King of the Jungle

It’s 2 am.

We just held a party at this house. Pre-drinks included some sort of Wii Fit Plus championship. It was Ok. Obviously I didn’t take part because Wii Fit Plus is an uncool, casual, kiddy extravaganza, and any fun the party guests were having was just hollow, fake fun, compared to the hardcore gaming experiences they could be having. Their laughter, hollow, fake laughter. Obviously such shallow gameplay couldn’t hold them so we had to walk to the pub to continue the night. We arrived at the pub and they said they were closing, the bottleshop was still open so we bought a couple more cartons and walked home, knowing only the despair of Wuhu Island awaited us.

Upon returning, the unwashed masses returned to their Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit Plus, gleaming whatever hollow enjoyment they could out of the household’s two Wii boxes; the second Wii, purchased by my casual gaming housemate, symbolising the kind of callous opulence Australians lived in during the naive days of Emperor Rudd and his economic stimulus packages. The other hardcore gamers and I discussed hardcore subjects like international communism, capitalist-anachronism, and the scourge of democracy in holding back this society from ideological purity. But as the beer and goon ran dry, so too did the crowd thin out, the short lived thrills of Wii Basketball running thin. Desperate for companionship, and the cheeseburgers retrieved from the mainstream, 24 hour Mcdonalds, the hardcore gamers and I went back to the living room.

“What silly game are the bongo drums for?” asked the most beautiful girl in attendance. I glanced over at the gimmicky, novelty plastic drums and fished out the game so desperately attached to them, so obviously strangled at the design stage and shoehorned with ridiculous sound based controls.

There are so many ways you could demean this game.

You could call it just the best sidescrolling platformer, merely the most fun game released for the Nintendo GameCube, or only the most visually striking game of a generation. But all those descriptions do it a diservice.

This is the best game of all time and it will take a design philosophy that undertakes incorporating a new psychological paradigm in the construction of ecstasy to beat it. The most beautiful girl in attendance and I never need to have sex, for we have played Jungle Beat together. I bought a second copy of this game on Wii, that I’ve never even bothered playing, just to generate sales and income for it’s sacred developers, EAD Tokyo. But the hardcore gamer and I agreed, during our discussions on pop economics and psychology, that we couldn’t change the world simply though changing our shopping habits, so I wrote this.