As an analog to John George Jones' ZX Spectrum titles I think this works rather well. The trouble with those games is how tedious and difficult they are, taking a half-hour of, frankly, impeccable play to finish if you know where to go. But Go to Hell and Soft & Cuddly aren't noteworthy for their mechanical depth or how fun they are. Go to Hell was made purely for Jones' own amusement, both games functioning as a showcase for the creative liberties allowed by the microcomputer boom of the early 80s. They are theoretically great because of their juvenile nature, but seeing more of Jones' inner machinations requires you to play and play well, a frustrating endeavour.
Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed cannot even hope to replicate that moment of novelty in creative expression. Imagery that was once shocking has become quaint, in gaming and apart from it. Jones' works were from a time before Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, before the grotesque literature of Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and Irvine Welsh, when imagery of deformed children and smashed skulls were associated with the depraved minds of arthouses.
Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed exists in a world where these deliberate transgressions rarely faze the chronically online mind. What is offensive is how it controls, a blistering interpretation of Soft & Cuddly's floaty platforming given the momentum of Lunar Lander. Death in Jones' games meant either labouriously beginning again from the start, or reviving in a nearby screen, but here the player quickly continues from where they died, a great concession. The interwoven screens of Jones' games are vaguely simulated, but perhaps to exacerbate their labyrinthine atmosphere, they illogically connect and disconnect from one another seemingly at random in Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed. The oddities of it all wind down incredibly fast, thankfully, with the player getting to the end seemingly at random. Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed is like an amuse-bouche of Jones' work, a decent recreation of the idea of those games without their punch.
Recommended by maradona as part of [this list]
Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed cannot even hope to replicate that moment of novelty in creative expression. Imagery that was once shocking has become quaint, in gaming and apart from it. Jones' works were from a time before Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, before the grotesque literature of Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and Irvine Welsh, when imagery of deformed children and smashed skulls were associated with the depraved minds of arthouses.
Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed exists in a world where these deliberate transgressions rarely faze the chronically online mind. What is offensive is how it controls, a blistering interpretation of Soft & Cuddly's floaty platforming given the momentum of Lunar Lander. Death in Jones' games meant either labouriously beginning again from the start, or reviving in a nearby screen, but here the player quickly continues from where they died, a great concession. The interwoven screens of Jones' games are vaguely simulated, but perhaps to exacerbate their labyrinthine atmosphere, they illogically connect and disconnect from one another seemingly at random in Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed. The oddities of it all wind down incredibly fast, thankfully, with the player getting to the end seemingly at random. Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed is like an amuse-bouche of Jones' work, a decent recreation of the idea of those games without their punch.
Recommended by maradona as part of [this list]