I have my issues with Takumi's writing, but honestly, the thing where you find a contradiction, and call an objection and then the hypest music possible starts playing, will never get old. That's peak video game. I love these silly games.

Also, there's something about the serialized nature of these games that reminds me why pre "golden age of television", TV shows were great. Like, you actually have time to become attached to the characters and care about them y'know? Like season 12 of Supernatural is absolute garbage, but still deeply enjoyable cause I spent hundreds of weekly episodes with my bois and I still care about them and want to see what happens to them, even though they're fighting Trump-metaphore british people. Ace Attorney is kinda like that. I hope Edgeworth doesn't end up in Gay Super Hell tho.

(played the commodore 64 version because it’s joystick controlled. oh… how I would be fulfilled in life… if only I could experience a real Kickman cabinet…)

Kickman seems like a naturalization of (outdated, specific to the 80’s) gaming stereotypes. it doesn’t really “get” it and it’s not trying to. it views the arcade game as another type of carnival game—nolan bushnell quite literally thought this as well when he ripped off Spacewar!—creating no pretense of a clean break, new tradition, or legitimate artistic practice. this clumsy shortcut is naïve and clumsy and extremely funny.

because this game has no juice, and isn’t about anything, it seems to parodize the tantalizing promises of other games. consider it literally: you aren’t surviving, you aren’t controlling, you aren’t a hero. like, you’re a clown. this is who you are now. as a clown, you ride your unicycle to work, you peddle around alleyways, you do tricks on command. the kitsch disinvestment holds up a kind of exaggerated mirror on this era of arcade games.

“why do I gotta be a clown…” I think, reasonably, as if all gameplay representations are very serious and not comedic in their failures to approximate. with the city laid out before your clownship, it’s also forced into an incomprehensible stillness. civilization has parted ways, all signs of life have vanished, so the clown labors may commence. what are clown labors? well…! as we all know, the clown must feed pac-man balloons in order to maintain his claim to clownship.

arcade games are on a spectrum between determinism and indeterminacy. Kickman continues being fucking hilarious by being almost all indeterminacy. think of the game as a cross between Crane’s Kaboom! and Wozniak’s Breakout. like Kaboom!, objects (specifically balloons and pac-man effigies) fall fast, from random spots on the screen, and need to be stuck or popped (behavior determined by the round) by the player-bucket. ideally, you want to play the game like a medium-paced Kaboom! variant. the tricky part is when you “stack” things, your hitbox dynamically changes as well. there’s a lot of stuff you gotta pay attention to! it’s one of those games where you have no choice but to stare peripherally and mind-meld, you literally become the clown… except, Kickman is too baroque for that, so its random pattern will eventually be unsolvable under this paradigm of move-and-catch.

a clown is nothing without his tricks, and a Kickman is nadda without his kicks. when put into this unsolvable scenario—honk! the clown breaks from his unicycle, so, so briefly, to deliver the perfect splits. remember, he is not clownman, he is Kickman! a kicked balloon behaves like a ball hit by the Breakout paddle. these now arcing balloons can be kicked indefinitely. dropped objects are also rate-locked: if you’re kicking three things, no more will fall. this makes Kickman an agonizing pile of split-second decisions. intuitively, I wanted to pick up balloons as soon as I was able, but the arcs that kicked-balloons follow are also, essentially, random, so avoiding game over often means juggling balloons until you can collect them in a way that leads into collecting the new one which falls immediately after any collection.

as I’m trying to (successfully) believe this is a lost work of art, I’m also trying to gaslight myself into believing there’s no unwinnable scenarios in this game. the most evil thing the game can do is a split, meaning the dropping of the farthest-apart objects falling in sequence, and it happens a bit too often. I have caught splits, but it’s hard as fuck! if you’re already juggling something, and catching it causes a split to happen, well, you’re probably going to clown jail. the amount of mental-processing that has to be done at round 6 and above is beyond my ability. every time I make the right decision to keep kicking and prolong my clown-destiny, to find those synchronic cyberclown grooves, I feel like the authority on clowning around. but most of the time, I make the wrong decision. us clowns are under immense pressure in late capitalism…

when early videogames are literally about accumulation (so reminder, here it’s stacking balloons, pac-man trinkets, and uh, feeding your stacked pac-mans other balloons and trinkets), there’s a kind of primal resonance that makes me pay attention. steven poole’s landmark textual reading of Pac-Man in his book Trigger Happy alchemizes the infinite chase back into life: “For Pac-Man, consumption cannot end; no conceivable quantity of dots is enough. He will continue to search them out and eat them until he dies.”

in Kickman, this consumption not embodied by a cartoon mascot. this extension of corporate power is, instead, being forced into the entertainer’s work, it's being directed by one externally. in Kickman, the clown must work with and compete against pac-man. pac-man intrudes on his clown labors, orientating his work around him, which before (in the progression of stage 1 to stage 2) were simple balloon tricks. pac-man will eat (literally, consume) balloons that were previously integral to the clown’s work. now the entertainer works to feed pac-man. but pac-man cannot clear out other pac-mans, leading to “dead” spaces in the clownworks, where these old mascots starve, and the entertainer scrambles to make sense of this new order. this progression sounds like something… something nearby… hmm…