Kusoge Sunday - Dark Summit

My first two Kusoge Sunday posts featured games that were indisputably kusoge. I knew that, sooner or later, I would have to branch out from that, though, and take on games that are less universally reviled. While I’ve been known to really dislike some critical darlings like Super Mario Galaxy and Uncharted 2, I can at least get some sense of why others would have raved about them. Some games, though, are so bad that even positive critical consensus can’t save them from being labeled kusoge.

Enter Dark Summit, a 2001 snowboarding/adventure game developed by Radical Entertainment, who are responsible for a lot of relatively respectable games, as well as Mario Is Missing! Dark Summit could easily have been nothing more than a quick cash-in on the success of SSX, but to their credit, the people at Radical tried to strike out in a new direction, giving their snowboarding game a story and basing its primary missions around advancing the plot. However, every aspect of the game’s production works against its goals, from ill-advised character designs to boring level layouts.

The presence of a story is the most obvious way in which Dark Summit departs from the SSX formula. However, this is about as perfunctory as game stories get. Heroine Naya decides to trespass on a ski slope that doesn’t allow snowboarders, and gets involved in some vague black helicopter conspiracy nonsense. A shady group wants her to stop the shady plans of...some other shady group. Honestly, I’ve never been clear on exactly what’s supposed to be happening, as the game’s audio presentation is incredibly muddy, and the dialogue is pretty tough to decipher through the constant wall of techno music.

Whatever the story is actually about, it seems clear that Dark Summit wants us to buy into Naya and the other snowboarders who help her unravel the mystery as hip young rebels. That’s impossible, because there’s nothing hip about these characters. The ones who don’t look like extras from a Mountain Dew commercial circa 1998 look like they took up snowboarding as part of a midlife crisis. This is especially true of Naya, who looks like a cougar dressed up for a rave circa 1996.


Even worse than the character designs are the level designs. The supposedly exclusive ski resort at which the game takes place is littered with pools of acid, rusting cars, electric fences and even naval mines. Naya’s drive to ride on such a course might be explained away by her being totally extreme, but why would rich people pay to ski here? We already accept more bad writing in games than we should, but no amount of shouting “It’s just a game!” can excuse this sloppiness. Adding injury to insult is the game’s color palette of sickly browns, greens and yellows, which make you yearn for the crisp blue skies and sparkling white slopes of the SSX games.

Capping off the Dark Summit experience are cumbersome controls that feel designed to keep the player at arm’s length from the action. Any trick more complicated than a simple grab or spin requires a string of button inputs that have no connection to what’s actually happening on screen. Successfully entering the inputs triggers a canned animation that can’t be combined with flips or spins. The significant lag in the controls combined with the rare opportunities for big air mean that you’ll spend a lot of time watching Naya transition from the canned trick animations to the canned falling animation. Speaking of which, the developers couldn’t even be bothered to make unique falling animations for different situations. Dropping off a cliff triggers the same loop of Naya flailing around as running into a wall.

It’s hard to tell how seriously Dark Summit takes itself. It usually feels like the game really wanted to be cool and exciting, but most of the design choices work against that. Like another Radical Entertainment game, Prototype, it feels as though the team recorded a brainstorming session, then transcribed it to be used as a design document. Just as Prototype was constantly introducing new powers that rendered old ones moot (without taking the old ones out of your arsenal), Dark Summit throws out design choices that are at odds with other design choices, until the game is just a mess of contradictions.

Why Dark Summit received largely positive reviews at the time of its release is beyond me. It shouldn’t have, as even by the standards of its time, it was a bad game. But that’s just my opinion, just as the positive reviews were just the opinions of a few critics. The lesson, if there is one, is that game reviews are neither consumer advocacy nor an attempt to uncover the Truth about a game’s quality. They are, and should be, entirely subjective. And Dark Summit’s should have been far more brutal than they were.

Kusoge Sunday: Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu

Color Dreams, the developers of numerous unlicensed NES anti-delights, is not normally thought of as a publisher. But publish they did, in between coding classic kusoge like Menace Beach and Baby Boomer. One might have expected them to put their limited resources behind a game that represented a step up from their usual garbage. Such expectations would be misplaced, as Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu makes abundantly clear.

Developed by Sachen, a Taiwanese developer whose unlicensed Famicom games were similar in reputation to Color Dreams' NES games, Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is an unqualified disaster. It should be enough to say that the game seems to have taken its primary inspiration from The Legend of Kage. Its main character (who I suppose is Master Chu) looks, jumps and fights like Kage, and the title screen even has him standing on a high tree branch.

The similarities are all superficial, though. While The Legend of Kage is no masterpiece, it is playable. As nearly as I can tell, there is no way to progress past the third stage in Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu. The object of each stage is to collect eight hidden yin-yang symbols, which opens a door to a boss room. Levels are small and scroll left and right, and there seems to be no way to uncover all the yin-yangs in one trip across the screen. Rather, there are a limited number of hiding places which turn up a different item each time you shoot them, so opening a boss door requires running back and forth through the level a few times, shooting the same spots over and over until all the necessary items show up.

If you think that sounds awful, you're right. But it gets worse. Both characters (Hu is playable in the two player mode, but controls exactly like Chu) are woefully underpowered; it takes three or four shots to put even the weakest enemies down, and bosses feel almost invulnerable. Pressing B causes Chu to swing a fan, which on a few random occasions blocked projectile attacks, but either timing blocks is completely unintuitive, or the mechanic is simply broken, because attempting to block the projectiles that stream out of bosses usually just led to dying.

It's hard to say whether Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is an improvement over Color Dreams' own attempts at game development. On one hand, it looks worlds better. Even though the level designs are depressingly bad, the characters at least don't look like google-eyed monstrosities. But as floaty and loose as the average Color Dreams game is, at least it feels like you could, with enough practice, acclimate to the controls and win the game. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu, on the other hand, feels like it was released before they coded the bit where your attacks actually damage enemies. In short, it looks marginally better, but is essentially unplayable.

Call it a wash. Just don't let Color Dreams' rare moment of inspiration in renaming this game trick you into actually playing it.

Kusoge Sunday - Tag Team Wrestling

Tag Team Wrestling began life in Japanese arcades under the title The Big Pro Wrestling! It was ported to the Famicom as Tag Team Pro Wrestling, and finally brought to the NES by Data East as Tag Team Wrestling in 1986. Released months before Nintendo’s landmark Pro Wrestling, the game innovated in two major ways. First, it featured tag team matches, something rarely seen in wrestling video games. Second, its control scheme was unlike any wrestling game before or since.

Innovation, however, isn’t necessarily a good thing. While it did beat better games to the punch in featuring tag team matches, Tag Team Wrestling’s gameplay is hilariously bad. In most wrestling games, moves are executed from a grapple, while running, or from the top rope. On machines with only two or three buttons, this limits the number of moves, but it works. Tag Team Wrestling tried to offer a larger moveset, but did so in a way that makes it feel nothing like a wrestling match.

Here’s how it works. You start by trying to land a strike on your opponent. If you’re successful, you're presented with a menu of moves you can execute, and three seconds to scroll through it. This mechanic is, to put it plainly, a disaster. Many move names have been reduced to baffling English abbreviations, and some haven't even been translated. It’s barely possible to scroll to the end of the list in three seconds, let alone make sense of choices like “B BRIK” and “TECCHU”.

With experience, you can get the hang of navigating the move menu, but you can’t do anything to mitigate the game’s other mechanic. Remember how Hulk Hogan used to delight audiences by appearing to become invulnerable while making a spectacular comeback? Well, that happens in Tag Team Wrestling, as well, only it’s the heel team who do it. Supposedly, this is a consequence of avoiding contact with your opponent for too long, but it never works that way. More often than not, he’ll just go invincible any time you start winning, ensuring that only luck can carry you to victory.

Maybe the awfulness of the gameplay could be rationalized if Tag Team Wrestling excelled elsewhere, but it doesn’t. Character animation is extremely limited. No move consists of more than two frames of animation. Flying moves and falls consist of the sprites being rotated to give the illusion of jumping or laying down. The only aspect of the game that is even passable is the audio. The music which plays during matches is nice and urgent, if repetitive, and there’s even (bad) digitized voice for the wrestlers’ grunts and the referee’s three count. It hardly salvages the game, but it’s something.

Despite all this, I would kind of recommend giving Tag Team Wrestling a shot. Sure, the game is a barely playable mess, but it does have one endearing quality. Your current ranking is always displayed on screen, and watching it move one step closer to the top rank in your current tier with each victory can be addicting. It’s like an MMO in that sense, always dangling another carrot in front of you. Sometimes that's all it takes to hook you, even if the the only reward the game has to offer is yet another frustrating battle with The Strong Bads.