Arcade Action: IN COLOR!

The video game arcade is rising like the proverbial Phoenix from its ashes, having fully recovered from its cataclysmic demise in the late 1980s. Much like every form of technology in America, this spur in growth can be directly credited to a bunch of hard working geeks in Asia, creating and exporting such money magnets as "Dance Dance Revolution," "Dance Dance Revolution 2," "Dance Dance Revolution Megamix," "Dance Dance Revolution Megamix 2," "Super Ultra Platinum Turbo Dance Dance Revolution EX," "Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Revolution," and the crowd favorite "Big Tokyo Baking Simulator Fish Dance." But what about the Asian games that don't make it big? For every incredible body part-moving simulator released, there are hundreds of incomprehensible Asian arcade games that fail to achieve such monumental popularity. Today we'll look at a couple groundbreaking Asian games which somehow fell under the average gamer's radar, "Trio the Punch - Never Forget Me" and "Zunzunkyou No Yabou." As you will soon discover, the general public's radar was in perfectly fine working condition when it rejected these titles.

Trio the Punch - Never Forget Me

Trio the Punch - Never Forget Me conveys a gripping, emotional story regarding three combat weary desperados forced to roam the countryside, slapping hundreds upon thousands of fat naked men and zombies attempting to murder them before exploding. The back story of the game is a little bit hazy due to the fact that it's completely in Chinese and, well, there is no back story. I'll attempt to explain the plot of the game as best I can without understanding Chinese or arcade games created by six grade school students who created the entire thing while wearing salad spinning bowls on their heads:

It is the year 2006 or 2009 or 1874, and the world has fallen into a post-apocalyptic nightmare of epic proportions. Fat men with no shirts have taken over the globe, terrorizing innocent citizens by walking back and forth in straight lines while spitting out red sperm from their mouths. These bulbous nudists are supported by a rogue's gallery of evil characters such as "The Big Blue Severed Foot That Stomps On You" and "The Big Blue Severed Hand Which Releases Packets of Blue Ketchup On Your Head." In a quest to free the world from such a cruel and violent tyranny, you must walk from one side of the screen to the other for a few weeks, punching everything that moves and most of the things that don't. If you fail, the retarded zombies driving yellow cars and the folding albino sewer alligators will take over the world, transforming it into a terrifying landscape of highly confusing two-dimensional evil. Are you brave enough to press the "attack" button for about 40 hours straight and free the Earth from their iron grip of twisted, shirtless horror? Probably not.

Many people might be turned off by the mere title of Trio the Punch - Never Forget Me, under the false impression that it's a game about a street savvy kickboxing monkey attempting to fight off WTC hijackers. I can safely announce there are neither any kickboxing monkeys or WTC hijackers in this game, although I really can't explain what is in it. You simply select one of three random characters, all of whom appear to be undergoing a painful enema via industrial vacuum pumps, and then prepare to fight roughly 100 million billion enemies like the following:

NAME: Fat Guys With No Shirt Who Get Even More Fat Somehow, Possibly By Photosynthesis DESCRIPTION: Upon first discovering the Fat Guys With No Shirt, you will probably remark, "Damn, these guys are fat!" Then you'll probably say, "Damn, these guys are almost naked!" Then you might exclaim, "Damn, I can't see shit anymore!" because your brain will refuse to continue working properly in protest of making it play such garbage. In addition to retching gravity-defying red sperm in random directions, the Fat Guys With No Shirt have the ability to get even fatter, because apparently that's a quality any evil overlord looks for when choosing his minions. He'll sift through the group of applicants, passing over robots equipped with death ray lasers and raging bloody demons from hell, finally settling on the person he feels will be able to gain the most amount of weight in the shortest amount of time because that's the true hallmark of a born leader. As you can see in the photo, there are also purple-colored Fat Guys With No Shirt, allarmed with the arcane, mystic, deadly power of "being purple." If you don't think that purple beings are inherently more difficult to slap to death than the average flesh-colored creature, go to a McDonalds and try to stab Grimace with a shiv. If anybody calls the cops on you, tell them you're doing research. Internet video game research.

NAME: Cotton Candy Leper Sheep DESCRIPTION: I know what most of you are thinking now: "gee Rich 'Lowtax' Kyanka, this game looks totally tubular right now, but I can't help but feel it would be better if there was some kind of pink sheep that lobbed bouncing chunks of itself at you." Well complain no longer, because this game truly has everything! The Cotton Candy Leper Sheep appears a couple times in the jungle level, which apparently makes perfect sense to people in China with salad spinner bowls on their heads. The level ends after you murder a few of these deadly monstrosities, at which point you actually become a Cotton Candy Leper Sheep and spend the next mission throwing pieces of yourself at Fat Guys With No Shirt and these creatures which resemble tiny, pixelated, homosexual versions of Drew Carrey.

NAME: Angry Old Insane Man DESCRIPTION: The face of the Angry Old Insane Man is on the transitional screens as well as the introduction, so I naturally assumed he was supposed to be a good and heroic guy like a Kung Fu mentor or a webmaster or something. Oddly enough, he appears as an evil boss around level five, and you must repeatedly punch him in the shoulder until he agrees to stop vomiting Chinese characters out of his mouth and forcing his head to grow 50 times larger for no readily apparent reason. The Angry Old Insane Man continues to appear at the end of every level and provide you with random powerups which don't help or really do much of anything, so I guess he harbors no grudge against people who stab him in the face with katanas.

NAME: Flappers Riding Flying Bucktoothed Fish DESCRIPTION: There are two water levels, which can best be described as "the levels with water." This deadly blue liquid houses some of the most nefarious enemies since Ikari Warriors 2, the Flappers Riding Flying Bucktoothed Fish. These characters are able to gaze lustfully into your eyes while showing off their fishbody torsos and exquisite pink evening gowns fashioned to strike awe and terror into anybody in their path. You know, because seeing elderly women whose legs have mutated into bloated, physics-defying sea creatures isn't terrifying enough. If you attack them, the Flapper part of their body will just kind of disappear and the fish will continue to make its unholy rounds across the screen. This leads me to believe that perhaps the fish grew a flapper on top of it, instead of the other way around. I'm really not going to spend any more time contemplating this mystery because I have much better things to do, such as not contemplate this mystery.

NAME: Zombies Driving Yellow Toy Cars DESCRIPTION: Zombies may be evil, but they still have to get to work just like any of us. Having shunned gas-guzzling vehicles such as SUVs and minivans, the preferred method of travel for the undead is apparently tiny little yellow cars which lack any advanced controls such as "reverse" or "accelerate" or "stop." They just kind of travel forward for all eternity until somebody agrees to approach their vehicle and punch them until they explode. As you can see by the picture on the left, the Zombies Driving Yellow Toy Cars all possess a rather disturbingly healthy sexual appetite.

Since I didn't have an extra month to write this update, I wasn't able to sit down in one location and defeat this game, so I cannot reveal the exciting end boss behind this twisted invasion of Earth. Judging by the aforementioned enemies, I'm assuming it's something incredibly dangerous and deadly, like a sentient ballpoint pen or a giant tit which explodes. If you have beaten Trio the Punch and would like to send me a screenshot of the final boss, I'd love to hear from you. Hell, if you were able to play Trio the Punch for longer than 10 minutes without becoming an atheist and burning your house down, I'd love to hear from you.

Zunzunkyou No Yabou

The nice folks in Japan didn't even bother translating the title of this game, which I suppose doesn't really matter all that much when you consider they would probably end up with something infinitely incomprehensible like Trio the Punch - Never Forget Me. I'd guess they would name it something along the lines of "Tender Stab: Legend of Extra Chicken." Zunzunkyou No Yabou is a Space Invaders-style shooting gallery game which you travel across the world and murder homosexual dancers from each country. Kabuki performers, Flamenco dancers, professional musicians, Indian women, Vegas showgirls, balding Japanese men leaving subway cars... everybody in every culture in every country must be murdered in order to cleanse the globe of, well, everything. It's kind of like a video game reenactment of the Christian Crusades, only with tiny Asian ghost buddhas instead of fat white guys in armor.

There are five levels in Zunzunkyou No Yabou, representing our five major cultures: American, Asian, Arabic, miscellaneous other ones that were too minor to require their own section, and outer space. The flow of the game seems to insinuate that once you finish committing genocide against every single living entity on Earth, you then proceed to murder creatures from outer space and complete your quest of removing every single living thing everywhere. As the last living creature in the galaxy, you will then elect yourself to the position of "King Galaxy" and pass a series of bills that proclaim how totally awesome you are while denouncing the numerous contributions Spanish dance has made to our culture.

As previously mentioned, the play style is similar to any space shooting game, where your character always points up and you press one button to shoot bagels out of your hips, and the other to launch some sort of nuclear death attack which warps space and time in a cataclysmic fiery inferno of destruction and radioactive Buddhas, slightly injuring everything on the screen. After throwing out enough death bagels to decimate that country's citizens, you will then move on to the boss of that level, who usually has virtually nothing to do with anything.

NAME: Big Headed Disco Queens DESCRIPTION: One of the first "American" levels pits you against a wave of disco dancers who throw deadly fans and roses at you in an attempt to make you pay an extra 25 cents to finish murdering them. Just like in real life, shooting a disco dancer once causes their head to balloon outwards like an inflatable kiddie pool, and the second shot turns them into a flaming skeleton that instantly vanishes. This is why I never bothered getting into the disco craze which swept the country by storm during my pre-birth years. I think my parents might've done a little disco dancing while they were pregnant with me, which partially explains my grotesquely misshapen head and affinity for neon pink fans.

NAME: Heavy Metal Allstars DESCRIPTION: According to Japan, one of America's most important cultural contributions lies in our rockin' heavy metal concerts. Art museums in Japan are crammed full of gigantic Dokken portraits and neo-cubist renderings of RATT concerts. These big mouthed, fire breathing, CD-chucking cavemen enjoy "rocking out" in large gymnasiums and, according to this game, feature 28 concurrent lead guitarists at once. I don't think any heavy metal band even plays 28 different notes total in a concert.

NAME: Post-Apocalyptic Punk Rockers DESCRIPTION: What's more fun than a high school basketball court full of mohawked potatoheads playing what seems to be jazz music from a single drum kit? Well how about cyclops women with big breasts throwing a combination of trail mix and Doritos at you? I'm still not really sure as to how either of these are hot, but then again I'm still not really sure as to how either of these embody American culture, so let's just chalk it all up to a little bit of video game magic courtesy of Zunzunkyou No Yabou.

NAME: Superhero America! DESCRIPTION: Much like the rest of the free world, Japan doesn't have a very positive impression of America, and they chose to convey this by portraying the American level boss as an insane, bloated, prancing retard who chucks out letters spelling the word "JUSTICE" from his crotch. I really can't explain just how brazenly homosexual Superhero America is, so perhaps you should just click this link and view possibly one of the most flamboyantly tributes to the colorful, greasy, big-breasted corporate entity known as America.

After thoroughly decimating every sentient being on the planet, you then move on to the outer space-themed levels, where you murder aliens stupid enough to mistakenly have their own culture. A couple levels later you are required to kill the actual embodiment of planet Earth, which has somehow evolved into a bashful, dancing life form able to spit out tiny replicas of Earth at you and change colors after being shot a certain number of times. Upon defeating the Earth, you are rewarded for your hard work by watching the game reset and start over again at the first level. There isn't even a "congratulations" screen written out in the goofy alternate universe language the Japanese use; it simply resets and bang, you're back at level one, killing more disco dancers and homosexual ballet performers.

I hope that today's update has provided everybody with a wonderful set of alternatives to the Dance Dance Revolution craze sweeping through America. Actually, I'm not really sure how it would've accomplished that at all, since both games mentioned are about as addicting as chewing insulation, but hopefully I've proved to everybody out there that there are things even more brazenly homosexual than paying money to dance to happy hardcore while a group of fat slobs look on and shield their eyes from the flashing lights. Like Superhero America, for example.

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)