Please, Colonel – can you tell me about almost 5 obscure pig-themed games?

This article originally appeared on Digitiser2000.com

Hello! My name is Mr Sausages. It's not an ironic name - I'm actually an awful cannibal, and love the porky taste of my own species!

I dunno about you, but when I think of retrogames I always think of pigs. Not because I particularly relate pigs with the distant origins of gaming, but because I have a terrible cognitive association disorder! I’m really quite ill!

Now that feeble setup is out of the way, let’s get on to the meat (specifically: pork) of this thinly-disguised listicle. That’s right: pointing and laughing at a load of rubbish old things, like a thoughtless maniac let loose in a geriatric care home.

1. Psycho Pigs UXB

This pig could be sticking 2 fingers up, which would be mega-rude. But then he only *has* 2 fingers, so hard to tell. If only there were some other way to judge whether he's an antisocial type...

A port of the arcade game Butasan, which was also known as Mr. Pig and Pig and Bombers (the latter of which could easily be the name of a trendy pub that would sell you artisan pork scratchings at £10 a bag, probably served in a trilby), this swinefest saw you mainly plodding about a single, largely featureless screen throwing bombs with timers at other pigs. Most likely until you died of boredom.

I mean, I’m not saying even the programmers thought it was dull, but they managed to get the name wrong and put “Psycho Pig” rather than the plural on the title screen. So clearly, they weren’t exactly enthused during development.

The only other thing stopping this game falling out of the hole in history’s trouser pocket and into the puddle of utter obscurity for many people is the questionable advertising campaign US Gold used for the home version, which featured a ‘page 3 stunna’ in just some pants holding a copy of the game.

It’s often said no publicity is bad publicity, but all this did is make people aware of “that terrible game with the advert where the lady has her bangers out”, whereas otherwise kids might have bought it on the basis of their own ignorance of its rubbishness. Major backfire in your face, sexist 1980s marketing types!

(Also: while researching this article I found out Butasan is the name of a type of butter substitute you can get in the Czech Republic. It doesn’t seem to be made of actual pig, though I assume might be palatable if smeared on some sausages.)

2. Pig Newton

With his gammony complexion, greed and strange hair Pig Newton sure does remind me of someone...

A pun on ‘fig newton’, which is a biscuit filled with fruit pulp that tastes of despair, Pig Newton was an early arcade effort by Sega based on a cartoon strip that’s somehow even more lost to the mists of time than this game.

You played a pig, presumably called Newton, who is of course up a tree hunting for a pig’s natural diet – bright blue freshly laid bird’s eggs that look disturbingly like buttocks. He can also drop apples on passing wolves who are trying to chop the tree down, and has to avoid squirrels.

It says a lot that a tree apparently growing 2 different types of fruit simultaneously is by far the least strange thing going on in this game...

Based on this mess, I can only assume the programmers of this game are entirely unaware of what a food chain is, or how they work. I’ve also got no idea why Newton appears to be cuddling a massive pile of mash with French fries embedded in it on the title screen either, but while doing this he gives you an unexpected flirty wink.


Somewhat fittingly given that coquettishness, it turns out disgraced comedian Louis C.K.’s production company was also called ‘Pig Newton’ – though of course he did considerably more than wink flirtatiously, the awful pervert.

3. Pig Out

Apart from anything else, I find it difficult to believe a pig would be granted a library card.

Subtitled ‘Dine like a swine’, this 3-player arcade effort sees your pig eating their way through various levels, consuming eggs (again with the eggs?), corn on the cobs, tacos and (bizarrely) Superman logos.

Once more, wolves are your main protagonists despite the fact they’d probably find it a lot easier to go for a sheep. Or, I dunno, just shove you aside and eat the tacos themselves. I thought wolves were supposed to be quite smart, but on the basis of their video game appearances and fictional attempts at breath-based demolition you’d have to seriously question this.

Heihachi the butcher's lewd facial expression does not lead me to want to sample his 'special bacon'.

The only other thing of note here is that the butcher who appears on the game’s character select screen appears to be Heihachi from the Tekken series of brawlers. He seems very happy with himself anyway, which I suspect would be at odds with most people who had to work in a shop selling ‘pickled pig’s feet’. Maybe being repeatedly punched in the face has removed his sense of smell?

4. Pigs in Space

Based on the well-known Star Trek spoof from The Muppet Show, this title demonstrates the surprising power and flexibility of the Atari 2600, and showcases why the new version of that console is such an exciting prospect.

Ha! Only kidding. Pigs in Space is an utter tragedy, and all copies of it should be kicked into an acrid swamp.

The '10' at the top represents the number of milliseconds it took Atari 2600 owners to realise they'd bought a complete duffer.

Comprising three shonky rip-offs of other games bolted together like a rancid Frankenstein, the first level sees you slogging through a dreadful Space Invaders clone playing a character who looks like a deformed Homer Simpson rather than a pig.

I mean really - they couldn't have done Ms. Piggy's body in white? It's harrowing enough her 'hair' now appears to be made of pig flesh.

Then, it’s on to a Frogger clone seemingly featuring a nude Ms. Piggy avoiding meatballs and…tapeworms? It’s anyone’s guess, given the 2600s putrid graphical prowess – though the nudity is surprising for what you’d assume would be a game aimed at a family audience. Then again, maybe this was a ploy to get 1980s dads to buy the game? I bet a few had a secret thing for Ms. Piggy.

Maybe the mud-coloured hole that makes up this level is a homage to the one Atari ended up burying all those ET carts in? 

Finally, you get to pilot your ship, which for all the world looks like a vase possessed by a demon, through a jagged brown pipe. While doing this, Gonzo clones throw sticks at you.

As if traversing an apparent giant lower intestine in a haunted pot wasn’t harrowing enough, your craft’s weapon only travels a tiny distance in front of it before falling off to the side like a wet hacky sack. This makes actually clearing the stage an excruciating chore, as you line up a succession of wobbly chip shots.

The most exciting thing about this game is that, according to the title screen, the developer was called HA! – although having played it, it might just be an Atari executive’s sarcastic expression of disbelief that you have paid for this shambling pile of badness. Still, pigs!

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.