Any shovelware with lots of bugs, continuity errors, and English language fails. I’m the type of person who believes in “so bad, it’s good” (or at least so bad, it’s funny). Warning for TVTropes link.
Someone else mentioned Procession to Calvary - an adventure game set in a cut and paste world of renaissance art with a very surreal plot and sense of humour. Pythonesque.
There Is No Game is pretty hilarious, the voice acting always makes me crack up.
Agatha Knife is a funny point and click adventure game where you're a 7 year old girl who's a butcher and needs to set up her own religion sacrificing pigs in the basement for... Reasons.
I just tried 2003 on emulator and I really tried to like it. You’re right, it’s really funny. But oh my god these controls are ATROCIOUS! I get it was 2003 and gamecube controllers were already wacky, but I really wanna punch the guy in the face who decided that to throw an out to a base you need to press TWO BUTTONS AT THE SAME TIME.
One game series that is not known for being especially humorous actually can be: The Halo games. More specifically the enemy grunts. If you sneak up on them and listen to their dialogue, their mix of faux bravado, cowardice and delusion of grandeur can be really funny. Especially because Master Chief is “The Demon” to them. A near-mythical monster. Just choosing the right time to reveal your presence to the grunts can result in comedy gold.
But wasn’t that the evil AI very explicitly trying to psychologically hurt the protagonist and being really lame about it? I mean it’s the evil AI doing it and I remember the point of it being that fat jokes are lame.
I always sort of read those jokes as illustrative as GLaDOS being a bad person fielding weak material more than like, an earnest expression of the game writer’s values. Like, the game itself doesn’t present the remarks themselves as funny so much as GLaDOS being rude, snippy, and actively incorrect given that Chell is mega-fit.
Yeah, that always came across as “I’m trying to neg you but I ran out of my best insults like an hour ago so I’m throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.” Same with the adopted joke.
I get that context, and I think that was for sure the intent, but they did not stick the landing. We already knew GLaDOS is evil. Casual fatphobia was not necessary. Plus the fact that some people won’t get that context or choose to ignore it and just think it is funny, as evidenced further down this thread.
Edit: The person saying they would replay it for the fat jokes was removed, so my last sentence makes less sense, but that was the reason I said that
There’s an extremely long list of creative works made to be satire that idiots don’t understand. The Colbert Report, Starship Troopers, hell there are people that think Homelander is the good guy in The Boys. I think it’s a little too restrictive if someone can’t make a point that certain jokes are lame out of fear of how a few idiots might misinterpret it (many times deliberately). There are people right now arguing that the Barbie movie is actually “anti-woke”.
Also consider how many people actually did get the message. They heard how lame the jokes sounded and realized how stupid fat jokes are. From what I recall, the game really makes an effort to deconstruct these jokes. There is no audience within the game laughing at the jokes, and the evil AI explicitly states that it’s making the jokes solely to to negatively affect the protagonists psychological well being to prevent her from achieving anything. And the jokes are directed at the player, so someone that might have made these jokes themselves hears someone else directing these jokes at them and can hear how lame they are. The evil AI comes across as lame, petty, and desperate. Someone who made fat jokes before playing that game might have had the realization “is that how I sound?”
I feel like the people that didn’t get the context likely made fat jokes before playing the game, and would be making fat jokes even if they never played the game. So I don’t think there was any negative impact. Someone that committed to being an idiot isn’t going change in either direction from any kind of media.
Like I said, I understand the context. I don’t need more of it.
Jokes like this and the other examples require either a very deft hand or an extreme level of satire. The jokes did not achieve either of those for me. The harm it causes by folks misinterpreting or ignoring context is not worth the people who get it. I have friends that would 100% understand the context and would still be made uncomfortable by the delivery. That to me is the best indicator to how well it aged.
Also, posting a wall of text full of ableism is also not a great way to convince me otherwise
Yeah I never except anyone on the internet to admit they’re wrong about anything. But randomly accusing someone of being ablest based solely on a disagreement over the interpretation of a piece of media is rather petty behavior (even by internet standards), don’t you think?
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