For Hong Kong 97 on the Super Nintendo, a reader review titled 'Remember folks, if you ever feel stupid, think about the group of people who made this piece of diarrhea in a cartridge.' Yes, I censored that part. This is one of the very few SNES games (or any game at that time) that drops the F-bomb or uses strong language. Hong Kong 97 (PD) [h4C].zip for - Super Nintendo Snes @ Dope Roms. USA Language. Hong Kong 97 (PD) [h4C].zip System Super Nintendo Snes. The Queue Rom button allows you to add this game to a queue list for later download. Related roms are related by name.
Photo of Bung Enterprises’ “Professor SF” game backup device: A popular model of SNES magicom devices. Unlicensed games weren’t the only illicit utilities that consumers were plugging into their consoles: Cheat and game backup devices were also hot items among enthusiast communities, allowing respectively for the use of rule-altering codes and for saving cartridge ROM files to an external memory. Naturally, these devices would still require a cartridge to plug into them in order to tell the SNES to load them, not to mention them being designed with altering / backing up your own game collection in mind to begin with. At least, that’s the more “innocent” use case for them. The backup devices – which came to be known as “magicoms” in Japan – would operate by dumping game data off the cartridge onto floppy disks, which could be easily interchanged and inserted back into the backup device.
This had the benefit of allowing you to play games saved on the disk without having to have the original cartridge on hand. Naturally, this opened up a black market for floppy disks containing numerous game ROM files, allowing games to be played without the original cartridge (so long as you had at least one legit cartridge on-hand to plug in). Not only that; it also allowed a method for homebrew games to operate on the SNES hardware, by releasing them straight-to-floppy and bypassing the cartridge manufacture process entirely.
Enter Yoshihisa “Kowloon” Kurosawa. As a young man, he ran a Japanese BBS apparently dedicated to the subject of Amiga computers, maintained archives of obscure games and books, and fancied himself as a journalist. He also had aspirations of working in the games industry within his native Japan, but was confronted with a fairly major issue: It was hard to so much as get your foot in the door without already having development experience, and it was hard to get that experience without already having associated with an established developer — something like a catch-22 situation. In the case of Nintendo, who were so controlling of their brand and the games associated with it, they were reluctant to even discuss terms with developers operating on an independent level; not trusting them to develop products deemed worthy of mass manufacture and retail. Furthering this exclusionary business practice were the matter of royalties a potential developer would have to pay (if they were even granted the “privilege” of doing so), making the whole prospect of trying to break into the industry that much more daunting.
Yoshihisa “Kowloon” Kurosawa. ( Photo taken from ) Seeming to resent the mainstream games industry at this point – especially Nintendo – Kurosawa steeped in his frustration over his being unable to produce his own games.
Hong Kong 97 Online
That is, until a trip to Hong Kong that would serve as a turning point in his life; where he stumbled upon some unspecified magicom device while wandering about a computer mall. He was suddenly struck by the idea that he could release a game for a Nintendo console without having to deal with Nintendo at all!
But this wouldn’t be just any game: It would be a game specifically designed to undermine what the company stood for, and to subvert the corporate system altogether. Kurosawa sought to produce – as he called it – “the worst game possible.” “I was sick and tired of consumer game systems and the way Nintendo were at the top of the pyramid. I was also really influenced by the extreme games coming out of Europe. I had an idea to create a cheap, vulgar game that would make fun of the industry. The emergence of game copiers finally gave me that opportunity.” Yoshihisa Kurosawa Only one more small hurdle stood in his way: Kurosawa had absolutely no idea how to set about programming an SNES game.
So, rather than invest the time in teaching himself, he called upon a friend who already had some amount of technical know-how. Apparently, this friend was employed at Enix Corporation — then-publisher of the popular Dragon Quest series, eventual merger partner with Squaresoft, and previously responsible for a number of disgusting pornographic games available for Japanese computers. He convinced his friend to dedicate two days of his time to helping program his game, which would ultimately serve as the full development cycle for the title. Again, in his own words: “What you see represents a 10th of what I intended to do.
There was no time. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have permission. We just sort of took a slapdash approach to giving it a Hong Kong-esque style, and that’s the result.” Not afforded the time needed to design assets from scratch, the game would rely largely on the unlicensed use of outside graphics: Crudely cropping characters from movie posters, downloaded images likely shared on BBS / Usenet groups, and compressing scans of seemingly random Chinese advertisements for use as backgrounds. Back in 1995, getting your hands on decent digital images wasn’t quite as accessible as a quick Google search; but for someone as clearly tech-savvy and resourceful as Kurosawa, I can’t imagine that sourcing these images was too much of an issue for him. His craftiness also extended to providing the game’s soundtrack; recording a brief audio sample off of a laserdisc he had picked up on Shanghai Street, and looping it in order to serve as background music. There was another piece to the puzzle: Translating it for three different languages (English, Japanese, and Chinese).
Yes, in spite of the game’s crudeness and cruelness, we still have to remember that Kurosawa had the intent of selling copies, even to the Chinese market which the game seems to take so much pride in insulting. To this end, a Chinese exchange student was hopefully paid for their work in translating the game’s text from its original Japanese — a process they were apparently very uncomfortable with given the nature of the game. Also, given the fact that Kurosawa seems to still refer to China as “a world of savages,” we can pretty safely assume that he was not the most pleasant taskmaster to work for. Yoshihisa “Kowloon” Kurosawa. ( Photo taken from ) All the game needed now was a name. Most folk seem to assume the game borrows its name from the identically-titled 1994 film Hong Kong 97 — a straight-to-video release starring Robert Patrick. While this is possible, I’d argue as to whether or not this movie would even appear as a blip on Kurosawa’s radar, considering it never even saw distribution in Japan (or in Hong Kong, for that matter).
Rather, both titles would seem to reference the same event set to occur in 1997: The transfer of power over the territory from the British Empire to the People’s Republic of China. To an anti-communist / seemingly-unabashed racist like Kurosawa, this was probably seen as something like a catastrophic fate for the region; as the transfer of power meant a change in how Hong Kong would be governed, and likely meant an influx of citizens emigrating from the Chinese mainland. At some point, Kurosawa had to call the project “finished,” and set about actually releasing his product to the world. Naturally, Nintendo certainly weren’t going to distribute for him, and it was unlikely he’d find many (if any) stores even willing to stock it on their shelves.
As such, the game would have to be distributed largely via mail order, with Kurosawa writing the floppy disks and assembling the packaging himself before shipping copies off to customers. To build “hype” for the title, he used his connections to various underground gaming magazines and wrote online posts under pseudonyms to raise awareness of the game — encouraging readers to send away for their very own copy. The crude packaging for the game is true to the crude nature of the game itself: A cover featuring a sloppily edited photo of Bruce Lee, superimposed over a crowd of PLA soldiers and the face of Chairman Deng Xiaoping.
Above the title (written as “HONGKONG1997”), the game acknowledges it is intended for play on a “SuperNES + Disk Drive;” and below, the name of the fake publisher Kurosawa established for the game in “HappySoft.” Though no images have seemed to surface of the back of the case, a transcription of the game’s features apparently written on it does exist online, sourced from and roughly translated here:. Players must control the relative of Bruce Lee, Mr. Chin, to kill the Chinese people. Chin is addicted to heroin. Take the syringe and power up! Survive the ordeal with the power of drugs!.
Special bonus for destroying cars carrying Chinese VIPs. Be careful of landmines.
They can also prove a valuable ally if used correctly. Will you be rewarded with an inspiring ending for murdering 1.2 billion people? Well, those selling points are certainly “unique,” to say the least. And I must admit; they’d have gotten my attention back in the day.
So, let’s see how Hong Kong 97 executes on its very particular premise. If you hate yourself / want to learn more about the more sordid history of Enix, check out the likes of Guest Mariko Hashimoto and Lolita Syndrome for the PC-88 and FM-7 computers. But only do so if you are of legal age to look at pornographic material, won’t be haunted by the pedophilia it blatantly caters to, and have a strong stomach for gore.
In other words: Please, for the love of god, spare yourself and don’t actually check out this atrocious garbage. This information is apparently sourced from one of Kurosawa’s self-published books, “Microcomputer Shonen Sawayaka Taisho (マイコン少年さわやか太閤記).” Naturally, I haven’t actually read the book myself, and an English translation of it doesn’t seem to exist, so I cannot authenticate whether or not this matches up with the story of the game’s development Kurosawa tells in his book. It’s also worth mentioning that Kurosawa seems to have something of an obsession with Nazism. For years, he sold a CD titled maintained that reference Holocaust denial conspiracies, and generally seemed to enjoy crudely drawing Adolf Hitler. It’s very possible that his interest in the Nazis is purely historical, but given his anti-communist sentiment and general dirtbag nature well, let’s just say that I don’t expect this guy to be on “the right side of history” here. 「我愛北京天安門」 There are actually two variations of the game’s ROM available online, and you can tell which one you’ve got your hands on as soon as the game launches: The more commonly-distributed variant provides three languages for you to select from, while the less common ROM has a fourth option curiously titled “CM.” Selecting this CM option will present two unique advertisements to you before the game begins; one for a brand of magicom device, and another for a BBS that I presume has long since gone defunct.
After these ads, the game will proceed in Japanese, and play out identically to the other versions of the game. Picking a different language in either ROM will present you a text advertisement for a games trade-in service before launching into the game. As far as I can tell, no one online has ever figured out why two variations of the game exist. Naturally, I have a theory: With CM meant to stand for “Commercial Message,” and with one of the ads showcasing one of the very devices you’d need in order to play a physical copy of the game in the first place, I’m going to guess that this variant was not the copy sold on floppy.
If I had to guess, this version of the game was distributed online on old games piracy groups and the like – maybe even by Kurosawa himself – in an attempt to entice pirates to help get the word out about the game, or to possibly even purchase a physical copy of their own (if only for the novelty of it). We’ll discuss how well this strategy may have worked later.
With the ads out of the way, you’re presented with the title screen, and shortly thereafter with the game’s story. Get used to seeing these screens: You’ll have to look at them again after every time you die and restart the game. They’re worth paying attention to at least once, though, as the plot here is absolutely wild.
And by “wild,” I of course mean “overtly racist” in a way that probably wasn’t particularly funny for any unfortunate Chinese players who may have put money down for the game without fully knowing what they were getting themselves into. In the distant future of 1997, Hong Kong is formally assimilated into Chinese jurisdiction. Immediately, the “fuckin’ ugly reds” begin to wreak havoc on the region, with the entire 1.2 billion person population of China deciding to move there seemingly overnight.
Clearly, there is only one solution to this dilemma: Send for Bruce Lee’s relative, Jackie Chan “Chin.” Naturally, being ““related”” to Bruce Lee, Chin is also a master of the martial arts in his own right, and deemed capable of taking down the entire population of a country single-handedly. Little does Chin or the Hong Kong government know, though, that the dastardly commies have been working on a secret project to revive the recently deceased Deng Xiaoping Tong Shau Ping as a powerful bioweapon! Can the “killer machine” defeat the red menace?
There’s a bit of historical trivia here worth noting: At the time the game was released, the real life Deng Xiaoping was very much still alive, albeit retired from his position as an authority figure within the People’s Republic of China. However, he was soon to pass, and just so happened to die shortly before the transfer of power over Hong Kong from Britain to China — in 1997. As such, people have credited Hong Kong 97 as “predicting his death,” even though the game doesn’t actually specify a date of death / leaves you to presume that Deng Xiaoping could’ve died at any point prior to the events of the game. For an example of a game getting a prediction for a political death “on the nose,” there’s always Homefront; which correctly guessed that North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-il would pass in 2011, and pass power down unto his son Kim Jong-un. Of course, none of this really matters once you get in the game: There’s no plot development or further mentions of the story to speak of. Hong Kong 97 is little more than one of the most bare-bones top-down shooters you’ll ever play in your life.
Space Invaders has more depth than this trainwreck, for chrissakes. As Chin, you have the full range of the screen in which to move and shoot — though leaving the bottommost area of the screen is practically tantamount to a death wish. Enemies approach you from the top of the screen, making their way down, with some launching projectiles at you. Occasionally, a car will drive in from stage right and exit stage left.
After killing a set number of enemies, the disembodied head of Tong Shau Ping will appear and attack you with an incredibly basic pattern that actually results in him being the easiest enemy in the game to deal with. You defeat him, and the loop begins anew, until you eventually die or stop playing. That’s all there is to the game. Remember when I mentioned that the game was programmed over the course of two days? Yeah, I reckon this is where it sort of shows, doesn’t it? What we have here is the skeleton of a shoot ‘em up — the most basic components needed to qualify a game as being such. You can imagine swapping out all the bitmap graphics with basic shapes / programmer art, and being left with something that you’d have been taught how to develop over the course of a day at a children’s computer camp.
I should know: I’ve taught children the basics of how to develop a video game over the course of just a few hours! Look, I’m obviously aware that you can only do so much with so little time spent in development, but you know what? They had the luxury of having as much time as they wanted. I don’t believe there was a hard deadline in effect here being enforced by “the publisher,” considering the publisher was just Kurosawa himself. Of course, I’m “missing the point” here, aren’t I?
The game wasn’t meant to be good: It’s meant to shock and offend with its content and its well, lack of content, I suppose? It’s like some crappy Flash game you’re meant to play once, laugh at / feel bad for having wasted your time with it, and promptly move on with your life. The problem here is though, Flash games don’t usually demand a fee or waiting for them to ship to your mailbox. Hong Kong 97 isn’t just a joke of a game: It’s a joke that Kurosawa intended for folk to pay actual money for. So, bearing that in mind, I’m going to review this game under the same set of standards I would any other retail software product.
If that seems unfair, it’s only because charging a “”budget”” price of ¥3,000 (!) for a game you’ll barely play for 30 seconds seems pretty unfair too, by my estimation. When the game begins, it loads one of six possible backgrounds which the game will cycle through as you die and restart. During the gameplay, the backgrounds do not move or attempt to provide any illusion of character movement: They are simply static images, all featuring heavy amounts of compression and hideous image artifacting. When Tong Shau Ping appears, the background will transition from a shade of blue to a shade of pink for as long as he is on-screen; reverting back to the original blue shortly after he is defeated.
At the very least, the backgrounds don’t blend in with any of the game’s other sprites, so discerning the foreground elements isn’t as frustrating a task as it could have potentially been. You’re limited in how many of your own projectiles you can have on-screen simultaneously. In using a bit of hackery to override the limit (set value “7E0EC500” for a good time), it becomes apparent that the reason for this limit is primarily to avoid the game slowing down to a frankly unplayable framerate: Sprite limits on the SNES hardware could apparently amount to as many as 128 on-screen, but I wanna reckon you can only actually make it to about a dozen in Hong Kong 97 before the CPU can’t really keep up. Even with the unlimited bullet cheat disabled, the default game will find ways to slow down all on its own — almost as if guaranteed when you blow up a car and get treated to the roughly dozen explosion graphics put on display. Even licensed titles in the shooter genre have never had the best reputation for running smoothly on the SNES, so it’s no surprise that leaving two drunks to their own devices in development would result in something completely unoptimized for the hardware. Speaking of those incredible special effects, the game has a whole load of ‘em to display! There’s the animated GIF of a mushroom cloud that appears whenever you hit something / blow someone up, the image of what appears to be an actual corpse that briefly flashes after killing an enemy, and no wait I lied that’s actually all they bothered to include in the games in terms of SFX animations.
That thumbnail-sized image of a corpse, by the way, appears in larger size on (NSFW) — complete with a VHS tape timecode dated August 6th, 1992. Now, there are multiple theories as to who this poor soul might be / how Kurosawa got his hands the image in the first place. A contends that Kurosawa himself committed a murder in the name of HappySoft, and filmed the whole morbid affair. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the body may be that of Polish boxer Leszek Blazynski, who reportedly committed suicide on / around that date, which may indicate that this is a still from a police crime scene recording. Whatever the origin of the image may be, it’s most likely Kurosawa downloaded it off of some BBS or obscure 90s shock site. Be prepared to visit that morbid game over screen more than a few times as well if you should for whatever reason decide to subject yourself to the game: You die in only one hit from any enemy or object, and have only one life to live. Though the enemy AI is simplistic enough – with two of the three enemy types approaching you in a straight line – they can easily surround you from the sides of the screen and leave you with no escape route.
The only temporary reprieve you may earn yourself is grabbing a syringe off of a fallen enemy, which gives you a brief 10 seconds of invulnerability. It gives you a breather from having to constantly weave and dodge your way through the endless enemy assault, and can make taking on the game’s laughably easy boss that much more easy. All that being said, surviving the gameplay loop is actually simple enough: It’s the monotony of it all that makes it challenging to stay actively invested in the game. By this point, you may be wondering much as I did: “What happens if you actually manage to kill 1.2 billion enemies?” Well, I’m here to conclusively report once for all, that I honestly don’t know.
I’ve seen folk, and they never reported finding any hidden graphics in there that you don’t see over the course of the standard gameplay loop. As of yet, no one has bothered to post a way to hack it so that you can immediately earn a score of 1.2 billion and see how the game responds.
Perhaps most tellingly though of what the game itself presents, you can’t actually roll the score counter into the five digits range: You’ll always be stuck with a score under 10,000, rolling back to a lower score when you hit that mark. This would indicate the obvious to me: Kurosawa and his friend never intended for anyone to get a score that high, let alone reach 1.2 billion, and probably didn’t bother to program anything in for if anyone should ever manage to. It’s all a joke at the player’s expense — a description which can also be used to explain this whole game. You know, I realize that I’ve so far neglected to discuss the cherry on top of this whole sundae: The soundtrack.
As briefly alluded to earlier, Kurosawa claims he ripped a musical track off of a random laserdisc he seems to have blindly purchased. It just so happens that the song he happened to have picked is “I Love Beijing Tiananmen”: One of the most popular songs written during China’s Cultural Revolution, and one which children at primary schools would be made to sing as part of their daily routine. The original song was written by glass factory worker Jin Yueling in 1970, with vocals performed by then-12-year old Jin Guolin. Unfortunately, without a knowledge of Chinese languages, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to determine who performs the particular rendition of the song as sampled for Hong Kong 97. What I can tell you with certainty, however, is that the roughly five-second sample is looped ad infinitum — no pause, no reprieve, no other tracks to transition to. You’ll be listening to the same song from the very moment the game loads until it is eventually closed.
As if that weren’t enough, there aren’t even any sound effects to break up the auditory monotony. If there was ever a game that begged to be muted, this would certainly be it.
It’s a strange case where discussing the finer points of the gameplay feels as if they might as well be a complete after thought. But really, what is there to say about them in a game where the gameplay seems like the tertiary priority? The controls are responsive enough and the movement speed is adequate. Of course the game could benefit from option-style power-ups enabling you a wider shot spread or what have you, or the ability to trigger screen-clearing bombs, or any other number of standard shooter additions that add an extra layer of strategy to the proceedings. But again, that’s hardly the point here: I’m sure Kurosawa could have made the basic controls intentionally awful if he had wanted, and I can almost guarantee he considered doing so at some point. So, I guess we should all appreciate his “restraint” here.
When the best compliments you can pay a game all amount to “at least the developer didn’t deliberately sabotage this,” the gimmick wears thin mighty quick. I think this is the first time we’ve gone and covered an “intentionally bad” game on this website, and let me tell you: I’m not a fan of them. When you deliberately set out with the intent of putting out crap, it’s just about the easiest goalpost you can clear, and it’s not often you manage to perform any feats of note in the process. There’s nothing amusing about intentionally fumbling — pretending to fall on your face as part of some obviously rehearsed routine. There’s none of that same charm that comes with seeing a developer trying and failing to execute on an idea, or trying to implement something so uniquely stupid / completely baffling that you find yourself entertained by the very thought of it.
I could shit out a comparable game to Hong Kong 97 in an afternoon, but I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from demonstrating the common courtesy of flushing it afterwards. For those curious / skeptical: It was as part of an after-school program on the part of a museum I was employed at. We were given a bunch of tablets to distribute amongst the kids (aged 10-15?), with some incredibly basic “drag-and-drop”-style toolkit pre-installed, allowing them to make very standard platformer fare with pixel-art graphics.
It was clearly meant to act as a sort of introduction to the concepts of programming and design, and the class all seemed to have a great time with it. I tried to impart as much additional knowledge as I could about concepts like “hit detection” and what “particles” are and whatnot, and all the children seemed to be genuinely engaged by it! I also mounted an attempt to try and take a peek inside the game, using a couple of different HEX / tile editor utilities, but I may well have been doing something wrong as all I ever managed to get out of it was jargon code and broken images. Admittedly, I am a rank amateur when it comes to this level of programming / coding, and so I’m not surprised that I didn’t end up being the one to crack this case wide open.
“I̕҉̸͜ ̵̨͠l̶̵̡͏ò̴v̨̛͏͡é͘̕͡ ̷͘͢͝P͢͠͞e҉̡k̵̶͝i̢̛͞n͝g̶̴͢ ̢͢͢͟T̛́́͜i̴̶̡̕͞a̡͢n͜͢͞a̶͜͠͏̢ǹ̷̢m̢̛͢͢͞e̢̨̢͞n̸͝͠” You may be surprised to hear that Hong Kong 97 did not prove to be a smash hit for the Super Famicom! In fairness, the odds were stacked against it from the start: The market for mail-order games was never on the same footing as proper retail releases, and designing with a specific peripheral in mind on top of that was only going to further restrict your potential consumers. There was another major flaw in the business model as well — aside from setting the unreasonable price point of ¥3,000, of course.
And that problem was, in releasing a game for a device primarily used for software piracy, you’re gonna be dealing largely with an install base of software pirates. “The types of people who bought Super Famicom game copiers weren’t the type to spend money on games, so it was like trying to sell something to a thief.
So only a few people were willing to wire money to my shady PO box in Tokyo. I sold the game on floppy disks for a few months, and then forgot about it entirely.” Yoshihisa Kurosawa And so, the game wallowed in relative obscurity for years afterwards; maybe seeing occasional reference in Japanese corners of the web, but likely being relegated to the fringe even there. Of course, when Kurosawa says he “forgot about it entirely,” this hardly rings true: He seemed plenty committed to continuing to advertise the game on his website, posting about it on message boards, and generally trying to promote his whole brand online. By all accounts, Kurosawa was all in on trying to become a fixture of the early internet otaku culture, and dipping his toes into any sort of strange business venture might earn him some amount of infamy. It’s also worth noting at this point that Hong Kong 97 may not have actually been Kurosawa’s first attempt at developing a video game. He is also credited on as having previously released a title for PC-88 computers in 1990, by the charming moniker of Torture Master ( 拷問マスター).
On an archive of a page which itself was meant to for the line of Japanese computers, a brief description accompanies the game, roughly translating to something along these lines: “This software was also released by Mr. Kurosawa, who is now the father of a child and living happily. He laughs about the game not selling any copies, but I think that this software should be considered one of the masterpieces of PC 8801 doujin game circles.
It’s still a bit scary.”. Torture Master (1990) Let’s not mince words here: It is my belief that Kurosawa is an attention-seeker, and a habitual liar to boot. He’s changed his story on Hong Kong 97 so many times over the years, it’s impossible to determine where the lies end and the truth begins. One day, he’ll contend that the game was made in a week, and the next he’ll tell you he overnighted it. He’ll go lengths of time where he pretends he didn’t actually develop the game (he merely “supported it” or what have you), before taking the credit in one of his rare interviews. He’s reportedly very flaky when it comes to coming through on conversational commitments, though some folk will tell you that he is very diligent about contacting folk who he feels “misrepresent him” in articles or videos.
At times he is boastful of his work, and at times he demonstrates a regret. He’s a man desperate to create a certain mystique around himself — “desperate” being the key word here.
I contend that Hong Kong 97 broke through into the consciousness of the outside world not thanks to Kurosawa’s continued campaigning, but rather as a naturally-occurring curiosity on the part of the emulation and games preservation communities. The file found its way onto ROM repositories, some number of folk eventually stumbled on it, and at some point folk started asking questions. Here in the West, we had to dig deeper and work harder to get our answers, leading most to simply giving up and passing the buck to someone else to figure it out. With the advent of easily accessible video uploading services and the like, and the dawning of the era of Let’s Plays, the game seemed to finally find the spotlight that Kurosawa seemed to have hoped for. And with none other than the Angry Video Game Nerd himself eventually releasing (covering none of its historical provenance, naturally), it’s firmly cemented its place in gaming folklore.
It’s with that folk felt they finally got their answers: In his most formally-conducted interview to date, Kurosawa once again stepped up to take responsibility for the game and give a simplistic overview of its development process. Aside from making sure to sneak in a few jabs at China – reiterating his stance that he still sees their citizens as “savages” – he also claims now that he wishes that “people would forget about the game once and for all.” Of course, he also addresses points such as the identity of the dead body featured in the game without giving any sort of answer, so it’s hard not to see all this as what I believe it is: Another opportunity to bring interest and intrigue back to the game, making sure there are still more questions than answers. In the article, he does let slip that he had a hand in developing another video game at some point — “a ‘run-of-the-mill’ first-person shooter for the Playstation 2.” Though he apparently refused to say which game it was, this is actually one of the easier mysteries to solve here. The title in question, by all accounts, is 2005’s Simple 2000 Series Vol. 88: The Mini Bijo Keikan (alternatively “ The Miniskirt Police”), in which his name is listed in the staff roll. It’s appropriately trashy fare for Kurosawa to lend his “talents” to a game where you play as a policewoman or secret agent of some sort clad in completely mission-inappropriate attire, which tears and deteriorates as you take damage until you’re clad in nothing but a bikini.
The line about the game being a first-person shooter is either mistranslation or misdirection, as it’s actually a third-person stealth action title largely centered around melee combat (though you can pick up and shoot firearms). Simple 2000 Series Vol. 88: The Mini Bijo Keikan (D3 Publisher, 2005) Having given up on achieving fame through game development or selling audio recordings of the ramblings of Nazi sympathizers, Kurosawa’s latest and longest-running business venture is penning an underground travel guide series, as well as selling additional documentaries and eBooks on the subject of his travels and other miscellaneous subjects he finds interesting. He wrote an entire book on the subject of “dry orgasms” at some point. I’ve not felt particularly compelled to try and translate any of his more recent writings: If researching his personal history and his 1995 video game has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t particularly like this dude. To be clear here, there’s only one thing I find particularly interesting about the whole sordid affair surrounding this game, and it comes down entirely to the story of its struggled distribution. I don’t find the game particularly amusing, the creator seems like a total try-hard, and I take umbrage with the idea that Hong Kong 97 is “the worst game ever” — by any stretch or metric.
There are mechanically worse games (both deliberate and accidental), more uncomfortable games in terms of malice and shock value, and games that are overall more incompetent in either more frustrating or entertaining ways. As such, Hong Kong 97 really should just go the way of a forgotten game and fade from the public consciousness again. But of course, it’s too late for that now: It’s become a staple of bad games media, and a go-to for folk who like to showcase crude content. I’m sure someone at some point will ask, “if you really want the game to be forgotten, why write a whole article about it?” Well, I reckon it’s on account of my Plan B scenario: If we can’t erase Hong Kong 97 from history, we should at least try our best to demystify it.
Let curious folk know that it was a failed money-making scheme turned successful attention-seeking plot by an asshole, and that it’s juvenile nature comes from a place of seemingly genuine racial and political tension. Reveal that the score counter is a sham, and that there’s no reward for wiping out the population of China. Put an end to the misinformation, and provide the boring facts about this boring game. Bury the game by busting it wide open. It’s rare that we’ll cover games on this website that I genuinely loathe or despise. It’s rarer still that I’ll take genuine umbrage with the developers, or disparage their effort.
This is one of those rare games, and Yoshihisa Kurosawa is one of those rare creators. I’ll induct it into the Bad Game Hall of Fame, since it certainly warrants the distinction — even if it doesn’t necessarily earn it, if you get what I mean. It’s half-hearted, intentional trash like this that actually gets my dander up, and I’ll be happy to never have to play this game ever again once this article goes up. It’s not worth my time, and it’s not worth yours, either. He also took credit as being part of its development for a time, before changing domains and effectively attempting to hide his involvement. Shamdasani, Pavan. South China Morning Post.
January 20, 2018. February 1, 1995 – August 26, 1996. This pricing information was gleaned off of – originally made to archive a Japanese message board dedicated to software piracy – as provided by a user named “SlickBlackCadilac” on Reddit’s. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque ornare auctor nisl, at accumsan nulla pretium eget. Nam dignissim nisi in tortor dictum, ac tempus neque ultricies. Nunc sit amet magna sit amet elit pretium bibendum sit amet a nulla.
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Unlicensed video games exist to fulfill impossible fantasies - I'm pretty sure that when I was a kid I had a bootleg copy of Street Fighter II where you could literally fill the entire screen with Hadoukens, and a pirated version of Tiny Toon Adventures where Donatello and Fred Flintstone apparently attended Acme Looniversity together (my two greatest childhood dreams). These shitty knockoffs gave us the gameplay experiences that the real game companies couldn't or wouldn't give us, like,. Or at least some of them did. Other unlicensed games seemed like they could have only been summoned into existence by the sort of kid who got beat up by Magic-card-collecting nerds (so, no one). Bear in mind that most of the games I'm about to show you were made in the '80s or '90s, way before technology advanced to the point where any 12-year-old can hack a Mario game and - these atrocities took actual effort to create, even though their only possible use is being made fun of 20 years later. 7 Titenic (NES) OK, who saw Titanic and thought, 'Yes, this should be '?
I'd seriously like to know, because I won't find out until I'm face to face with that person whether I'd like to punch him or shake his hand. Probably punch him, which is what you go around doing to all the random cooks, sailors, maids, old ladies with shotguns, and other passengers that you come across in this game, all presumably just desperate to survive the sinking of the mighty Titenic and see their families again. 'Make way for the king of the world, bitch!' Of course, you also have to defeat all the killer rats, bats, snakes, and chickens that historically plagued the ship. To achieve this, you must control, depending on the stage, two-fisted Jack Dawson (an uncharacteristically beefy Leo DiCaprio) or ax-wielding Rose DeWitt (just as Kate Winslet portrayed her). 'Hey, I found a whole bunch of extra lifebo- AAAARGH!' As is usual in these types of games, it's hard to decide which character is better.
On one hand, Rose has a fucking ax, but on the other, Jack does this when you leave him idle. With commies crowding the streets, the government of Hong Kong has no choice but to hire Bruce Lee's relative, Chin, to murder the citizens of China. All 1.2 billion. Unfortunately, it looks like they got gypped, because this is clearly Jackie Chan. The same font was used in.
Hong Kong 97 Rom
Any game would struggle to be half as entertaining as that introduction, so this one didn't even try - it consists of your character standing over a static background as a stream of communists rains down on him. Shoot them to survive; get touched once and it's game over, at which point you're treated to a real photo of a corpse with the words 'CHIN IS DEAD.' All of this happens while a hellish plays in an endless loop. Prime Minister, I've just played a game. Call off the transfer.'
'Yes, Your Majesty.' The available backgrounds include a photo of Chairman Mao, Maoist propaganda posters, and the Coca-Cola logo (presumably they were hoping for a sponsorship). Do this long enough and you'll reach the boss: the disembodied giant head of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, turned into 'the ultimate weapon' by communist science. Note that Deng was alive when this game came out, so they correctly predicted his death. And subsequent transformation.
Dodge the giant head's attacks and eventually it will blow up with the potency of half a dozen nuclear explosions. Which you know because they literally show you half a dozen nuclear explosions.
Whoa, it's just like the Death Star before the remaster. The King of Kings is seriously like something Rod and Todd Flanders would be shown playing in The Simpsons, only worse. It's supposed to be to get children interested in the Bible, but all it does is convince anyone who plays it that if there is a God, he doesn't love you. This is basically Jesus: The Game, and the worst part is that you don't even control Jesus - you can play as the Three Wise Men on their way to see the Messiah: According to this game, they kept having to stop because their camel wanted to spit on lizards. The game has few enemies, and most of them are rocks, probably because the whole 'turn the other cheek' thing also applies to ninjas and guys swinging chains.
Occasionally you're assaulted by biblical trivia questions like 'Who was the mother of Jesus?' Or 'The baby Jesus was wrapped in. ' but they always include the exact passage that has the answer, so you can just take out your pocket Bible and check that shit out super easily. Where's the challenge in that, I ask? Mostly, you go around collecting frankincense. Why does Jesus need so much damn frankincense, anyway? 'Not enough frankincense.
BONUS: Eternal damnation.' 4 Harry's Legend (NES) A Harry Potter game for the original Nintendo console seems like a temporal anomaly. By the time the world found out who the hell Harry Potter was, the Dreamcast was already out and the PS2 was on its way - I'm pretty sure most kids reading those books didn't own an NES, or know what it was. And yet, here we are.
In this loose adaptation of the first novel, Harry discovers the real magic inside himself: the magic of kicking shit. He goes around kicking his abusive relatives: 'You'll never mistreat me again, now that I've figured out how to move my leg in a swinging fashion.' Kicking Lord Voldemort: Yes, this game accomplished in three stages what the movies did in 20 hours.
And kicking these pink midgets that you fight (for some reason) in the head: The anti-little people message is a lot more overt than in the novels. 3 Gulf War Games. From Both Sides (NES/Mega Drive) If you were a kid in the early 1990s, you might have been a little too preoccupied determining which one is the best Ninja Turtle or marveling at the universal fact that Michael Jackson can do no wrong to even notice that there was a little war going on in Iraq. Unless, that is, you happened to own Operation Secret Storm - designed to fill you in on all the relevant details of the Gulf War conflict through your Nintendo. The game stars a brave American operative identified only as 'George B.,' although I think we can all guess who that's supposed to be. Looking good for 95, Mr.
George is sent to Iraq as a one-man invasion force to 'save oil refineries in the Gulf,' which you accomplish primarily by beating the crap out of every vaguely Arab-looking person that comes into your path. Your enemies range from dudes with Freddie Mercury mustaches to straight-up 1,001 Nights stereotypes - as in, you'll literally bump into people with turbans flying on magic carpets in this game.
Aka the main reason the U.S. Had to bring surface-to-air missiles to the Gulf.
As he makes his way across the country, George will visit many exotic locales, from oil refineries to Iraq's famous pyramids. He'll even locate those elusive chemical WMDs and kick them in the face. Because they have faces, because they are fire demons. 'I'm just shy, is all.' Eventually George reaches the final boss, 'Saddam Insane,' and learns his terrible secret - Iraq's president is actually a helicopter disguised in the shape of a man.
Or vice versa. How did this GIF from Hot Shots! Part Deux get here? After defeating Saddam (both of them), your only reward is an unceremonious 'Game Over' - that shows you how much America cares for its heroes. By the way, 12 years later, Iraq retaliated with: Iraq War 2003 for Sega's Mega Drive, where you control a static tank shooting down the U.S.
Hong Kong 97 Snes Download For Mac
Army's 'cosmically air attack,' because '!' 'Let's give Bush a mustache to make him look sinister.' You overdid it! Now he's a manly warrior!'
In fact, the game was originally supposed to be called Wally Bear and the Just Say No Gang, but the company apparently didn't feel like forking out the license fee to use that phrase (they didn't want kids to lay off drugs that much). Trying to teach children about this stuff through video games isn't necessarily a terrible idea, but at least be a little more upfront about it, otherwise they'll feel betrayed and start doing crack.
The Raid 2020 had a much better approach, starting with its title card, which includes a machine gun and the phrase 'WINNERS FIGHT DRUGS.' 'SIMPLY NOT DOING DRUGS IS FOR WIMPS.' In this one, which incidentally is by the same company as the nonviolent Jesus game, all you do is shoot drug dealers to death with your laser gun while avoiding deadly bird poo. Just like a real narcotics officer. Look at the pictures of Pikachu on your hard drive: And yes, he's naked in all of them. And even open Internet Explorer and browse the World Wide Web: Two percent of Cracked readers are seeing this from there right now, according to our stats.
Of course, the game isn't really doing any of that stuff - you can tell because Explorer didn't take five minutes to open. This isn't actually a functional operating system, you dummy; it's just letting you pretend to do those things because you're hopelessly lonely and it pities you. As baffling as this is, it's made even more baffling by the fact that someone also made an that adds Solitaire functionality.
Hey, I wonder what happens if you enter the Konami Code during the intro screen. Microsoft Probably. Maxwell Yezpitelok is in Chile, and also! Do you have a cell phone with a camera?
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