“GOTY: 420BLAZEIT” Review

Introduction

Content warning: Persistent flashing lights, for the seizure – bound, and aggressive loud noises, for headphone users and autists. Extremely high density of dead memes, dubstep, and other nonsense.

Look, you’ve all read the title. Not quite. The full title is “GAME OF THE YEAR: 420BLAZEIT vs xxXilluminatiXxx [wow/10 #rekt edition] — Montage Parody The Game.” Don’t make fun of it; it was born in an ignorant time, in the far – off years of 2014. The interesting thing about Web culture is that very few people pine for the days where we all posted rage comics and unimaginative advice animals on websites which contained shock porn and anime. The time may never come when we’re nostalgic for “dank” memes. I put “dank” in quotes, not because I don’t believe in their dankness, but because I want to segregate them.

It’s a Unity game, which is bad, making heavy use of copyrighted materials, which is good, alongside the hippest memes such as… Rainbow seizure frog. Duane. Lenny face. Scumbag Steve. Spoderman. Bonzi Buddy. The Eye of Providence. Marijuana. Doritos and Mountain Dew. Doge. Yeah, those all enhanced our lives. Even the decent ones like Super Hot Fire are thrown under the bus by the montage of ironically unfunny and self – referential dreck. And speaking of dreck, there’s also Shrek, starring as the final boss. You go in his swamp. That’s a great one; I love the swamp.

Tryin to make a change :–\

Being a reviewer and prepping myself for the eventuality of going back into Game Dev Hell, I look over speedruns to think about the philosophy of games, seeing how broken they can be, how acceptably broken a game is allowed to be, and seeing what affordances we can give the player to help them enjoy a game even after playing literally hundreds of times. For what reason, I estimate addiction mixed with the waning sense of accomplishment.

One such speedrunner posted this choking story: “In #GAMEOFTHEYEAR420BLAZEIT, I was on pace for a 1m5s run, when I died to Shrek, for whom the strategy is just to shoot him in the face and walk in a circle. It’s the easiest fight, but I moved my mouse wrong and died. So avoidable. Edit: This is a real game. Not a joke.” This was the only reason I knew of this game, and not because of the hundred billion or so Let’s Plays that popped up like rats from the sewers. I can’t possibly give a better review than that.

Oh, alright. You run around and shoot the bad guys with meme masks on while you are assaulted from all senses with flashing text overlays and hilarious animations from some video or GIF that was popular three years ago. You beat the game by killing Shrek, who turns out to be Spoderman, and then a hideous though harmless Pokésona flashes a lot and plays The X – Files theme at an extremely high volume. The gameplay is bog – standard but functional and it is at least novel for being a cheap laugh. It’s only ten minutes in length, so you won’t suffer long. Isn’t that all that matters?

Conclusion

Being a “funny” “parody” “artgame” as described in the tags, as opposed to the extremely high – quality and thought – provoking work that is the typical taste of the PewDiePie Forums, I suppose this game comes down to the question of whether it made me laugh. It did, just a little, but that’s mostly from remembering the much better videos that the game makes reference to. I feel bad for Joel for spawning Bonzi Buddy and Grand Dad and overshadowing the rest of the Vinesauce meme team. The self – awareness afforded by Vinny’s nonsense is sadly missed. Pearls before swine.

Giving the game credit, it’s one of the most bombastically arrogant ones I’ve ever played, having an unfiltered creativity about it which is much appreciated in the age of watered – down productions that exist to cynically get money from an unwitting audience. Not to say this isn’t that; it is the type of stupid meme game that would be spread to death by teenagers who make Holocaust jokes in the school library. But if one is going to make a game like they, they might as well go all – out. This does go all – out, for better and worse.

Although it’s a relic of its time, in an era where anything more than a year old runs the risk of being seen as quaintly antiquated (like vaporwave, to my chagrin), it does what it sets out to do. I’m not going to worry about how the developer turns out; I think we can agree that, like the 80s, we were all caught up in the moment and were blameless in partaking in meme cultures. I’m worried about how my reputation will be affected by even exposing this game.

While this isn’t the Game of the Year, and I find the wow/10 #rekt edition lacking significant updates from the original print, it’s somewhat entertaining. But let’s be real. Do you want to play something titled “GAME OF THE YEAR: 420BLAZEIT vs xxXilluminatiXxx [wow/10 #rekt edition] — Montage Parody The Game.” Or would you rather be playing “Tales of Game’s Presents Chef Boyardee’s Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa”? That’s what I thought.

Content Warning 2: Electric Boogaloo: Seriously, don’t play this if you have epilepsy, in case you thought the first warning was some sort of sick joke. What am I, a clown?