A man walks into a bar. Then, in anger, he flips over one of the tables. The end. If you're thinking that this is a fairly pointless story, you'd be right. But in Japan, they made a video game about it. Appropriately titled Upending The Tea Table Game, the game allows you to enter different arenas-a tea party, a bar, a wedding, a restaurant-and flip tables. As your family (or a waiter, or colleagues) keep annoying you, you get to bang on the table for points. And, for a finishing move, you get to flip the table in a show of rage. High score! Next level.
And you thought gaming was only about normal stuff like shooting aliens with lasers, fighting goblins in mysterious treasure-filled caverns and high speed car crashes. Welcome to gaming's Bizarro World, where the games are strange and the gamers are stranger.
What's more, not all these games are obscure titles with a cult following- many of them are mainstream successes. Take the smash hit Katamari Damacy-a game in which you roll a sticky ball around levels, picking up objects as you go along, getting bigger and bigger until your ball is the size of a small planet. You start by picking up nails, buttons and Lego blocks, move on to toy cars, books, pet dogs, eventually gathering up buses, trees and entire houses and roll them all into a huge ball, and shoot it up into the sky where it becomes a star. All to the sound of impossibly cheerful Japanese electronic pop music of the Nyan Cat genre (don't know what Nyan Cat is? Shame on you. Look it up.) It's all quite strange, yet amazingly compelling.
Sony's experimental game Flower allowed you to be a single flower petal, being carried by the breeze, floating above meadows and fields. It was an unusual game, offering a contemplative, meditative experience quite unlike any other. At least until Deepak Chopra's Leela arrives later this year. The demos seen so far show a player using body gestures to interact with extremely trippy colours and symbols on screen, which Chopra claims will actually help us in our emotional and spiritual development. In the same way that Duke Nukem Forever does, only in a more positive way.
There are more examples from the mainstream. Elite Beat Agents was a game in which you had to help a trio of secret agents solve cases and rescue people. By dancing well. To Chicago's "You're The Inspiration". In the WarioWare series, you play through hundreds of minigames at blinding speed- one minute you're picking a nose, the next minute you're shaking flies off a banana, and the next you're clearing the air of fart fumes (don't ask). In Bad Mojo, you play a man turned into a cockroach who tries to reconcile his differences with a human bar owner who later turns out to be his father. And then they escape to Belize with a ton of ill-gotten money. They live happily ever after. Weird? Yes. Based on Kafka's The Metamorphosis? Yes. The game even has a cat named Franz.
However, for truly bizarre and outlandish videogame experiences, we must look away from the mainstream. Usually in the general direction of Japan.
The Japanese make games so weird that many of these titles are never released in any market outside of Japan. Consider Boong-Ga Boong-Ga, an arcade title that allows you to vent your anger at various characters, such as your ex, your mother-in-law, your boss, a mafia don and so on, by smacking them hard on their bottoms. For which the arcade cabinet comes with a huge fake bottom that you actually smack. High score!
They also have a dog walking game in which you . . .er . . . walk your dog in a park by cleverly combining a joystick and a treadmill. And you need to find places for the dog to pee and poo. How this is fun, I have no idea, but hey, we're talking about the Japanese here.
And then there's Super Pii Pii brothers, in which you use Nintendo's Wiimote controller to pee accurately into a men's urinal. It measures angle, speed and all those other fluid dynamics that go into the act of successful peeing. High score! So that women in Japan can, ostensibly, experience the many joys of peeing standing up. Sheesh.
The insane LSD (Linking Sapient Dreams) released for the Playstation was simply played by walking around what is ostensibly an acid trip dream world, to the sound of some extremely weird music. That's all. And weird things happen. The walls suddenly grow eyes. Sumo wrestlers hurtle past you. Elephants fly through the sky. Cow heads explode. It's entirely random and quite utterly insane. And what's more, you don't even need to be high for it to drive you nuts.
But it's not just Japan. The notorious Custer's Revenge for the Atari 2600 gave players the objective of getting past hordes of Injuns, so that your character could take its pants off and have sex with a 4-bit pixelated Native American woman who is tied to a pole. How they thought this would be enjoyable, I have no idea. In Socks The Pet Cat, you play the US president's pet cat, who must defeat enemies like Russian spies, the press and Richard M. Nixon in order to warn your boss about a nuclear bomb attack. Right.
There's no dearth of outlandish experiences in videogames, if you're willing to look hard enough. And if you get lucky, you might discover something that makes the events depicted in God of War seem as normal as a cookery show.
