ATTN: Kubus Kampers

I stopped writing this blog a while ago out of respect for the King. Forces were fighting against him, trying to stop him from being Kimberly Kubus, and he had to remove his presence from the internet, and become a "private pirate."

Now, he is ready to rise from the ashes. But he needs your help. He doesn't have the files anymore.

Do you have any Kubus games, music or movies? Contact me at me (at) epparker.com

And I will help you join the Kubus Restoration Society.

BAN (Original)

We're now finished with Kubus's rather unproductive first year, and we're onto 2003. Today's entry covers the original version of BAN. I vaguely recall playing one or the other of the BAN games at one point, but I can't really remember if it was the original or the remake, nor can I remember what it was like.

BAN starts off with an uncharacteristically cute startup screen. An unusual degree of thought seems to have gone into presentation here. The letters B, A, and N appear on the screen one at a time, with Kubus speaking each letter out loud.

Likewise, entering the game mode, you'll find that there are more options available to you than is typical for one of Kubus's games. Your character (a smiling stickman) can move to the left and right, and he can jump. Sometimes he can float upward and downward. He can also shoot blue circles at a green head that bounces around shooting smaller green heads at him.

This part of the gameplay is actually kind of clever. See, the head is huge, it moves to the left and right bouncing off the walls. You can't evade it, except that for you, the screen wraps around. So what you have to do is jump back and forth between the two ends of the screen as the head smashes into them.

There's no easy way to tell if you're actually hurting the head or not, but after a while, you start shooting larger circles, and then after that you find yourself in a new room with sort of a ninja star wobbling around in it. You have to run under it.

After this, a picture of a telephone teleports around the screen. When you click on it, it says, "RECEIVING CALL," and you hear a twenty-second clip of Kubus trying to talk over static. After listening to it, you are faced with a choice. Will you...

Send him to the radio company?

Redial?

Use the yellow page to track down his phone number?

Search for his number on the internet?

The game is surprisingly forgiving. Chosing the wrong answer doesn't send you back to the beginning or anything, you just get to try again. No big deal.

Moving on to fight more heads, the game is still pretty forgiving. your progress isn't erased or anything if you die. You just start over fighting the head again.

Meanwhile, most of the areas are accompanied by pretty passable sound and music. It's not mozart or anything, but it's not caustic. In one section, Kubus sort of beatboxes/makes flatulence noises, and it's actually sort of charming. The visuals are all fun and bright, and everything takes place against a sort of optimistic white void.

This game does have flaws though (I know... I know...). For one thing, you'll run into a lot of cheap deaths. The screen wraparound thing had some sort of bug in it where sometimes instead of teleporting to the other end of the room, you teleport to the middle of the room, right on top of the head. Plus it's never very clear if the head is lethal or not. Sometimes you can touch it for seconds at a time without suffering any harm. Sometimes you just bump into it and you're dead. No apparent pattern.

Also of note: there's no really obvious easy way to exit the game.

But worse than that is that this game set my expectations pretty high, and didn't live up to them. The game packed a lot of variety into its first three screens. A fight against a bouncing head, a "stealth" level where you have to sneak under a thing, and a click-the-object game followed by a logic-devoid multiple choice test. My hope was that the game would continue throwing surprises at me.

But it quit. After that, it was a slightly different head to fight, and then the game just sent me back to level one. So basically it just loops you through four events over and over. See, the phone call seemed witty and whimsical when I first encountered it, because it felt like just a little let's-throw-it-in kind of thing. But when it turned out to be a quarter of the entire game, it couldn't carry the weight.

I'd love to play a game like BAN, but with more. I mean, if Kubus could keep on throwing weird stuff at me for about fifty screens, I would genuinely be able to enjoy this game on its own terms. As it is, it picked me up and dropped me.

But that's not the kind of game it's meant to be, so I can't be too hard on it. I give it a 4/5. It's fun and whimsical, but over too quickly. Perhaps the remake will hold more appeal for me. Or perhaps the remake has nothing to do with the original, and Kubus just titled it like that to mess with me. The latter seems more likely.

Friday the 13th 2

As we speak, I'm starting up Friday the 13th 2. The question on my mind: Is it that Friday the 13th?

It sort of makes sense, because if it was based on the film, that would explain why there's no Friday the 13th part one. Obviously the game would be based on the second movie. Possibly because the first movie doesn't feature all that much Jason.

I will determine whether this game is based on the film franchise by whether or not there is a character with a hockey mask in it.

The first thing you see is a loading screen made up of chunky orange jagged shapes. This is more or less what I was expecting.

On starting up, the game immediately puts you into the action. The action is a sort of sandy area where you play a little brown lump of a person among a bunch of little green guys.

It seems I can't take screenshots in this game. It just won't work. You'll have to take my word on the graphics.

Moving is clumsy. When you press an arrow key to move, your character twitches in the appropriate direction, then pauses for a second before beginning to actually advance. A player who doesn't experiment may even be led to believe that the only way to move is to rapidly tap the direction you want to go, and just twitch your way around the screen.

One of the notable features of this game is that there is actually some animation. The character actually looks in the direction he's moving, even if it's up or down, and his arms and legs sort of twitch as he moves. When he comes to rest, though, he always looks to the left. When he moves, even though he does look in the proper direction, there's always at least one animation frame of him looking to the left.

I tried different stuff on the keyboard to see if I had any abilities that I didn't know about, and I believe it was the D key that brought up the game's premise and controls. Here's the rundown from Kubus himself:

"The goal of the game is to kill Jason before he finds the van and drives out. He will also kill the kids before this escape. You shoot him with Control (Ctrl). Good Luck!!!"

So it must be that Friday the 13th, because there is a Jason in it, and he kills kids.

I experimented with shooting a little. Unusually, you can only shoot about one bullet per second as opposed to the usual tons of bullets per second. The bullets are pretty small, and you can only fire them laterally and you can only fire them while standing still.

Walking down past the bottom of the first screen, I find myself in a new screen with something that looks like it might be a vehicle in it. This is probably the van. Bumping into the van does nothing. Bumping into the green guys does nothing. Shooting the green guys or the van does nothing.

Venturing further to the south, I found a larger concentration of green guys. Perhaps these are the kids that Jason kills?

I've now come in from the south of another screen, even though I've been moving south. There is a red building in the upper right corner. I saw a dash of something moving, but it went offscreen before I could get a good look.

Entering the building I find sort of a rug with a sun on it. Moving off to the right, I find myself back outdoors surrounded by green guys.

Moving to the south, I see a dancing black silhouette outlined in flashing colors. Is this Jason? I'll try shooting it.

It must have been Jason, because shooting it showed me a screen of my character standing in a graveyard, and then the words "YOU WIN" scrolled across the screen over and over endlessly.

A second playthrough uncovers more fun stuff. Walking off to the West from the initial screen reveals Jason pretty much immediately. This time Jason actually fired a huge bullet. He fired it away from me though, so I was pretty safe. I walked past him to the south to see if I had missed anything else, and found an immobile spider that I could shoot. The spider died, and dropped a red circle that I cannot collect.

Further exploration reveals that the thing I saw going running off the corner of the screen earlier was a humanoid. Probably one of the kids that Jason can kill. There was another, different one elsewhere. I am a bit impressed that they weren't just duplicates.

Running around the map doesn't seem to have much rhyme or reason. Areas don't seem to be connected to each other in a way that creates a consistent, unified layout. I can't find the bar from the screenshot on the website, so I may be missing some stuff. I got stuck in a collision with an immobile green guy, so I quit.

The rundown: This game is definitely a minor work, but it's kind of a gem. The main character feels like a precursor to Johnny, having the same dumb smile. There was animation, and the character model for Jason, while bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the film character that he was supposed to represent, was actually pretty effectively creepy. The game was easy, and I can't imagine dying. Jason doesn't seem to be much for targeting.

This game may even actually have some replay value. The thing I saw moving before I encountered Jason was definitely not Jason, and I would have liked to have taken a look at it.

All in all, I'd rate it a 5/5. The graphics throw some fun surprises at you, and there are no frustrating parts, which is great. It's kind of a good gateway Kubus game for new players who want the surreal atmosphere without the endless frustration.

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.

Premise

In this blog, I will play, listen to, or view every piece of media produced by Kimberly Kubus, also known as Kim Okkerstrom and Sparlaticus. Kubus is the self-styled inventor of the wheel, the king of good stuff, and the daddy of spiritual jazz.

Kimberly Kubus is best known for his Game Maker games, which are typically played for their manic, hastily sketched atmosphere, and not for their actual gameplay value. His most infamous games are Drink Tea or Die, a very simple game in which two players compete to see who can drink a cup of tea the fastest, and the Johnny series, which, last I heard, was the longest-running Game Maker series in existence, with 29 official installments.

Kubus's games are often broken, and some of them quite literally cannot be won. A lot of them rely on the player being able to guess the location of an invisible door or fall to his death. A lot of his games rely on dumb luck. For instance, in many of his games, enemies will spawn in random points on the screen, and move in random directions. Often they appear directly next to the player's character, killing him before he even gets started. Some games respawn the character instantly, and he dies five or six times before the player can even take control. Kubus's games are made very rapidly, with, I assume, very little playtesting. When he is in the mood for making games, Kubus releases several games per week. At one point, he created two new Johnny titles in one day. Kubus's games are released under the brand of "PG Games, The Paradise of Great Games."

In recent years, Kubus has branched out into other media. He now releases music on a regular basis. As I type this post, it is April of 2010, and Kubus has already released nineteen full-length albums this year. Kubus's music could most charitably be referred to as noise music. Most of the tracks consist of Kubus fiddling around with various instruments which he seems never to have played before. There is no sense of key or even tone. Typically a loose semblance of rhythm is the only way you can tell that it's intended to be music. Most of it hurts your ears and gives you a headache. Kubus's music can be listened to for the novelty factor, and can be quite funny at times. Songs like "You Can Suck My Duck," and "Dumpster Truck Massacre" are genuinely humorous. Sometimes, though, Kubus will go through a whole album without any vocals, which is very difficult to withstand.

Along with music, Kubus has been branching off into film, under the banner of "Kubus Home Video." At their best, Kubus's films feature him and a friend improvising a very loose narrative, usually in a mundane setting like the woods near Kubus's home, expecting the audience to imagine along with them that they are someplace more interesting. For instance, in The Island of Fucking Good Pussy, Kubus claims to be on a boat, then claims to be walking the plank, and walks across a log. He then claims that he cannot jump off the plank because there are "too many sharks," but that he "sees an island" that he can jump to. At their worst, Kubus's films are mostly made up of extreme closeups of Kubus's rotten teeth.

This is Kubus's website.

As a whole, Kubus can be enjoyed for the humorous moments that spring from his mostly improvisational style. When playing a Johnny game, you'll suddenly come across an enemy with an enormous freakish smile and stringy blond hair helpfully labeled "HIPPY." When viewing one of his videos, you'll suddenly see a JPEG of a warped escalator pop up on the screen, and hear Kubus shout "I EAT FLESH!" If you go in expecting to enjoy his works on these terms, then you will get the most out of them.

It is my theory that Kubus is sort of an online performance artist, and that his works are intended to be exactly as frustrating as they are. After seven years building a library of over a hundred games, Kubus's games are exactly as broken and frustrating and visually jarring as they were in 2003, if not more so. It is impossible to interpret them as anything other than intentionally so-bad-it's-good without insulting Kubus tremendously. That in mind, Kubus seems to take joy in alienating his audience. His best, most interesting work, will usually be followed by horribly dull work, just in case you were starting to acquire a taste for it.

As I feel like it, I'm going to try to go through and review every single one of Kubus's works. I'm not sure about the exact chronology, but I'm going to try to go through them year-by-year at least, starting with the earliest stuff and working my way up. I may try to even it out a bit, and mix in some of the early films and music with the early games, since the music and movies don't start until 2007.

I will rate Kubus's work relative to his other work. The best stuff, even though it would be considered pretty bad by most counts, will be rated five of five stars, and the worst stuff will be voted one of five stars. Additionally, the games will only be weighted against the other games, the films will only be weighted against the other films, and the music will only be weighted against the other music.

Also, in reviewing Kubus's works, I will attempt to refrain from snidely imposing faux-highbrow layered meanings onto everything. Also, I will give Kubus's work the benefit of the doubt, and not attribute any of the crazy stuff to drug consumption unless it actually includes or references drugs (as does a lot of of the music.)

So yeah. That's the plan.