I was talking with friends a little while back, and the topic turned towards the bizarre. What was the strangest game you have ever played? Now my friends and I love bad movies and weird games, so we had a lot of contenders. Being that we grew up in Asia also meant we had a much wider array to choose from, but also that our tastes have taken into account the wackiness that other cultures might find mundane. Any of the Bishi Bashi games would confuse and boggle the mind of anyone whose most strange experience is a Wario Ware game, but it was easily not the craziest thing we have come across.
So last night, the question popped into my head again, and to tell the truth, I don’t have one game in my mind that stands out as the most ridiculous. However, I have quite a few fighting for first place, so I figured I’d post about them.
Keep in mind, I’ve played a good many strange games. Not all of them are bad, but a lot of them are far from good. Some I can’t go in depth here since they were in arcades and I can’t travel back in time to take a picture for you, gentle readers.
I’ve played Brave Firefighters, the arcade game where you were *pause for dramatic effect* firefighters. We played the living hell out of that game simply because we mentally substituted the flames for ghosts and it became the best Ghostbusters game, until possibly now.
I’ve played Emergency Ambulance, which is like Crazy Taxi but far more stressful. Getting your patient, a wounded cop, to the hospital on time, without getting hit too often, during a massive city-wide car chase is, as far as I can tell, impossible.
I’ve SEEN Boonga-Boonga, the game where you… oh Japan… put an electronic finger in a fake person’s digital butt. I’m not sure if it actually constitutes as a game, but whatever.
My point is that it takes a special something for me to think a game is particularly strange. So here we go:
I’d like to believe that the general populace is fairly well learned, and, if not, are more than willing to educate themselves. So if you really don’t know what Les Miserables is about, give yourself a quick Wiki-education:
(No, I don’t know how to make the accented ‘e’, leave me alone.)
It’s a beautifully sad tale about a handful of individuals during the Paris Uprising of 1832 (a fictional event, believed to be an analogue for the French Revolution). It speaks on morality, justice, religion, love, and what the human spirit is capable of under extreme duress. What would be the best way to experience this story? Novel? Stage show? One man from Japan thought the answer was “Punch the crap out of people!” and so he made his game: Arm Joe.
Apparently the name is derived from the fact that in Japan, Les Miserables is named “Ah, Mujou”. ‘Mujou’ means hardness, cruelty, heartlessness. ‘Arm Joe’ seems to be a hilariously tragic fault in the romanization of the Japanese name.
The thing that amazed me is that I played this game many years ago, and it allegedly came out in the late nineties. Observant people will notice the “2006″ in the bottom corner. This guy has been updating his game for almost ten years!
The game feels, well, clunky. It’s a doujin fighting game. It’s better than most of the Mugen dredge I’ve played. That’s not saying a lot. It has a decent move-selection for each character, and sports eleven different fighters to choose from. It does have supers, a mild combo system, but is prone to glitchy weirdness.
That aside, what makes this game thoroughly confusing is that, not only is it a fighting game based on a novel/musical, it is weirdly faithful to the subject matter.
Enjolras, leader of the resistance, has a move where he shoots upwards out of the screen, and drops a dead policeman on his opponent.
Jean Valjean has a move where Cosette stands protectively in front of him, which seems sort of mean…
…but I guess it’s fair since Cosette uses Valjean as a Stand,
… and bodily hurls him as a projectile…
… at… um… Robo-Jean, who must’ve been a minor character, because I sure don’t remember him.
Oh, and Enjolras has one of the best supers I’ve ever seen in a fighting game. Rather than simply defending the barricades from the soldiers…
He drops them on you.
It seems I’m not the only person who wholly enjoys this game, as it took me all of five minutes to locate online. It’s freeware, and, if you wish to brave the Japanese pages it’s located on, you can download the game right here:
Arm Joe: One of the… uh… greatest?… games you’ll ever play.
Was this the Les Misserables game?
Yeah..I think this is it