OK, lava lamps aren’t the worst kitsch gift a person can give. That’s an American sports game, right? Stop moaning you could have gotten a lump of coal. Fancy a FIFA game in your stocking? Why not Pro Evo Soccer? That’s the same, right? Want a retro gaming experience on your N64 with a vintage copy of Madden 64? Well, all we could get you was Olympic Hockey Nagano ’98. You want Mortal Kombat? Try Killer Instinct instead. Even if they aren’t rip-offs, there are often games within the same genre that don’t quite match up. There have been many games released over the years that are pale, droopy copies of more venerable, much better games. But hard video games aside, could there be a more disappointing gaming experience? Something that’ll irk you more than dying 45,000 times while playing Dark Souls? Contra, too-the game that made every player wish they had a real-life machine gun in order to fire a few rounds into their console. 1986’s Ghosts’ n Goblins for the NES springs to mind. Some of you may be old enough to have received prohibitively difficult video games during the ’80s. The cities burn, silence falls, broken only by the clacking of millions of desk-placed Newton’s Cradles… Maybe this “office toy” phenomenon is the shiny pair of keys jangled in front of our faces while Skynet becomes sentient and prepares to launch the nukes. Maybe this is to distract office workers as more and more of their productive activities get usurped by machines. This may very well point to a darker reality than “lazy, wealthy fat cats”-maybe this is what some AI singularity-type entity wants for us. No point, no goal, no elements of a game at all. If they really are meant to function as toys, they are the most depressing, Soviet-esque style toys ever-black plastic, chrome, one single motion or function. There’s a stereotype about corporate types that suggests that all they do is sit around in offices or cubicles all day, do very little work (if anything at all), and collect huge paychecks, siphoning cash out of a bloated system propped up by a clutch of hyper-productive people who do all the actual work. What would it be, 35 maybe 40 seconds of mirth? Whatever happened to socks as a crap gift? At least you can wear them. Same deal just penned after Knowles’s mildly amusing stunt. Worse still would be the copycat Reasons to Vote for Republicans: A Captivating Interpretation by Char Daley. The same goes for Michael J Knowles’s magnum opus Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide, a 266-page book that covers areas like immigration, education, and homeland security…the subsequent “chapters” all being blank. Then what? Nobody will want to read through this again. Some are quite funny: Dimly Lit Meals for One: Heartbreaking Tales of Sad Food and Even Sadder Lives by Tom Kennedy will give you a chuckle. I refer to novelty books-designed to be read once and then sit in a cupboard or on a shelf or shipped off to a charity, ready to inflict its transient banality on another poor soul. ![]() It’s a whole literary industry designed to cater to the lazy and NPCs. Unless you consider the millions of pages printed with utter dreck each year, solely for the purpose of shifting copies to individuals who have no idea what to buy and possess very little sense of humor, wit, or actual knowledge themselves. To read is to voyage through time.” Very wise words. Look, if Shaquille O’Neil can’t take it, you are probably going to die.Ĭarl Sagan once said, “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. Do you really want your loved ones doubled over in agony, losing their tastebuds on Jesus’s birthday? Not because it’s cool, but because netizens love laughing at the pain of others. The Pacqui One Chip Challenge, where one Carolina Reaper pepper sauce-coated chip is eaten, has become the stuff of viral videos. The crueler version of this is the many iterations of “Hot Challenge”-based products out there. Just kidding, Millennials aren’t having kids. What’s more surprising is that we haven’t seen a wave of Gen Z kids seeking legal emancipated minor status from their Millennial, Potter-obsessed parents. Harry Potter fans are mad keen on playing the jellybean game (after the infamous “Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans” that yield such flavors as dirty sock and vomit)-”Will it be butterscotch, or will it be dog turds? Isn’t this fun?” The kinder version is the various “yuck factor,” Russian-roulette-style products. These are the sorts of gifts given when your local toy store has sold out of electrocuting games.
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