Sick sad world

Am I the only person (besides Christian) who thinks that Naughty Bear looks like absolute fucking garbage?

OK, I get that game devs have to pour obscene amounts of money into advertising and marketing, and that in a lot of cases, the amount of marketing that a game receives is generally related to both the amount of money spent on the game and the amount of backlash when said game kind of sucks. This is mostly a problem that is rampant on the HD consoles (seemingly, not very many people read Wii reviews, otherwise they would have realized that Little King's Story was the best game of last year) – heck, just check out the numerous tepid reviews coming in for Alpha Protocol, a game that sounded cool on paper and has had an absolutely massive advertising push.

The problem that I have with Naughty Bear isn't just that they're spending a lot of money on what looks to be a pretty shallow and pointless game. No, the problem extends much further back than that.

Back in 1999, Nintendo was embroiled in its most hard-fought conflict yet. They'd survived challengers in the form of the TurboGrafx, the Neo Geo, and the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, but by 1997, they were losing out to a new challenger in the PlayStation. Basically, this conflict set up the trenches in which the major console manufacturers have more or less followed to this day – the Nintendo console as the game with kid and family games, and the occasional mind-blowing Nintendo-made game that keeps the fans coming back; and the other console(s) as the dark, edgy, mature, bloody console with the epic-lengthed games that are targeted towards teenaged males and young adults. These divisions weren't quite as obvious in the PS1/N64 era, but in hindsight, it was "PlayStation does what Nintendon't" all over again.

Now, for the other part of the story. Nintendo had acquired the British company Rare a few years earlier, and besides putting them to work on a couple of Donkey Kong games, had basically left them to their own devices to create whatever they wanted. Sometimes, this led to fantastic results, in the form of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark; sometimes, it led to creative and interesting platformers in a Nintendo style, as with the first Banjo-Kazooie game. And reviewers went wild for one game in particular, even bestowing on said game "Game of the Year" status – that game was Conker's Bad Fur Day.

I played the Conker's Bad Fur Day about four years ago – I was 19 at the time. So technically, I was still a teenager (although probably still about six years away from the target audience for this game). And it's not like I think offensive humour isn't funny. The problem with Conker's Bad Fur Day isn't that it's offensive, though. It's that it's simply not funny. I didn't laugh once. I mean, if you think that the pinnacle of humour is Billy Madison or something, it might be enjoyable, but it's not. And underneath all the poop and semen jokes lies a pretty mediocre platformer that isn't even as good as Banjo-Kazooie.

The biggest problem with Conker, though, is the forced baditude. In this case, it was clear that it was an attempt to give the N64 a "harder" edge, and to make some of the people who defected over to Sony come back to play this "edgy" game. The game plays like a forty-year old sitcom script writer's version of what he thinks edgy is, making the game just a chore to play through. And then to have somewhat supposedly respectable gaming publications (and a lot of the people who gave the game such high marks – like Matt Cassamassina – are still around and should have known better) bestow such high honours on the game blows my mind. People fell for an attitude rather than a game.

I don't think Naughty Bear will garner the same respect as Conker, but the part that blows my mind is both: a) how much the game is being hyped up, and b) how much it is exactly like Conker's Bad Fur Day. Replace the bear with Conker and you've got yourself another sequel.  I was under the impression that gaming had become more "cinematic," more "mature," but Naughty Bear shows me that baditude still rears its ugly head from time to time. And I'm so glad that they took inspiration from such an insipid source! Great. Why all the hype, though?

I get the feeling that more than current gaming publications would like to admit, a lot of their writers are gaming nerds first and critical consumers of culture a distant second or third or fifth. And that's the problem – too many writers are trapped in this state of eternal adolescence, because that's the only way to get yourself excited to play games all the goddamn time. Have you seen how many games they have to review? Each reviewer at a major gaming website or magazine probably has to play through at least a hundred games a year, and that's pretty punishing (I mean, it's not like forced labour punishing or anything, but still). I only get really excited to play maybe ten or fifteen games a year.

Naughty Bear is easy. It excites those teenaged male glands in a way that few games can (I mean, it's a TEDDY BEAR! With a SHOTGUN! Hilarious!), to the exclusion of all of those pesky non-traditional gamers. To me, though, it seems desperate. Come on, gaming industry – I know you can come up with something better than a half-baked Conker fanboy tribute.

Note on the title of this piece – it's a reference to the TV show Daria, where in every episode there's a lead-in to a show called "Sick Sad World" which is basically the epitome of schlocky badness. Here's an example: