I’m still working on digesting the mammoth steak BBQ from yesterday’s Memorail Day grill-a-thon, so while my enzymes do their dirty work, how about a quick discussion about the role of foodstuffs in our gaming?
Dave: Say you’re a rogue police officer who’s taken to the streets to clean up the criminal vermin that have turned your beloved city into a lawless land of armed assault and dominatrix whipping.
With each locale you square off against deadlier foes, and they push your endurance to the limit. Some have knives and baseball bats. Others juggle flaming sticks. All want you dead.
You punch and kick and jumpkick and vault and suplex and occasionally call your cop buddies to launch dangerous napalm in your general vicinity.
And just when you’ve reached the zenith of your physical limitations and your seconds away from collapsing in a fatigued heap of bruised and battered limbs, you punch a newspaper dispenser and beyond all odds, there, hidden within, is a delicious turkey!
"Poultry--the street fighter's best friend."
Jon: Streets of Rage…such a tedious selection. I’m just upset because I would’ve made the exact same joke about finding freshly prepared BBQ inside of a trash can (on a CLEAN plate no less). Now for a more pabulum gaming morsel, I recalled what is possibly the greatest videogame I have ever seen. Kung Food for the Atari Lynx.
That's a big ol' whiskey tango foxtrot right there over.
Imagine if you will, the drug fueled design meeting that birthed this idea. A beat-em-up where players take control of a diminutive green skilled muscle man and venture into the kitchen to pound the piss out of mutated produce. Did I mention that the muscleman is bare-assed naked too? There is a storyline included somewhere as well, but after taking the required ten consecutive bong hits before firing up Kung Food, I subsequently ate the instruction book. Surely this must be the title that proves games are an art form. The Citizen Kane of gaming, where players become that which they consume, and on the Atari Lynx no less. That’s deep man.
Pictured: The Lead Designer of Kung Food, and his creation.
Erich: I’m going with Snake Rattle ‘N’ Roll, the NES isometric platformer in which you play one of two snakes (guess what their names are) who traverse checkerboard stages avoiding enemies (including disembodied stomping feet) and gobbling up a neverending supply of ball-shaped creatures called “Nibbly Pibblies.” Eat enough Nibblies and your snake gets long and heavy enough to trigger a scale that opens up the next level. Yum!
I was going to tout this game as an obscure title from my childhood, but it turns out SR’n'R was actually an early Rare game! I don’t know for certain whether my love for Battletoads convinced me to pick this one up, but it’s starting to look like the house that Mario built isn’t the only cartoony through-line in my personal gaming story.
The bad news is that now that I know this game was made by Rare, I should give up hope of it ever coming out on the Wii’s Virtual Console. The good news is that the game gets so devilishly hard (thanks to the confusion caused by having to use the NES D-pad to move and jump in an isometric world) I don’t think I’d have the patience to revisit it.
Not just a weird fever dream from my childhood
Tags: food, Symposium Ad Nauseum
I’m going very old school with this one. All the fruits from Ms. Pac Man. I can’t remember how many times I died trying to get that stupid cherry, orange, or strawberry & it was only worth 100 or at most 1,000 freakin points.
I’m tempted to go with GTA; San Andreas, where you can make Carl eat so much fast food he pukes. I’ll go with the health replenishing head chomping action of the Aliens in Alien vs. Predator 2.
I like how you conveniently find chained humans in the Legacy Of Kain series.
I dug the cheese in Mousetrap for the Colecovisin way back when.