Category: NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Blips! 🌭

“Pshoooooooo! Pshooooooo! Blam blam! Blamblamblamblam,” said the desperate man who agreed to write an entire book of video game jokes while only knowing only two things about them: arcades do the bloop, and Pac-Man does the eat. If this book screamed for help for 80 pages, it would be twice as honest and three times as funny:

Blips! by Jovial Bob Stine (1983) claims to be “THE FIRST BOOK OF VIDEO GAME FUNNIES,” which I can prove to be a lie four different times by walking across my office…

…or fucking five if you count how it’s not funny.

So not only did Blips! fail to be first-to-market, it fundamentally misunderstood how comedy, video games, and even books worked. Let me give you an example of it doing all of this at once. The book opens by telling you to put a quarter on the page because that’s how video game fanatics think all objects work, and then Bob explains the joke, because that’s how comedy fanatics think jokes work.

Besides explaining jokes, one of the best things you can do as a writer is invent your own mental disorders and then make fun of your reader for having them. You know, the same way you think cats can’t pee unless you hook them up to an air pump. But maybe stop pumping your cat, that’s a fish by the way, and listen: This shitty idiot doing everything wrong? Jovial Bob Stine? That’s one of the pen names of R.L. Stine, who is one of the most successful authors of all time. Nine years before he wrote the first Goosebumps novel, he was blindly mashing words together to make this trash.

For his introduction, Jovial Bob reuses the same idea he had for the title and book jacket– random sound effects and nothing else. Then he reuses the same idea he had for the quarter thing– blaming it on the dumb reader. He is already pumping air into a peeless cat, and it’s still the intro. This fucking blows. Do you want to know what I was expecting here, Bob? Donkey Kong puns that suck shit. And you didn’t live up to that. This is like worrying the drive-thru was going to screw up your order and opening the bag to find your wife’s head. It’s like expecting an apology from Arby’s for killing your wife but getting a note that says, “Pshoooooooooooo! Pshoooooooooo! Blam blam! Blam blamblamblam!”

This is the first cartoon in Blips!. It’s a Pac-Man pun you’d expect any popsicle stick manufacturer to land on two to five seconds after beginning the Pac-Man pun-writing process. But the fact that he’s laughing at his own joke and then calling attention to it reveals a crippling insecurity. Bob has fucked up every single thing so far, exhausted his video game knowledge, and now realizes he’s in trouble. In other words, what did Bob Stine’s wife say to Pac-Man? My husband doesn’t have a dick either! HA HA HA HA! GET IT?

The next cartoon is a fully illustrated version of the joke on the book jacket. It’s about a boy on the stage of a well-attended community anti-video game essay contest awards ceremony, which is already a very long walk, but then the kid wants the $50 prize in quarters? From the context of this book, but not this cartoon, we have to assume these quarters are to play arcade games which means Bob either botched the joke’s premise, or the joke is how this kid tricked the essay judges, a group of people who are both inconceivable and not pictured. It is a wrongness casserole baked by a beast with diarrhea hands. If I was Satan, these two pages are how I would let a dead cartoonist know he was in hell.

In another relatable, conceivable setup, two children run into each other at the arcade to talk about an upcoming history test. “I use quarters to start all things and I believe the points in video games directly translate to non-video game numbers,” thinks one of them, expressing it in an even dumber way. It’s another long journey off a cliff, but it’s not like it would work if it was punchier. This is a faulty conceit squeezed from a brain stuck on the vague concept of “points.” That “100” on the history test is a percentage, you dumb fuck. You shovel-beaten ape. You keep constructing these mazes of impossible stupidity and walking into your own walls. God damn it, Bob, did you give this kid a score of 212,857,944,2? That’s not even where you put commas, Bob. Jesus Christ.

Okay, this one works. If you assume home video games in 1983 could be mistaken for realism and also that hearing about this would instantly convince a person that the game would create a second source of the physical pain they’re already feeling. To be fair, maybe the joke is how this kid’s broken leg was from a recent skiing accident and the realistic new video skiing game would retraumatize him. And yes, that’d be hilarious, but at the risk of exposing some personal biases, is a black 9-year-old with no visible ski equipment the best way to communicate “skiing accident survivor?” This punchline only really had a shot if the girl ran into the room saying, “This personal home arcade game is about how silly it would be if crutches only went up to your knees!!” In your face again, Blips! illustrator.

So far, Bob has covered Pac-Man eating, sound effects, quarters, sound effects, Pac-Man eating, quarters, points, and skiing. I’m not leaving anything out or being unfair to him in any way. Those things are, without exaggeration, the end of his expertise on this subject. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that his next bit was about Pac-Man eating. The nicest way to put it is that this is all premise and no punchline. What if Pac-Man’s physiology was governed by the same rules as a human digestive system? Fine. Now imagine fucking that idea up worse than this. Bob literally spelled it out for the reader across three pages and then kind of gave up before anything funny happened. He had a ghost from the game Pac-Man get sick from hearing about Pac-Man’s diet, but they share the same maze, Bob. He’s a many-times-over dead spirit cursed to watch Pac-Man devour these things forever. He knows what he fucking ate today. This has all the whimsy of a toxicology report for a bachelorette who died of alcohol poisoning.

I’m not kidding when I say Bob bailed on his main concept after 14 pages, four of which were about Pac-Man eating, to start an entire new thing. The next third of the book is THE VIDEO GAMES HALL OF FAME, a collection of nonsense characters who have played video games, a thing he was not prepared to write jokes about. This allowed him to explore hilarious ideas like Rex I. Site, a boy who isn’t good at Asteroids when he’s blindfolded, and get thi– oh, Bob is done. That’s the whole bit. Well, I’m sure the next one will be better…

… it’s not. In fact, Hart F. Heering is basically the same bit– what if someone was in an arcade and had a disability, but didn’t know they had a disability? Maybe these are references to some short-lived medical panic only Bob fell for? “Makes you blind and deaf” might be a fourth thing Bob thinks he knows about video games.

So this girl’s name is Delia Cards, which is a red herring. Forget about it, there’s no joke about cards anywhere. Delia is in the book because she claimed an arcade was easier on her eyes than reading, which is either nothing if you’re normal, or one of the looser types of ironies if you believe arcades make you blind. So now I know the code. You have to think like a dumb, wrong person writing for their idea of a stupid person. Now make someone blind, and there’s your joke.

Chip Beef, again, think nothing of it; it’s not a reference to anything, is also in The Video Games Hall Of Fame for a dubious claim. He says he was going to the arcade to get fresh air, but arcades are where people fart? Maybe smoke? It’s unclear. The gas mask seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting as far as storytelling goes, and this is the only reference to (maybe) arcade smog in all of Blips!. The most generous explanation is this is 70 typos in a row under an unrelated drawing printed in the wrong book. This is gibberish. It’s a joke you’d tell a bored fish during your final moments of asphyxiation.

Bob is starting to learn he’s not great at coming up with funny situations or funny names. He stares at the blank page and takes a wild guess at comedy. “Red Redrobbin? And he is out of quarters, like a red robin would be?” Bob is now panicking. You don’t write something like Red Redrobbin the Guy With No Pocket Change if there’s anything left in you. But Bob has so, so much more to space to fill. So Bob summons the last bit of his imagination.

“Uhh… w-what about a guy named Bob B-bob bob bin? And he writes his name Bob, he writes his name Bob! Bob Bob Bobbin. Bobby Bob! His hat says Bob, the belt is BOB. Bob!” Bob nods to himself. It’s a good one. He’s still got it. He rewards himself with a seventy minute scream into a mirror.

I don’t know why I included this one. It’s a gorilla who cheated at Donkey Kong by being a gorilla, and then got his championship sash taken away when they tested him for gorilla. It’s a perfect comedy bit, executed by a writer at the top of his game.

Is an arcade cabinet still a person if she and everyone else thinks she is a video game? How many video games out there are people who have simply forgotten who they are? What great writing. This is a half-formed Robot Chicken pitch Seth Green would type into his Notes app to confuse himself the next morning, but to Jovial Bob Stine, it’s a full page of his book. If this was meant to be a joke, you’re not done, buddy. All you did was put a mentally ill child in terrible danger.

Ha ha, that Mormon ass Donny Osmond doesn’t even know how electricity works. Eat shit, Donny Osmond. Okay, where were we? Oh, right. Video game jokes! Brrzzt! Bloop! Hold on, is that one?

It’s nice to see Bob has given up the pretense of video game comedy and embraced the forbidden un-language of his madness gods. “This boy makes sound effects, like one of the pillars of arcade game jokes. Blorp, blam blam, if you insist on the telling of one. It shall be the last sanity you know before your ears suffer the formless mouth of TINJESHT.”

Holy shit, this one is just a donkey-faced monster on a bicycle rampage. No, listen: R. L. Stine wrote a book of arcade game funnies and one of them was “Ha ha, here’s a donkey-headed murderer, the end.” Which means, and I know how this is going to sound, I think this book rules? He’s somehow so wrong with every instinct he’s managed to steer into genius. Imagine if you were in a brainstorming meeting for Donkey Kong puns and some guy suggested DON KEYFACE, a non-gorilla beast who runs things over on its bike. You would stand up and applaud as your face melted off your fucking skull. This is sincere insanity. You can’t fake DON KEYFACE. And Bob knew it was his masterpiece. He ended the whole The Video Games Hall of Fame bit here and got back to regular cartoons.

Well, not regular cartoons. He started a section where he made up his own outrageously zany video games. For instance, um, LUNCH MEAT!? But, and I don’t think I’m the world’s greatest thinker to point this out, this was 1983– games were about lunch meat. Doing an inexplicably silly thing in an arcade game was as ordinary as losing it to a DON KEYFACE attack. You fucking Normal Al Yankovic’ed Burger Time, Bob.

Ha ha ha, what if Space Invaders was haircuts, you fucking kids?

No no, kids! Kids! You goddamn pieces of shit. Ha ha ha what if Space Invaders was ha ha Merv Griffin!?

Both of these preposterous, batty ideas are real games, so again: great work, Bob. But Bob does make a good point about Richard Dawson. He put his mouth on a lot of families. And while it seemed friendly, those mothers and sisters must have felt a lot of social pressure to do it. Maybe a Richard Dawson interceptor missile is the kind of satire that leads to meaningful discussions of consent. Wow, y– oh my god, I hope this doesn’t mean DON KEYFACE was about ugly women’s voting rights or something.

Bob’s ideas for fake video games went from games that exist to games that exist (with pop culture references), and now he’s reached the same place he gets to with all his bits– mirthless suffering. “Fuck the jokes,” thought Bob, and not for the first time. “I’ll just write down something unpleasant. Homework. A lonely nothingness,” he decided. And then he typed those ideas, exactly as they were, into his book with no twist or irreverence. “Something about nuclear holocaust,” he thought. Ha. He knew he had the start of something…

… it turns out it was the entirety of something.

The best jokes are the ones where Bob takes an ordinary scene from a game and then spices it up with the perfect word balloon. “What’s all this fighting!?” asks the soldier stationed on a battleship. That’s enough already, but he also screams, “THEY PROMISED US SHUFFLEBOARD!” It’s a reference, of course, to the famous catchphrase, “I promise you shuffleboard.” It’s funny because think how many things had to go wrong in Bob’s brain and life to place words in this order and mistake that for doing something. Ha ha ha it’s fucking absurd.

Bob has made it as clear as he can: he does not know what he’s doing. This is another joke about a kid who can’t tell the difference between video games and the other parts of the universe. It’s beyond a mere contempt for the subject matter and his readers. What has Bob seen that made him like this? When he’s waiting for his pizza, does he scream, “YOU’RE NOT REAL, MS. PAC-MAN! AND I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES IT!” It is batshit nuts. It’s like writing a baseball riddle book and having 40% of the jokes be, “Take a bite. Because I bet you think you’re supposed to eat baseballs, you trash. Yum yum, fuck you.”

Oh, this should be good. A how-to guide, only intentionally wrong. Wet electronics? That wouldn’t work at all. What a card. Let’s see where he goes with this…

… and for seven pages Bob reworded “take apart your electronics and wash them in water.” Blips! is the story of a writer shattering against the smallest obstacle. These are the thoughts a veal cow would have if you carried a Nintendo past it once.

This is stunning. It seems almost impossible to write this many words and not accidentally make a joke at least once. These are genuinely childlike answers to the question, “Can any of you first graders help me finish my book? It’s supposed to be funny, but don’t worry about that. We gave up on that a long time ago.”

When a cartoonist is running low on inspiration, they can put a character in a therapy session. It’s hack, but it’s a classic way to re-frame everyone’s perspective. Yet even there, Bob’s only Pac-Man joke is EAT.

Wait, is that the end? A fist fight over Warlords and Asteroids? Huh. I think I like this one.

Bob is doing some kind of paper arcade game. So is this going to be, like, a Choose Your Own Adventure thing?

No… it’s much less. It’s five pages of a make-believe fly swatting game with no jokes. I honestly don’t know what to make of it. What could you even call it? Arcade fan fiction? How a child thinks game design works?

Do I feel silly? I guess, Bob. This is stupid as shit. What are you doing?

Wait, so the seven pages of you pretending your book was a video game was a prank? On the reader!? This is like writing FREE CANDY on a chemical toilet and locking yourself inside. It’s like tricking a map by wandering into the woods to starve. Bob opened and closed his book by mocking the reader, a person literally reading a book, for not understanding books. If it was anyone else, I’d think they were joking, but if there’s one thing I know about Bob Stine, it’s that he never jokes.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Benjamin Sairanen, who plays every Hot Dog article like a video game and is undefeated with a score of 000,000,00,1,7.

Tags books, Free, Joke books, Video Games

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Doom – Hell on Earth, A Novel 🌭

Post author By Tom Reimann
Post date 10/04/2022
10 Comments on Nerding Day: Doom – Hell on Earth, A Novel 🌭

“Hey kids! Doomguy here. We talk a lot about ripping and tearing in this action-packed computer game, but what I really want to rip and tear are your secular prejudices, to make room for the wisdom of the Church of Latter-Day Saints!”

That passage doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the 1995 novel DOOM: Hell on Earth by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. But it should be plastered on the cover like a Surgeon General’s Warning. It should be stenciled all over a bulletproof layer of shrink wrap that fully encases this grimy sci-fi paperback like the heat shield on a space shuttle. This book should come with an exit interview by a CIA deprogrammer.

You stalwart HOTDOGGERS may remember that a few months back, I spent entirely too much time picking apart the first book in the DOOM series, which took the popular video game DOOM – an action shooter about a space marine’s violent wind sprint through the armies of Christian Hell – and deleted every word from that description except for “Christian.” The authors boldly transformed the game’s mute protagonist Doomguy, a relentless engine of gratuitous destruction, into Flynn “Fly” Taggart, a repressed ghoul who seamlessly weaves alarming tirades about religion and the military together with ham-handed anti-drug messages that would embarrass McGruff the Crime Dog. He does this while nursing excruciating erections about every single female he encounters, including the dead ones. However, the primary target of his silent turgidity is his BFF and squad mate Arlene Sanders. At least twice every chapter he struggles with the concept of being friends with a woman, a paradox that thunderously confounds him at every turn. He is neither the hero we needed, nor the one we deserved. But he was the one foisted upon every unsuspecting DOOM fan who picked up these books thinking they’d be fun sci-fi horror adventures.

I won’t recap every weirdly Christian moment or uncomfortable burst of sexual frustration from the first novel, Knee Deep in the Dead, because I already did that, and that’s what the internet is for. Suffice to say that the book lays the groundwork for transforming DOOM into something closer to Kirk Cameron’s The Road Warrior than the gonzo heavy metal bone circus that is the video game.

So, when I kicked in Brockway and Seanbaby’s door and threw my badge and gun into their faces, screaming, “Kick me off the force if you must, but I’m going through the rest of these books and there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it,” I thought I knew what to expect. (Please note that if “Fly” Taggart had been present, he would have immediately chastised me for my blasphemy.)

But what I didn’t expect – what I could not know – is that the second DOOM novel is a fully unmasked tome of Mormon propaganda. Specifically, a Christo-fascist apocalypse fantasy that dabbles in right wing conspiracy theories and white supremacist talking points. In other words, it’s a page-turner in the worst possible application of that phrase. Where Knee Deep in the Dead was a cheap sci-fi horror novel full of PG-13 horniness and confusing diatribes about Catholic school and whether it is immoral to inject yourself with liquid cocaine to kill scores of monsters more successfully, Hell on Earth is 230 pages of patronizing monologues defending the Mormon church. Occasionally, a monster shows up.

I cannot stress this enough – most of this book is entirely devoted to Mormonism; more specifically, to attempts at convincing the reader that Mormonism is the coolest. It has the exact energy of a youth pastor spinning a chair around backwards to sit down and tell you about how Christ was the original MC. MC JC, probably. This book has real rappin’ Jesus vibes, is my point.

Fly and Arlene crash-land on Earth after the events of the first novel to find the planet overrun by demons that aren’t actually demons but are really aliens pretending to be demons, because that way the authors won’t get in trouble with their parents. The two marines make their way to the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City. There, they team up with a sniper named Albert who engages Fly and Arlene in at least fifteen theological debates every chapter; and a fourteen-year-old computer hacker named Jill, who Fly simply cannot wait to fuck. I wish that was a joke. I truly do.

The four are sent on a mission to Los Angeles to do some fucking thing, deactivate a shield I think, so they can escape to Hawaii and do some other fucking thing. Listen, I tried to follow the plot, but the book devotes about ten percent to the actual events of the story and ninety percent to delivering an entry-level course on the core tenets of the Mormon church. They get to LAX and manage to steal a plane, but are forced to separate, leaving Albert and Jill skybound for Hawaii, and Fly and Arlene on the ground trying to figure out what to do next.

It sounds like a bad story that sucks, because it is, and it does. Not even the authors were terribly concerned with the plot. I know this because Fly and Arlene do nothing but quiz each other about the Mormon church for the first sixty pages.

It goes on…

“You see, Fly, after learning everything I could about Mormonism, I became convinced it was bad. And my prejudice is the real problem.”

Nothing says “bad-ass space marine” like scolding your friend for making fun of a make-believe angel.

Although Fly admits to not knowing much about Mormons, he constantly corrects and scolds Arlene about them. Again, even though the book quickly establishes that she has studied the Mormon Church exhaustively, whereas he read a magazine article about them one time.

It continues…

“How dare you call Mormons patriarchal?! I count three women right there! TAKE IT BACK!!”

This is not the last time the book will wistfully invoke the Holocaust.

Suggesting the Jews would’ve “won” the Holocaust if they’d only fought harder is a classic white supremacist argument!

“Bet you can’t name all the books of the Book of Mormon, kids!”

If the first level of DOOM the game had been Doomguy in a deep V-neck t-shirt bragging about how much Bible he’d read, I would have done much better in school.

“They’re not apocalyptic, you ridiculous woman! They’re patriots!” Incidentally, the book almost immediately contradicts this argument when Albert shows up:

“We’re not apocalyptic, we’ve just spent the last several decades preparing for a doomsday war against the vague concept of evil.”

At one point, Fly tucks in for the night by doing some casual reading of the Book of Mormon, just in case you thought I was overstating how much of this sci-fi horror yarn is devoted to teaching adolescent DOOM fans about the benefits of the Church of Latter-Day Saints:

It goes on…

These excerpts may seem tedious, because they are. But they grow even more tiresome when the pair finally meet Albert. The book desperately wants you to think Albert is a stone-cold badass with a heart of gold, the savior of humanity, the kind of person we should all aspire to become. A literal angel, and I’m not making that up.

(Note: This is Doomguy talking.)

How do they convince us Albert is cool? By telling us more than once that he was a decorated sniper in the drug wars.

At one point, Albert admits that he flat-out murdered people for the CIA:

“Headshoot boom, in Jesus’s name, Amen.”

Albert also inherits Fly’s disturbingly chaste horniness and manages to make it even more uncomfortable by immediately fantasizing about impregnating Arlene:

Don’t worry – he pauses this sinister daydream just long enough to admire how sexily Arlene kills monsters:

But if you thought Albert was just some god-bothering burgeoning serial killer, think again! Not only does he constantly fantasize about “taming” Arlene, but he also engages in pages upon pages of bad faith arguments designed to make Arlene’s extremely correct and pointed criticisms seem like “female hysteria.” Because the other thing this book wants you to believe is that women are dumb shrews, and men are level-headed slabs of logic and reason.

I promised you the Holocaust would come up again, and unlike the authors of DOOM: Hell on Earth, I keep my promises. Although I suppose the novel does technically live up to the promise of its title.

Referring to the Holocaust as a “divine test” is also a white supremacist talking point!

Speaking of white supremacy, Albert also makes sure to explain Dispensationalism to his new friends:

In short, Dispensationalists believe that the Bible is literally true, and that a biblical apocalypse must and will occur before the second coming of Christ. Some modern dispensationalists like Ronald Reagan believe that the apocalypse will be nuclear (that’s probably true), but that it will be a good thing, because it will wipe out all the nonbelievers and leave only the pure, noble Christians.

Dispensationalism frequently overlaps with white supremacism!

The book also really wants you to understand that it’s actually heroic and selfless to take multiple wives:

The experience of reading this DOOM novel is one of constantly having to remind yourself that you’re reading a DOOM novel.

I mentioned earlier that a fourteen-year-old computer hacker named Jill is unjustly thrown into the group, and that Fly immediately starts drooling over her in an oblique but no less felonious way. By now you should have learned that while I am prone to exaggeration in every other area of my life, when I’m speaking about the DOOM novels, I speak only the unvarnished truth:

A “foxy little item” who is in the eighth grade.

It continues…

Relentlessly, it continues…

Sweet mormon jesus, it continues…

For the love of everything I have ever cherished, it continues…

The book does great pains to convince us that Jill is an adult, and both demands and deserves to be treated like one.

Hm, I wonder why this book keeps vaguely sexualizing the teenage girl while simultaneously insisting she be considered as adult as her warrior companions?

At least one sect of Mormonism marries underage girls to much older, adult men!

Arlene tries to share the above Doomguy Fun Fact™ with Fly, but is immediately shouted down:

“I’m not even going to address the teen marriage, because what’s really disturbing is your prejudice, Arlene.”

But it’s all okay, because Fly decides he’s the safest person to befriend Jill because his brain will allow him to completely dehumanize her at any moment:

This is actually a powerful argument as to why she shouldn’t be anywhere near you, Fly. This book is so unhinged, I can’t understand how the pages remain glued to the spine.

I made nearly 100 screen grabs of different excerpts of full-hoot lunacy, which, had I included them all, would’ve ballooned this column to well over 100 pages. So in the interest of saving valuable internet space and not requesting another extension on this deadline, I made the final stretch of this column a potpourri of some of my favorite moments of fig-shitting derangement.

Did you think this DOOM novel was going to contain a mini-rant about how Linus, the Peanuts character, is a filthy Communist? Because I didn’t!

Hey. Hey. Listen – fuck calendars. Wristwatches are where it’s at.

…what.

…what.

Authentic teen speak!

Predicting CompUSA would survive into the 22nd century might be the most irresponsible thing this novel does.

I genuinely do not know whether that’s a typo.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is writing feverish anti-Linus propaganda while smiling like the whale who ate the shrimp library.

…

This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sean Chase, who holds the record high score in Jehovah’s Witness Quake II.

Tags Best of 2022, books, Free, religion, Video Games

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Archie’s Weird Mysteries

Post author By Lydia Bugg
Post date 10/03/2022
6 Comments on Nerding Day: Archie’s Weird Mysteries

Tags cartoons, comic books, tv

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Mojses by Qumm 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 09/30/2022
9 Comments on Nerding Day: Mojses by Qumm 🌭

There was once a convention called E3 where everyone involved in video games would crowd around a competitive spectacle of screens, announcements, and bikini girls. But deep in the basement of the LA Convention Center was a magical room called Kentia Hall where the deranged and foreign game developers held a sick impersonation of the upstairs party. It’s where Malaysian Best Storage might have a booth next to StyleRings For Marry Game Boy, LLC. And nearly twenty years ago, it’s where a small man eagerly handed me this:

“Ha ha what am I looking at?” I muttered to myself. “Is moJses made out of cum?” The man nodded excitedly. I was right –precisely right– but not in the way I meant.

You’re probably confused. It’s crazy, but simple: QUMM, which stands for Qualified Uuiou of MobileMan, owns moJses, a head company of QUMM, sometimes known as “the QUMM,” and when they say “MobileMan,” I think they mean “mobile video games.” According to Google, they don’t exist. According to Bing, horny moms need it, free trial. And in 2004, someone from either moJses or the QUMM handed me this catalog of their 72 titles. It is the only record that exists for them or their games, and from the way it quivers, I don’t think it likes being in our universe.

It opens with a letter from the CEO of both companies making it clear this is not a catalog for consumers or retailers to buy his games. He is looking for a publisher to turn this ragtag collection of partly coherent, mostly finished ideas into products three shell companies removed from any legal liability.

The first thing Andrew Suh needed was a single person who could turn Korean words into English. After the failing of largest tuna diaper, he moved on to his second goal: telling American publishers about his games. This would be a pointless, humiliating endeavor without finishing that first task, but Andrew was a go-getter. Maybe? Let me look him up.

I don’t know if Andrew Suh is a very common Korean name or a very cursed one, but Google thinks he’s either a murderer or a taekwondo molestor, and it’s 100% positive he was never the CEO of a MobileMan company. None of this is important, though. It’s a hell-damned pamphlet from a man shadow. What really matters are these, the hottest 2004 moJses mobile games from QUMM!

Battle Bugs might be what you expected from a 2003 mobile game from a company that never existed(?)– an incoherent bug-on-bug(maybe) fighter(probably) set on leaves(definitely). Battle Bugs is Game Type: Stand-alone and Color Depth: 256 Colorꜛ, but I’m not kidding when I say so is every single one of the other 71 QUMM games. QUMM, if they’re all Stand-alone and 256 Colorꜛ, shut up about it. This is like the Domino’s Pizza website adding “Diabetes: Yes” to everyone’s information.

I personally love authentic Engrish like this, back when it was done by confused maniacs who lied themselves into a translation job. But it’s more than that. This is also terrible copy. The person selling this had nothing to say long before they realized they had no way to say it. Two of their six bullet points are about pushing bugs off of leaves, which is pretty unnecessary given the title. No one heard “Battle Bugs” and thought, “Wait, how the FUCK would that work!? Leaf pushing!? Did I hear that right!? I DID!? Okay, wow, that was a hell of a presentation.”

This is a street basketball game only it’s set inside and has an exception about “normal two-point or three-point shoot.” So Street Basketball might not be either of those words? Honestly, I knew less about basketball after each bullet point, but I want to say it was quite a technical achievement to get six moving basketball(?) players onto a phone designed to be thrown away after calling your meth supplier. Though, it seems strange that after working so hard on something you’d let a gym coach dying of a snake bite name it and describe it.

After strangling the English language to death trying to explain the basic premise of basketball in Street Basketball, they decided to take it easy with their actual street basketball game, Power Dunk. The bullet points are: One, has a title. Two, moving sprites. Three, you control it. This is how you would describe a video game you’ve never played on its discount headstone. Jared Fogle, today, would be better at selling sandwiches than this person is at selling Power Dunk.

In Taxi Driver you’re a taxi driver, sure. But you’re also a caveman saving up to buy a wife? That can’t be right. Hold on, I’m going to see if I can search through the Internet graveyard and find out more…

… okay, here we go, from a 2004 snapshot of the long dead moJses by QUMM website:

You don’t marry anyone at all! The taxi money is for buying beer to drink alone, and if you drink enough beer, you can look at a girl. Then some other guy said, “Oh, crying into beer near a woman? In English, the word for that is marriage.” So these maniacs were trying to make Flintstones Taxi, but they accidentally made Flintstones Honeymooners, which is just Double Flintstones. This is way too complicated. Didn’t they make any phone games about fucking ninjas?

Yes! YES! I said “fucking ninjas” and QUMM gave me Ninja Porker! It’s like a monkey paw tried to betray me but accidentally improved my wish. Suck it, monkey p— wait, did they just spell “Poker” wrong? This is… I’m not sure I’ve ever felt heartbreak like this. And the idea of adding little ninjas to cards is so worthless they barely mention it. Their sales pitch is basically, “Poker is a popular board game, and this is close enough. If we had to categorize it, I guess it’d be Puzzle (Like Shooting)? Caution: the ninjas are cute, but do not pork.”

In the same way Ninja Porker was based on the popular board game “Poker,” Wizard Stone is based on the “popular character of a wizard.” It’s also based on the popular character of a princess, but she doesn’t look like she’s a big help as she weeps from underneath evil bricks. I might regret this, but let me run her screenshot through a translator:

“I grabbed it with Volmo?” Is Volmo the blue one? Is the whole pile of blocks Volmo? Do I really want to know? This is an artist who rendered the pleasure on the face of every block crushing the princess and gave careful detail to the tear falling from her eye, then said, “Fuck it, seven blobs counts as hands.”

At first glance, Santa looks like an ordinary Santa game. Even through the Engrish, you can’t misunderstand “Giving a gift to children by being a Santa Clause.” But then it gets weirdly hot. Santa is joined by cute Santa boy and sexy Santa girl, and you don’t hand a gift to the children– you dance it at them. So this game is about sexy, pumping Santas for kids? Those words should only be said right before, “and may I remind you, Sex Crime Kevin, you are under oath.”

This is getting dark. The next one better be awesome, moJses by QUMM.

Oh hell yes. From the darkest corners of the HardThrash comes A Scray Game! That title is the Scottie Pippen of fucking up– a world-class, multi-faceted fuckup from anywhere on the court. Naming your horror game A Scray Game is like trying to put on a condom and accidentally wrapping a broken balloon around your wife’s head. It’s like filing a police report that says “suspect Attempt the Wiffe Ballon.” A Scray Game is like trying to shrug, but throwing out your shoulder and dying.

Even in 2004, Just Barely Not Tetris was a tired genre. The Magic Pangpang people took a look at the shitty little almost-Tetris they had created and thought, “at least we got the sound effects to play without stopping the music?” And look, I’ve worked on enough video games to know this was probably hard. But it’s also a baseline expectation. If a movie poster said, “Dog is cop, Color backgrounds, Expertly covered up times Jim Belushi farted with car horn,” you’d think duh. That’s what sound design is for. How bad is this movie if you’re bringing up the internal awards you handed out to the Jim Belushi fart team? Answer the question, makers of K9: Fartcop!!!

Magic Pang Pang 2 was also in the book, only it was given the name Minumaru Adventure and it had so much less to offer they spent half of their sales pitch changing “neighboring 1 coins” into “1coins.” Language barrier or not, this is fucking crazy. These people just started multiplying numbers! And the exchange rate never changed! 5 neighboring 10 coins is still only worth 50coin! This is like sending Jim Belushi on a press junket to tell reporters, “In K9: Fartcop 2, one fart equals a fart, two farts equals two farts, and five farts in a bushel is a five bushel partyfart. Also, it’s now called Fartufarto’s Bar Mitzvah.” Perfection, in other words.

Sometimes it’s clear what the Engrish is trying to say, but it’s still funny. The word “well-written” is such an absurd choice when describing your source material. It’s almost an apology. Like they’re saying, “Okay, it wasn’t a bestseller or anything, but before we turned it into a flip phone game and called it Sword Man, it was fine.”

I think the moJses by QUMM copywriter is losing their confidence. And rightfully so. They are an amateur trash salesman looking for a fraud co-conspirator in a language they do not speak. In other words, the plot to Jim Belushi’s Fart Shop.

Okay, this is real salesmanship. They say this Final Fantasy knockoff was awarded the title of “The best promising game” by the goddamn Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Amazing! And unlikely since that is not an award the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism gives out, nor would it seem appropriate to give to a video game they themselves funded. This has all the credibility of Fruit Ninja claiming it won a Latin Grammy for “Tallest Fun.” Still, what a brag improvement it is from “Game feature: 3 coins equal 3coin, no listen, let me explain the coin exchange system again across the next four bullet points.”

They’re going to answer your main question first. Yes, Cronous is The Cronous, adapted for phone from the hit full 3D game, ‘the Cronous’. It has all the characters you love. Dalof. Seduce. And if you’re wondering about the interaction of data? It’s coming. Assuming you, the reader, are a huge American publisher and a big the Cronous fan who wants to show them how to do that. What else is there to say? Oh, right. It’s Stand-alone and 256 Colorꜛ.

Were you wondering what is the real action game? Fucking enjoy the real action in Combat Troopers. Or wait for Combat Troopers XV, because this is only the first in a series. How could it not be? Combat Troopers (1) has 4 entire stages, they are all Jungle, and we are banking on the creative team behind those things having a lot more ideas in the tank. Do you hear us, future? Combat Troopers and their various items and weapons are coming!

Chicken Run is hard to explain. First, it’s actually called Chicken House. Second, consist of 3 plates and each plate is circulated and change plate. You get it. Alright, let’s do one for the ladies.

Musical Performance Game is a Stand-alone Musical Performance Game (256 Colorꜛ) designed to appeal to women by including characters. And sure, they’ll love the round, orange nothing without a name. They’re women. But Musical Performance Game takes it a step further by letting those ladies become a handsome prince and kiss a princess. A magically hypnotized prince if I’m understanding it correctly. I’ve seen some bad English speakers, but these lunatics tried to describe a rhythm game about a ball and inadvertently wrote a gender-swapping sexual assault starring two unrelated characters. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the final day of shooting K9: Fartcop when Jim Belushi said, “That’s a wrap on Q*Bert’s Hamlet! Great job, everyone!” Hold on, wait. God damn it, yeah, I think I’ve lost my mind. Let’s do one more.

What the shit? This is a game about a high school teacher choosing beautiful girls? This reads like a criminal confession hidden inside a list of game features. “My princess plays various sounds… as you watch the little girls grow up.” “My princess has a convenient interface… for choosing one of the beautiful children.” It’s like someone wrote an AI to describe games and it went rogue and tried DMing you for foot pictures.

What happened here? Every other game was satisfied being a generic throwaway imitation. They were like, “It doesn’t matter if any of these are good. Pump out a couple basketball ones, an Ikari Warriors, a Tetris or two, Dance Dance Revol— and oh! We should do a uniquely branching narrative graphic adventure sim about grooming high school girls spanning their entire childhood! What else? Maybe one with chicken plates?”

I don’t want to end on that one. Let’s do one more. I know this is a lot of madness to expose yourself to, but it’s not like any 2004 Korean mobile game sales pitches can get any worse.