This is a work of fiction. There is no game called "Octopodes and Car Crashes" that I am aware of. My friend, Li Yue, who is working on the graphic version of my novel, did the illustrations for me.


A review of Octopodes and Car Crashes


About one month ago, I received an octopus doll in the mail from an unknown sender in Mozambique. Then, about two weeks ago, I received a blank email from Paul Rimbaud. Some of you might recognize the name. He is one of the few surviving members of the Pixel Atonal movement – one of the few who didn't die of drug overdose or for obscure reasons in a developing country.

If you aren't aware of the Pixel Atonal movement, then you aren't missing much. They claimed to be a school of design thought, but they were really more of a gang. In the '80s, they were university dropouts who published an underground journal titled "Pixel Atonal", hence the name of the movement. The journal was hardly readable; most of it appeared to have been scribbled during a drug trance. They published game too; games without the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality, which they sold in flea markets. Despite the rarity, the cartridges are also worthless, even today. The games were of atrocious quality, sometimes appearing to be nothing more than mere tech demos, sometimes so crude and vulgar that few kids could survive the first minute (keep in mind the type of unsuspecting parent that typically bought game cartridges from flea markets back in the '80s), and sometimes they were so esoteric that no kid could know what the hell was going on.

Not only were the games absurd and incomprehensible, they sometimes wouldn't even run on a standard NES. The games would be packaged with Xeroxed manuals, full of typos and unintelligible grammar, that was supposed to explain how to overclock or hack your NES so that a game would play. The group made other odd decisions, such as continuing to develop games for the NES even in the late 90s (about the time the last few of them disappeared.) Octopuses and Car Crashes, a game "released" by the Pixel Atonalists in 1991 cost $200 for the cartridge due to the price of the extra chip it contained. It sold zero copies, and no one has ever seen the game played.

This is where I'm supposed to say "Until now", but actually I still haven't seen the original Octopuses and Car Crashes played. What I have seen is a remake, which is titled Octopodes and Car Crashes (supposedly Rimbaud learned that the correct plural form of Octopus was Octopodes). A week after Paul Rimbaud's blank email, he sent me another email with a link inside. Originally, I wondered if the first email had been a joke, but who would have remembered the name Paul Rimbaud? All of the Pixel Atonalists gave themselves their own last names. The last names were so memorable that as I result, I can't recall any of their first names... something Faust, something Borges, something Pound, something Proust. Rimbaud was one of the lesser members, always in the background. I believe he wrote the reader's letters section of the journal (all of the letters being fabricated; no one wrote letters to the Pixel Atonalist.) How many out there, not only remember Rimbaud, but remember that his first name was Paul?)

So now I had this email from Paul Rimbaud, and its simply too absurd for it not to be from the real Paul Rimbaud. I click the link, thinking it is probably a virus, but I'm also thinking: Hell, if it's a virus that a Pixel Atonalist is sending me, then it probably is worth seeing.

The link leads to a download of an install file called "Octopodes." I immediately think of Octopuses and Car Crashes. Then I notice the download size... 23 gigs (never expect a Pixel Atonalist to compress, or program with any sort of efficiency,) and I think that even Paul Rimbaud couldn't bloat an NES rom so much as to make it 23 gigs.

While I'm downloading, I starting digging around. I call other people I knew who were around in the underground virtual world culture in the '90s (I first got into it in the late '90s. The stories from the '80s I had merely heard about.) Several of them had received links as well. Rimbaud probably had our email addresses from some age old IRC server that had long since disappeared from the internet, but remained archived on a floppy disk of his.

Someone was a little more knowledgeable about what was going on than me: "Get this", he says. "Epic Games is trying to track Rimbaud down. It uses the UnrealEngine3...unlicensed. They just got wind of it yesterday"

Pixel Atonalists – always on the run. I never forget the day I received an email claiming that Proust had been shot up in a brothel in Cambodia. Haven't heard about him since, though I'm honestly not sure if he really is dead.

The next morning, I make breakfast and sit at the computer, Octopodes and Car Crashes ready to install. I'm half-certain the thing is going to break my computer. Should there be some documentation about overclocking my processor? I check the game files folder and I see a single readme.txt.

Controls:
Green : G
Borges, if you are reading this, give it up. You will never find me. The chance you had in Jerusalem was your last shot. I won't slip up again."


What the fuck? So, I take it, Borges is hunting down Rimbaud, and possibly other Pixel Atonalists as well for god knows what reason. This is going to be interesting.

The install takes an hour, and is very confusing. I thought my computer screen was glitching for a moment there. There was a blue screen of death (hi there, old friend), and then it abruptly disappeared. Never seen a computer recover out of a blue screen of death somehow. Is my computer now considered undead? Has it somehow transcended life?

Then the program starts. My first thought is that I'm not sure how Rimbaud financed this project. While the screen is loading, a city starts to piece itself together. It is rather stark and uniform, not a whole lot of quality artistic design going on. Looks very much like some sort of fascist city under a permanent curfew. It is nighttime, the buildings are all a dull gray, and the only advertisements are occasional billboards which spout randomly generated gibberish like "Whale Eats Sun."

The camera starts to move around lethargically (I'm on the street level in first person view,) and it's as if someone is controlling me. I try the mouse, then the arrow keys, but nothing seems to work. I hit all the buttons, and the camera continues to move automatically. A wicked car crash happens off in the distance, the scattering of junkyard parts looks a little bit like Burnout's crash modeling. Defeated, I slump into my chair and watch the screen for a few minutes as the camera wanders through a bland city at an excruciating slow pace. There are cars; always present, constantly moving along the roads, lights blurry. Cars at driving through an empty city at night always make me think of acid jazz.

At this point, I make some breakfast, and leave the program to run itself, not sure how much longer this will go on. A half hour later I return to see the game still in auto-drive.

The camera inches through a lawn to some semi-suburbia house and gravitates toward a window. The interior of the house slowly becomes visible. There is a beautiful wicker dresser, and some very stylish wallpaper. I'm thinking it all looks very familiar. Was it perhaps from my own childhood home? Did Rimbaud sneak into my place and pore through my childhood photo-albums? No, the home I grew up in didn't look anything like this. Damn, this furniture was ripped straight from the Sims 3. The Pixel Atonalists never had an issue with copyright. Their games in the '80s used to feature Mario in the same exact pixel composition as he appeared in SMB3.

The camera continues to hover around the window, as if sensing something. A moment later, a female NPC walks into the room. It is the first time I see the semblance of life in Rimbaud's city. I never really had a chance to look into the car windows. The girl walks up to a shelf and flips through a book (all very Sims-like) and then disappears into another room. The camera moves away from the window, and inches along the edge of the house until it comes to another one. We see the girl again, showering now, still very Sims-like, but very un-pixelated.

I myself take a morning shower, and get dressed. But I'm not sure what I'm dressing for. I'm thinking to myself that this is some sort of pedestrian-stalking game, made for those who enjoy the activity in GTA.

When I get back to the computer, it is still nighttime (I'm beginning to realize that there is no daytime in Rimbaud's city, only eternal night), and the camera is following the same girl pedestrian as she walks down the street. She crosses at a stoplight. She does some window shopping. She sits on a park bench for a few minutes. We are crossing a pedestrian bridge over a busy interstate, when we pass another girl walking in an opposite direction. The two girl's have the same exact face and body type, but different hair styles and clothing. Then I notice a rather large purple octopus slinking along, about ten feet behind her. Following her.

I realize I am about ten feet behind the girl I have been following. I am also an octopus?

The girl I have been following returns home. Oddly enough, she leaves the door half open, and I shovel my jelly tentacles inside somehow (suddenly, after learning that I am an octopus, the sloppy motion of movement makes sense to me.). It is as if she intentionally left it open for me, as if she is aware of my stalking, as if it is mutual, as if she enjoys it.

I follow her into her bedroom, (it doesn't really matter anymore that I am not actually controlling the octopus, since our minds both seem to be thinking the same thing at the time), and watch as she dresses into her pajamas and slips into the covers. I climb onto a chair beside the bed and watch her sleep.

I make lunch, and watch some TV, occasionally checking the computer screen. The girl continues to sleep, and the octopus continues to observe. It doesn't feel so much like a stalker anymore, but like a guardian angel, perhaps. I remember the octopus doll I received in the mail. I wonder where I put it.

I forget about the program for a while, and sometime later that night, I return to see that the octopus was in the backseat of a car, watching the girl as she drives. Unsurprisingly, the sky is still dark. The city could be seen passing by through the passenger windows, the same handful of building designs repeating themselves.



The car passes through intersection after intersection. We stopped at one red light for what seemed like an eternity. As I started to get frustrated, I remembered the first line of the readme.txt. "Green : G." The single control of the game; its purpose was just now becoming clear to me. The car moved through the intersection and picked up speed. Another one was coming up.

I put my finger on the "G" key. The approaching light was red. I pressed "G" and it abruptly changed to green. The car picked up speed and smashed into another car crossing the road. It all happened so quickly, that I didn't really have time to judge the crash physics. There seemed to be plenty of independent parts jostling around, but my mind could hardly get a snapshot. The car ended up laying sideways, the girl halfway sprawled out into the street, dead, one leg held captive somehow by her seat belt. The octopus slithered out of the wreckage and seemed to take a final look at her bloodied but still complete body. (I was surprised that a Pixel Atonalist wouldn't put the same sort of effort into body dismemberment that he put into the car crashes, but I suppose that at some point the money ran out, wherever it came from.) The intersection was a steaming disarray of loose car parts.



The octopus turned away from the wreckage and continued on, most likely seeking out another NPC to stalk.

It was midnight. After a full day of watching the game play itself, I finally decided to turn it off. I thought of going to bed, but when I entered my bedroom I saw where I had placed the octopus doll – on the desk, nearly facing my bed. I tossed the doll into the closet and returned to the computer.

I thought about the second part of the title: "and Car Crashes", and about the single control for the game. I realized that the octopus wasn't really a guardian angel, it was more like an angel of death. I started to dig around for more information. I messaged someone who had also received an email from Rimbaud, and he provided me with a link.

The link opened up a whole new element of understanding the game. What I saw was a gallery of hundreds of octopodes of various colors and an IP address listed under each one. I clicked on one at random, which opened up another page of images, all taken from inside the game world. They were pictures of the moon, of girls walking down the street, and of car crashes. Lots of car crashes. I realized that the other octopus I had seen, crossing the pedestrian walkway in the opposite direction, had belonged to another computer logged into the game. I hadn't even realized the game was online.
I backed out of that gallery and did a search for my own IP address. I found my octopus, which was a red color. Seeing that transparent, ruby-like red for the first time was like finally understanding the heart of my octopus. Its whole personality seemed to make sense to me.

I clicked on my octopus and watched as the images began to load. There was the image of the girl NPC showering, taken through the window. And the images (so many images) of her sleeping. And then, the car crash. About twenty snapshots of the crash in motion; the windshield breaking, the iron bending, a nondescript body from the other car flying into view, the car upside down, caught in time while it flipped, pieces of metal and glass floating in mid-air, and finally the picture of the girl NPC's body partially extended from the car.

I ran the program again the next day. It was more of the same thing. Stalking girls (there apparently are no men in the world), and creating magnificent car crashes with a simple press of the "G" key. After a few more hours I uninstalled the game.

As for the final score? I typically don't believe in review scores, but a Pixel Atonalist isn't a worthy Pixel Atonalist if his work isn't getting slammed.

Graphics: 3/10 (Nice (stolen) engine, cities are bland, assets were stolen, most of the work seemed to go into the female models.)

Sound: N/A (There is no music. There isn't much sound aside from the sounds of cars driving and crashing, which is all very generic, and probably ripped from Burnout.)

Presentation: 2/10 ("Manual" is not very helpful. Install seems like it is doing something nasty to your computer.)

Gameplay: 1/10 (There is no gameplay really to speak of. You are basically just watching a bot explore a virtual online world)

Final score: 2/10

Rimbaud wouldn't want anything higher.