Tag: Comedy

Do Not Feed The Monkeys
News

Ah, just what dystopian videogames need: acid humor

It’s no surprise that videogames are increasingly interested in matters of surveillance. After all, these days we can all feel like distant observers of each other’s lives, peeking in from the fringes provided by social media. There’s plenty of fiction from the 20th century that predicted our current circumstance: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Brazil (1985), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and so on. Perhaps the only surprise is how willingly we submit our personal lives to the machines that are made to watch us. Last year, videogames got serious on the subject, with harrowing thrillers like Replica, Orwell, Inside, and Watch_Dogs 2,…
Feature

Horror comedy in videogames isn’t given enough credit

He recently passed away, but in his 90 years on earth Herschell Gordon Lewis claims that he had been approached on two occasions to direct a snuff film. The idea didn’t amuse him. During an interview with Alexandra West from Diabolique Magazine, he said such a thing wasn’t “worthy of a thought.” “I regard that as too far back in organized society,” said Lewis in his genuinely golden voice, which narrates some of his films. He expressed that even seeing bodies on the evening news was tested his sensibilities. To Herschell Gordon Lewis, death did not appear entertaining. It would…
Jazzpunk
News

Odd noir adventure game Jazzpunk comes frolicking to PS4 soon

The adventure game most likely to puzzle your eyeballs with a noir-inspired pixel odyssey—Jazzpunk—is coming to PS4 on September 20th. The trailer for the PS4 release is weird in that quintessentially Jazzpunk way; a combination of live-action shenanigans, a smidge of gameplay, and a dash of construction paper-looking papercraft in an atomic-age package. It sets the tone for the odd game that is 2014’s Jazzpunk, albeit re-released in a shiny updated package. The version hitting PS4 virtual shelves is a “Director’s Cut,” and as Jesse Brouse, of Necrophone Games, puts it: “Some of the new content was resurrected from our…
Project Tingle
News

Zoe Quinn’s making an erotic-comedy FMV game, includes sexy unicorns

Chocolate milk cowboys. Velociraptor billionaires. Unicorn butt cops. Bigfoot pirates. These creations are the basis for the works of erotic novelist Chuck Tingle. “The Tingler”—the name Chuck gives to his erotic books—are also the foundation for the newest game from Depression Quest (2013) creator Zoe Quinn. What type of game do you make when you’re inspired by the works of a man who wrote the sensationally titled Pounded By the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union, or the Hugo-award-nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion? An FMV game, naturally. You can’t just Tingle the body. You’ve…
News

Mosh pit simulator for VR goes wrong, turns into nightmarish comedy

Having recently earned front page status on Reddit, I Have No Idea What I’m Doing: The Game is a virtual reality mosh pit simulator gone wrong, or so its creator Sos Sosowski claims. In it, hordes of creepy, slightly gelatinous men with no respect for personal space try to swarm you, leaving you awkwardly flailing your arms at them as you try to push them away. So, another day on Tinder, then? I wanted to make a mosh pit simulator but it turned out really creepy! pic.twitter.com/CiTL8mZ6y0 — Sos Sosowski (@Sosowski) April 13, 2016 As you can probably see from watching the gifs,…
Feature

Videogames and Tarantino: A mistaken love affair

Whether you like his work or not, Tarantino has a grip over the collective imagination many creators can only live out in their dreams. Take this year’s The Hateful Eight for instance. So much attention has been given to the mere possibility of a new Tarantino project that the film’s first script was leaked, the early screener pirated, and later, the pirates even apologized for releasing the film early because they admired it so much. Despite all that, the three-hour long The Hateful Eight managed to convince people to fill theater seats and watch a film in an antiquated format…
Fallout 4
News

Turning Fallout 4’s world into 1950s-style animations

If you’ve played last year’s Fallout 4, you’ve doubtless seen the series of animated shorts that play upon starting the game up. Black-and-white and with scratchy audio, these videos turned the post-apocalyptic Boston wasteland of Fallout 4 into a comedic, 1950s-style cartoon. (If you haven’t seen these shorts, then you can easily catch up on them all over on developer and publisher Bethesda’s YouTube channel.) Each of these shorts detailed one of the letters in the game’s  “S.P.E.C.I.A.L.” system. This has been a staple of the Fallout series since its first outing in 1997. It’s an acronym that stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma,…
News

Go back in time to save time in the adorable Tick Tock Isle

Described as a spiritual successor to the delightful Cat Poke, Tick Tock Isle is a point and click adventure game that doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel—and it’ll charm the pants out of anyone who thinks that wheel is outdated or boring. The demo was originally released four years ago by the duo of Jason Boyer and Ryan Pietz. “We spent an entire summer designing our biggest game yet,” Boyer writes on his blog. “Unfortunately, we didn’t have anyone to program it beyond a demo, so it lingered in our unfulfilled dreams folder.” Finally in April 2015, they decided to “make our dream a reality and…
News

For once, a videogame that has you clear up the violence rather than cause it

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Viscera Cleanup Detail (PC)  BY Runestorm For most people, the idea of cleaning up anything sucks. It’s a chore; not meant to be enjoyed, just endured. What’s going on with Viscera Cleanup Detail then? This is a videogame purely about cleaning that has enjoyed two years of popularity before it was even finished. People are lapping it up like a mop head does spilled liquid. One user review finds comedy in how the person who wrote it refuses to clean their messy room but has scrubbed an…