Kill the Dummies

If you're like me, then when you start up PG Games's Kill the Dummies, the first thing you'll think is, "Oh. Those dummies." For me, this was not a positive response. Going back to one of the two earliest Kubus creations (Friday the 13th 2 shares its release year, and it's anyone's guess which came first), I was a bit disappointed to be confronted with an uncharacteristic pop-culture reference.

Really, when you first open it up, Dummies looks like it's going to be one of those "isn't this pop-cultural figure SOOOOO annoying?" revenge games. This game seems to have come into being around the same time when beating up Britney Spears, the Teletubbies and Furby on Newgrounds was really, really cool.

While the game definitely springs from a genre that has long since been appropriated by banner ads promising free iPads, once you get inside it, you can see the Kubusian touches. You'll first notice it when you get to the opening screen to see the Dummies head on a yellow field with two synchronized flies walking around, and you can't figure out how to make the game actually start.

I wondered if that screen WAS the game. After a while, though, I realized that nothing on the screen was interactive, and started making my way down the keyboard. You need to press the spacebar.

Once you get into the game, you'll find yourself in a sort of boring photograph of a garden with the Dummies guy floating in front of you. From a first-person perspective, you'll see a crudely rendered limb of some sort. with pieces of metal jutting out of it. The arm is clearly a heavily compressed JPEG, and the transparency is done so that the artifacts show up as fuzzy white stuff around the fleshy mass. This is your weapon. You'll use this to kill the dummies.

Of course, there are no instructions here either, and while it's pretty easy to figure out how to move the arm left and right, the button to actually thrust your jagged metal utensils at the face is buried pretty deep. The O and P buttons are pretty much the last ones I tried.

The O button jabs the face from the left. The P button flips your arm to jab the face from the right. It's very easy to hit the face. If you do, the face says "ouch," and bleeds. The face bleeds differently depending on weather you strike it from the left or right. Striking from the right produces a thin twizzler-like stream on the left side of the face. Striking from the left generates shrinking ovals of blood on the right. The dummy will never retaliate. He won't even stop smiling. He'll just bleed and bounce around the screen.

Of course, in traditional Kubus fashion, there's no delay between attacks. If you hold the attack button, the arm moves smoothly up and down, causing the face to bleed and say "ouch" with every frame of animation. There's something wrong with the transparency on the arm, and partway through each swing, a big black square obscures most of the screen.

Of course, as it's a Kimberly Kubus game, you can't complain about bugs. They're going to be there. If you've dug through the archive far enough to find this game, then you're expecting them. You probably kind of want them.

I was kind of surprised to see the tension escalate. I was just starting to think that the eponymous dummies were immortal, when a new background scrolled onto the screen. This one was sort of some haystacks in a pasture. I knew that this indicated my ascent to level two, which only lasted a couple of seconds for some reason.

After that, you get a boss fight. the size of the window changes to accommodate an entire moon as a background. The Dummies guy has devil horns at this point, so you know he's more powerful than the others.

At this level, the arm and rusty chunks of metal are replaced with a crude sword just floating in space. The animation for the sword is even more broken than the animation for the arm, and it flops all over the place when you swing it.

The devil dummy is pretty easy to kill. Doing so results in this game over screen:

And that's it.

This game grew on me as I played it, and though it didn't really stray too far from the conventions of the genre, it definitely put the Kubus twist on it. The blood and gore and violence were definitely not the kind of thing that would relieve stress for an angry dummy hater. In fact, I find the target of the game as traditionally Kubusian as a pop-culture target can be. I have no idea who would be frustrated enough with the Dummies books that they'd want to take it out on them with a sword in space. The dummies were always just sort of a cultural gray area. They never had an annoying commercial or anything. About all they did was take up a lot of black and yellow space at bookstores. Killing the dummies doesn't mean anything to anybody. Nobody bears the dummies enough ill-will that they want to stab them in the temple for a couple of minutes.

So really, this game is about the same thing as half of Kubus's games. A thing is floating through the air. You either have to avoid it or destroy it.

Of course, it's pretty tame compared to the newer ones. If this were one of the new games, it would be really hard not to die immediately.

The really odd thing about this one is that it was apparently created in collaboration with a "Siege Delux." A google search reveals that Delux has made a game or two of his own, which are apparently fairly similar to Kubus's. I have no idea what part of this game would require a second programmer, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's the decidedly un-Kubusian music, which is bouncy and has a tune. I would also hazard a guess that he had something to do with the bizarre non-menu screen, since I've never seen twitchy movement like that of those two flies in one of Kubus's games.

I guess I'm going to have to award this one a dead-average score of 3/5 stars. I was turned off by the premise, which turned out to be a complete non-issue. I got over it just in time to notice that really, the only really good Kubus atmosphere in the game came from the weapons. Everything else was clipart or photographs, which could have been in any old game.