Final Fantasy Four(ums) (Final Banter-sy)

7AM on the Nibelheim defense league forums, a heavily pixelated image of an alien is placed next to some angry-looking bullet points, it reads:

Illegal alien Jenova came to Midgar, at taxpayers expense!

Illegal Alien Jenova responsible for the deaths of Shinra employees, what will the government do!?

Illegal Alien Jenova given council house inside six-bedroomed subterranean crater, yet Tonberrys from THIS PLANET remain homeless!!

Comments:

HIDEOUSSPOOK_56: Ridiculous! Since I lost my job maintaining guard scorpions, I've had to downsize to an tiny cottage that harbors a mechanical fiend, and THEY GET AN ENTIRE CRATER? STEP UP SHINRA!

2_BOTTOMSWELLXXL: I bet the people in Kalm town don't mind do they? But would they harbor a Space Alien with multiple forms, I DOUBT IT!

HONEYBEEINN: Download the honeybee app and find hot local guys in your area now!

PROUDCLOD_LAD: SEND THEM TO COREL PRISON IT'S ALL THEY DESERVE!!!

GILFORDAYS69: Heidegger wouldn't have let this happen! Rufus is YET ANOTHER liberal snowflake pandering to the minorities!

AIRBUSTER_BROS: UNBELIEVABLE! When are the government going to finally pull their finger out and shoot a big cannon at it?

8AM on the Dollet women's rights forum, the forum temporarily crashes after being inundated with Gifs of Ultimecia making a sandwich while being dolphin punched. The perpetrators are rumored to be acting on behalf of Final Fantasy 4-Chan but cannot be officially identified due to uniform Kain Highwind masks. The forum degenerates into madness...

DOBENFLO2000: It's UltiMEcia not UltiSHEcia!

MANWITHTHEMACHINEGUN: All it takes is one bad period and BOOM, locked in time compression, CANNOT BE TRUSTED

JUNCTIONBOI45: Nobody wants to watch women play Triple Triad anyway, it's a MAN'S sport!

ELNOYLE: Its Edea not SHEdea! Looks like they have no...'CLUE'

PAPALOVESMOOMBA: It makes you want to take a Doomtrain over the lot of 'em! THEY WOULD PROBABLY BE LESS CONFUSED!!!

TIAMATTHEW890: Balamb Garden has become nothing more than a breeding ground for virtue signalers and social justice warriors, it doesn't prepare these kids for a real life of fighting T-Rexaurs and propelling dogs at high velocity while in space

9 AM on the Treno buy/sell/trade forum, one of the moderators has placed an abridged article from the tabloids concerning famous instagram foodie 'Quina Quen' and her decision to remain gender neutral despite hostility from local Flans. Patrons are keen to offer their expertise on this subject, well versed on gender awareness of course through years of buying/selling things online:

212RAGTIMEMOUSE: WRONG! It's male, female and anthropomorphic rat people, EVERYTHING ELSE IS CLOUD CUCKOO LAND!

XXUNCLEADELBERTXX: It's giving these kids mixed messages, last week I saw a child WITH A TAIL!

TETRAMASTER222: It's trance Kuja not TRANS Kuja!

TRENOBUYSELLTRADE: XXXXXXX Free listings this weekend at the Treno auction house! Enter code 'MINI-CID' for this one time offer! XXXXXXX

OZMAWEP19: If I meet this 'Quina' I will not be pandering to IT, and IT'S idea of gender. Even if IT does try to consume me in order to learn better magic

Its 10AM on the Zanarkand against cyber bullying page, the page is empty because it turns out it never really existed...

Then after that the forums just sort of talked about nothing in particular, with the occassional sub-forum providing a glimmer of interest...15PM wasn't that bad I suppose

The "Radical" world of 90's marketing (Non-righteous edition)

Hey dweebz, the names Link; that's right, the same bodacious-radical gnarlariffic rude and crude Link you know from the hit games 'The Zeldas' and 'The Zeldas 2: Lost in Bill-Clintopia' I'm back dudes, and this time I'm more righteous than ever. With awesome 32 Megabits of graphics so brain-meltingly coolorific, you'll think you're IN the game, and let's not forget the mondo-mega pumpin' stereo sound, with jams so skitchin, these beats will make Beethoven bop! So what are you waiting for dorks and dorkettes, PLAY MY GAME ALREADY!!!!

...90's video game adverts were a scary time, when Sega wasn't telling you to burn your Super Nintendo like the fucking nerd you were, Nintendo was telling you to ignore Sega's lies, slash your wrists and commit forever to the cult Nintendo. Of course you also had Atari and 3DO on the table, but the table had wonky legs near their side so every time they stood up the table would not provide them with consistent 3^rd party support METAPHOR OVER!

90's comics were particularly guilty of this trope, just look over any issue of X-Factor (The most 90's Marvel that Marvel has ever been) and you'll find companies desperately trying to pedal those unsold copies of 'Chuck Rock' and 'The Pagemaster' with reckless abandon, neither of which are worth playing, let alone mentioning. Nonetheless a younger more impressionable me would ignore the weekly antics of Boom-Boom and Calaban in favor of adverts telling me how inadequate I was for not owning the latest game to feature an overweight caveman. Often they were tantalizing double page spreads, on the left side the interchangeable slogan 'Are you rad/bad/cool/crude/mad enough?' on the right, a child in MC Hammer cosplay having some form of 'sensory' overload as a result of the 'realer-than-real' graphics. Often the children didn't look like they were enjoying the product at all, in fact it was causing them some serious physical and mental discomfort, of course kids were hardier back then; you put a Mega-CD in front of youngster now and they will literally die from how real Night Trap looks

Games have come a long a terrifying way in recent years, developers no longer imbue anthropomorphic animals with attitude and game adverts today usually feature slow motion footage of two characters colliding to an 'Imagine Dragons' song, followed by a vaguely prophetic but ultimately meaningless slogan. 'Endeepen your Deepness', 'All ends must come to a beginning'; 'Smell with your eyes'. As for adverts in comics, real physical comics; I refuse to believe physical paper even exists any more; when was the last time you saw paper? Paper has become the new papyrus, a novelty you bring out at parties/Egyptian hieroglyph classes. The medium is dead based on all those facts I just said, but what if it wasn't...?

RE: EDGE MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE ADVERTISING IDEA

Dear Retro Prefect

We appreciate the lengths to which your creative marketing strategy attempts to engage a particular, jaded demographic. Unfortunately at this time we must decline its inclusion within this, and subsequent issues of Edge magazine. Many of us agreed that while the campaign showed genuine passion for the product in question (Soldier Combat 4) there were aspects which did not convey the overall ethos of this magazine as a whole. In particular the gratuitous use of profanity, the mention of being 'Balls deep in a woman' and the derogatory and derisive mention of the game 'Peggle' a game which we all agree here at Edge Magazine, is the best game since sliced 'Braid' (An office in joke you wouldn't get because we are sole arbiter of indie games and their success)

Our sincerest apologies in advance,

Miles Edgeworth

(Senior director: Edge Magazine)

ADVERT IDEA FOR SOLDIER COMBAT 4

Picture of burly alpha-male holding nerds severed head, possible double page spread with multiple 'beta' corpses littered around a local newsagent (contact Londis) scantily clad women are writhing in the brain matter whilst looking longingly up at the beefy alpha man (contact Uncle Ned) text box below written in blood/spooky font reads...

HEY FUCK HEAD ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF! You probably can't handle 'Soldier Combat 4' because you're too busy being rejected by women, SNOWFLAKE! Grow a pair 'man-boi' and then try this game on for size, and we'll know if you're lying about your manliness because voice chat is MANDATORY, and our moderators know BULLSHIT from 20 parsecs! (That's a reference you'll understand NERD)! This game comes on a disc but if you expect any of the content to be actually on it, THINK AGAIN CUCK! What's wrong, too POOR to afford DLC? Go back to playing Peggle gaylord! There are 10 different collectors editions, WHAT YOU THINK THAT'S TOO MANY! I'm sorry, but how many collectors editions did Final Fantasy VII have? NONE I ASSUME, BECAUSE RESEARCH IS FOR PUSSIES AND I'M TOO BUSY GETTING BALLS DEEP IN THE ACTION TO READ SHIT!!!

I don't care if you buy 'Soldier Combat 4' or not, I don't care about you and nobody else does, you are nothing...AVAILABLE WHENEVER I DECIDE IT'S OUT!!!

I've still not played Peggle, any good?

Perfect Weapon

If there was ever a game which deserved the word 'perfect' within the title, Perfect Weapon would be last in a disorderly and disheveled fighting game queue; desperatley trying to cut inbetween Pit Fighter and World Heroes, as Mortal Kombat laughs from its unjust VIP queue position. In a unique twist by unaptly named developers 'Gray Matter' (whos only other title appears to be Body Hazard, a game which the internet has denied the existence of) they have forgone the dissapointment associated with misleading box art, instead plastering in game footage on the front cover that promises men in figure hugging leather being ambushed by blocky lizardmen.

I was first introudced to this fighting debarcle by PC format magazine and it's much coveted front cover demo disk. In the days of terrible internet, when illegally downloading Snes Roms took three hours; the idea that a demo could access games in half the time it took to actually complete them was something of a refreshing change. I feel that Perfect Weapon is definitely suited to the PC keyboard controls , in so much as whatever method of control you use, the game will innevitably still remain a clunky mess. Fans of Resident Evil will understand that the rotating antics of Chris Redfield should only be assigned to the confines of a darkened corridor, and not against the terrestrial polygon hordes of planets which feature a single environmental characteristic. The first level sees you in planet cliche mainstay, ice planet. I was sorely dissapointed by this as the demo planted you instantly in second planetary cliche "Desert" planet. Desert planet seemed like an exiting prospect back in the day, and it is what lead me to ultimatley buy the game 10 years later on the PS1, desert planet has a lot to answer for...

The first thing you may notice is that the fighting system is incedibly ineffectual against most enemies, any antagonist less than a meter tall is impossible to fight due to the impractical nature of the crouching kick. The aforementioned kick requires unprecedented precision made all the more difficult by A: All the rotating you will have to do to constantly re-align with these enemies. B: Short stature enemies don't take kindly to the condescension implied by a squatting, rotating giant. For a Perfect Weapon, the main character is certainly the least worthy candidate of his title, having been forcibly kidnapped and left to die on an icy planet at the cold paws of knee high dogs; he is essentially nothing short of a useless weapon.

I can't say I've played this game for more than an hour since purchasing it, in fact I've probably played this less than the aforementioned demo. But this tells us less about my lack of conviction when it comes to journalistic impartiality, and more about the fact that a game costing £2 from a car boot sale is so unplayable that it's unworthy of a time investment beyond 60 minutes. Perfect Weapon remains within my PS1 collection as a worthless reminder to everyone that a title isn't everything, and the game itself is even less...

Mario Party 3 (Return Of The Formulaic Party Game)

Dear the N64 console

For many years I have enjoyed the graphical marvel your console provides, the clunky 3-D worlds, the clunky controllers, the clunky plots you try to shoehorn into games that don't need it. The ability to capture every facet of human emotion in a clunky avatar that is more than likely an animal with an alliterated name. But now the year is 2001, and the rising popularity of Robbie Williams strongly suggests we must regress to a simpler time, where women are women, and men don't dress like Gene Simmons in the name of "Entertaining you". A time when Cluedo could be enjoyed without people making suggestive jokes about the lead pipe, a time when board games ruled...this time is now, this time is Mario Party time!

And so with these wise words in mind, Mario Party saw its third and unfortunately nowhere near final installment released in 2001. Six sequels later and the game mechanics have not changed in the slightest, bar the  tacked on control scheme courtesy of the Wii Remote. At the time, the idea of a board game interspersed with mini games sounded like a refreshing idea. Of course the Wii has taught us that mini games serve only one use, and that is to appease the working class long enough to not commit acts of wanton vandalism. The fact that the riots co-inside with the gap between the releases of Mario Party 8 and 9 is no coincidence...

As with all board games, playing alone is not only dull; but also a sign of how tragic a persons life has become. The only thing more depressing than a rainy night of boggle alone, is a rainy night of boggle with a incomprehensible green dinosaur that keeps stealing your Boggle cubes. After playing this game on and off for five years with the same set of friends, the game has now developed from an innocent Nintendo endorsed board game, into a coin grabbing ritualistic hate fest filled with numerous catch phrases, racism towards trees, and tragic twists of fate that can lead the winner into last place within a turn. The games major fault really is the brutal tendency it has of stripping a player of all their hard earned/stolen stars and coins. It is for this very reason that the game fails to provide any sense of achievement even if you do win, the best strategy is to spend most of the game without any assets, as you run less risk of losing them all immediately...although as we all know Waluigi is always the party star, and this is a role he never takes lightly

A lot of people have dismissed this game as being nothing more than an unnecessary sequel to an unnecessary series, and I would wholeheartedly agree. But as Mario Party games go, Mario Party 3 is by far the most unnecessary sequel of them all, and for that it deserves its rightful place in the homes of all people who enjoy torturing their friends for 20-40 turns. I give this game two waves of Bowsers clunky "take about ten" coin stealing hands...

The Adventures Of Alundra: A Link To Nintendo's Copyright Department

The year was 1997...the Internet was just about passable as something that could be used for things, just as long as you had the patience

Imagine however, a world where Wikipedia was absent, where the only way to find out about the latest PS1 titles was to actually buy a magazine inaccurately stating the release dates. You could I suppose troll through the hundreds of self proposed "Fansites" courtesy of Geocities; but that would usually end in tragedy as you scrolled through a slow loading page of animated GIFS, and then got your first taste of pornographic fan art...

So Alundra, well endowed as I came to find he is; became known as a result of the now thankfully defunct "Playstation MAX" magazine. A periodical which embraced the ideals of journalism like a burly retard man who doesnt know his own strength, the neck snapping inaccuracies of this magazine however made me aware of Alundra, a Zelda clone which had I been older and wiser, would have seen it as just that...and still bought it anyway.

I recently took to replaying the game after two previous unsuccessful attempts trying to finish it, I shall recall these attempts in chronological order...

ATTEMPT EIN: Got stuck on a pyramid level although the exact details of why or what went wrong are unknown. I later discovered an array of cheats for the game on my Action Replay cartridge which may have lead to the memory card reformatting itself...game restart became undesirable on account of post traumatic memory card loss

LESSON LEARNED- If thou art to gain glory through cheating, Alundra and other PS1 titles shall be deleting

ATTEMPT ZWEI: Scrolled through the overly long introduction sequence with major disinterest, ended up strolling onto a beach only to underestimate the power of fire breathing turtles, game over without saving, prospect of seeing the intro a second time...undesirable.

LESSON LEARNED- A boring summer cannot be quelled, by a foray into games previously uncompelled (to play to the end)

ATTEMPT DREI: Seemingly ploughed through levels I previously thought of as impossible, possibly as a result of having nothing else to do other than hand out flyers for an Italian restaurant supposedly owned by a Persian. (He was able to reverse time briefly when people denied his flyers) six months have now transpired, prospect of returning to a story driven game I have neglected for over half a year...undesirable but feasible

LESSON LEARNED- In youth, skills are low. When grown, far you go

The problem with coming back to games from your childhood is that A: They are often shit B: They are far more difficult, and my tolerance to play them is far less. I soon discovered however, that Alundra falls into neither of this categories, not only does it hold up, but the difficulty is far easier than I had remembered. Perhaps it may be that now in my mature stages of adulthood, I have developed the necessary life skills with which to traverse fictional coal mines and crypts easily, whereas the ability to converse with a labourer without contempt still eludes me. Alundra still however provides the tried and tested trial and error you can never be expected to really understand.

Games from the PS1 era however, take longer to load than other consoles on account of the mega graficks and the deposit of dog shite in the disk tray. Try as my father might to remove this evidence, the noxious cocktail of fecal matter and lemon zest will forever remain in my nostrils, reminding me of a simpler, potentially blinding time...

Alundra is definitely a hidden gem among the PS1 library and in some ways surpasses the Zelda series. First of all, the story extends beyond rescue the princess by collecting three things followed by eight things and secondly, the bombs you carry are twice as comically over-sized. Regrettably the sequel decided to enter into 3D, and while I enjoyed the game at the time I can safely assume Alundra 2 has aged nowhere near as well as its predecessor. Buy it, play it, never finish it...( a fourth attempt is planned for 2023)

Captain America And The Avengers

In 1991, if you actively discussed anything to do with comics obsessively to people who didn't care, you would be at the receiving end of a Vibarnium shield. Nowadays however, people get that reference and Thor is now considered an acceptable role model for young children. (Especially young children who aren't aware they are frost giants) So perhaps it's fitting that I pander to an audience obsessed with a film about fighting aliens that have weak motives for invading earth.

Captain America and the Avengers came from a time when comic book plots didn't have to be grounded in some semblance of reality, where Hawkeye thought purple and blue were acceptable costume colours, where Nick Fury was white; where the destroyer armour hosted his own chat show. (discussions with destroyer) It's a game that doesn't try to win over the unconverted by offering hilarious quips from iron man, or jokes about Captain America not knowing about modern things. Which is just as well as the translation efforts courtesy of Data East prove that even the symbol of American justice (racism) cannot escape misguided dialogue translation. "It is you who is not escaping" says whirlwind after being ambushed by a group of heroes who have no intention of escaping...thank you Japan!

Avengers is your typical arcade scrolling beat em up, by which I mean after the initial euphoria of beating up the same non-marvel endorsed robot enemy for 20 minutes; you soon become aware that there isn't much else. The four avengers (Captain America, Hawkeye, Iron Man and the Vision) all play exactly the same. The only difference of course being that everyone wants to play as shiny Iron Man while Hawkeye is often neglected on account of archery not being a super power.

It's clear that Data East couldn't afford to splash out on many of the Marvel A-listers for this game so boss battles are fought against the likes of obscure favourites "The living laser", "Ultron" and "Klaw". Classic Marvel villains that laugh maniacally for extended periods of time and make puns out of their names. "You wont live against the living laser!", "It's time to face the long arm of the Klaw!", "You thought you could beat Ultron, you are Ult-Wrong!" and so on...luckily the red skull appears to remind you that Marvel is not all Klaw and Laser, but this is by the end of the game so no amount of Nazi/Communist sympathisers can save you from the boredom you've already experienced.

Captain America and the Avengers reminds us that adaptions of comic book franchises into any other medium don't always end well. The enjoyment of this game is very much short lived with most of the entertainment coming from poor translations and the occasional sound bytes courtesy of the Super Nintendo hardware. People who complete the game will be disappointed at the absence of an end of credit teaser, but given this was made in 1991, nobody cared who Thanos was anyway...SPOILER!

Mr Eisner’s videogame aggressive corporate takeover.

“All your wishes can come true so long as those wishes involve all your intellectual property being owned by Disney.”

Order in the court! Once upon a time Uncle Werner Herzog Disney might have been the ice-man at the top of the adventure land totem pole. But now I Michael “Iron Fist” Eisner am the one making all the hard decisions, or at least I was during the 90’s until I was forced out for indecision regarding the Power Rangers franchise. Old Wodan might have thought he had explained the delightful electronic content that the Disney corporation have on offer but everything he says is just fairy stories, much like the stories you hear about people being killed on the small world ride. While the ice-man is back in the chest freezer allow me to present a series of graphs representing our ability to harness the power of a child’s imagination and turn it into cold hard cash.  (Specifically Eisner-dollars which will become legal tender once I offer England’s Queen a role in High School Musical 4: Secret of the Ooze)

Aladdin:

Whether it be a Chinese boy fighting his evil uncle Abanazer or an Arabian trying to stop an educated man from deposing a useless monarch, the moral of Aladdin is always that you can’t trust a foreigner. The videogame adaption takes this theme and runs with it, vertically across a series of platforms. Speaking of platforms this game was released for both the Mega Drive and SNES. The Mega Drive version allowed Aladdin to swing a sword at the friends of democracy while the SNES version reduced Aladdin to throwing apples at the face of man and giant snake alike. Like Disney, Nintendo are a family friendly global corporation and they didn’t like the idea of children accidentally slicing each other’s arms of with scimitars. I for one agree with this decision, children without arms are no good to the Disney corporation as they slide through the restrains on space mountain. That’s another frivolous lawsuit waiting to happen, if you read the small print on your ticket you’ll see that Michael Eisner is not responsible for events that transpire in outer space. It’s much safer for children to risk brain damage by hurling apples or similar round objects at each other, that’s just more brain damaged children coming on charity. trips to Disneyland. Whether the money comes from your own parents or the make a wish foundation makes no difference to me, I’m still just going to give it to Haim Saban.

Disney’s action game featuring Hercules:

 I was so sick of people coming up to me asking whether the Bambi game was a FPS or an RPG. The only thing I hate more than acronyms is ice cream vans which use images of Disney characters without paying the proper licensing fees. Listen “Uncle Whippy” just because you provide the ice necessary to stop our founders cadaver going gangrenous doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to depict Goofy asking people to mind that child. Goofy is a registered trademark of Disney and any public image of Goofy should be in keeping with his image as an idiotic dog who would no sooner mind a child as follow proper safety procedures while putting up wallpaper. It is true that the rights to our popular characters are sold at a price too high for most to afford, but have you considered using one of our less famous characters? Your ice cream van could feature official sanctioned images of Gurgi from the black cauldron for as little as $50,000 a month. The point is that most games are mysterious like a Cornetto and you never know what is luring at the bottom of the cone but Disney’s action game featuring Hercules is straight forward like a Cherry Brandy lolly. Only instead of unpopular cherry flavour it features unpopular 2D platforming and a Cyclops who quotes the names of Magic the Gathering Cards.

Toy Story:

 If you ask Michael Eisner (and everybody does eventually) Toy Story was the beginning of the end (for Michael Eisner). But I am not bitter at the fact that John Lassiter has hoodwinked his way to the top by remaking the Brave Little Toaster. In fact I wish him all the luck in the world because after Cars 2: Back in the habit  he is going to need it.  However this game comes from a time before films such as “Old Man misses dead wife” “Robot makes futile attempts” and “Not the Fantastic Four” and as such we can enjoy it’s pre-rendered graphics without knowing that eventually all the characters will be destroyed in a furnace. I’m particularly fond of the sections which see Woody carry toy aliens around the windows maze screensaver, as Tom hanks cheaper brother might say “There’s a serpent in my footwear!”

Toy Story 2:

 From the producers of “Apocalyptic sentient automobile future” comes Toy Story 2, the Toy Story sequel that isn’t an hour of suicide inducing melancholy and ten minutes of hilarious jokes about Ken. This time the men from Disney have gone all out to move away from 2D platforming and bring you ….3D platforming. You can recreate all your favourite moments from Toy Story 2, such as the bit where Buzz Lightyear repeatedly tried to jump between tree branches or the scene where Buzz Lightyear can’t work out how to get up a desk and uses the level select code to go straight to the airport level. As a down on his luck due to drink driving charges Tim Allen might say “To Infinity gauntlet and beyonder!”

Disney’s Epic Mickey:

 This game tells the familiar story of an old relic being “sent away” and replaced with a younger model who knows more about maximising corporate revenue streams. With this being a game of course Oswald the lucky rabbits family don’t team up to oust you from your position after a few mistakes that anyone could make, that is because un like real life games have to be fair. If Oswald the lucky rabbit was so great how come he is a frozen shell while I Michael Eisner am a vigorous man who does not rely on liquid nitrogen to stop his eyes falling out. Even Mickey Mouse can make a few mistakes, I mean who would think a film about a sassy cow in the wild west could be anything other than a massive success?  Well in this game Mickey say’s “no” to the irrelevant men of the past and erases them with paint thinner. However it’s not all “black and white” as much like myself Mickey has some difficult decisions to make along the way, for example should he erase Tron –Pete from existence or simply edit out all his politically incorrect moments? Should he help a pirate marry a cow or report him to the authorities and should he create a Roger Rabbit franchise or have his attempts to create a Roger Rabbit Franchise fail due to outside interference. Of course in the end Mickey escapes from the backwards world he is trapped in and gets lucrative jobs in network television. Again Nintendo were happy to allow this game to be exclusive to their Wii system as it does not encourage children to attack each other with weapons, it merely encourages them to drown each other with paint thinner.

Kingdom Hearts:

 Combining two popular franchises to create an all-powerful mega-franchise is just the sort of practice that Michael Eisner approves of. It’s just a shame that instead of working with Square-Enix we weren’t able to buy them outright and acquire rights to all their characters. Let me tell you I had big plans for a new series of Bonkers where Bonkers Bobcat pilots a wanzer. (I also had an idea for a Saturday morning Tobal cartoon called Oliems Troop, but I was advised not to talk about that in public ever again) We weren’t able to release the main Kingdom Hearts games on Nintendo consoles due to the gratuitous use of giant keys as weaponry. In fact the main character’s “Keyblade” stirred up a lot of controversy at the time with people making statements such as “A key should open the door to peace, but these keys bash the faces of all key loving people.” and “This is a key moment in the fight against the deformation of keys.” All the stories of key-related violence in the media didn’t help (boy pokes own eye out with key/ childhood keytastrophe/ Asylum seekers given free keys by government.) and for a while many shops were refusing to stock Kingdom Hearts due to the high level of key based violence. Eventually cooler heads prevailed and everyone was free to enjoy the simple story of the boy from the sixth sense travelling through the magical worlds of Disney and producing a lot of unnecessary portable spin offs.

Jungle Book Groove Party:

 Everybody likes hastily made cash ins of popular fads that cheapen a once highly regarded artistic achievement, just ask the people that made the Jungle Book 2: Jungle in the city. With Jungle Book Groove party Disney were able to combine the classic songs from the Jungle book with very slow dance dance revolution style gameplay to produce an unsatisfying experience for all. On my personal recommendation Lou Bega was invited to record his own version of “I want to be like you.” Because if you were Lou Bega I can’t imagine anything more than wanting to be more like someone else. (Specifically someone who wasn’t Lou Bega.) Still it was nice for everyone to hear from Lou Bega again a good few years after Mambo Number 5 just to make sure he wasn’t dead. This game was actually supposed to restart Lou Bega’s music career and had it been successful we would have launched Black Cauldron Groove Part featuring Shaggy and Basil the Great Mouse Detective Groove Party featuring Aswad. Unfortunately the “Groove” franchise was not to be ad the Kettle Drum version of the Rattigan song must remain in the Disney vault…for now.

Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Mix:

Where other men might fear to tread Michael Eisner struts in confidently. After the failure of one “groove” game you might think an intelligent business man would shy away from the whole foot-arrow genre. But as Michael Eisner says “If you aren’t prepared to fail then you aren’t prepared for (Vicki) Vale.” With the help of Konami we were able to produce a dancing game that mixed classic Disney songs with other not Disney songs that didn’t really have any business being there. That said until you have heard a house remix of Chim Chimmeny then you haven’t lived and we even included an exercise mode to count calories for those gelatinous beasts that have enjoyed too many official Mickey Mouse Club House pasta shapes. Yes those shapes may have contained an almost lethal dose of salt, but nobody told you to eat them and going blind is just a natural part of life.

Disney’s Think Fast:  

Is there a controller more pointless than the buzz controller? All it does it make the buttons slightly bigger, for most of the games you don’t even use the big red buzzer to buzz anything. Personally I (Michael Eisner) feel that the people that made it must have been “buzzed” by illegal substances when they created it. That doesn’t mean that we here at the Disney corporation aren’t going to take advantage of it to produce Disney themed quiz games. After all if we were that picky about employing drug addicts we wouldn’t have hired the crack head that came up with Sebastian the talking crab. I mean what sane person would ever even imagine a crab could talk? They don’t even have mouths just pincers and a negative attitude towards being boiled in pots. I found this out the hard way while trying to make a romantic meal for Mrs Eisner and from that day all crabs have been disbarred from Disney property. That is why the new DVD release of the Little Mermaid instead features a Monkfish called Hydrogen V. What more is there to say about this game other than that it features a man who isn’t Robin Williams or Dan Castalanetta voicing the genie quizmaster and also that it features a disproportionate amount of questions about Treasure Planet. Even I didn’t like Treasure Planet and most of it was based on my own life.

I must now leave the writing desk as it’s time for Meister Walt to be defrosted and last time he caught me touching his things I was forced to watch Lilo and Stitch. Do not worry though Eisner will  be back as that old frost giant won’t live forever and even if he does I will eventually discover the codes to the Disney nuclear submarine.

Your Pal – The Great Eisnerheim