TOP 5 MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE IN CHASE H.Q.

This article originally appeared on Digitiser2000.com

Of course, in real life the giant arrows pointing at criminals are only visible to the police.

Back in the 1980s, life was simpler. Instead of all the rules and regulations cops have to ignore these days before tasering someone in the forehead, they could just cause mayhem and chaos on the roads and streets of the US of America while apprehending people who merely look like a wrong-un. All regardless of whether they had much in the way of evidence and all that. So, er, actually much the same as now, but let’s pretend it wasn’t for the purposes of this article, yeah?

Anyway, many people don’t realise it – mainly because it’s a complete fabrication – but the game Chase H.Q. is actually a digitised documentary of a day in the life of two such typical 80s ‘plod’. But what about the so-called villains they apprehended? Let’s take a look and see what REALLY happened when the cameras (arcade machines) were switched off (broke down after being repeatedly kicked by dank teens lurking in run-down seaside arcades).

Case 1: Ralph, the Idaho Slasher

First off, this clearly isn’t ‘Ralph’. Assuming the Idaho Slasher is a murderer rather than someone just known for their prolific urination, it’s pretty obvious that a serial killer wouldn’t own a flashy sports car – let alone an imported British one – as all their money would be spent on knives and knife sharpening equipment such as whetstones, leaving them barely enough to run a Honda Civic.

They'd probably have caught him even sooner if their car didn't have clearly oval wheels.

Plus look at this man’s face: what’s that strange white line down the side, and why is he so oddly open mouthed, like someone warming up to attempt to eat a large swiss roll in one go? And those odd, orange overalls? This is trendy 1980s America, with its shoulder pads and espadrilles, after all. No, there’s something up here.

VERDICT: A passing bin man framed by having an Easter Island statue mask glued to his face to make him look a bit like the killer in Halloween.

Case 2: Carlos, the New York armed robber

Now this is more like it. New York is quite big, and absolutely heaving with baddies (just take a look at any of the villain-sodden New York-based Spider-Man films such as Spider-Man,Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Another Spider-Man 2and Spider-Man: A Further Spider-Man only now Robert Iron Man Jr. as well). So to become notorious enough to be ‘the’ New York armed robber, Carlos must be hot stuff in the crime world. Or is he?

"Sir, you're accused of serious crimes - this is no time for a rendition of the YMCA!"

Take a look at this archive photo of Carlos’s arrest. For starters, now it seems he’s down for armed robbery AND murder, so the charges have been trumped up – probably to make him sweat and want to ‘flip’. We can also clearly see that he’s missing a finger on his left hand, and is wearing a terrible brown wig so is 100% definitely bald.

This makes me believe this is in fact none other than popular and now quite dead actor Telly Savalas, and these cops have abused their position to stop a famous person simply to get him to sign autographs and record voicemail messages for them to use on their mobiles in 20 years’ time. No doubt they got him to recite his famous catchphrase “Who loves your babies? Kojak. Kojak is the one who loves your babies!”.

VERDICT: Police corrupted by the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.

Case 3: A ‘gang’ of Chicago pushers

Now this is just getting silly. Since when has 2 people been a gang? They’re either the most pathetic gang since the Get Along Gang (because ‘getting along’ and not being openly hostile to your fellow club members is hardly the highest of bars to set yourself, let alone make the entire raison d’etre of your group), or this is yet another stitch-up by the boys in blue. Well, one of them is in blue at least.

"Never mind - at least we still have our gang membership cards!"
"Oh shut up."

What’s most disturbing here is that the right hand of the cop performing the search has punched straight through the trousers of the poor man in the green coat, and seems to have disappeared inside his anus. That shows a high level of panic and desperation in our suspicious sheriff.

VERDICT: Police officer is aware he will be shortly discharged from the force due to corruption, so is hastily self-retraining as a bovine veterinarian and getting some practice in on unwitting members of the public.

Case 4: The L.A. Kidnapper

It's the guy in the grey suit I feel sorry for. He clearly doesn't know where to look!

VERDICT: Scene too harrowing to comment.

Case 5: The Eastern Bloc Spy from Washington

Ah, the cold war – nothing like the fear of retaliatory nuclear attack resulting from a botched diplomatic incident to focus the minds of law enforcement. Or at least that’s what you’d hope, but no: our boys are off again, smashing cars off of the highway left and right in pursuit of justice.

So what does our secret agent from behind the iron curtain look like? A thin, shrew-like nasty such as V. Putin, or a blonde Natasha-style femme fatale?

In actual fact, he was really arrested for the heinous crime of going 'double denim'.

No, apparently we’re supposed to believe that no one thought someone blacked up and doing a terrible Bruce Springsteen impersonation (perhaps he sang Al Jolson songs in the style of ‘The Boss’?) was suspicious, and further that such a person could carry out espionage operations unhindered.

This is obviously yet another set-up job to cover for the fact the real spy must have got away, but we can at least cut our police friends some slack for putting an end to what we can only assume was an inexplicably racist and very confusing cover band.

VERDICT: Deserving of 20 years on fashion grounds alone.

NINTENDO LABO: VARIETY KIT

This review originally appeared on Digitiser2000.com

After doing this, IKEA furniture no longer holds any fear for me!

It’s hard to know where to start with something as left-field as Nintendo’s Labo kits. There’s the games, the ‘build’ experience, the extras, the genuinely fun little ‘how it works’ videos, and all the other Easter eggs and bells & whistles. Like the kits themselves, it’s not so much one thing but loads of parts all coming together into one hearty ‘activity soup’.

There is something I need to mention straight away though: this soup is PIPING hot. If you’ve come here expecting to see a cynical beatdown administered to a ‘silly cardboard kiddies toy’, then I’m afraid you will be horribly disappointed. Also: you are probably a joyless sack of curmudgeonly grump. There, I said it.

Because that’s the biggest thing about Nintendo Labo. Yes, it may be bits of card and that, but it’s all been distilled out of drips of more or less pure joy.

The Labo is of course not only fun for humans, but the ideal gift for a colony of paper wasps.

​We (and I’ve not gone all royal – for the benefit of this review, ‘we’ is me and co-reviewer: my daughter who is 7, and thus the voice of youth vs my arthritic ramblings) have the variety kit. This consists of a remote-controlled bug thingy, a fishing rod, a toy house, a set of motorbike handlebars, a piano and a chainsaw.

Except: I made up the chainsaw. But given how absurdly creative people are already being with homebrew designs, with everything from programming their own replica Game & Watch games to making an electric guitar, I’d give it a few weeks and then this’ll probably be true as well.

So far, we’ve made the bug (an easy built of 5 mins or so), the fishing rod (a good couple of hours on and off) and the house (ditto). While the complex builds can be long-ish, they were all good fun and never got tedious – like everything here, you can tell that they must have been tested and re-tested to be honed to perfection. Even the suggestions to take a break pop up just when you think “I might like a break soon” and when small people’s minds begin to wander.

Also, I can’t rate the way the instructions are broken down and presented highly enough – they’re perfectly pitched for kids to understand, but not boring or patronising for older dudes or adults.

Even so, I’d not suggest leaving young ones unsupervised, as some bits are fiddly so bent card and tears (both in the ripped card and wet eyes sense) may result. More grown-up kids should be able to do most of it themselves though, assuming they didn’t get drunk on cheap cider in the park after school.

This is almost certainly how Mozart got started. Only in his day, the kits would have been made of papyrus.

The builds themselves are marvellously realised, and surprisingly sturdy. They work like a cross between origami and Lego, but even as you’re putting things together you still can’t quite believe you’ve just made a working fishing reel, or a spring-loaded button, or a functioning lever out of nothing more than bits of flat card. It really does feel like some sort of papery alchemy.

That said, to get these so refined and spot on I can only assume Nintendo’s offices are knee-deep in cardboard prototypes and they must have lost at least a dozen staff members to papercut exsanguination. RIP (Ha! Rip, see? Like card? Oh fine, be like that.)

Anyway, once assembled each kit has its own games or activities, and each of these in turn has a plethora of hidden features, videos on how it works, ideas for other things you can do and so on. In some of these, Nintendo has pulled off the almost impossible and made learning fun – seeing exactly how the toy-cons function is fascinating, and again the level is pitch perfect. Getting a 7-year-old to enthusiastically watch a video about how an IR camera works is no mean feat.

I could prattle on, but I think you’re getting the gist. So here are just a few examples of why Labo is so flippin’ great. First off, yesterday my daughter, myself and my parents (both in their 70s) were playing the fishing game. No one needed any explanation or instructions how things worked, and we all had a blast hoisting unwilling mackerels to the virtual surface.

(For context, my Mum is so technically inept she once tried to insert a floppy disk into a CD drive, and despite owning the PC in question for years was adamant that it “used to take them before”. In fact the only other console she’s ever played on was the Wii, and in doing so she accidentally bowled my wiimote into the TV.)

This is super-obscure, but the RC bug reminds me a lot of the baddie robots in a 1990s Tom Selleck film I can't remember the name of. Only Nintendo's ones don't squirt acid at you (yet - that's probably coming later in the year).

Second, my daughter really wants to find out if her friends at school also have Labo kit so they can race their bugs, and wants to set up obstacle courses in the dark to test the bug’s IR camera ‘eye’.

Thirdly, I’m in my early 40s and so hardly the target audience. And yet I’m obsessed with catching a swordfish. I also can’t wait to make the electric guitar, and am desperately trying to figure out a way to justify buying the giant robot kit. Because who the hell doesn’t want a giant robot costume/avatar?

Plus of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are loads of other toy-cons in the pipeline, there are already thriving forums making up new ways to use the software, and third-party kits are already appearing too. From a business point of view, Nintendo have kicked off the sort of peripherals market and community usually more associated with Apple pretty much overnight.

None of this would matter though if Labo didn’t work, and by all rights a pile of cardboard coupled to what’s basically a custom tablet sounds like an entry you’d find in a book called “Gaming Gimmick Hell” sandwiched between the Joy-Hat 6000 (the only hat that’s also a joystick!) and Sega’s ill-fated “Sonic-branded enemas – for when you need to ‘go’ real fast.”

I tell you what. I'm going to get a bloody sailfish if it kills me.

​Against all the odds though, it does work. It’s fun to make, easy and fun to play, it’s genuinely educational (heck, schools are approaching Nintendo to get Labo in classrooms to teach coding – Sony and Microsoft would kill for that sort of foot in the door), it has short-term appeal in the builds and games, and potentially huge longevity in the toy-con garage that allows you to hack about your own ideas.

But above all that stuff, it’s a shared experience everyone can enjoy together. Which, yes, sounds twee – but the enjoyment I’ve had watching the fun my daughter has had is a huge part of it. At her age many games are still too tricky or demanding, or simply unsuitable. This is something we can both play and do together, on equal terms.

It’s hard to sum things up without it degenerating into a list of clichés and superlatives, but Labo is Nintendo doing Nintendo turned up to 11 and then some, and making Herculean levels of creativity and polish look practically effortless. Years from now, when stuff like the shiny new God of War is just an entry on some people’s favourite retro game lists, there’ll be lifelong Nintendo fans who got hooked on gaming, and perhaps coding, because of Labo.

Ultimately this isn’t a game or a toy – this is a gateway drug. And it’s chuffing genius.

ALTO'S ODYSSEY

"Just off to the shops for some...sandwiches! Sand, see? We're in a desert! Ha ha h-I'll get me poncho."

As well as being the name of a band of elderly men who regrettably dress in lewd clothing, 'KISS' is also an acronym for the phrase 'keep it simple, stupid'. Which is ironic, as it'd be a lot simpler to just say that than say 'KISS' and then have to explain it every time you meet someone who hasn't heard of it. Also, they might initially think you want to kiss them, which could lead to all manner of hilarious 1980s BBC sitcom-style situations.

Regardless, the 'simplicity = good' intent is sound enough and certainly true when it comes to mobile phone games. Not overcomplicating things when you don't have physical controls is always a decent idea, as anyone who has tried to play a phone-based FPS will testify to. Most of your screen ends up obscured with virtual buttons, and after even a short burst of virtual joypadding you'll usually need to pause the game to clean off thumb grease to ensure everything stays responsive.

And that's just with your normal skin - don't even THINK about starting a game like that within an hour of eating a packet of crisps. A few seconds of being daubed with your oily digits, and it's the equivalent of playing on a home console where your TV screen has been liberally coated in Mazola.

That's why mobile games that need the minimum of interaction to control are this: the best. And Alto's Odyssey is one of the best of this best of bunch.

"Given the warm weather, I'm honestly starting to think the scarf was a mistake..."

Alto's Odyssey is essentially an endless runner-type game disguised as a snowboarding game, albeit on sand in this case. You have one 'button' (the screen) for the most part that makes you jump. Hold it down when you're in the air and you'll do a backflip. Hold it down against a grindable rock wall and you'll grind up it (which throws the law of gravity out of the window a bit, but in a game where you're constantly sliding downhill forever that's probably the least of our worries). There are simple power ups such as crash recovery items and, later, a wingsuit to allow for extra flips, and different characters to unlock who have differing attributes, but nothing that drastically affects the core gameplay of slidey-downeyness.

So really, that's basically it. But: saying 'that's basically it' is also criminally underselling the game.

The brilliance of Alto is how well it makes these simple mechanics work given the game is generating landscapes on the fly. Like the very best Mario titles, whenever you come a cropper you never feel hard done by - it's always your fault you mistimed your jump and hit a rock or failed to clear a chasm and you always feel like you'll be able to nail it next time. This is in stark contrast to many a mobile game, where iffy controls and/or iffy programming make it feel like you've got as much control as someone playing darts while wearing oven gloves and rollerblades.

There aren't any enemies in the game bar environmental hazards, with the exception of lemurs. Startle a lemur, and for some reason it will pursue you until it either catches you and kills you or it falls down a canyon like the idiot semi-monkey it is. And if you don't think lemurs are that violent, you'd be wrong - once at a safari park we spotted a lemur in the enclosure who had a missing arm. A passing zookeeper heard us talking and told us that the lemur in question had got a bit too cocky once and challenged the chief, and the alpha lemur had literally ripped his arm off and hit him round the head with it, Viz-style.

You didn't see THAT in Madagascar, did you?

"Granted I'm no air traffic controller, but this CAN'T be an optimal use of airspace?"

Murderous primate goading aside, the other element that will keep you coming back again and again are the challenges. These are issued 3 at a time (clear each batch and you go up a level) and can see you having to perform certain stunts, travel a set distance without stacking it, grind a specific bit of scenery and so on. These start simple but by level 20 or so they get fairly tricky. But again, always do-able - they never feel like artificial longevity barriers that have been made absurdly hard purely to impede progress.

Given the game has been out for a couple of months now (on iOS anyway - an Android version is still forthcoming), you might wonder why I'm reviewing it at all. Well the simple answer is, I realised the other day that this is the game I've been playing the most these last few months and so it probably deserved it. And I'm not playing it that much purely because of convenience either (although as it's on my phone that's undeniably a boon - not many people have a PS4 in their lavatory, after all). It's because I really, really enjoy it.

The ever-changing graphics are gorgeous. The music is calm and unintrusive, which is no mean feat given it's a loop of one track. But most of all it's just nice to play - really, really nice. It's fun, there's no massive pressure to do anything, no absurd, needless plot flapping along and no being pestered with microtransactions, adverts, side quests or the like. It's the gaming equivalent of a lovely Sunday evening radio show that plays chill-out music - and not one on a commercial network, where you'll be feeling all zen one minute and then listening to a pair of z-list actors fumble out a cack-handed joke about double glazing the next.

"This is going to hurt, isn't it?"

It's also an evolution of the endless runner in that it allows you to play it for longer if you wish. A lot of the 'classics' of this genre such as Jetpack Joyride are undoubtably fun, but enforce the short burst playstyle by increasing their speed until they're unplayable by all but the most heavily caffeinated of obsessive Korean gaming-addicted children. But here there's no difficulty ramp-up or need to have the twitch responses of a nervy bluebottle. You just keep going until you mess up, or you've just had enough.

Chances are you won't have enough of it for a very long time though, because it's great. And if you like great games that are fun to play and an absolute bargain, well then it's a no-brainer.

Some people might baulk at the fact that it's a mobile game you have to pay for, of course. But then it's worth bearing in mind that those people are also complete morons. You don't expect quality and no adverts and no microtransactions for nowt, unless you're an unreasonable, grasping bumface.

Please, sir or madam: don't be a bumface. No one likes a bumface.