, you’re getting a green fist enema right there, face pressed up against the everything bagels. So it’s weird that the game is being picky about how we get mad. But hey, in the passive aggressive post-it note at the start, the game did make a big point of telling us about its help command. Lets try that!

So the first screen goes out of its way to tell us there’s a help function, and when we use it, we are told to quit the game, leave the house, go to the kind of sad specialty store that stocks tip manuals for obscure text adventure games, and then have them order a book about this virtual book? I think this might actually be scammier than the modern video game financial model. Say what you will about microtransactions that let you buy neon shaders for your dildo bat, at least they’re both private and instant. They don’t have you travel just to get laughed at by a guy who wasn’t good enough to work at the game store and wasn’t good enough to work at the bookstore, but was okay enough to work at the game book store.

Let’s try again:

First, is that an unskippable cutscene in a text game? Hideo Kojima would describe that as “a bit much, maybe there is a sexy woman and you see her butt and there is a masturbation mini-game where your penis is a missile silo and your testicles are full of tiny babies with your face and you have to slap the babies to fire the missile and-”

Sorry, I’m going to have to cut Kojima off there, and go down in history as the first person to ever do so.

More importantly, every time I turn into the Hulk I get blasted with anti-Hulk gas? If you have to build an anti-Hulk mechanic into your Hulk game, you’re not making a Hulk game. You’re coding a text adventure about a weenie who makes a huge deal out of getting mad but ultimately does nothing about it. Fuck you, that’s Marvel Questprobe’s Ben Shapiro.

I do love how prominently the game has to display the ™ every time they mention the hero of their own story. That’s not distracting at all.

Oh shit, that was just a tiny gameplay break in between cutscenes!

This is so Kojima there’s actually a three paragraph section just transcribing a commercial for Norman Reedus’ Ride.

So wait, that’s really the story? You were given the rights to The Incredible Hulk and the unbounded world of text and you wrote an easter egg hunt where he can’t turn into the Hulk? That’s like being told to write a Spider-Man game and then having him take an UberPool to renew his fishing license. Why do you hate fun? Is it like teenage drinking? Did you get into fun too early and it became a problem as you grew older? Admit you’re powerless over good vibrations and take a fearless moral inventory, don’t take it out on the kids with well-meaning grandparents who don’t check reviews before they buy birthday presents.

There aren’t even any cool items in the game — no girders to swing into a rampaging grizzly bear, no little helmets to put on your Hulk dick that let you ram it through walls. There’s a tube of wax. A hand fan. A mirror that you can’t even use like a normal mirror.

There’s only one use for the Hulk in the whole game:

See that tunnel? You wanna go out that tunnel, huh? Well, this is an adventure game — a whole genre based on solving puzzles that head trauma patients make up to stump the pixies only they can see since the motorcycle accident — and that means you die all the time for reasons you couldn’t possibly deduce and are never given a chance to counter. If you actually use that tunnel, you are crushed by high gravity.

But if you Hulk out first, you can survive it. That is a god damn journey this developer went on, all just to figure out a use for Hulk powers which consist of “punching things real good” and “kicking things real good” if Hulk remembers he has feet.

Anyway, survive the riddle of the inexplicable ultra-gravity and you go to Vaporwave Eskimo Jupiter.

There is no explanation for this setting. In the grand tradition of every video game before 1995, there is no coherent sense of place or logic here, and every room is designed by a different prog rock fan violently disassociating from reality. Vaporwave Eskimo Jupiter is one of two main areas. Head any direction from there and you’re in:

A 1986 nerd’s Trapper Keeper, pre-swirlie water damage. Even by adventure game standards, which are “none,” this is pure gibberish. And that’s basically it: Try any direction from this puzzle on the back of a box of off-brand ‘Nontendo’ cereal, and you return to the Lazer Igloo.

I tried 17 million commands including “ponder life” and “quit” before thinking “maybe I should dig a hole, despite no prompting to do so.” That was the solution.

No matter how much shit I might talk about it, Marvel Questprobe does feature my favorite scene in any video game ever. I present it here in its entirety, unedited.

I like to think Hulk does that non-stop until he is no longer underground. It’s like a Hulk locator, in case you lose your Hulk at the beach.

After several more hours wandering between Space Alaska and Remedial Escher, I figured maybe I had to switch back to Banner to solve this puzzle.

This game punishes you for trying anything. Every new thing you discover comes with two guesses as to what to do with it, and then it’s instant death. Start over from the beginning. Remember, this isn’t like a normal video game where it’s kind of fun to run through an area again. You’re just typing the exact same commands in the exact same order to earn another two guesses as to what a lunatic thinks you do with an egg.

Through means I do not understand and could never replicate I did stumble across an interdimensional bureaucrat just hanging out in his quantum office. I thought I knew what to do here, but once again we see even the most basic logic is outright rejected:

In frustration, I simply typed “go west” eight hundred times, and then an anthill appeared. Clearly. Clearly!

That may seem out of left field, but that’s actually a reference to the classic philosophical essay GO WEST UNTIL ANTS by Franky Beefsteak, in his collection I CLAIM THIS LIBRARY BATHROOM UNDER SQUATTER’S RIGHTS published by the bathroom mirror and his own ruptured hemorrhoid blood.

I mean, obviously space ants.

Welp, those are my two guesses. Time to die.

O.K. Ants attack eyes. The game considered this such a foregone conclusion that it didn’t even warrant an exclamation point. Madness has become so routine to this author he no longer bothers transcribing the sounds he hears inside his skull as the amoebas eat his brain. “Chewing memories,” he types, “eat eat eat first kiss; gnaw summer camp. You get it.” His every waking moment is plagued by hovering flesh orbs that scream in his mother’s voice and it happened so gradually he never even learned that was weird. “Haha right,” he’ll add to a coworker’s anecdote about missing the train, “and then you gotta deal with the mommyballs negging you all the way to work!” He’ll hold his hand up for a high five and then bite off an ear when he doesn’t get one.

Jesus, I cannot live here, inside the dream journal of a man dying of xenon poisoning. We must get out.

Let’s trace our steps: First we tip back in our chair to Hulk, get anti-Hulk gassed, then bite our lip to Hulk again so we can survive Neon Canada. Next we wander aimlessly through the Children’s Activity Zone on the back of a Denny’s kid’s menu until we anger the bureaucrat. We go west until ants but not until ants attack eyes. Maybe we flee? We flee back to the Activity Zone and then read the sign that tells us to drop all our gems. Yes, that’s it! We just drop our gems and corrupt the game file.

The end!

Right? That actually seems like a pretty good ending. I’ll accept that.

But a game-breaking glitch is indistinguishable from storytelling in this reboot of Alice in Wonderland as told by a hobo who wears a tin foil grill for his electric teeth, so I looked up a walkthrough.

It turns out no, it’s not supposed to crash, and no, it doesn’t make more sense after this. Here’s a little snippet from the walkthrough. You just:

GO DOME, DROP FAN, GET GEM, W, GET GEM, BITE LIP (until you see

Dr. Strange), BITE LIP (until he points at the baseboard), EXAMINE

BASEBOARD, PLUG OUTLET, USE WAX, BITE LIP, ASK STRANGE (until he tells you to remember your worst nightmare), ASK STRANGE (until he leaves, dropping a gem), GET GEM, GET WAX, E, BITE LIP, GO TUNNEL, E, DROP GEM, DROP GEM, DROP GEM, DROP GEM, REMEMBER NIGHTMARE (you become incredibly strong), S (until you reach the field without mesh on the dome and without ants), GO DOME, W, PULL RING, E, BITE LIP, GO TUNNEL, E (to ‘Fuzzy Area’), REMEMBER NIGHTMARE, N (you stand in an underground room), EAT EGG (before it explodes!)

Right, I should have figured that out. I just go into a coy lip bite loop which arouses Dr. Strange so much that he alerts me to the existence of baseboards, and then I remember my worst nightmare while biting my lip to get super strong so I can eat the exploding space egg. Of course. They say hindsight is 20/20, and they also say the bus driver is the secret king of Reverse USA, which is why you have to spit in the coin slot to corrupt his copper hoard so he can’t forge the wires of the vaccination satellite. Both very good points.

There were supposed to be twelve of these games, complete with tie-in comics from Marvel, but they put out three and then the entire company went out of business. I know that seems like a sudden out of left field ending but ANTS ATTACK EYES.

…
This post was brought to you thanks to a hot tip from Hot Dog Johnny Unusual, and by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Neil Bailey: The only man alive tough enough to EAT EGG.