Recommended by maradona as part of this list.
If you're even the slightest bit adjacent to the kind of gaming circles that toss terms like 'kusoge' around, then what I'm about to talk about needs zero introduction. The legendarily bad Hong Kong 97 is a shmup about Chin; distant relative of Jackie Chan, kung-fu super soldier and high-functioning heroin addict, being tasked by Hong Kong's government to destroy a herd of "fuckin' ugly reds" 1.2 billion strong, as well as stop China's new super weapon: the giant reanimated head of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. If the frankly ridiculous plot synopsis and screenshots haven't tipped you off, Hong Kong 97 is taking the piss big time. The game was made in 2 days by it's creator, Kowloon Kurosawa, who purposefully wanted to make a shitty game to mock the game industry as a whole, and you can definitely feel it. The music was taken from a second-hand disc Kurosawa got in Shanghai Street, the sprites were collaged from various sources, such as newspapers, movie posters, Chinese propaganda and documentaries, and copies of the game were minted onto floppy discs via a SFC ROM copier. This slapdash approach to publication and development gives it this bizarrely engrossing mixed-media aesthetic that has no doubt aided it's reputation nowadays. But beyond the surface level enjoyment to be had by poking at it's poor quality as a game, there's a lot of interesting design choices made for Hong Kong 97 that deserve to be given a closer look.
See, Hong Kong 97 takes place during the Handover of Hong Kong, where Great Britain relinquished sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. Considering the tension between Mainland China and Hong Kong that exists to this day, a plot about an opioid-addicted super soldier killing the entire population of mainland China in order to keep Hong Kong clean is a little more than just surreal window dressing for the plot. In addition, the final boss is Deng Xiaoping, the "Architect of Modern China", and the man who imposed martial law during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. Couple this with the fact the only music you hear in-game being a 6 second loop of the Cultural Revolution-era children's song "I Love Beijing Tiananment" (specifically the part of the lyrics that translate to "I love Beijing Tiananmen, The sun rises above Tiananmen."), and the fact that some of the random backgrounds you can see in-game include Maoist propaganda and a picture of Mao Zedong, you can pretty quickly figure out that the game holds a strong anti-Communist sentiment, acting as a parody of typical state-issued jingoistic propaganda. When you take into account that the game's publisher, HappySoft Ltd. released another political satire game called "The Story of Kamikuishiki Village", which used a similar multi-media visual approach to lambast the Aum Shinrikyo cult, the idea of Hong Kong 97 being political satire isn't entirely out of the question. Because of this, I hold that Hong Kong 97 is less of a game and more of an interactive parody piece.
As a game, it's barely-functioning hot garbage, but aesthetically: it's unmatched. You have to see this shit in motion, even for just a minute to witness how absolutely unhinged this fucking game is. It's a batshit piece of political parody and wholeheartedly deserves it's status as the cream of the crop when it comes to kusoges.
If you're even the slightest bit adjacent to the kind of gaming circles that toss terms like 'kusoge' around, then what I'm about to talk about needs zero introduction. The legendarily bad Hong Kong 97 is a shmup about Chin; distant relative of Jackie Chan, kung-fu super soldier and high-functioning heroin addict, being tasked by Hong Kong's government to destroy a herd of "fuckin' ugly reds" 1.2 billion strong, as well as stop China's new super weapon: the giant reanimated head of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. If the frankly ridiculous plot synopsis and screenshots haven't tipped you off, Hong Kong 97 is taking the piss big time. The game was made in 2 days by it's creator, Kowloon Kurosawa, who purposefully wanted to make a shitty game to mock the game industry as a whole, and you can definitely feel it. The music was taken from a second-hand disc Kurosawa got in Shanghai Street, the sprites were collaged from various sources, such as newspapers, movie posters, Chinese propaganda and documentaries, and copies of the game were minted onto floppy discs via a SFC ROM copier. This slapdash approach to publication and development gives it this bizarrely engrossing mixed-media aesthetic that has no doubt aided it's reputation nowadays. But beyond the surface level enjoyment to be had by poking at it's poor quality as a game, there's a lot of interesting design choices made for Hong Kong 97 that deserve to be given a closer look.
See, Hong Kong 97 takes place during the Handover of Hong Kong, where Great Britain relinquished sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. Considering the tension between Mainland China and Hong Kong that exists to this day, a plot about an opioid-addicted super soldier killing the entire population of mainland China in order to keep Hong Kong clean is a little more than just surreal window dressing for the plot. In addition, the final boss is Deng Xiaoping, the "Architect of Modern China", and the man who imposed martial law during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. Couple this with the fact the only music you hear in-game being a 6 second loop of the Cultural Revolution-era children's song "I Love Beijing Tiananment" (specifically the part of the lyrics that translate to "I love Beijing Tiananmen, The sun rises above Tiananmen."), and the fact that some of the random backgrounds you can see in-game include Maoist propaganda and a picture of Mao Zedong, you can pretty quickly figure out that the game holds a strong anti-Communist sentiment, acting as a parody of typical state-issued jingoistic propaganda. When you take into account that the game's publisher, HappySoft Ltd. released another political satire game called "The Story of Kamikuishiki Village", which used a similar multi-media visual approach to lambast the Aum Shinrikyo cult, the idea of Hong Kong 97 being political satire isn't entirely out of the question. Because of this, I hold that Hong Kong 97 is less of a game and more of an interactive parody piece.
As a game, it's barely-functioning hot garbage, but aesthetically: it's unmatched. You have to see this shit in motion, even for just a minute to witness how absolutely unhinged this fucking game is. It's a batshit piece of political parody and wholeheartedly deserves it's status as the cream of the crop when it comes to kusoges.
3 Comments
Well damm
This thing wholy started the shitpost aesthetic
maradona
2 years ago