I refuse to believe the surfing works as intended. I have never lasted more than 30 seconds in that mode. What do the buttons even do??
5 Likes
372. PUYO PUYO TETRIS

I nearly won a Puyo Puyo Tetris tournament at PAX last year even though I’d never played the game before and half the setups had fucked up button mappings. I’m certain I could have taken the whole thing but the tourney was running late and my blood sugar was awfully low and I had to split to have dinner with SButts. I had better shit to do. Why bother winning a game when you can be bonding with humans, right?
But I definitely coulda won that shit if I wanted to, okay? Nearly every other competitor was unbelievably bad. PAX is not the place to be if you enjoy playing games more than gaming culture. It is a place where they ban sticks from Street Fighter tournaments because they offer an “unfair advantage”. It’s a place where all the old-timey console setups are running on HDTVs. It’s a place where half the booths probably weren’t selling Funkopops but it sure felt like they shoulda been. It’s a place that ain’t for me.
There’s only one place I belong: in bed, in the dark, playing Puyo Puyo Tetris on my Switch. While I’m confident 2017 me coulda won that tourney had I actually ate lunch I don’t think the current me would fare too well. Not even on a full stomach. I may currently be ranked 69th in the state (which is better than being #1) but I’ve seriously lost a step or three. I regularly go on double-digit losing streaks, as if I’ve forgotten every single thing I learned from Howard & Nester’s guides to Tetris. In the past this would have upset me, cuz I was all about playing to win, but Puyo Puyo Tetris is currently not about competition. It’s a way to numb myself out while making brief, wordless contact with other human beings. In Puyo Puyo Tetris I can’t upset anyone by saying the wrong thing, and I lose so often that most of my opponents surely walk away smiling ear to ear. So I think Puyo Puyo Tetris is now my #1 lonely game.
But go ahead and add me to your friends list. I’ll bop your ass.
371. NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORDS
https://twitter.com/BachelorSoft/status/975992115535732737
This Tweet should have been popular. That’s what I think.
New York Times Crosswords for Nintendo DS used to be my #1 indulgence whenever things got very it’s-bed-time-all-the-time. But then I completed most of the puzzles. I switched over to the iOS version, which offered a few free puzzles every week and occasionally, when I was flush with cash, I’d splurge and drop $2 for a month’s worth of access to that NYT Crossword vault.
But then they got real stingy with the free puzzles and jacked the price up to $7 a month. That’s even worse than today’s Bari Weiss column, if you ask me. Maybe almost as bad as supporting the invasion of Iraq.
So I no longer do crosswords but I hope Will Shortz is living a happy life inside his solid gold mansion.
370. ANIMAL CROSSING: POCKET CAMP
You will never see me like a horny tweet. I have enough anxieties fav’ing everyone’s very cute selfies, but I do it anyway because even history’s greatest beauties need positive reinforcement.
I know this because I am one of those beauties.
Please…tell me I’m beautiful while you still can. Who knows how much longer these good looks will last.
Anyway if you ever see me liking a photo with, like, a butt or exposed shoulders or a hint of ankle it was either an accident or my sister got ahold of my phone. My sister is a cruel prankster. The Animal Crossing screenshot you see above is one of the selfies she left on my 3DS when she lived in my town. Her character’s name was BigTUFF! and she was always teaching my neighbors profanity and crafting lewd fashions down at the tailor. I eventually kicked her out of my town and told her to buy her own damn game after my best friend Hamphrey the Hamster began signing off by telling me to “suck it!”
Hamphrey and I did not have that kind of relationship. That was not cool.
My sister is currently hooked on Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. We do not talk much nowadays but when we do she either asks me weird questions about my recent tweets or talks about how this Animal Crossing game isn’t very good, but she can’t stop playing it, yet it’s better than it was, because they added this and that. Then she’ll make me look at her improved campsite, and every time it looks more and more like it was decorated by a serial killer. Like, the attic in her van was just a weight bench and walls lined with barrels, which was bad enough, but now the centerpiece of her town is a dentist’s chair on white tile surrounded by columns and fenced-in animals? It is upsetting imagery. I do not like it. I do not like that my sister might be a real sickie.
So if I ever fav a nude or get arrested for dismembering a corpse please remember: I was framed. Framed by BigTUFF!
369. TENDER LOVING CARE

A few months back I actually had a gal in my bedroom for the first time in a decade or two. Scandalous stuff. Her and I. Alone. With the door closed. In front of my computer. Playing a video game.
That game was Tender Love Care, an erotically-charged psychological-thriller developed for interactive-CD-ROM by the makers-of the 7th Guest.
It starred John Hurt, an expensive sports car, and a supporting cast that looked like they were pulled from the set of a juicer infomercial.
I think the plot was about a sexually adventurous nurse trying to heal a traumatized couple’s broken relationship by…fucking them, maybe? The game seems to boil down to clicking one or two hot spots in a room, where you uncover diaries whose entries are all about the nurse’s hot legs, followed by full motion video clips of the nurse not really doing anything hot. Occasionally John Hurt gives you a psychological quiz to find out your real deal kinks. I do not know if this results in you receiving your purity test score at the end of the game. I did not finish it; that gal went home 20 minutes after we started. Still trying to figure out why things fizzled out so quickly.
Maybe it’s not as fun as I thought, watching someone else click on drawers and reading news clippings? Maybe I should have chosen something more dynamic, or cooperative, like…I dunno, I don’t play many games with other people. Borderlands? Would things have gone better had we played Borderlands?
Or maybe she just isn’t adventurous as I am when it comes to digital entertainment and virtual sex? Maybe I misread the situation. Maybe I was moving way too fast. Maybe we should have sat on my bed reading old issues of Little Lulu.
Or maybe I made all the wrong choices on the personality tests? That’s unlikely though. I have a great personality.
Or maybe it had nothing to do with me. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well. Maybe she had diarrhea.
Yeah, it was probably diarrhea.
368. KETSUI
I am here today because in 2002 I read a negative writeup of Ketsui on Insert Credit.
This writeup was very bad. I will not quote it here, because I understand that people are capable of growth and change. I know I wouldn’t want anyone digging up anything I wrote prior to, like, last week. Especially if I wrote something as silly as “Ketsui is Dodonpachi with helicopters and homing attacks.” Or “It’s a shooting game for casual gamers, but marketed to the dedicated gamer.” Or abbreviating DoDonPachi as “DDD” which…wait…w-w-what…
For a little while there Ketsui had a rep amongst the Western shooter community as “the bad Cave game”. It largely came from that piece; the only positive impressions of the game came from people crazy enough to drop $2,000+ on a new PCB. And who you gonna trust? The world’s #1 GamePark 32 fansite Insert Credit dot com or some rich French dude on the shmups forums?
I bet that French guy’s never even set foot inside Taito Hey.
But some time in 2003 I started downloading shooter superplays off, like, Hotline or some shit, right? And one of them was a compliation of Ketsui footage set to “Tough Boy” by TOM☆CAT. The game in that video did not play much like DoDonPachi; yeah, it also had a chaining sytem, but in Ketsui you wanna get all up in your enemy’s area when you blew them up. That’s how you got the big points. Some nice risk vs. reward shit, maybe. Was kinda hard to tell what was really going on in a 128 x 96 res RealMedia video, but it seemed way more aggressive than the DDP superplays. I was pretty sure Insert Credit had gotten shit way wrong. And between that and the one annoying guy who wrote all those super long essays about games that were really endless blathering about his dumb life I realized maybe I didn’t like Insert Credit. Maybe it belonged on my shit list.
Being on my shit list meant I still read every single thing ever posted on the site but I did so with a scowl.
Around 2004 I came into some money: a whole one-thousand U.S. dollars. That’s an awful lot of money, if you ask me. Life changing money. What would you do with that much money? Save it? Pay down your debts? Invest in a new look? Move and start a new life in a new town? Or perhaps…blow it all on video games?
Guess what I did.
Yes. I bought an arcade cabinet and a Ketsui PCB.
(This cost me well under $1,000 but for the sake of this post let’s pretend I broke the bank here, okay? In reality most of the money went to fast food and copays.)
Ketsui was one of the pricier PCBs at the time but I decided to go big so I could prove the Insert Credit of 2002 wrong. Also because it wasn’t emulated and likely wouldn’t be anytime soon. But I mostly bought it cuz I wanted to prove that I had a good eye…for game.
Which I did, of course. Many people know it now but I’m going to pretend that I was one of the first people in America to declare Ketsui is a masterpiece. It is a top 5 game of all times, depending on the day of the week. Sometimes it gets bumped by Espgaluda. Sometimes by one of the Mushihimesama Futari variations; I can’t remember which one cuz there are so fucking many but I know one is way better than the others. But for at least 2 days a week? Ketsui is one of the best games, and easily better than and very different from DoDonPachi if you actually like and understand shooters.
If you just wanna credit feed yeah whatever just pick the one with the cutest pilots and never talk to me about games again.
At some point you realize – surprise – you’re going to keep living. That you’re gonna have to move that fuckin’ cab someday. May have to haul it up some stairs, even. That it doesn’t matter if you got it + a few PCBs cheap in 2004. It’s still gonna take up half the fuckin’ living space in your new home. You realize that shit got to go.
You realize that this world is even more bullshit than you thought.
So you sell off almost all your shooters. They move quickly, for much, much more than you paid for them. No one wants your cab; the hoarders who used to be obsessed with Neo-Geo carts moved on to shooter PCBs, but they don’t actually play these games, so they aren’t interested in hardware. And you’re mostly okay with this, cuz money helps you eat. It keeps the lights on.
But you hold off on selling Ketsui for a little bit. It’s the most valuable game by far but it’s your snobby little baby. You think maybe you’ll get your life together and find a place to live with your drawing board and and your guitar and your cab and your stupid game that you never got remotely good at. Maybe you’ll find a nice, cheap place in the woods where you can curse loud and free whenever you lose your last life to the stage 3 midboss, or sing and shred real deal suicide ballads regardless of how late it is. Regardless of how troubled the neighbors might be.
But of course this doesn’t happen. You end up poking around online, trying to find spaces outside of shmups to sell this thing for the most possible dollars. You end up at places you haven’t thought of in awhile.
You end up on the Insert Credit forums. You realize some shit went fuckin’ down.
Maybe one of the top threads is about selling video game lifestyle t-shirts. But somewhere below that? Pretty sure there was a thread mentioning select button dot net AKA the new Place To Be.
So you log on there, hoping you’d see peeps wanting to drop quadruple digits on a R@RE HTF arcade game. But instead everyone getting angry about David Cage, and Uncharted, or saying nice shit about Dog Days, or Ultima: Runes of Virtue, or Uncharted 2, or Alien Soldier, (still) or, most importantly, politic’s.
You realize these were the people you shoulda been hanging with all these years, but it takes you like half a decade to work up the the nerve to chat with the. But that’s alright. Cuz maybe they weren’t ready to talk to you just yet…cuz you’re just that cool.
(You weren’t ready either, ok. You spent a little while thinking Bioshock wasn’t a total piece of shit. You had problems, okay.)
The arcade version of Ketsui was released between DoDonPachi DaiOuJou and Espgaluda. The latter two received excellent PS2 ports courtesey of Arika. Ketsui did not. The PS2 wasn’t capable of a perfect port. I think the system choked due to some weird scrolling technique used in the background of one stage and even though it was just a superficial thing the owner of Arika refused to compromise because Ketsui was his favorite game.
Now I may be misremembering some things there but I’m sure of this: Arika went to Sony and applied for a PS3 devkit. Their application was rejected. Sony did not want a 2D game like Ketsui on their console. That game with the giant enemy crab was cool with them though.
Please keep this in mind if you ever see anyone praising Ken Kutaragi as a genius. Dude sucked.
367. KISS: PSYCHO CIRCUS: THE NIGHTMARE CHILD
KISS is one of my major influences and I am not ashamed. They are not a good band, but they are the best band, because KISS is the funniest, dumbest, most tasteless band. I know this because I have read about a dozen books about KISS. I have listened to all their shitty albums. I’ve even seen their made for TV movie.
But I have never played any of their video games. This is unlikely to change unless someone tells me they’re loaded with Paul Stanley stage banter. Like I’ll slog through 6 hours of key hunts if it means I get to play a boss fight while listening to clips of all the times Paul flipped out on a fan with a laser pointer. Otherwise I’ll pass, thanks.
26 Likes
HOBO Please give a talk about why Ketsui is good. I have owned it twice and will own it a third time and I think it is only okay.
Also this list continues to be incredible.
You would not be happy with how little KISS is in that game. So very little KISS. I think they each get their own domain and you have to go beat a boss there or something? I don’t know. I had a pirated DC copy and maybe the burn was bad, or maybe the game was boring, and I didn’t get very far.
The only time I saw KISS live was on the Psycho Circus tour, and they had 3d glasses to wear for the screens to be in 3d, and it was weird to watch something in 3d even though there were real 3d dudes standing there performing in front of me.
4 Likes
I paid over one hundred english pounds for ketsui ds because I wanted a portable game I could play until the end of time. while I didn’t play it for quite that long, it remains my favourite game on the system. even if at that size it feels terribly straining on the old eyeballs. zoning out only inches before those ribbons of fire and curious ejaculations of bullets is just so beautiful and meditative
1 Like
The lack of KISS is what sold me on Psycho Circus.
there was a kiss psycho circus comic series around the same time. i had a couple of issues i’d found in back issue bargain bins, and it also had very little kiss content. it was mainly a bunch of horror stories that you’d expect to be associated with a more contemporary nu-metal band, but they all took place in a world where the 4 members of kiss were some kind marvelesque cosmic giants watching over everything
1 Like
it does tickle me that after all these years, hobes has managed to definitively solve writing about videogames
6 Likes
you know, like an idiot I used to spend a lot of time thinking about how to write about video games. way more time than I spent actually writing about video games, or reading about video games. now I don’t think about video games ever, and I sure as fuck don’t read about them. but I’ve read every damn word of this list, and you can put that shit on the back of the hardcover.
12 Likes
Thank you for saying nice things. I didn’t log in or read the site for a week cuz I felt painfully embarrassed and ashamed of my posts. Good to know they’re actually all perfect and good.
I didn’t have power for awhile there so I am a little behind on work. I will post once I am caught up.
Then I will delete this post. Enjoy it while you can!!
14 Likes
7 Likes
My mom found my posts and she’s throwing a big party to celebrate how good they are.
She’s planning on reading them out loud to the neighbors.
Please pray for me.
15 Likes
I literally cannot think of a worse fate to befall. Pure mortification.
Hi Ma Bachelor!
hey everyone im grounded cos my mom read all my online cusses out loud at that party last week and everyone got real mad at her (and me) and we may have to move to another apartment complex, it was that bad, but last night mom fell asleep on the couch while watching LUCIFEr on her laptop so hi, missed you all, gonna unplug this computer now so when mom wakes up in a few hours the battery will be dead and she won’t have time to charge it before her doctors appointment and i bet during the car ride i can butter her up real good and get her to return my computer and give me the password for net nanny and then i can post all the games i wrote about and gifs i made, by hand, on paper, for you
mods please delete this post if im not back by tomorrow night cos if she finds out i used the computer without asking im in deep s*** (doodoo), she already noticed a few of my log ons to buy shoes and return shoes from zappos and i got away with saying ‘i didnt do it, it must be hacks’ but i dont think that’s gonna work this time, also please don’t quote this post because it has to be deleted and if you quote it she’ll know i was on here and i’ll get in even more trouble ok thank you
ps read mell lazauras ‘momma’ at creator.scom, itll make you appreciate your mom
11 Likes
366. NELDA NOCKBLADDER’S ANATOMY LESSON
Imagine making an unofficial sequel to some shitty 25 year old mascot platformer or CGI adventure game when you could be trying to one-up whatever this shit is. I mean, I haven’t played it, and it seems to be one of those deals where instead of actual jokes every other word is some nonsense like BLINGWAD or DOOZAG or CUSTARD, but it’s clearly a billion times more interesting than fuckin’ Bubsy or Spyro or Vexx. It’s probably very playable and good. Probably gonna get that big time 501 Games list bump and before the week is out everyone will be raving about it and pretending they’ve always loved it, like what happened with Little Ralph. Can’t believe how much everyone’s talking about Little Ralph! I even overheard discussion of it while in line at the post office the other day. Other patrons were exchanging tips and tricks and inviting each other to future competitive Little Ralph tournaments. Can you believe it? It’s amazing how influential I am, and how long lines at the post office can be. I was there for almost an hour!!
365. KIRBY’S DREAM COURSE
The best video game sport is golf.
The best Kirby games are not platformers.
The best golf game is not Kirby’s Dream Course, but it’s up there. Probably the best one that wasn’t made by dads, for dads. I’m a big dad booster nowadays. Think I’m starting to fully appreciate the dad mindset, even though I’m not old enough to drink. Like, I currently find stylized recreations of unattainable real world luxuries far more surreal, hypnotic, and pleasurable than the most tripped out digital dreamcscape, and I bet this is a sign of maturity. I bet that’s a sign that I’m ready to adopt.
But if given the chance to hit the links in the real you better believe I’d say “oh hell naw.” I consider particpating in such an extravagant, environmentally destructive pastime out of bounds. Heck, you might say I’d rather go green than be on the green. Yet minigolf…minigolf is a different story. I’m sure it’s okay to play and enjoy minigolf. It’s miniature, after all. It can’t hurt nobody.
Been a long time since I played me some minigolf though. For awhile there I undertook a grand project where my goal was to visit and review every single miniature golf course in these United States. It was incredibly fun and helped me snap out of the deepest funk of my life but I had to give up on that dream after, like, 2 weeks cuz I had no job, no car, and no money. Turns out that even though minigolf is way cheaper than real golf it’s still damn expensive.
I’m sure if I had just a little bit of funding I could have kept going, but oh well. Why dwell on what could have been? Even though I definitely woulda had a popular minigolf “blog” which would have lead to a major “book deal” followed by my own “reality” TV show and product “endorsements” and multiple visits to “divorce court”. Even though…
…I would have been so happy.
I probably missed the window for getting famous for writing about minigolf. Now you’d probably have to do youtubes. Probably a buncha folks already on that shit. But I bet once the print edition of this list moves a million copies I’ll have carte blanche to do whatever I want and maybe…maybe I’ll pitch the minigolf idea as the followup.
Tell me, gentle reader…would you like to be my caddy? Please sound off, and post gifs demonstrating your ability to carry a solid gold putter at least 10 yards without fainting, in the comments.
364. SENGOKU TURB
I have no clue what TURB means but I bet it’s used in Nelda Nodblocker at least once.
363. MARUSO NO ONNA
This title may translate as “A Taxing Woman” and before you ask no, it’s not about any of my ex-wives…! That’s very sexist of you to think that and next time I run into one of them (in court) I’m going to tell on you! No, this is based on an award winning major motion picture about a lady tax inspector and her comedic adventures chasing down tax cheats. It is for Famicom, developed by Capcom, and it is not available in English. Every Famicom game featuring giant robots or anime hobbits has a fan translation by now but somehow this, the dream game I didn’t know existed until I compiled this list, is unplayable. And you know who I blame for that? Sexist creeps like you who are afraid of strong female protagonists and think ill thoughts about all my wonderful ex-wives…!!
362. ADVANCED GUARDIAN HEROES
I used to carry my Game Boy Advance and assorted games in a purple Crown Royal bag, similar to the one pictured above. I’d gotten the bag from my uncle, who was a man with an appreciation for the finer things in life, such as Cuban cigars, high-end stereo equipment, exotic woods, pornographic laserdiscs, and expensive watches. When he bequeathed this bag upon me he did so with such ceremony that I thought it must have once been partner to a fancy pocketwatch. I thought “If I carry around my digital children’s toys in this no one will judge me poorly. Instead they will think I am an eccentric, well-to-do fellow, and maybe that will lead to me getting blowed while playing Advance Wars on a bus.”
Such a dream never came true, of course, and that may be because Crown Royal has nothing to do with high-class watches and is actually a brand of mid-range Canadian whisky. Toting around such a bag probably wasn’t a good fit with the shakes and seizures I was plagued by during the Game Boy Advance era – I don’t know what “the DTs” are, because I’m not old enough to drink, but is there a chance people would have thought I was suffering from them?
The bag was also a very poor choice functionally as well, as whatever cheap material it was made from infested my GBA and many of my cartridges and rendered them non-functional. A major tragedy! But Advanced Guardian Heroes, that one survived the bag. And that’s a shame, because it’s really not very good. Yes, I played it on actual hardware. Yes, it has some interesting ideas. But who gives a shit, game is ugly as fuck.
361. MINESWEEPER
Earlier today my younger sister, who has pretty deep knowledge of the world of game, was soliciting advice on what virtual world she should enter next. She wanted something similar to a Harvest Moon or an Animal Crossing. Something where she built a home. I offered a few suggestions, all of which she shot down, before recommending Dragon Quest Builders, which I described as “like Minecraft (but good)”. She rejected that as well, declaring “Fuck no. I can’t believe kids are so obsessed with Minecraft. I always hated it as a kid. Why would anyone play that instead of Solitaire?”
So today I learned that my sister’s spent this entire decade thinking Minesweeper’s become the most popular game on Earth and that is my Conversation That Made Me Reconsider Things Of The Week.
360. BIBLE BLACK
If you wanna read about this game you’re gonna have to sub to to the top tier ($200/mo.) of my Patreon. One of the conditions of Mom un-grounding me was I have to lock all my “d-jokes” behind a paywall, because, and I quote, “I didn’t raise a fool. If you’re going to give sickies their jollies you shouldn’t be doing it for free.”
Sorry everyone, but I think my mom’s right. No more free rides, or free laughs. Also if you didn’t know about Bible Black until now please don’t go googling it without paying me – I deserve to be rewarded for my labor, and for hipping you to a gross game for perverts.
Thanks.
14 Likes
359. TEAM FORTRESS 2
I used to be bigtime into Team Fortress 2. I liked to play Medic. I liked to feel needed. I liked to fill the role no one else was interested in. The one that let me pretend I was the key to victory or not at all responsible for my team’s failure. To me that is “the ideal.”
I did not “main” Medic. I do not understand why you would want to do such a thing in a class-based game. Like, the skill and knowledge ceiling of an Overwatch or League of Legends character is much, much lower than something like Guilty Gear. You may as well take advantage of that. You may as well “play the field.” Cuz otherwise these games get super boring super fast. Go ahead and play Scout or Spy or Demoman any chance you get. Go ahead and have a good time. You probably shouldn’t play Sniper though. You’re probably not going to contribute that much as a Sniper.
But that’s just my opinion. That’s just…the right opinion.
I got into Team Fortress 2 rather late. A few months before it went free to play. And during that time the only servers with actual humans playing were furry servers. I did not like the players on the furry servers. They were mostly loud and obnoxious and all their sprays were bad cartoon pornography. My spray was a panel from Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy depicting Sluggo chilling and levitating and saying “NO”. I would make sure to spray it at the start of every round. I just wanted to protest a little bit. I wanted to let them all know that NO, Bulbasaur is a top (this is canon), and NO, it’s not cool to appropriate homophobic slurs. It’s not cool to use them against people who don’t wanna buttfuck a Bulbasaur. Sorry if you disagree. Sorry if you wanna sodomize a Plant Type but I don’t. I respect all Pokémon. I respect all b-holes.
Anyway yeah I think this screenshot of my stolen Sluggo spray alongside a big titty Charizard may be the best possible summation of my relationship with games, and gamers, and the world.
You ever play an on-line game? You ever be enough of a rube that you try and communicate with strangers? I have. Many times. One time while playing Team Fortress 2 there was this person in all-chat asking questions in broken English about the game, and earning achievements, and unlocking cool shoes, and I answered them sincerely. I said “Hey, I’ll teach you how to do all that shit, even though you’re barely making sense. I’ll teach you how to ‘unlock those kicks.’”
And it turned out this person wasn’t some barely literate American. It was someone from a far off land, who was also experiencing some hard times, and I became their surrogate parent/uncle/friend thanks to on-line. I’m sure we’ve all been there at some point. I’m sure we’ve all done what we could to help someone survive. I’m sure I’ll make another post tomorrow going in-depth about this shit. But for now? For now Team Fortress 2 is the #359 game of all times.
Thank you for reading.
21 Likes
Feel free to take over this list until I stop feeling shitty. Don’t bother if you suck though. This is a very important historical document and I don’t want some lame-o crapping it up.
Thanks.
6 Likes
digimon world dusk good
just remembering what a great series of sentences this was. thank you mr. hobo, for saying what needed to be said.
2 Likes