Kid Chameleon KICKS ASS.
This game got no love whatsoever. Everyone fucks this game. Sega forgot about it the day after they released it, and there were no sequels (officially at least), the terrible comic stopped at 2/3 installments, and its shallow characters never made another appearance anywhere.
And that’s a whole lot of horse shit because KC is an incredibly cool tough platformer if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s very fun and like lots of good designed games you can play it for score, speed, or completion and have a totally different challenge each way. There’s a leftover debug secret to stand on a specific block and Warp Zone your way through the game in five minutes, or you can do the longest possible run and hit more exits than SMW. But whatever we’re not here to PLAY games. I’m just gonna talk about the surface bits that even the fans stride past and act embarrassed about, the fucking traitors.
KC has a unique aesthetic approach where it’s deliberately trying to come across as a lush Sega 90s Video Game, AS a lush Sega 90s video game. I imagine that at the time that sort of worked against it because people thought it was boring or unimaginative.
Well a few years after that the BIG popular creative look was a Flash animation jumping on a floating snare drum, and nowadays when people think 90s they draw a stick figure in MS Paint and color it pink and blue, so go fuck yourselves 90s gamer teenagers who were too good for gorgeous environmental tilework and sunglassed leather jacket soullessly marketed at them.
Anyway KC used actual 90s tools and 90s brains, so instead of being a heartless execrable waste it easily grabs the evocation and soaks you in evolved versions of forested lakes and Lava Levels. Everything is loaded with skulls and mysterious ruins from no civilization because gamey.
(All the bosses are slight variations on Heady Metal’s design. He only looks more fucked up each time, until in the final fight he has many rows of eyes, and then a tiny head in each of his eye sockets.)
The plot is about Wild Side the sentient arcade, or Wild Side the sentient video game inside of it, or Heady Metal its sentient boss that takes it over. It’s an ambiguous Trinity that never has its provenance explained - built by nobody for no profit beyond a mysterious transaction in a reality higher than the one it inhabits. We never find out how Heady Metal, the game’s boss and face, gets “free” of his scripting. I don’t think he ever really does.
But one or another this new Video Game Building is trapping kids inside of it for totally opaque reasons. We never see these other kids in the game or once you defeat it - just lined up, waiting to enter the game. So A Cool Kid with no name and the greatest gamer skills ever steps inside to defeat him - putting the story into the same boat as many Star Trek holodeck episodes - the story of a human entering a god to fight it.
The closest myth precedent I can think of is that of Saturn devouring his son, or Jonah swallowed by the whale. But the relationship between Kid and HM is acrimonious without blood relation and Jonah doesn’t fight and destroy the whale to escape it. I really do think Kid Chameleon has a special story. It’s never explained how Kid could possibly “beat” a game that doesn’t want him to win in same way the Bible never really touches on why an omnipotent God allows powerful enemies to torture and claim the souls of His people.
The share identical truths: The undefeatable enemy’s an obvious lie, created by adults to frighten kids. We place our children in “virtual realities” where a scary patriarchal face tells them: Your peers are already mine. Defying me presents challenges greater than any your Earth has to offer. You cannot beat me.
Abrahamic faiths and Kid Chameleon are the same persuasive story, the first wanting your life and soul, and the latter expecting you to take it as a challenge and defeat it for the low price of like $40 unless you emulate it.
Toss your Final Fantasies and Xenogears in the hamper: Kid Chameleon is straight-up a story about a child killing God.
(Even though most people don’t even consider its story to really be a story. Same people who bend over to excuse the traditional stupid chestnut: “fight a single handed war for a royal family you never meet” - Mario, Zelda. Mario can die in two hits, which gives him more in common with Koopas than with their King. Yet he kills Koopas by the million even though they seem to be family employees more than anything, and hangs out with Bowser and plays games. Unspeakable.)
(And to be fair, you can emulate the Bible, too.)
Heady Metal is a God that thumbs his nose at humans and boasts, a God begging to be knocked down. While this one’s described as having gone wrong somehow, we have to question whether Heady Metal’s “fallibility” is not, in truth, just as calculated and intentional as the “infallibility” of our incessantly flummoxed Creator, who, it is surely coincidence, requires you to either 1. go nuts or 2. listen to cruel and selfish humans if you want to listen to him. Video games are for trapping kids without killing them. So how was Wild Side even deviating from its intended purpose?
