CN: Discussions of Gamer Elitism, Blatant Racist Depictions, Discussions of White Supremacy in Game Design, Passing References to 2 Conservative talk show hosts.
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KAZooK is meant as a 'party game' and minigame collection on the PSP, released by the now defunct company Monte Cristo. A paris based game studio that, as far as their wikipedia page suggests, made absolutely nothing of significance, which I suppose makes sense considering the person who put this into the database didn't even bother to add their company name. They made such wonderful and lovely games like 7 Sins, in which you use the 7 sins to get in girls pants. Yeah…. Or…um.. Dino Island! An early 2000s management simulation game where you make your own jurassic park! Which I literally never heard about and seems to have an abysmal framerate. With the speed of releases, 4 a year or so, Detchibe assured me that this company and even KAZooK itself is 'definitely shovelware'. So basically the studio has this track record of Tycoon Games and War Games. These games reach right past crude right into the realm of sleazy which probably makes sense considering they started out making a bunch of Wall Street simulators. Regardless of all this though, the company decided to try and make a budget party game for the PsP which it seems they had no prior familiarity with. What's the worst that could happen?
PsP Analysis:
Before I talk about KAZooK properly I want to reflect on something about the PsP itself. You can skip this portion if you're not interested, scroll until you see ~~~, but I feel like the nuances of this system are probably worth consideration in advance. I used to have a PsP as a kid and unfortunately the thing didn't last long. I got a few PsP games to play in the car, from what I can recall Daxter and a Frogger game, but not much else. I must have for the year of having it as a wee child of 10 had about 3 games total to portion out and I think there was a few reasons for this. For one, an older person trying to find a game to play for a child on the PsP would often be at a loss. The PsP's library was for the most part intended for teenagers and adults, with games like Soul Kalibur etc. There was no 'Mario' for the console because the system was never even intended to compete with the DS. There's an interesting guerilla advertising campaign that reflects this where they hired people to paint graffiti on buildings (with permission) in order to make the PSP seem cool and badass.
But when we talk about the PSP being at the least 'more for teenagers' specifically we probably mean more in the age range of 15-18 or so, not 12-14. Why? Well put simply, the PsP is a console that requires enough maturity and experience to know you shouldn't fuck around with your electronics too much. For example, the PSP was great for its wide screen and amazing graphics, but the front of the screen was this glossy polish just waiting to be smudged and scratched up. But there was no guard, no way to protect it from the potential damage. This was something that a younger person probably would not give much thought to at all especially because the DS had a stylus and actively made its whole gimmick around touching the screen with it.
I remember mostly being just entirely confused what to do with it and just barely trying to get it to work. The idea of being able to play online PsP games with a friend was absolutely out of the fucking question because nobody my age (8-10) had one of these things, and I was a quiet kid anyway.
The PsP and the DS are often seen as competitors despite Sony's own wishes to appeal to an older demographic. What they probably didn't realize is that their more 'mature' lineup of games that are crasser and rely on 'darker' stories honestly means near nothing to most gamers. I say this with with a profound level of respect, but unless you're somebody like Chandler you as a gamer are not going to give a fuck about the tonal energy. Most gamers, even into their 20s are still playing stuff like pokemon, and so this concern about trying to 'appeal to certain demographics' often falls on deaf ears in a wider console competitions sense. The reality is that the PsP had such a disparate library and such an amount of care given to it that most people would just pick the DS and be fine with playing the more pulpy and cartoonish 'Phoenix Wright' if they were desperate for a story. What I'm trying to say is that most gamers really prioritize game functionality over dark themes and a good story. Which is why the humorous criticism now of 'nintendo adults' is starting to catch on, you have a lot of people out there that played mainline Pokemon, Zelda, and Mario and are just frankly not really that ready to move on and consider other games in a way that doesn't negatively compare them to these games (for example the people who call the Binding of Isaac 'worse Zelda').
It also reflects an often funny growing pain about gamers in general: Most of us listen to Nine Inch Nails sure, but only people like Blood Machine and Chandler try to look for this edgegoth style in games. This is functionally the reason why Blood Machine is honestly a lot cooler than me about for example the ending of Sonic Adventure, a game that ends explicitly with a mythically shocking tragedy. For me its hard to stop the junevile instinct of saying 'why the fuck would they do this edgy bullshit in a kids game' which is sort of immature of me, but is an instinct towards light and fluffy stuff with little tonal whiplash that a lot of gamers tend to share. When people talk about gamers being a non category because 'everyone plays videogames' it often misses the fact that gloomier narratives by design are rare, and that there's a very specific age range where it is expected that gamers wont treat edginess as sort of a novelty (in the way of the tendency to play Hatred or Postal 2). And treat the melodramatic, the gothic, and the edgecore as a legitimate aesthetic with its own capacity and aims. One thing I love about Blood Machine is how completely disconnected from that bias against those aesthetics and how much scorn she has for people putting it down. Her favourite games cover everything from the cybernoise of Kane and Lynch 2, to the noirgoth of Max Payne simply because she doesn't let that bias about a game having a 'dark' or 'tragic' narrative really get to her.
Recently we were feuding a lot about demographic analysis and how useful it actually is, with me exaggerating that x or y game feels like it should be for me but is actually for kids. Sort of teasing at this maturity tension. I want to make an even bolder point here and argue that 'games enthusiasm' and 'casual gaming' are distinctly different demographics to appeal to even if they have significant overlap. For example usually what you will hear in defense of the idea that videogames are a shared hobby by all is the sentiment that even grandparents play games but, and I really hate to be the person to break this to you guys, Words With Friends and Candy Crush are casual experiences for pissing a bit of time away. Sure you have the more family oriented Wii but I don't think the Wii Sports games invite a sort of enthusiasm. This is not to say that casual games are bad but rather to highlight that the people who play Mario Party are a way wider and usually less intense and enthusiastic about continued and improved play, than the people who would play Terraria. Now a games enthusiast could play both, but a casual gamer is going to drift more towards those lighter ways to expend time. This is sort of where this paradox of maturity actually comes most at its head, we may accept all these games as videogames and even accept all these people as 'gamers' as a way to put down the obnoxious elitism around skill checks for being a 'true gamer'. However the idea of a Grandma playing Octopath Traveler is still categorically unusual to us. Enter one of the most unabashed gaming weebs I've ever met: Britta Food4Dogs. She's great because she talks about her passion to collect and find figurines for games I've never even heard of, stuff presumably from the PSN and PS Network stores, allowing her experience like Hyperdimension Neptunia and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. She's a wonderful and thoughtful elderly lady who plays these games with the subs on. If you're more interested in the story, I can send you here for her life story. The reason I felt this tangent was worth mediation is because I sort of reject both the universalist 'everyones a gamer' and 'true gamer' sentiments. Food4Dogs can play some platformers but mostly sticks to these turn based longer anime narrative action adventure and turn based games. I think its worth recognizing that this is deeply unique to her age but also if we reach beyond the thought process of it being just about age we can view it more as a lack function. Food4Dogs got into this realm of escapism out of trauma and grief, saying she needed something to throw herself into entirely. But this sentiment, of going to escapism has not been an accepted virtue of the 'boomer' generation. Instead, often due to a mix of technophobia and traditionalist elitism, 'great literature' or an hour or so of 'casual' tv/games is privileged instead. Not to even get into wider technophobic nationalistic bugbears like Censorship, parental maturity ratings, or the evengelical fear of "Magik". This has been an enormous disconnect I've had with my own family, and if you want to be charitable is perhaps the spine behind why there's a certain sort of elitist opinion about perseverance and there being this category of 'true gamer'. It's a form of alienated call and response and ingroup cultivation so that they can pretend to get closer to people while in fact often doing the opposite.
How does this relate to KAZooK? Well, KAZooK was released on a console known for its significantly more mature and obscure library, where the incentivization was towards more narrative driven titles. And these dorks thought, with all that in mind, that making a party game collection with crude humor was a good idea for collecting market share. While in general demographics are usually more critical in terms of their absence, I believe that pushing out of the 'casual' experience and into the 'enthusiastic' experience with gaming is actually quite a noble goal. To give people larger and well realized modes of escapism to build their perceptions and identity around that go beyond the 'pseudo casual' storytelling of Star Wars to something instead like Mass Effect is, in my view, not in itself a problematic desire. If I didn't think that, I probably wouldn't waste as much time on writing about games as I do by design tests readers to be more 'involved' with the experiences they have. On top of this it's sort of a reflection on why I wouldn't even really think to review Mario Party at all because I don't have anything to say about it that would enhance the relationship between gamer and player, negatively or positively (aside maybe convincing people that Mario Freak Me Out, but I can talk about that another time). With that all in mind, KAZooK releasing on here instead of the more accessible DS, which Monte Cristo had recently made a game on, was an enormously stupid marketing decision. Not to mention as you'll soon see there's enough perseverance based game design decisions that would turn that more casual audience off, meaning they functionally made a game for like nobody.
Now let's return again to the subject of functionality. The subject of game functionality is where the PsP actually takes its most damning hit and may reflect another reason why I wasn't given that many games on the system. Because of the desire to control more of the market, the PsP made a frankly dumb decision of locking the hardware down to using these clunky fucked up discs called the UMD, a disc system that was made pretty much just as a way to suck up more money. Grandparents trying to pick out a game would be further alienated due to this as well. You had to get this mini disk that was inside a case, open up the back of the PsP and sort of stick it in there. But the other issue is that there was nothing really clipping it in place, if it jostled even a little bit the disc would not be read. But you also were supposed to not actually take it outside the mini case and that would actually destroy it. In my childlike confusion I almost broke the first game trying to peel the edge open because of this. This dated trash disc reader never needed to be done this way, they could have just done it as downloads even back in 2005 and there would be no issues whatsoever, but they waited a long time before going that route, something like 3 or 4 years. Proof that this was really them just being market sharks instead of simply hardware limitations is that while you could probably have bought and downloaded movies on the PSP to, they released them in this UMD format as well. I understand that a lot of people are obsessive about having the physical hardware but at my poor age when I couldn't have actually gotten the thing to work properly for more than 10 minutes without holding it with more caution and grace than a fine china tea set, I would have much rather had it go that way. I imagine most of the people older than me who got one of these thought the same.
That being said, if you could keep good care of it and were able to get one of these after 2010 when you can buy and download games (or in actual fact, you could easily pirate games on them to). It was an impressive piece of hardware with stunning graphics, a lot of abilities for modding and an interesting library. It also had the ability to hook up to a TV and play on there, which is fucking crazy impressive for something made before the I-Phone. You can also hook headphones up to it! One game that I played on the Emulator before that I didn't remember was the Final Fantasy Tactics the War of the Lions which due to its inclusion of cutscenes and a wonderful retranslation that makes the dialogue read like Shakespeare's best is considered far superior to play than the original. Imagine if you will playing something that beautiful and involved on a long ride, plane, train, car, whatever. And you can absolutely see how this console had its moment in the sun. I'm sure there are obscure releases on this console that from a narrative perspective might just as well outperform any other portable console. In fact I know almost without a doubt that War of the Lions is better than all the Switch titles I've touched combined (I really hate the switch). So sure, if you were the right person in the right place and time you were probably experiencing the sort of video game Kino most could even dream of. However none of this came to pass in my case, about 1 or 2 years after I got the PsP with still my limited library of like 3 games, my dad spilled soda on the machine by accident ruining it, it got thrown out and really I didn't get to spent much personal time at all with a handheld after that point, sadly. I borrowed a DS a few times from a friend but that was about it. Needless to say I wasn't exactly mourning the loss of the PsP (although I do sort of think I'd want one now).
Now before I move on for good, there's one other set of pros and cons that are worth consideration here: how do the buttons feel? Well I don't have the console in front of me so i'm going off of 15 year old memories, but they are iconic ones. For the most part the buttons feel quite good, the d pad and shape button are tactile and don't fight with you at all, but if a game is more involved and uses the L and R buttons it starts to get even more awkward. Most importantly though is the thumbpad. I remember thinking as a dumb kid that the thumbpad actually never felt right because, I suppose to keep something from breaking, they flattened the thumb pad and had it stick really close, that means that feel wise it was more like a rug I was sweeping around than a thumb stick. The awkwardness here is that this thumbpad was positioned below the d-pad instead of above which means for walking around you had to cramp your thumb downwards and at a sort of angle while playing. I imagine this shaped the library in a lot of nuanced ways, there's no way in hell that you would be able to interact with all the buttons at once which is why my assumption is that the PsP probably had a lot more in terms of visuals and narrative design, involving turn based games than more commonly expected action games or platformers. This meant that any game that required you to use a lot of active movement were probably not going to work out too well.
Almost every game in KAZooK's party collection requires deft and highly involved movement and coordination. For example Zombie Blaster, the 2nd game playable requires you to move around to aim at targets in order to stop your blonde girlfriend (!!!) from being hit by enemies. Meant to imitate a sort of rail shooter experience except its really just the 1 screen. Now you can use the D pad in order to do this, but that's not going to get the job done particularly well which is why the 'rugstick' would instead have to be used. This is definitely where the experience of playing on original hardware becomes squandered a bit, see I emulated this game, and played it with an xbox remote (I would use a playstation remote but I'm not entirely sure where I put it) which means that the joystick and the larger screen with which to see everything would make the game significantly easier in this way and, in a certain sense, lose the game to translation a bit. That being said you could argue that for a lot of experiences, considering the awkwardness of the original console its a game feel translation issue that would enhance the experience rather than harm it.
In KAZooK's case it sort of successfully did both at once, if you consider 'enhancing' as a disparaging term in this case.
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When you boot up KAZooK you are greeted to a blinding white screen where you have to choose your language between the different flags while the most fuck ugly shirtless rodent mascot tries to do a rap sign hello to you. He sticks around in the title and options screen everywhere while you try to set stuff up. He reminds me of that weird creepy uncle you just don't want to really ever be around in the same room with, and the fact that it's just a still mascot makes it all the more disconcerting. The menu UI and visual look never get bet or more intelligible than this btw. Note also that the flag is not the US for English, but the UK flag, which is enhanced by the fact this game never came out in the US. You're then immediately met with the most inexplicable an opening title sequence I've ever witnessed, a statue in the middle of a town is hit with lightning and then the most abominable collection of 3D character assets, that feel like the art designer of Big Mouth took too much ambien and tried to make a bobblehead sim, huddle and crowd around the screen like a bad birthday surprise party. Welcome to KAZooM, fuck you.
What I found funny about this game is that PSP experts seem to know about it, with one youtuber even openly commenting in 2021 about it in a drier mechanical fashion as a game in a list of terrible video games. What I'm surprised by however is that this game hasn't gotten the 'animated clown game tuber' treatment that people are probably used to with AVGN or the now infamous JonTron, when I initially looked it up I hardly at all found videos of it. But this game would be perfect 'tuber bait for that style of outrage and chronologized confusion. This again reflects the fact that the PSP library probably doesn't really suit that sort of Jovial review so that genre of youtube has probably not even found it. But it's probably also doubled by the fact that this game is so wildly obscure that I had to capitalize the letters in the search engine to even get the result. I have no clue how many copies its sold, but the fact that as of the time of writing not a single person has marked this as anything, played, backlogged, wishlisted, nothing it probably a good hint that it wasn't too many, further undermining its potentially as a party game since you would need to be online close to another person who had it (and lets not forget the dogshit UMD format which would interrupt your multiplayer experience at the slightest sign it wasn't plugged in correctly, and unlike computer games, there's no way to really 'hot seat' a portable game anyway so by all metrics this was a party game where nobody else showed up to your sad pathetic party.
Now before you start playing you have to make a profile and character, and we are about to figure out why this game probably didn't get manufactured and distributed in America. You only get to choose between two black stereotypes. Either a bushy eyebrowed guy with a gold chain and a 'gangster' bandana donning his scalp. Or a fetishized black slender women with huge red lips, a red jumpsuit mostly unzipped, and huge tits for the character model, half showing. Both are pretty explicitly meant to be african american stereotypes. Now if you wanted to be incredibly charitable you could read the fact that you can't choose a white character from the start as actually a bit subversive since white people would then have to experience what it's like to not be the status quo. You have to slowly 'unlock' the rest of the mostly white cast so surely that's kind of cool? Well even if they weren't deeply racist stereotypes already, I wouldn't really say so. See, in order to get these other characters you have to get enough score to get enough money to unlock them which already textually implies that these unlockable characters are 'worth more' and the 'reason to keep playing' than your starting ones. Your motivation to play is to basically become more white. I did a bit of snooping and as if to confirm my suspicions, there's no indication from the box art material that this game was intended to appeal to a black audience since there's not a single black person on the cover . There is a racist asian stereotype though so that's cool, finally a game Steven Crowder can enjoy I guess.
Bigotry is actually made even more explicit by the progression system in terms of the minigames, so, the minigames themselves each operate as an attempt to imitate some other style of game: Ping Pong, a SHMUP, a Baseball game. But generally there's 2 things about them. Almost all of them are score attack games with the more money you get meaning you get closer to unlocking a minigame from the shop, but that also means none of them have an end point. They also attempt to make almost all the games harder by just making you do what you did before slightly faster each time. There's a few exceptions to this but fundamentally what this ends up doing is making it so eventually based on your reaction time you just can't clear everything in time just fundamentally. To top it all off, a lot of the games seem to revolve around reaffirming prejudices. For example, within the first 5 games you have unlocked from the start, 1 of them is a game called 'pool party' where you have to hit the baseball to throw the guys in the pool out of the line, a quick gendered 'spot the difference'. However as I mentioned before the sprites are so ungodly ugly that the main visual indicator I could reasonably rely on to look at the tits. I can't even begin to tell you how humiliating the whole conceit of doing something like this irl made me feel, it made me recall this one time I was dragged on a cruise ship and you had those guys who would basically pump up the party and he had me 'as a guy' wear lipstick and coerced me and a few others to kiss the head of another guy. These 'gendered' jokes are just homophobia and transphobia so I feel like the feeling of that anecdote probably reflects the gross and humiliating 'humor' behind this game. Considering the fact you were batting the men and based on some other demographic, male power fantasies of all the women standing for you probably plays into it too. The one right after that labeled 'Trash Radio' is you hearing 4 different people all shock jocking into the radio (all men) expletives that show as images (think like how Dropsy does it) and your job is to censor the bad one of the four. Whats funny about this one is how it defines censorial content from not, I suppose part of the humor and learning is supposed to come from mistakes but instead it just feels weird. Boxing for some reason needs to be censored, alright noted. But then I had one that showed Bunny, Mad Face, Flower, and Basketball and seeing the once again heavily racialized shock jocks (its ok because one of them is white, but actually they just recolored the asset of another guest thats actually at the table!) I thought 'well surely if Boxing is Censored, then so is Basketball' but instead angry face is censored. Why?? Is angry face censored???? You don't think people are allowed to be mad on the radio???? Have you no clue how annoyingly angry Rush Limbaugh was????? Is it not acceptable for people in France to be mad on the radio? I don't understand…
Bear in mind, you have to get a high score in order to unlock new content by doing the actions again but faster, which just sucks, the only way I can progress is through either blatant prejudice or the shittiest ping pong in my life. Also let me not that it takes FOREVER to unlock a new game or character, they flat priced everything at 10k, and you get 100 for playing a round but more if you get on the score leaderboards. Except the issue is if you're doing really unusually well the leaderboards would probably have a score skyrocketed so high that you wouldn't be able to reap money from it, not to mention it actually takes a long time. The leaderboards are catastrophically hard to breach, I got to round 15 in several of the games and often only got halfway to breaking 10th place (which if I recall correctly only rewards you like 300 dollars). This game reminded me that if you place a store based on skill in a game you better be reasonable to player competency and actually think about how long it will take to unlock the next thing.
Like, this is a piece of shovelware, similar to that of Action 52 and 10001 Games in 1. Where the only appeal of the game is to have as much differing content in it. I presume from a consumption perspective the idea would be you find one or two games in that collection you like and then ditch the rest. That's what makes turning shovelware into a progression experience so unfathomably inane. You want your player to enjoy some of the game, so why would you even bother locking it off? There's no way a shovelware mini games-collection purchaser would want a progression loop to lock them off since the demand is for a wide array of content. My theory is that the meditative style of play, to brainwash you, is actually a bit intentional. Even though it sounds conspiratorial I think there's merit in that because there's a hypno swirl transition that loads between menus and the music is as repetitive as it can get, bordering more on a commercial jingle than a 'song'. Saying that makes it sound like a challenge to everyone who has not played this to give it a try, and sure do whatever you'd like, but you're going to be surprised to find that its not just a vile game, but a dull and lame one too. It goes way too hard into those Jet Set Radio style aesthetics without realizing the real appeal which just glazes the game with a very corporate charmlessness. It's a painful experience but not an amusingly painful one, a 'please switch the TV channel to something else this is freaking me out' level of bad.
Okay so I want to talk about 1 other thing, which is that you can actually use a cheat (!!) to get extra money. You can get 100000 dollars by changing your name to "MoneySux" but the problem is… that's only enough money to Buy 10 of the games XD. the profile activation thing was a pain the fucking ass since you can't switch profiles easily and it was having difficulties letting me switch my name, so I was able to get it to work about twice to play around 15 of the 30 games, I playe. They were all equally either offensive or vacuous. A fighting game with no block or dodge options, a racing game with 1 single lap, and a game with all about button mashing to break a guitar on your PSP. There were a few that were 'bearable' and actually had an idea, for example Dance Off has you spitting in the mic in a 'rap off' where the idea is that you have to copy what the opponents do, much like FNF across a visual bar at exact times. The way they make it harder is by first sending two separate bars of information to copy, and then in the later rounds taking away the ability to read the notes after he said them. This forces you to sort of use basic short term memory skills but there's still a fundamental problem, you don't have anything but implicit timing to when your turn starts so typically you'll miss the first note you intended to hit and health doesn't reset so eventually you just lose anyway. The game is also so unbearable that having it actually challenge you in any substantial way just makes shit way worse.
Finally, you can access the credits from the menu, but the credits run as slow as possible, with each credited person and company coming on screen individually every 5 seconds. I highly suspect that developers knew they made garbage shovelware, and really wanted to hide their involvement as much as possible and so went to their lead and said 'lets turn the credits into an optional dance sequence!'. That's smart of them and was ultimately a good call as this game doesn't even have a wikipedia page dedicated to it.
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I suppose you could argue since I only played half the games I haven't really 'completed' it, but I feel like I've done enough diligence that I can claim to have completed it more than almost anybody else on BL, and the game literally just wont let me play the others without unnecessary grinding.
This write up was commissioned as part of a contractual agreement with the BL user king bacho who successfully cracked the code on a previous game. Initially this was intended to be for the phillips C-DI game Hotel Mario which I may do a reflection on of my own accord one day, but I was having issues getting the emulator to work properly. So he rerolled me this obscure trash instead. In some ways I quite appreciate it since I feel like I was able to offer a much more robust condemnation of this game and its contents. Although there is that lingering question of if I actually learned anything, I learned about a french shovelware company, how videogame publishing can employ racist logics, and what happens when you release a game with no real thought given to the platform you're releasing on (clearly they were able to make a DS game before they just decided not to). I suppose I was also reminded of how great the PSP library is so if its no problem for purists that I'm not playing on original hardware I might play more PSP games in a while. On the other hand, I wouldn't exactly say I'm insecure about it, but spending a dozen pages ridiculing a game with no prior attention to it does feel on the whole a waste of time. Like I know about 3 people that I'm almost certain would read through all of this but I'm not really doing much of anything beyond giving them the morbid entertainment of seeing me whine about my bad experience.
Previously I inquired about that critiquing bad games that the majority of people seem to like is worth doing, but what about games people dont like? If doing that can cause ego problems in terms of hubris and piss people off, then I would describe the act of doing this as a way to cause severe alienation, being in a desert of knowing that you wasted your time playing something obscure and bad and don't want others to really directly experience it either. I feel you can probably draw blood out of any stone if you punch it hard enough, but I don't exactly see myself going out of my way to critique the failings of the NES "E.T." game that much for example, nor on shovelware, nor on trashy phone games. Detchibe and Franz were both threatening me with playing (Mario) the Music Box which honestly seems like a good time in comparison to this greasepube of a game. Regardless, I think I learned my lesson not to run this sort of prize ever again >:C
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KAZooK is meant as a 'party game' and minigame collection on the PSP, released by the now defunct company Monte Cristo. A paris based game studio that, as far as their wikipedia page suggests, made absolutely nothing of significance, which I suppose makes sense considering the person who put this into the database didn't even bother to add their company name. They made such wonderful and lovely games like 7 Sins, in which you use the 7 sins to get in girls pants. Yeah…. Or…um.. Dino Island! An early 2000s management simulation game where you make your own jurassic park! Which I literally never heard about and seems to have an abysmal framerate. With the speed of releases, 4 a year or so, Detchibe assured me that this company and even KAZooK itself is 'definitely shovelware'. So basically the studio has this track record of Tycoon Games and War Games. These games reach right past crude right into the realm of sleazy which probably makes sense considering they started out making a bunch of Wall Street simulators. Regardless of all this though, the company decided to try and make a budget party game for the PsP which it seems they had no prior familiarity with. What's the worst that could happen?
PsP Analysis:
Before I talk about KAZooK properly I want to reflect on something about the PsP itself. You can skip this portion if you're not interested, scroll until you see ~~~, but I feel like the nuances of this system are probably worth consideration in advance. I used to have a PsP as a kid and unfortunately the thing didn't last long. I got a few PsP games to play in the car, from what I can recall Daxter and a Frogger game, but not much else. I must have for the year of having it as a wee child of 10 had about 3 games total to portion out and I think there was a few reasons for this. For one, an older person trying to find a game to play for a child on the PsP would often be at a loss. The PsP's library was for the most part intended for teenagers and adults, with games like Soul Kalibur etc. There was no 'Mario' for the console because the system was never even intended to compete with the DS. There's an interesting guerilla advertising campaign that reflects this where they hired people to paint graffiti on buildings (with permission) in order to make the PSP seem cool and badass.
But when we talk about the PSP being at the least 'more for teenagers' specifically we probably mean more in the age range of 15-18 or so, not 12-14. Why? Well put simply, the PsP is a console that requires enough maturity and experience to know you shouldn't fuck around with your electronics too much. For example, the PSP was great for its wide screen and amazing graphics, but the front of the screen was this glossy polish just waiting to be smudged and scratched up. But there was no guard, no way to protect it from the potential damage. This was something that a younger person probably would not give much thought to at all especially because the DS had a stylus and actively made its whole gimmick around touching the screen with it.
I remember mostly being just entirely confused what to do with it and just barely trying to get it to work. The idea of being able to play online PsP games with a friend was absolutely out of the fucking question because nobody my age (8-10) had one of these things, and I was a quiet kid anyway.
The PsP and the DS are often seen as competitors despite Sony's own wishes to appeal to an older demographic. What they probably didn't realize is that their more 'mature' lineup of games that are crasser and rely on 'darker' stories honestly means near nothing to most gamers. I say this with with a profound level of respect, but unless you're somebody like Chandler you as a gamer are not going to give a fuck about the tonal energy. Most gamers, even into their 20s are still playing stuff like pokemon, and so this concern about trying to 'appeal to certain demographics' often falls on deaf ears in a wider console competitions sense. The reality is that the PsP had such a disparate library and such an amount of care given to it that most people would just pick the DS and be fine with playing the more pulpy and cartoonish 'Phoenix Wright' if they were desperate for a story. What I'm trying to say is that most gamers really prioritize game functionality over dark themes and a good story. Which is why the humorous criticism now of 'nintendo adults' is starting to catch on, you have a lot of people out there that played mainline Pokemon, Zelda, and Mario and are just frankly not really that ready to move on and consider other games in a way that doesn't negatively compare them to these games (for example the people who call the Binding of Isaac 'worse Zelda').
It also reflects an often funny growing pain about gamers in general: Most of us listen to Nine Inch Nails sure, but only people like Blood Machine and Chandler try to look for this edgegoth style in games. This is functionally the reason why Blood Machine is honestly a lot cooler than me about for example the ending of Sonic Adventure, a game that ends explicitly with a mythically shocking tragedy. For me its hard to stop the junevile instinct of saying 'why the fuck would they do this edgy bullshit in a kids game' which is sort of immature of me, but is an instinct towards light and fluffy stuff with little tonal whiplash that a lot of gamers tend to share. When people talk about gamers being a non category because 'everyone plays videogames' it often misses the fact that gloomier narratives by design are rare, and that there's a very specific age range where it is expected that gamers wont treat edginess as sort of a novelty (in the way of the tendency to play Hatred or Postal 2). And treat the melodramatic, the gothic, and the edgecore as a legitimate aesthetic with its own capacity and aims. One thing I love about Blood Machine is how completely disconnected from that bias against those aesthetics and how much scorn she has for people putting it down. Her favourite games cover everything from the cybernoise of Kane and Lynch 2, to the noirgoth of Max Payne simply because she doesn't let that bias about a game having a 'dark' or 'tragic' narrative really get to her.
Recently we were feuding a lot about demographic analysis and how useful it actually is, with me exaggerating that x or y game feels like it should be for me but is actually for kids. Sort of teasing at this maturity tension. I want to make an even bolder point here and argue that 'games enthusiasm' and 'casual gaming' are distinctly different demographics to appeal to even if they have significant overlap. For example usually what you will hear in defense of the idea that videogames are a shared hobby by all is the sentiment that even grandparents play games but, and I really hate to be the person to break this to you guys, Words With Friends and Candy Crush are casual experiences for pissing a bit of time away. Sure you have the more family oriented Wii but I don't think the Wii Sports games invite a sort of enthusiasm. This is not to say that casual games are bad but rather to highlight that the people who play Mario Party are a way wider and usually less intense and enthusiastic about continued and improved play, than the people who would play Terraria. Now a games enthusiast could play both, but a casual gamer is going to drift more towards those lighter ways to expend time. This is sort of where this paradox of maturity actually comes most at its head, we may accept all these games as videogames and even accept all these people as 'gamers' as a way to put down the obnoxious elitism around skill checks for being a 'true gamer'. However the idea of a Grandma playing Octopath Traveler is still categorically unusual to us. Enter one of the most unabashed gaming weebs I've ever met: Britta Food4Dogs. She's great because she talks about her passion to collect and find figurines for games I've never even heard of, stuff presumably from the PSN and PS Network stores, allowing her experience like Hyperdimension Neptunia and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. She's a wonderful and thoughtful elderly lady who plays these games with the subs on. If you're more interested in the story, I can send you here for her life story. The reason I felt this tangent was worth mediation is because I sort of reject both the universalist 'everyones a gamer' and 'true gamer' sentiments. Food4Dogs can play some platformers but mostly sticks to these turn based longer anime narrative action adventure and turn based games. I think its worth recognizing that this is deeply unique to her age but also if we reach beyond the thought process of it being just about age we can view it more as a lack function. Food4Dogs got into this realm of escapism out of trauma and grief, saying she needed something to throw herself into entirely. But this sentiment, of going to escapism has not been an accepted virtue of the 'boomer' generation. Instead, often due to a mix of technophobia and traditionalist elitism, 'great literature' or an hour or so of 'casual' tv/games is privileged instead. Not to even get into wider technophobic nationalistic bugbears like Censorship, parental maturity ratings, or the evengelical fear of "Magik". This has been an enormous disconnect I've had with my own family, and if you want to be charitable is perhaps the spine behind why there's a certain sort of elitist opinion about perseverance and there being this category of 'true gamer'. It's a form of alienated call and response and ingroup cultivation so that they can pretend to get closer to people while in fact often doing the opposite.
How does this relate to KAZooK? Well, KAZooK was released on a console known for its significantly more mature and obscure library, where the incentivization was towards more narrative driven titles. And these dorks thought, with all that in mind, that making a party game collection with crude humor was a good idea for collecting market share. While in general demographics are usually more critical in terms of their absence, I believe that pushing out of the 'casual' experience and into the 'enthusiastic' experience with gaming is actually quite a noble goal. To give people larger and well realized modes of escapism to build their perceptions and identity around that go beyond the 'pseudo casual' storytelling of Star Wars to something instead like Mass Effect is, in my view, not in itself a problematic desire. If I didn't think that, I probably wouldn't waste as much time on writing about games as I do by design tests readers to be more 'involved' with the experiences they have. On top of this it's sort of a reflection on why I wouldn't even really think to review Mario Party at all because I don't have anything to say about it that would enhance the relationship between gamer and player, negatively or positively (aside maybe convincing people that Mario Freak Me Out, but I can talk about that another time). With that all in mind, KAZooK releasing on here instead of the more accessible DS, which Monte Cristo had recently made a game on, was an enormously stupid marketing decision. Not to mention as you'll soon see there's enough perseverance based game design decisions that would turn that more casual audience off, meaning they functionally made a game for like nobody.
Now let's return again to the subject of functionality. The subject of game functionality is where the PsP actually takes its most damning hit and may reflect another reason why I wasn't given that many games on the system. Because of the desire to control more of the market, the PsP made a frankly dumb decision of locking the hardware down to using these clunky fucked up discs called the UMD, a disc system that was made pretty much just as a way to suck up more money. Grandparents trying to pick out a game would be further alienated due to this as well. You had to get this mini disk that was inside a case, open up the back of the PsP and sort of stick it in there. But the other issue is that there was nothing really clipping it in place, if it jostled even a little bit the disc would not be read. But you also were supposed to not actually take it outside the mini case and that would actually destroy it. In my childlike confusion I almost broke the first game trying to peel the edge open because of this. This dated trash disc reader never needed to be done this way, they could have just done it as downloads even back in 2005 and there would be no issues whatsoever, but they waited a long time before going that route, something like 3 or 4 years. Proof that this was really them just being market sharks instead of simply hardware limitations is that while you could probably have bought and downloaded movies on the PSP to, they released them in this UMD format as well. I understand that a lot of people are obsessive about having the physical hardware but at my poor age when I couldn't have actually gotten the thing to work properly for more than 10 minutes without holding it with more caution and grace than a fine china tea set, I would have much rather had it go that way. I imagine most of the people older than me who got one of these thought the same.
That being said, if you could keep good care of it and were able to get one of these after 2010 when you can buy and download games (or in actual fact, you could easily pirate games on them to). It was an impressive piece of hardware with stunning graphics, a lot of abilities for modding and an interesting library. It also had the ability to hook up to a TV and play on there, which is fucking crazy impressive for something made before the I-Phone. You can also hook headphones up to it! One game that I played on the Emulator before that I didn't remember was the Final Fantasy Tactics the War of the Lions which due to its inclusion of cutscenes and a wonderful retranslation that makes the dialogue read like Shakespeare's best is considered far superior to play than the original. Imagine if you will playing something that beautiful and involved on a long ride, plane, train, car, whatever. And you can absolutely see how this console had its moment in the sun. I'm sure there are obscure releases on this console that from a narrative perspective might just as well outperform any other portable console. In fact I know almost without a doubt that War of the Lions is better than all the Switch titles I've touched combined (I really hate the switch). So sure, if you were the right person in the right place and time you were probably experiencing the sort of video game Kino most could even dream of. However none of this came to pass in my case, about 1 or 2 years after I got the PsP with still my limited library of like 3 games, my dad spilled soda on the machine by accident ruining it, it got thrown out and really I didn't get to spent much personal time at all with a handheld after that point, sadly. I borrowed a DS a few times from a friend but that was about it. Needless to say I wasn't exactly mourning the loss of the PsP (although I do sort of think I'd want one now).
Now before I move on for good, there's one other set of pros and cons that are worth consideration here: how do the buttons feel? Well I don't have the console in front of me so i'm going off of 15 year old memories, but they are iconic ones. For the most part the buttons feel quite good, the d pad and shape button are tactile and don't fight with you at all, but if a game is more involved and uses the L and R buttons it starts to get even more awkward. Most importantly though is the thumbpad. I remember thinking as a dumb kid that the thumbpad actually never felt right because, I suppose to keep something from breaking, they flattened the thumb pad and had it stick really close, that means that feel wise it was more like a rug I was sweeping around than a thumb stick. The awkwardness here is that this thumbpad was positioned below the d-pad instead of above which means for walking around you had to cramp your thumb downwards and at a sort of angle while playing. I imagine this shaped the library in a lot of nuanced ways, there's no way in hell that you would be able to interact with all the buttons at once which is why my assumption is that the PsP probably had a lot more in terms of visuals and narrative design, involving turn based games than more commonly expected action games or platformers. This meant that any game that required you to use a lot of active movement were probably not going to work out too well.
Almost every game in KAZooK's party collection requires deft and highly involved movement and coordination. For example Zombie Blaster, the 2nd game playable requires you to move around to aim at targets in order to stop your blonde girlfriend (!!!) from being hit by enemies. Meant to imitate a sort of rail shooter experience except its really just the 1 screen. Now you can use the D pad in order to do this, but that's not going to get the job done particularly well which is why the 'rugstick' would instead have to be used. This is definitely where the experience of playing on original hardware becomes squandered a bit, see I emulated this game, and played it with an xbox remote (I would use a playstation remote but I'm not entirely sure where I put it) which means that the joystick and the larger screen with which to see everything would make the game significantly easier in this way and, in a certain sense, lose the game to translation a bit. That being said you could argue that for a lot of experiences, considering the awkwardness of the original console its a game feel translation issue that would enhance the experience rather than harm it.
In KAZooK's case it sort of successfully did both at once, if you consider 'enhancing' as a disparaging term in this case.
When you boot up KAZooK you are greeted to a blinding white screen where you have to choose your language between the different flags while the most fuck ugly shirtless rodent mascot tries to do a rap sign hello to you. He sticks around in the title and options screen everywhere while you try to set stuff up. He reminds me of that weird creepy uncle you just don't want to really ever be around in the same room with, and the fact that it's just a still mascot makes it all the more disconcerting. The menu UI and visual look never get bet or more intelligible than this btw. Note also that the flag is not the US for English, but the UK flag, which is enhanced by the fact this game never came out in the US. You're then immediately met with the most inexplicable an opening title sequence I've ever witnessed, a statue in the middle of a town is hit with lightning and then the most abominable collection of 3D character assets, that feel like the art designer of Big Mouth took too much ambien and tried to make a bobblehead sim, huddle and crowd around the screen like a bad birthday surprise party. Welcome to KAZooM, fuck you.
What I found funny about this game is that PSP experts seem to know about it, with one youtuber even openly commenting in 2021 about it in a drier mechanical fashion as a game in a list of terrible video games. What I'm surprised by however is that this game hasn't gotten the 'animated clown game tuber' treatment that people are probably used to with AVGN or the now infamous JonTron, when I initially looked it up I hardly at all found videos of it. But this game would be perfect 'tuber bait for that style of outrage and chronologized confusion. This again reflects the fact that the PSP library probably doesn't really suit that sort of Jovial review so that genre of youtube has probably not even found it. But it's probably also doubled by the fact that this game is so wildly obscure that I had to capitalize the letters in the search engine to even get the result. I have no clue how many copies its sold, but the fact that as of the time of writing not a single person has marked this as anything, played, backlogged, wishlisted, nothing it probably a good hint that it wasn't too many, further undermining its potentially as a party game since you would need to be online close to another person who had it (and lets not forget the dogshit UMD format which would interrupt your multiplayer experience at the slightest sign it wasn't plugged in correctly, and unlike computer games, there's no way to really 'hot seat' a portable game anyway so by all metrics this was a party game where nobody else showed up to your sad pathetic party.
Now before you start playing you have to make a profile and character, and we are about to figure out why this game probably didn't get manufactured and distributed in America. You only get to choose between two black stereotypes. Either a bushy eyebrowed guy with a gold chain and a 'gangster' bandana donning his scalp. Or a fetishized black slender women with huge red lips, a red jumpsuit mostly unzipped, and huge tits for the character model, half showing. Both are pretty explicitly meant to be african american stereotypes. Now if you wanted to be incredibly charitable you could read the fact that you can't choose a white character from the start as actually a bit subversive since white people would then have to experience what it's like to not be the status quo. You have to slowly 'unlock' the rest of the mostly white cast so surely that's kind of cool? Well even if they weren't deeply racist stereotypes already, I wouldn't really say so. See, in order to get these other characters you have to get enough score to get enough money to unlock them which already textually implies that these unlockable characters are 'worth more' and the 'reason to keep playing' than your starting ones. Your motivation to play is to basically become more white. I did a bit of snooping and as if to confirm my suspicions, there's no indication from the box art material that this game was intended to appeal to a black audience since there's not a single black person on the cover . There is a racist asian stereotype though so that's cool, finally a game Steven Crowder can enjoy I guess.
Bigotry is actually made even more explicit by the progression system in terms of the minigames, so, the minigames themselves each operate as an attempt to imitate some other style of game: Ping Pong, a SHMUP, a Baseball game. But generally there's 2 things about them. Almost all of them are score attack games with the more money you get meaning you get closer to unlocking a minigame from the shop, but that also means none of them have an end point. They also attempt to make almost all the games harder by just making you do what you did before slightly faster each time. There's a few exceptions to this but fundamentally what this ends up doing is making it so eventually based on your reaction time you just can't clear everything in time just fundamentally. To top it all off, a lot of the games seem to revolve around reaffirming prejudices. For example, within the first 5 games you have unlocked from the start, 1 of them is a game called 'pool party' where you have to hit the baseball to throw the guys in the pool out of the line, a quick gendered 'spot the difference'. However as I mentioned before the sprites are so ungodly ugly that the main visual indicator I could reasonably rely on to look at the tits. I can't even begin to tell you how humiliating the whole conceit of doing something like this irl made me feel, it made me recall this one time I was dragged on a cruise ship and you had those guys who would basically pump up the party and he had me 'as a guy' wear lipstick and coerced me and a few others to kiss the head of another guy. These 'gendered' jokes are just homophobia and transphobia so I feel like the feeling of that anecdote probably reflects the gross and humiliating 'humor' behind this game. Considering the fact you were batting the men and based on some other demographic, male power fantasies of all the women standing for you probably plays into it too. The one right after that labeled 'Trash Radio' is you hearing 4 different people all shock jocking into the radio (all men) expletives that show as images (think like how Dropsy does it) and your job is to censor the bad one of the four. Whats funny about this one is how it defines censorial content from not, I suppose part of the humor and learning is supposed to come from mistakes but instead it just feels weird. Boxing for some reason needs to be censored, alright noted. But then I had one that showed Bunny, Mad Face, Flower, and Basketball and seeing the once again heavily racialized shock jocks (its ok because one of them is white, but actually they just recolored the asset of another guest thats actually at the table!) I thought 'well surely if Boxing is Censored, then so is Basketball' but instead angry face is censored. Why?? Is angry face censored???? You don't think people are allowed to be mad on the radio???? Have you no clue how annoyingly angry Rush Limbaugh was????? Is it not acceptable for people in France to be mad on the radio? I don't understand…
Bear in mind, you have to get a high score in order to unlock new content by doing the actions again but faster, which just sucks, the only way I can progress is through either blatant prejudice or the shittiest ping pong in my life. Also let me not that it takes FOREVER to unlock a new game or character, they flat priced everything at 10k, and you get 100 for playing a round but more if you get on the score leaderboards. Except the issue is if you're doing really unusually well the leaderboards would probably have a score skyrocketed so high that you wouldn't be able to reap money from it, not to mention it actually takes a long time. The leaderboards are catastrophically hard to breach, I got to round 15 in several of the games and often only got halfway to breaking 10th place (which if I recall correctly only rewards you like 300 dollars). This game reminded me that if you place a store based on skill in a game you better be reasonable to player competency and actually think about how long it will take to unlock the next thing.
Like, this is a piece of shovelware, similar to that of Action 52 and 10001 Games in 1. Where the only appeal of the game is to have as much differing content in it. I presume from a consumption perspective the idea would be you find one or two games in that collection you like and then ditch the rest. That's what makes turning shovelware into a progression experience so unfathomably inane. You want your player to enjoy some of the game, so why would you even bother locking it off? There's no way a shovelware mini games-collection purchaser would want a progression loop to lock them off since the demand is for a wide array of content. My theory is that the meditative style of play, to brainwash you, is actually a bit intentional. Even though it sounds conspiratorial I think there's merit in that because there's a hypno swirl transition that loads between menus and the music is as repetitive as it can get, bordering more on a commercial jingle than a 'song'. Saying that makes it sound like a challenge to everyone who has not played this to give it a try, and sure do whatever you'd like, but you're going to be surprised to find that its not just a vile game, but a dull and lame one too. It goes way too hard into those Jet Set Radio style aesthetics without realizing the real appeal which just glazes the game with a very corporate charmlessness. It's a painful experience but not an amusingly painful one, a 'please switch the TV channel to something else this is freaking me out' level of bad.
Okay so I want to talk about 1 other thing, which is that you can actually use a cheat (!!) to get extra money. You can get 100000 dollars by changing your name to "MoneySux" but the problem is… that's only enough money to Buy 10 of the games XD. the profile activation thing was a pain the fucking ass since you can't switch profiles easily and it was having difficulties letting me switch my name, so I was able to get it to work about twice to play around 15 of the 30 games, I playe. They were all equally either offensive or vacuous. A fighting game with no block or dodge options, a racing game with 1 single lap, and a game with all about button mashing to break a guitar on your PSP. There were a few that were 'bearable' and actually had an idea, for example Dance Off has you spitting in the mic in a 'rap off' where the idea is that you have to copy what the opponents do, much like FNF across a visual bar at exact times. The way they make it harder is by first sending two separate bars of information to copy, and then in the later rounds taking away the ability to read the notes after he said them. This forces you to sort of use basic short term memory skills but there's still a fundamental problem, you don't have anything but implicit timing to when your turn starts so typically you'll miss the first note you intended to hit and health doesn't reset so eventually you just lose anyway. The game is also so unbearable that having it actually challenge you in any substantial way just makes shit way worse.
Finally, you can access the credits from the menu, but the credits run as slow as possible, with each credited person and company coming on screen individually every 5 seconds. I highly suspect that developers knew they made garbage shovelware, and really wanted to hide their involvement as much as possible and so went to their lead and said 'lets turn the credits into an optional dance sequence!'. That's smart of them and was ultimately a good call as this game doesn't even have a wikipedia page dedicated to it.
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I suppose you could argue since I only played half the games I haven't really 'completed' it, but I feel like I've done enough diligence that I can claim to have completed it more than almost anybody else on BL, and the game literally just wont let me play the others without unnecessary grinding.
This write up was commissioned as part of a contractual agreement with the BL user king bacho who successfully cracked the code on a previous game. Initially this was intended to be for the phillips C-DI game Hotel Mario which I may do a reflection on of my own accord one day, but I was having issues getting the emulator to work properly. So he rerolled me this obscure trash instead. In some ways I quite appreciate it since I feel like I was able to offer a much more robust condemnation of this game and its contents. Although there is that lingering question of if I actually learned anything, I learned about a french shovelware company, how videogame publishing can employ racist logics, and what happens when you release a game with no real thought given to the platform you're releasing on (clearly they were able to make a DS game before they just decided not to). I suppose I was also reminded of how great the PSP library is so if its no problem for purists that I'm not playing on original hardware I might play more PSP games in a while. On the other hand, I wouldn't exactly say I'm insecure about it, but spending a dozen pages ridiculing a game with no prior attention to it does feel on the whole a waste of time. Like I know about 3 people that I'm almost certain would read through all of this but I'm not really doing much of anything beyond giving them the morbid entertainment of seeing me whine about my bad experience.
Previously I inquired about that critiquing bad games that the majority of people seem to like is worth doing, but what about games people dont like? If doing that can cause ego problems in terms of hubris and piss people off, then I would describe the act of doing this as a way to cause severe alienation, being in a desert of knowing that you wasted your time playing something obscure and bad and don't want others to really directly experience it either. I feel you can probably draw blood out of any stone if you punch it hard enough, but I don't exactly see myself going out of my way to critique the failings of the NES "E.T." game that much for example, nor on shovelware, nor on trashy phone games. Detchibe and Franz were both threatening me with playing (Mario) the Music Box which honestly seems like a good time in comparison to this greasepube of a game. Regardless, I think I learned my lesson not to run this sort of prize ever again >:C
Erato_Heti
1 year ago