The Freaks of Arkham Asylum: The Scarecrow

It goes without saying that Batman: Arkham Asylum is a great game.  Likewise, it goes without saying that Arkham Asylum (the location itself) is one creepy place, with its claustrophobic hallways and ancient hidden passageways.  Batman fans know that it is here that all of Gotham City's super-villains are kept after they get their asses handed to them by the Bat.  While most of these villains are completely insane freaks that each deserve their own blog post, today I'm going to talk about Scarecrow.  In my opinion he was the creepiest character in the game (yes, worse than the Joker), with plenty of appearances throughout Arkham Asylum, each more intense than the previous.

For those who haven't played this game or read the comics, the Scarecrow is a villain who is obsessed with the concept of fear and has invented various fear-inducing toxic gasses.  The scarecrow sack mask only adds to the effect, along with preventing him from breathing in his own fear toxins.

As with all characters in the Arkham Asylum game, the Scarecrow is released from his cell and begins his rampage of terror throughout the asylum, happily attacking security guards and Batman.  From the first moment we encounter him, he is wearing his Scarecrow getup, complete with syringe-tipped gloves.  I've always wondered, did the asylum personnel let him wear this crazy costume in his cell, or did he break into a storage locker and equip all these things after he was released?  Because he seems to be all geared up after only being out of his cell for a short time.  Oh well, this is Batman.  If we can believe that a giant half-human, half-crocodile guy can exist in this world, we can believe that the Arkham staff are stupid enough to let the Scarecrow wear syringe gloves in his cell.

Moving on, whenever you encounter the Scarecrow in Arkham, you inevitably enter a nightmarish hallucination sequence caused by Batman breathing in the fear-toxins.  In these sequences, the Scarecrow manages to take the freakishness to the next level.  Batman hallucinates that the Scarecrow is a 100ft tall giant, with a cringe-inducing distorted voice.

These sequences are pretty intense to play at night without lights.

In the unfortunate case that Batman dies during a hallucination, you are treated to a cutscene of the Scarecrow creeping towards you in the dark, adding to your nightmares for the evening.

There is one hallucination that is worth mentioning due to how cleverly you transfer from the real world to the nightmare world.  If you haven't played the game yet, don't read on!  During one section of the game you are calmly walking through a deserted area of the asylum when Batman starts lightly coughing every once in a while.  All of a sudden the game freezes and the screen gets distorted.  If you've ever had a graphics card overheat and start displaying artifacts on the screen, you will recognize the distortion and expect the worst (I thought I fried my video card).  Before you go into full panic mode and shut down your PC or console, the game unfreezes and cuts to the opening movie of the game, but this time with the roles of Batman and the Joker reversed.  I have to give credit to the game developers for creating such a refreshing prank!

In conclusion, the Scarecrow is one severely freaky character in Arkham Asylum, whose hallucination sequences must be experienced at least once.  What did you guys think of these sequences?  Did you get fooled by the spoof "crash?"

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Out of Place Gaming Moments

One very important factor that can make a game great is immersion.  We want to feel like we are in the world created by the game developers, interacting with everything and everyone.  Occasionally game devs throw in Easter eggs or other features that completely pull you out of that immersion.  Sometimes it's a welcome change, sometimes not, and sometimes it's just plain weird.  Previously I covered the strange and out of place giant heart in GTA IV, and today I'm going to talk about a couple other gaming oddities that seem out of place in the worlds they try to create.

Blitzball, from Final Fantasy X

When you hear the words Final Fantasy, what comes to your mind is most likely lengthy quests, epic boss battles, and......underwater soccer matches?  Ok probably not so much with the soccer, but unfortunately those of us who played through Final Fantasy X had no choice but to add this awkward event to our list of experiences.

You're pretty much screwed every time this happens.

Mini-games are no stranger to Final Fantasy games, remember all the hours you spent in the Gold Saucer amusement park in Final Fantasy VII?  In FFX, the team-based underwater sport known as Blitzball feels completely out of place with the monster-slaying, temple-exploring aspects of the game, but that could be forgiven if the mini-game was fun.  It is fun right?  Wrong.  Blitzball is a sloppy mess, an attempt to mix together turn-based battle and a sporting event, with disastrous results.  Your teammates are severely underpowered, the opponent AI is awful and unfair, usually ganging up on you and leaving you no choice but to fumble the ball.  The very last thing that could redeem Square Enix for introducing Blitzball into the world of Final Fantasy would be if this mini-game was optional.  But alas, nobody who plays through FFX can escape its clutches, seeing as you must complete at least one Blitzball match in order to advance in the game.

The Super Mario-style level in Star Trek Elite Force II

This is actually a pretty funny addition to Star Trek Elite Force II, even though it is in the form of a hidden Easter egg.  When playing a Star Trek-themed first-person shooter, the last thing you'd expect to encounter would be a side scrolling level in the vein of Super Mario.  However in this game it does happen.  At one point you can find a hidden warp pipe, shaped just like the nice green ones we all know and love.  Entering the warp pipe shifts the game to third-person view and takes you to a platforming level that clearly pokes fun at the mustached plumber.  Don't believe me?  See for yourself:

Honorable Mention: Everything in Conker's Bad Fur Day

This game is like one big episode of Monty Python, you never know what kind of level you'll end up in as you progress through. What starts off as a simple story about a drunken squirrel trying to find his way home soon evolves into a completely crazy adventure unlike anything you'll see even to this day.  One moment you'll be inside a giant mountain of dung fighting a living (and singing!) piece of waste, the next moment you'll be battling dinosaurs in a prehistoric-themed level, or pulling off slo-mo moves in a world that pays homage to the Matrix. It's unexpected, and everything is pretty much out of place, so this deserves an honorable mention.

This post has barely scratched the surface of out of place elements in videogames, what kinds have you encountered during your years of gaming?

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Sligs: It's An Odd World After All

With a name like Oddworld, you expect a weird game.  The Oddworld series definitely delivered the strangeness, and in a very good way.  The games had creepy locations and an even creepier population.  I still remember my "what the hell" moment seeing the animated Abe head for the first time on the title screen of Abe's Oddysee.  Today though we're going to overlook Abe and talk about the Oddworld games' iconic enemies: the Sligs.

Straight from the demented mind of Lorne Lanning

Sligs are to Abe what Goombas are to Mario.  However Mario never had to deal with fast-moving Goombas with machine guns who could pick him off from a distance.  Sligs are basically used as security personal throughout Oddworld, tasked with fending off intruders (I'm looking at you Abe) and keeping Mudokon slaves in line, which usually means beating them for no reason.  They are brutal, merciless, rude, and lazy, often sleeping and smoking on the job.

Appearance-wise, these upstanding citizens make you wonder what's going on inside Lorne Lanning's head; they look to be something out of your worst nightmare.  Tentacles either cover or extend from their mouths (we'll never know for sure since they always wear a gas-mask), making Sligs look like they are swallowing a giant green spider.  They also have no natural legs.  Their bodies end at the bottom of their spine, forcing them to crawl around using their arms unless they are fitted with prosthetic legs.

Slig without robo-pants

Sligs come in a few variants.  There's the standard foot soldier Slig (the first picture of the article), the flying Slig who uses a helicopter-style prosthetic that Dr. Robotnik would be proud of:

And then there's the Big-Bro Slig.  This is a Slig who has been beefed up using massive amounts of steroids, making him so large that he needs a heavy duty four-legged prosthetic in order to move around.

Of course Sligs are just one type of creature in the Oddworld games, there are many other nightmarish creations to talk about, but that's a story for another day!  Hopefully this brought back some memories of sneaking around Rupture Farms, hiding from these mean green machines!

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Shrek on Xbox: A Twisted Fairy Tale Indeed

It pretty much goes without saying that the majority of movie-licensed games are very poor quality, with the exception of great games like EA's Lord of the Rings series, and the recent Batman: Arkham Asylum/City games.  Back in 2001 a particularly painful movie-licensed game was released alongside the original Xbox: Shrek.  Why am I picking on a kids game you might ask?  Well the reason is I played it back in the day and I found it to be an odd game, so I feel it belongs in our blog of strangeness.

Judging by this cut and paste artwork, we can tell the game will be high-quality.

Begin Rant

Ok there's a few things I want to complain about before I get into some of the weird things about this game.  First of all, this game probably tricked many unsuspecting people into purchasing it, leading them to believe it would follow the hilarious plot of the first Shrek movie.  This is not the case at all; the game shuns the plot of the film, opting to go with the “Merlin is evil, go stop him” route.  Because of this we don't get any of the characters from the film besides Shrek and a very brief appearance of the Magic Mirror (supposedly Merlin has kidnapped Fiona, but we never see her, unless she's in the ending credits.  I never bothered trying to beat the final boss so I don't know for sure).  Words cannot express my disappointment at the absence of Donkey.  Nothing says “I'm cheap and I don't give a damn” like not licensing everyone's favorite characters, and on top of that not providing a voice actor for Shrek.  How can you make a Shrek game without at least hiring a Mike Myers sound-alike?

M.I.A.

End Rant

Now that we got through the rant, let's talk a little about this strange (and bad, very bad) game.

The Environment Art Style

Whereas the environments in the first Shrek film were clearly inspired by medieval times, the environments you encounter in the game look like they were rejected from the Nightmare Before Christmas.

Structures have crazy proportions, and everythingis bump mapped so that Bill Gates could flip the bird to Sony by showing off his more powerful hardware.  It's kind of interesting and kind of cringe-worthy as you wander around these areas.  However you'll spend most of your time lost due to horrible level design.  The art style in this game should have made the environments more enjoyable, but as a whole it somehow feels soul-less.  Maybe it's because the areas are so sparsely populated?  Maybe it's the crap soundtrack?  Either way, when playing this game you get that weird feeling you only experience when playing budget games.

The Characters

One of the things that made the Shrek films so enjoyable were the comedic re-creations of classic fairy tale characters (I can't help but laugh whenever the cross-dressing evil stepsister has a line of dialog).  Fortunately we get a little of this in the Xbox game, with such classics as Humpty-Dumpty and Little Bo Peep.  However the remaining characters/enemies are mostly uninspired, such as witches, skeletons, bats, court jesters, and many more things from Blandville.  There are a few really weird character creations though, such as Gumby-like kids with slingshots:

Shrek takes out his frustrations on half-assed character design.

the candy monstrosity Frankendrop (who happens to also be a boxer), and the oddly funny disco-dancing cow that appears in a few of the levels.  Something that I also found a little odd are the human characters.  In the films they were portrayed as exaggerated but semi-realistic people, but the game tends to show them as dwarf-like with bland faces.  Did the developers care at all about being true to the source material?

This ends my quick look at Shrek for the original Xbox.  This is really one of those games that you have to play for yourself to experience how bad it is, along with how awkward the environments are.  I feel like I should end this post with a Smashmouth song like the movie, but the game devs didn't bother to license their music either.

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Unexplained Strangeness in Bully

Have you ever come across a character in a game whose back-story isn't explained, despite the fact that we know the back-story could be awesome, even to the point of rivaling the main storyline?  It's annoying that game developers sometimes leave interesting stories out of our games, so that we may only speculate in forums or (shudder) fan fiction.  But as with all media, the authors can't explain everything or the games/movies/books would never be released.  In this article I'm going to be looking at some of the weird things in Rockstar's Bully game that have unfortunately gone unexplained.

But wait a second, Bully?  A game about a kid taking over a private school?  You might be thinking that other than the exaggerated high-school setting, there's nothing too interesting happening in the background.  But keep in mind that this is a Rockstar game, remember all the crazy things you heard on the car radios in the Grand Theft Auto games?  Not to mention the supposed Bigfoot sightings in GTA San Andreas.  Bully surprisingly contains some aspects from the science fiction and horror genres.

The presence of aliens is strongly implied in the game.  One of the missions in Bully has you collecting transistor radios for a hobo camped out next to the school.  Once you've given all the radios to the hobo, he builds some kind of device, and then is promptly pulled into the sky by a huge tractor beam, never to be seen again.

Beam me up Jimmy!

That's not all the alien evidence either.  Later on in the game you get access to the nearby asylum, where you discover more hints.  In one room is a portrait of a scientist standing next to what looks like a little alien:

Like all conspiracy theories involving aliens, low quality photos are to be expected.

Further exploration takes you to a room with X-ray images hung on a wall.   Some of these images appear to show an alien's head.

I don't know about you, but when I was playing through Bully I definitely wanted to learn more about the alien presence in the little town this game is set in, it seemed more interesting than the game's plot of taking over the school.

Earlier I also mentioned horror aspects in Bully.  It is hinted that there is a werewolf inhabiting the area.  In the same X-ray room mentioned above, there are also an X-ray showing what appears to be a wolf-ish head on a human body.  Nearby in the asylum is an area that looks to have once been barricaded off.  When you come across this area, the barricades have long since been violently destroyed, giving the appearance that something has broken out of the asylum.  Another fun thing Rockstar added to this game is a werewolf mask that you can equip.  The interesting part is that the mask has a facial scar similar to that of the game's main antagonist Gary (coincidence?).  Add to that the occasional howling sounds that can be heard at night, and you have one fun side-story that the developers have left mostly to our imaginations.

 This concludes my look at some interesting story possibilities in Bully that have yet to be explored in depth.  What kind of unexplained game stories have you guys come across?

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