Bulk Bin Episode 1: The Final Chapter

Oh snap, did your Destructoid C-Blog page get set to "shuffle" by mistake? Did everything get all mixed up and random? Do you even know what I'm talking about CAUSE I DON'T

Here is a picture of an ad I remembered that I found when looking up Panic! for Sega CD. Just had no other reason to throw it in here, so I figured it warranted an explanation.



I have been trying to write a blog for awhile but because I don't have a coherent point to make, it has been in a start and stop cycle. I have decided to take lemons and make a blog. So rather than one cohesive piece with a middle, beginning, and end, you are going to get the remains of a few different pieces. Yes, this is the bulk bin of the Dtoid blogs; where all the irregular pieces of Oh Henry's and Smarties get tossed into a plastic container and are sold by the pound. This is Bulk Bin, the first and probably last of a series which never went anywhere and was destined to die much like the guy who I accidentally killed one summer by tossing him into a boat propeller. Sorry, Uncle Francis.

Panic!



What do you get when you take a bunch of crazy shit, a storyline that makes no sense, and a game that has no gameplay? You get Panic, a game for the Sega CD which has you pressing random buttons in a frantic race to eventually press more buttons. It's almost like a random cutscene generator, with so much crazy shit intact that the developers felt it completely unnecessary to actually include real gameplay. It is a game that says "FUCK YOU" to common conventions, and to about sixty bucks of your hard earned cash if you happened purchase it back in 1960 or whenever it was people still gave a shit about FMV games.

Speaking of FMV games, what the fuck happened to them? Oh, that's right, every single one of them was completely terrible, I forgot. Of course there was one made somewhat recently about guys in space or something but it never got any press because the only thing it at one time had going for it was a soundtrack written by RUSH. They pulled out suddenly and without warning like (dick and ejaculation joke here, make sure to delete this and add it before you post or you will look like a fool) so it never saw the light of day, unfortunately. Just like (follow up to dick joke) AM I RIGHT, HAHA.


Darkstar, game of the year of 199never.

Anyways, Panic was a weird little bastard of the game that received nearly no press at all and has long been forgotten, much like so many copies Sewer Shark and Willy Beamish. It's too bad in a way; it kind of sucks to play it, but it's so super unique, crazy, and downright ludicrous that I wish more people knew about it so we could talk about it for three seconds before moving onto a more interesting topic. But what was the reason for the failure? To find out, I sat down with series creator to discuss

Retro Style

and broke off his cock.

Anyways, it is a bit of a pain; why do we need so many retro style games? I got the "joke" a long time ago. "LOL so clever, it's 2012 where there are flying hover cars and Halo spaceships and Minority Reports and yet, AND YET, the game is all pixellated like my Nintendo which is still hooked up to my toaster. Ingenious." I really just don't understand the utility behind it all. The best retro stylized game I have played was Mega Man 9, but that actually had basis in reality; the rest of the Mega Man games before were 8-bit, so they made another one, and it worked pretty magically. But to make your games look old on purpose is going out of style. In fact, some might even say it is a replacement for a real sense of style, and in some cases I'd agree.


Yo get yo red ass hipster beard ready bitches, it's time for some 8-bit retro!

But that is the problem with Indie and art games in general. One good one comes along, and a bunch of hipsters nod their head and say "genius." and apparently get to work doing the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING. When people defend Dear Esther I want to barf in my mouth, swallow it, and then barf again just because I wasn't man enough to handle the taste of stomach bile. That game was retarded horseshit, and if they fooled you into buying it based on it's apparent emotional "depth", you were suckered.

Just to prove how easy it is to emulate, here is an idea I came up with just now for an Indy game.

It would be called Algorating Rythym, because the name sounds smart even though it makes no sense. It would be about a girl called Sprite, who is a sprite. Get it? Hold onto your butts. The whole thing is a metaphor for mindless collecting in games. The girl is sent on several quests from different people around the game world (all 8-bit but in a fish eye lens and 2.5d) and would have to collect things for them. She'd have to kill ten wolves, but the tenth would give her a long speech about the pain of existence. But every time she handed in the quest to be completed she'd lose one heart from her life bar, because the hearts represent the time and energy she had to invest in order to help the people who asked. When she was finally able to finish the last quest, she would die; but would suddenly become completed, and footage of a little girl walking down a beach would be shown in sepia, and in slow motion. The game would be a message about living your life.


Sleep is death; the game where you attach meaning to it because it's like playing with crayons, paper, and a plastic hourglass from your Pictionary box.

Sounds pretty fucking lame, right? Well, if it were in the hands of people who actually believed in the message, I'm sure they could tweak it enough to pound it down the throats of suckers who could find emotional value in a ham sandwich. And if they can, I want them to have my number, to call me, to give me some royalties, because if there is anything I like more than indie games that rely on now cliche retro nostalgia, it is taking advantage of people.

Farmville 2 Review

and that is why Harvest Moon is so much fucking better, Jesus Christ, what is wrong with me.