Global Courant
As it happens7:39“You just know crap when you see it,” says a man reviewing a bad video game match
What really makes a video game worthless?
“There aren’t really any set criteria,” says James Bradbury, 46, from Hull, England. “You just know bullshit when you see it.”
Bradbury is the host of the Comp.Sys.Sinclair Crap Games Contest 2023. Running since 1996, the tongue-in-cheek competition invites entrants to code the worst possible games for one of the UK’s oldest home computers, the ZX Spectrum.
“If you have a big ambition, but maybe your skill level as a programmer doesn’t match that ambition, that can make something worthless,” Bradbury told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“If you have a certain sense of humor and you want to build a game around that, that can be pretty rubbish.”
This year’s entries include Cocaine Bear, loosely based on the 2023 movie, which itself was loosely based on a real bear; Face Punch, where the player moves back and forth very slowly and punches an opponent until they fall; SUPER (Advanced Fishing Simulator), a fishing simulator that’s actually not very advanced at all; and several games based on the popular drawing toy Etch A Sketch.
Screenshots of some of the contenders in the Crap Games Contest 2023: Cocaine Bear, Face Punch, BRYSON DECHAMBEAU PLAYS LIV GOLF and Mad Gods. (csscgc23.blogspot.com)
Bradbury’s job is up play and watch them all. He’s done nearly 30 so far and will continue to do so as the entries roll in through the end of the year.
“Imagine you have five different Etch A Sketch games and you have to write a… review for each game and they are all essentially more or less the same,” he said.
The crown goes to the loser
So how did Bradbury end up with such a tedious responsibility? It’s his reward – or punishment – for putting in a relatively decent play for last year’s game.
Each year, the person whose play is rated the least worthless is charged with hosting and judging the following year’s competition.
Bradbury earned his job by creating Isle of Jobo, in which you play a corrupt Prime Minister trying to stay in power as long as possible while lining his pockets and those of his cronies.
A screenshot of Isle of Jobo, dubbed the Least Crap Game of the 2022 Crap Games Contest. (crapgamescompetition2022.great-site.net)
“I’m definitely proud of the game I made,” said Bradbury. But he has mixed feelings about the consequences of his win and/or loss.
“There’s definitely a lot of work involved… to run a year-long league where you rate games, you know, with a very mixed standard of quality,” he said.
“It’s quite a bit of pressure to come up with something new and interesting to say with a game that took maybe five minutes to make, and it really doesn’t do anything.”
Started with an April 1 joke
A game for the ZX Spectrum that barely does anything is basically what started this whole thing. It was called Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.
“All you can do in the game is press the letter M, and if you hold it down, a little lawn mower will start mowing the lawn very slowly,” said Bradbury. “And after a certain time, the lawnmower broke down.”
A retro vintage Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer console, released in 1982, featuring games and retro joystick controllers. (see shooteatrepeat/Shutterstock)
In 1988, computer magazine Your Sinclair published a glowing review of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator – which did not exist at the time – as an April Fool’s Joke. according to a Guardian article by Rich Pelly, one of the former writers of the now-defunct magazine.
A month later, Your Sinclair released a genuine copy of the game on a cassette tape attached to the sleeve.
‘100% crap factor’
That inspired readers to submit their own terrible games, which the magazine began reviewing in a column called Crap Game Corner, written by Pelly.
“My job description included reviewing games and taking screenshots (initially with a real camera and a hood over the television, until someone worked out a more technical method),” Pelly wrote in The Guardian.
“The dichotomy of Crap Game Corner was the longer it took, the worse the games got, and the happier the readers were when I turned them down. (Games were rated to 100% Crap Factor).”
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That column turned into the game, and here we are.
“I’ve always found it incredibly funny to quickly code a rock game over lunch and then … see what people think,” said Bradbury. “It’s really nice to be a part of that history.”
Each entry is intended to hearken back to the era of the ZX Spectrum, a system that could display as many as eight basic colors and had 90,000 times less memory than a modern iPhone.
That, Bradbury points out, is part of the charm.
“People of my generation, it’s the first computer people had in their homes. So I think there’s a lot of great childhood memories and nostalgia associated with it.”
The games are all free to download, and modern gamers can play them on their computers by using an emulator – a program that simulates playing a real ZX Spectrum.
The contest ends on December 16, at which point Bradbury will decide which game is the most bullshit and which is the least bullshit, dooming another creator to a year of reviewing absolute crap.
“I’ll try not to let the power go to my head,” he said.
