Games that time forgot: Games that aren't really games edition

9:25 PM on 12.26.2006   |   Anthony Burch

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This week we have a trio of games that aren't actually games, in the strictest sense. No, these games serve as endurance trials, interactive pranks, or one long, drawn-out joke. Interested in seeing the medium of interactive art pushed to its breaking point? Hit the jump.

Takeshi's Ultimate Challenge

What is it?

According to the final screen of the game, Takeshi's Ultimate Challenge (Famicom) is a game "made by a man who hates video games." Kitano Takeshi, Japanese comedian/actor/writer/film director/my avatar  created the game as a method of torturing the player with near-impossible tasks and testing his or her endurance. At times, the game would ask you to:

-Sing karaoke into the microphone installed in the Famicom's second controller for hours straight

-Leave the game alone for at least an hour without pressing a single button: however, if you left it alone for more than one hour and ten seconds, the entire game restarted. This meant you couldn't just leave the room and do something else for a long time.

-Try to jump over a gap that was exactly one pixel wider than your character's maximum jumping length

-Hit the final boss twenty thousand times to defeat it 

Hit the jump for why you haven't played it, and the other two games. 

Why haven't I played it?

 Because you probably weren't living in Japan twenty years ago, and you're probably not enough of a masochist to take the kind of abuse the game (and, vicariously, Takeshi) dishes out. It also goes without saying that a non-video game starring a Japanese celebrity and requiring several weird peripherals was never imported to any English-speaking countries.

Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors

What is it?

While one portion of the game is an actual action/RPG type deal where you kill rival magicians and exploit their secrets, the majority of the game consists of pranks and non-games. For example, the games "Mofo the Psychic Gorilla" and "What's Your Sign" serve as a method of tricking a friend: the idea is, you'd get a second player, and in the case of What's Your Sign, you would input his or her birthday before they arrived. After your friend arrived and answered some random questions, the game would correctly tell them their astrological sign, to everybody's surprise. In Mofo the Psychic Gorilla, your friend would pick a card from a real-life deck of playing cards, and, through button combinations, you'd tell the game which card he picked. When Mofo correctly guessed the card, your friend would be flabbergasted.

Or, in the fake game Buzz Bombers, the first player would, a hundred times out of a hundred, annihilate the second player through cheats and button combinations that were only available to player one (invincibility, added agility, and so on). The player could even disable some of these cheats, so the other player could win a couple of times in order to prevent them from suspecting anything--and, even more interestingly, there was a button combination that switched the "cheat" controller from player one to player two, just in case your friend got suspicious and switched controllers with you. Buzz Bombers even came with a fake instruction manual and title screen, to further support the prank. 

The best known game in Smoke and Mirrors, however, is "Desert Bus," which simulates a real-time road trip from Tucson to Las Vegas--meaning that it takes eight hours to complete. The bus only goes 45 miles an hour, you can't pause the game, there is no scenery, no other cars on the road, and the bus veers slightly to the right, so you can't just tape a button down and walk out of the room. After eight hours of monotonous, constant driving, what do you get? Exactly one point, and the option to pull a double shift and drive the eight hours back to Tucson. Before the game was canned, Penn and Teller were planning on creating a contest where the first person to get 100 points in the game (that's 800 hours of continuous driving without the ability to pause the game) would win a crapload of stuff.

Why haven't I played it?

Because it wasn't released.  You can get it here, though, with a Sega CD emulator.

Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time

What is it?

A collection of minigames, jokes, and clips based on the TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus. While one could actually derive some legitimate, permanent entertainment from the minigames and jokes, the overall goal of the game was to fix several different parts of a Gumby's (the guys with the knotted handkerchiefs on their heads) brain, and in so doing find out the Secret To Intergalactic Success.

The problem was that solving each part of the brain was damn near impossible. You had to click around randomly on each screen until you found three clues, at which point a door would open up and you entered a maze. The maze was controlled from a first-person perspective (virtually identical to the maze runner portion of Myst), and to give the player "help," Eric Idle's voice would provide directions.

The problem was, Eric never, ever gave correct advice: he'd tell you to go right when you had to go left, he'd tell you to stop when you had to keep going, and he'd get angry at you for going in the correct direction. Considering the mazes were insanely complicated and all the while you had to deal with Eric's distracting (but hilarious) comments, it was near impossible to finish the game without a walkthrough (it was so hard, in fact, that 7th Level gave out a cash prize to whoever could beat the game first). 

Why haven't I played it?

 Hell if I know. While the actual overall goal of the game is sort of a waste of time (the Secret to Interagalactic Success is, unsurprisingly, pretty disappointing), the minigames are fun, the clips are hilarious, and the new material for the game is really funny. You can still find it on eBay, along with Monty Python's other two games.