Games With Stupid Names - #12: Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness

No amount of snarky commentary can do these screenshots justice. Suffice to say, I have been playing Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness, a PC point n' click adventure game where you must use Bible verses to defeat evil robots in a bizarre lycra-clad futurescape. Instead of an energy bar, you have a 'faith' bar, which is depleted if you fail to respond to the robots' (who look like a scuba fetish version of the Smash aliens) lies with the appropriate scripture. I played it for a bit, then started to feel my brain turning the consistency of aerosol cheese and had to stop. Just look for yourselves.

Games With Stupid Names - #11: The Lord Of King

In The Lord Of King, you play some beardy dude who pulls a magic fire axe out of a stone, becoming, in the process, a king. But not just any king. Oh no...

You're the Lord of King! Gooowaaaaarggghhh!

The rest of the game sees you waddling about hacking at weird mantis-creatures, skeletons, cruel wingéd gargoyles and a few fire-belching end of level bosses in an awkward and tedious chop-a-thon, the even timbre of its dullness undisturbed by a single moment of enjoyment from beginning to end. The control system is a piece of shit, your fire-axe takes way too long to charge up to be of any use in a melee, the difficulty curve goes piss-take exponential somewhere around Level 3, and the music is so unatmospheric they might as well have pressed a Casio keyboard's demo button and let you cleave giant bats to an instrumental version of 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go'.

When you lose your last life, a low-quality sampled voice sounding like Jo Brand with a mouthful of wet bread asks, almost maudlin: 'Don't you want to play this game?' then bellows with laughter, as if even he realises that the idea of squandering another second supping this abysmal tragedy juice is patently absurd.

Released in 1989, The Lord Of King is a blatant, albeit hamfisted, forgery of Taito's 1987 corker Rastan Saga, a game I particularly like on account of its being a univocalism in 'A'.

Rastan Saga is epic where The Lord Of King is anecdotal, visceral where the latter is coy, and fun where its rival is a flyblown mound of zebra shit.

Taking you over rocky mountain ranges, through fetid swamps and into trap-filled castles, it's a robust, well-realised Conanfest with just the right amount of hokey homoerotic thrills to keep your heart hammering in your chest - indeed, as your energy bar gets depleted, the discomfitingly realistic multi-chambered heart at the end begins to thud ever more rapidly, until you vaporise with an echoing moan.

Rastan Saga's soundtrack is particularly mighty, with lots of cool percussion and pounding multivoiced sections to get the blood pumping. Why not dribble a little of its barbariany love into your ear-gobs? 'Because I don't like video games, Tim.' What? Ah, fuck you! 'He who is bored of video game soundtracks from the late eighties is bored of life.' - Samuel Johnson

Games With Stupid Names - #10: The Irritating Maze

Hello, yes, it's me, Tim Clare, inviting you to watch my strange, infrequent ritual of poking a shotgun muzzle into a barrel of writhing pilchards, then squeezing the trigger. What's that? Some old video games don't hold up to close aesthetic scrutiny? No shit!! What incisive, necessary reportage! You should, like, be given a job or something!

So in The Irritating Maze, you're supposed to guide a sort of cyberpunk dreidel-cum-gyroscope round an electrified pinball machine. You get to choose whether you'd prefer to be play as a 'Man' or 'Lady', although, in the interests of gender equality, this has no effect on the game mechanic whatsoever. You can't even see them onscreen during normal play.

I started off with the chick. She showed her approval by having some kind of mini-stroke.

So when you start the game, you see your selected avatars' gloved hands placing the 'zap rod' in the starting bay, then you're supposed to ease it around the course using the trackball, avoiding all edges and objects, which are crackling with voltage. It's basically a video game version of those 'steady hand' buzzer games, except a team of programmers worked on this for months, and it manages to be even less fun.

I was all set to make the obvious crack about truth in advertising, but if the creators really had wanted to give it a literal title, it would be called The Shit Game. Sure, it's irritating, but not in that whole Marble Madness aaargh! okay, okay, just one more go compulsive way - it's irritating like losing your i-pod, or getting buttonholed for three hours at a bad party by some dropout with vomit on his breath who won't stop going on about how awesome The Shawshank Redemption is, no, seriously, fucking listen a minute... that film is proper shit-hot, right? Proper... like, that ending, is the best fucking ending of any film ever. What? No, go on then, name a better film! No go on, name a better film! What? That's cos you can't.

Games With Stupid Names - #9: Mustache Boy

Pity the swollen ranks of crap comedy superheroes - every Goitreman and Ochre Bagpiper, each Super Wafter and Captain Brasso, even The Amazing Mr Narcolepsy - and their attempts to amuse by being mediocre. They are all but wisps of bumfluff against the majesty that is Mustache Boy. Mustache Boy is a vaguely Einsteinish hirsute child. That's it. Some unpleasant hormonal disorder meant he grew a tache before puberty. That's the sum of his powers.

His moustache plays no part in the game mechanics (which involve trundling round a maze, painting blocks with your feet, Q-Bert style, while jumping over baddies) whatsoever. Best of all, he wears a space helmet the whole time, so his facial hair isn't even visible. It's like having a hero called Technicolour Revolving Cornea Chap then always portraying him in a massive pair of reflective cop shades.

The only nod to his hidden tache is the fact that, if you collect the letters to spell 'MUSTACHE', you get an extra life and skip to the next stage. Notice the disturbing subliminal commands positioned around the maze. After a few minutes play, they make you kind of, uh, woozy. Wait... maybe the protagonist isn't in the game at all! Maybe I'm Mustache Boy. KILL... KILL... KILL...

Games With Stupid Names - #8: The Amazing Adventures Of Mr F. Lea

The Amazing Adventures Of Mr F. Lea can't blame its title on some over-enthusiastic foreign programmer's bad English - unlike most of the other games I've covered in this hall of shame, it's just a really crap pun. Appropriate really, since the entire game is basically a succession of weak jokes, as gentle and poorly-executed as the vicar's 'funny' cartoons in the fortnightly church newsletter.

As the eponymous Mr F. Lea, you must face four dog-themed levels in whatever order you choose. Unlikely though his name may sound, when I worked selling car insurance over the phone, my manager was a Mr D. Olphin, so shit names do exist in the real world. D. Olphin wasn't a dolphin though, at least as far as I'm aware - I never saw him in person, and to be fair everyone who worked at Norwich Union had tiny, expressionless eyes and talked in a string of chirrups and clicks.

Each of the quartet of levels is essentially nicked from a more successful game, given a doggie makeover then made shit. It's like watching a version of The Matrix where all the cast are alsatians filmed on someone's Nokia. Whilst having one of your toes amputated.

'Dog Hollow' is a joyless rip-off of the first level of Donkey Kong.

Instead of fireballs, giant gorillas and daredevil leaps across girders, the rear end of a dog kicks bones and what look like beach balls down a florid morass of blocky gibberish. Collect balloons on the way, if you can be arsed.

'Lawnmower' latches onto Frogger's glistening calf and humps the living Christmas out of it.

Instead of a road and a river, you must first guide Mr F. Lea across a lawn, avoiding the mowers, then help him leap over a series of dogs' backs (the sausage dogs are the easiest to hitch a lift on, for the obvious reason) to reach some tiny, nondescript hangars (for a less obvious reason). Collision detection is crappy, and Mr F. Lea moves in a succession of decrepit jerks, yet it's still insultingly easy - an achievement almost impressive in its dreadfulness.

The other two stages, 'Dog's Back' and the irritatingly-apostrophed 'Dog's Tail's', plagiarise levels from Taito's 1982 platformer Jungle King, a game which had its own dubious history of theft, after Taito got sued by Edgar Rice Burroughs' estate for its unauthorised use of the Tarzan character (including a sample of his trademark yell), and, sadly, a game which was total shite.

'Borrowing' liberally from the vine swing and uphill boulder-dodging levels, the final two stages see Mr F. Lea swinging across a succession of apparently delighted pooches' tails, (a level which is so easy I've literally never managed to die on it - I don't even know if you can) and running up a dog's back, dodging the spots, which for some reason seem to have become lethal to fleas.

In fairness, Jungle King was bollocks to begin with, so TAAOMFL can't really be said to have hugely besmirched the lineage by producing similarly tedious, workmanlike plod-a-thons, but when they're such obvious toss, why steal them in the first place? It's like building a sex-robot then giving it the face of Gaby Roslin.

Also, why did they filch two crappy levels from Jungle King, yet not touch the section that sees you swimming through a river, repeatedly stabbing crocodiles in the face?

Regular readers of this blog know only too well what a fan I am of games where you get to stab crocodiles in the face. It's an unsung genre, and one that TAAOMFL would have done well to mimic. Instead of all that knifey-carving-supple-flesh-gnnnh-I-love-spoiling-you-bitch harmless fun, we get a stupid flea jumping up and down on a dog's big smiling head. Fuck you, Mr Lea. I bet D. Olphin would have stabbed a croc. He would have stabbed a croc right in the visage and liked it.

Games With Stupid Names - #7 The First Funky Fighter

Of all the video game titles we've encountered so far, The First Funky Fighter is the most semantically problematic, colliding various contradictory images into a single, on the face of it ludicrous, claim of primacy. One definition of the word 'funk' is 'the smell of sexual intercourse', thus making the protagonist 'The First Fighter Who Smelt Of Sexual Intercourse'.

This is a movie I would pay to see my friends. But surely lots of fighters have boasted a musky fuck-aroma? That heady pong of spunk, B.O., mackerel and bum juices is universally recognised as the pheremone-drenched calling card of any self-respecting warrior.

On the other hand, dictionary.com defines 'funky' as: 'overcome with great fear; terrified'. 'The First Fighter Who Was Terrified'? Less awesome, dudes. But this radical transformation from log-cocked beefcake to simpering bedwetter doesn't do anything to resolve the central preposterousness of the claim - I doubt very much this chap was the first brawler to experience nerves before a scrap.

'The First Fighter Characterised By A De-Emphasising Of Melody And Harmony And A Strong Rhythmic Groove Of Electric Bass And Drums'? Ah, fuck it.

TFFF sees blond ripped-shirted pugilist Randy setting out on a quest to rescue his bosomy blond girlfriend Chris from an unholy alliance of sharks and bipedal humanoid gators. Randy is a man of few words and direct action. When Randy has a problem, he punches it. Right in the face.

That's not to say he's not flexible. Occasionally, he stabs it in the face.

And, under very special circumstances, Randy will rip the problem's face in half.

Randy is so fucking masculine, his dick has a dick. After studying TFFF, I can't tell you if he is indeed the first fighter to smell of sexual intercourse, but to him, I expect other people's sexual exploits smell like damp cabbage, whereas his testosterone-marinated fucking stinks of roast dinners and burning tar.

SPOILER ALERT. At the end of the game, once every enemy has been punched in the face, Randy takes Chris to the beach, and fucks her completely in half. She loves it.