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Chapter 654 Bad Games Lovers.
🕑 Added 2025-09-18 02:54:27 +0000 UTCKyoto Japan Friday 12 March 1996.
Kirk Hanamura, a half-Japanese, half-American guy, was the son of a Japanese mother and an American father. He came from a wealthy family, but his true passion wasn’t money or luxury—it was video games. However, unlike most gamers who idolized polished, high-quality titles—especially those from industry giant ZAGE—Kirk had a unique obsession: bad video games.
To him, bad games weren’t just amusing—they were a misunderstood form of art. Where good games followed rules, bad games broke them, often in hilariously unpredictable ways. Kirk believed they had a chaotic charm and creative boldness that polished games could never replicate.
Now, comfortably settled in his bedroom, Kirk was ready to dive into one of his all-time favorite bad games: Whoozie!
“Heheheh, Whoozie! What a weird name,” Kirk muttered with a grin. Developed by a company called Blue Tongue, this game was clearly trying to ride on the coattails of Sonic the Hedgehog. But instead of a sleek blue hedgehog, Whoozie starred an orange chameleon with big eyes and awkward animations. Everything about it screamed knockoff, from the lightning-speed platforming to the over-the-top attitude—but with none of the polish. The game’s setting was an oddly gritty urban cityscape, full of cluttered backgrounds, janky level design, and clunky transitions.
Unlike Sonic’s smooth graphics and fluid animation, Whoozie! featured stiff character movement and low frame-rate action. But to Kirk, that just added to its bizarre charm. What made the game truly stand out was Whoozie’s tongue mechanics—he could glide using his long tongue like a hang glider and could also latch onto ledges with it, swinging himself across gaps with cartoonish momentum. The controls were janky, but once mastered, they had their own strange rhythm.
The most outrageous part, however, came with the boss battles. At the end of each stage, the game ditched its platformer roots and transformed into a 2D fighting game. Out of nowhere, players were thrust into a new gameplay mode complete with health bars, new move sets, and dramatic close-ups. And strangely enough, the fighting mechanics weren’t half bad.
The bosses themselves were completely absurd. One level had you battling a fat cat in a business suit who puffed a cigar between combo attacks. Another stage introduced “Fartie,” a pig who used farts as both a projectile and a mobility tool. Then there was the monkey Formula 1 driver, who zoomed across the screen with a tire-shaped shield. The designs made no sense, the tone was all over the place—but that was exactly what Kirk loved.
It was chaos, pure and simple. But it was also unexpected, experimental, and weirdly ambitious in its own broken way.
The story? Oh, it’s absolutely ridiculous—and that’s exactly why Kirk loves it. The plot kicks off with Whoozie, the orange chameleon, being furious—yes, genuinely angry—because he’s not green. In his mind, chameleons are supposed to be green, and the fact that he’s orange is an outrage he simply can’t accept. So what does he do? He embarks on a dramatic journey to locate a legendary artifact known as “The Green Way,” a mystical scroll said to grant anyone who swallows it the ability to turn green.
But the story doesn’t stop there. Along the way, Whoozie apparently borrowed a lot of money from various shady characters to fund his quest—money he never managed to pay back. These creditors, now furious at being stiffed, become the game’s bosses. Each boss is essentially a former lender turned bounty hunter, now trying to stop Whoozie from completing his green-colored destiny.
It’s a plot so bizarre, so incoherent, that it loops back around into brilliance. The absurd motivation, the nonsensical debt side-plot, and the way it all ties into Whoozie's obsession with becoming green—it’s the kind of narrative that could only be found in the most daringly bad of games. And for Kirk, that made it perfect.
It was so bad, it became brilliant—and Kirk loved every second of it. The sheer absurdity, the broken mechanics, the bold, misguided ideas—all of it came together in a chaotic harmony that polished titles could never match. ZAGE’s high-quality games would never dare to do something this off-the-wall, this unapologetically silly, and that was exactly why Kirk was so drawn to bad games. They had the guts to be weird. Whoozie! wasn’t just another favorite in his collection—it was a personal classic, a reminder that even disasters could be unforgettable.
And actually, Kirk wasn’t alone. On the ZAGE forums, there was an entire dedicated space for people who loved bad games just as much as he did. This oddball corner of the internet was always buzzing with conversations—people posting passionate takes and reviewing the worst titles ever made.
Naturally, their love for these flawed gems often sparked debates with more “normal” gamers who stumbled into the threads and couldn’t wrap their heads around the appeal. To those outsiders, bad games were just that—bad. A waste of time.
But Kirk saw it as his mission to change that perception. He took every argument as a chance to educate. To show others the joy of janky controls, the surprise of poorly translated cutscenes, and the weird beauty found in the chaos. In his eyes, these games weren’t mistakes—they were misunderstood masterpieces.
For Kirk, bad games were far better than so-called "mid" games. Mid games were boring—they were safe, formulaic, and often lacked any personality. They simply checked the boxes of what a video game should be and stopped there. Bad games, on the other hand, were wild. Sometimes they tried something genuinely new and fell flat, and other times they just went completely off the rails, embracing their weirdness without apology. It was that fearless creativity, that refusal to conform, that made bad games exciting. Whoozie! was a perfect example. It didn’t care about being normal—it wanted to be unforgettable, even if that meant being a glorious mess.
And bad games aren’t the same as trash games. Trash games are usually thrown together with half-baked ideas, broken mechanics, and riddled with bugs. They lack effort, vision, and even basic functionality. Bad games, on the other hand, are complete products—they may be weird, clunky, or misguided, but they’re still playable and often ambitious in their own strange way.
Kirk knew the difference well. ZAGE would never allow trash games on their platform. But bad games? ZAGE didn’t really care, and that was exactly why Kirk respected them. They gave space for oddball creativity to exist, even when it didn’t hit the mark.
Right now, Kirk was deep in the ZAGE forums, gleefully replying to a thread titled, “What do you think about Whoozie!?” His post read, “Whoozie! is a masterpiece! My favorite character has to be Fartie the farting pig—he’s so strong and ridiculous, I love it!”
As he hit send, he grinned at the responses already rolling in. It wasn’t just a post; it was a declaration of love for a game most people wouldn’t dare to defend. But here, among like-minded fans, Kirk felt at home. These were his people—his digital soulmates who embraced the strange, the broken, and the boldly stupid with the same enthusiasm he did. Together, they shared laughs, theories, and reviews in what felt like a celebration of misunderstood creativity.
Meanwhile, Zaboru was casually browsing the ZAGE forums from his office when he noticed the growing thread about Whoozie! and the passionate post from Kirk Hanamura. He chuckled to himself, not in mockery, but in genuine amusement and quiet agreement. Everything Kirk said resonated with him deeply. As the founder of ZAGE, Zaboru had long understood the strange appeal of “bad” games. He approved them for the platform not out of oversight, but out of a quiet belief that there was value in their chaos.
To Zaboru, there was a clear distinction: trash games were lazy, broken, and cynical cash grabs, while bad games—true bad games—had heart. They were flawed, yes, but filled with wild ambition, strange mechanics, and fearless ideas that good games often avoided. Zaboru believed that sometimes a game could be so bad, so outlandish, that it looped back around into being a form of unintentional art.
He thought back to his previous life, to cult movies like The Room by Tommy Wiseau. That film was a disaster by every technical standard, yet it had captivated millions and become iconic. Not because it was polished, but because it was sincere and absurd in a way nothing else dared to be. Whoozie! and games like it reminded him of that same spirit.
Zaboru leaned back in his chair, a faint smile on his face. As long as he was in charge, ZAGE would always make room for the misfits—the broken, beautiful disasters that didn’t fit anywhere else. Because in their own strange way, they mattered too.
Not to mention, in Zaboru’s previous life, he had encountered countless absurd indie games—titles that were so bad, they somehow became beautiful in their own unique way. There was something captivating about their flaws, something unpolished yet full of strange charm. Zaboru believed those experiences shaped his philosophy. He wanted to preserve that spirit—the idea that bad and bizarre games could stand as their own genre, worthy of celebration rather than dismissal. To him, they represented a raw, unfiltered form of creativity that polished games often lacked. However, he was firm on one point: while bad games had a place, trash games—those lacking effort, care, or vision—would never be welcome. That was a line he would never cross.
To be continue
