The last two articles were about how A.I. is antithetical to authors, audiences, and society in general. Now we are going to examine A.I.’s greatest sin:
A.I. is anti-weirdo. And I am a giant weirdo.
Today, we are going back to Space Invaders. Space Invaders was a 1978 arcade title where you are a spaceship, and it was your job to eliminate encroaching aliens. Clear “a screen”, and you will proceed to the next level with slightly different space dudes. Repeat into infinity.
This led to decades of titles that presented screen “boards”, and the style of Space Invaders was adapted into everything from Donkey Kong to Karate Champ. Most relevant to today’s topic, a spiritual Space Invaders successor was 1986’s Bubble Bobble. Here a pair of dinosaur brothers ventured into a mysterious cave to blow bubbles at robots and wizards.
Bubble Bobble was not as historic as Space Invaders, but it did inspire further games that took the basic premise of a 2-D platformer/battler and limiting it to a single screen of opponents. This concept maintained popularity through the 80’s and 90’s, and led to games like Buster Bros, Snow Bros, and Tumblepop (which may have featured brothers).
Tumblepop is a 1991 Data East joint where a couple of cleaning dudes are using vacuums to beat back the forces of aliens/a mad scientist (you know, like Ghostbusters). Every stage has a collection of monsters, and your… uh… Tumbler? Your Tumbler can use their vacuum to inhale creatures when they are close enough. You may then “shoot” the captured critter at other opponents, or inhale more monsters to then fire more damaging/bigger shots. Yes, it is Kirby a year before Kirby’s Dream Land. But there is some tension here that our favorite pink protagonist has never experienced: if you wait too long to expel a baddy, it will burst from your vacuum backpack, and you will lose a life. It is a fun risk/reward model! However, it is not going to carry a 40-hour adventure. Once you get the timing down, you are good to conquer the whole world of Tumblepop. Like many arcade titles, the whole game takes about forty minutes. But you may lose interest after about ten.
Tumblepop was not the end of Data East’s exploration of this genre, though. Tumblepop was immediately followed by today’s featured game, Diet Go Go.
Diet Go Go was released in 1992, and in many respects, it looks like the “super turbo” upgrade of Tumblepop. The playable characters still control exactly the same, but they are no longer two identical dudes, and are now two distinct characters. The main villain is the same mad scientist as last time, and he is still cooperating with a host of aliens and monsters. Gameplay is still a screen full of opponents, and you still advance stage by stage in the same murderous manner. But! The vacuums of Tumblepop are gone, and “blasting” your enemies is less straightforward. Literally. Once an opponent is stunned, you still can shoot them forward, but you also can launch them in a diagonal that will cause them to bounce all over the playfield. And this is the best way to do it! Bopping critters all over the screen in a sort of pinball-multiball chaos is the ideal path to a fun time. Start enough of a hectic chain reaction, and you might finish a level in a delightful flurry of madness.
Oh, and the reason your enemies are so bouncy? You are making them fat.
As relayed through wordless cutscenes presented on the attract screen, that evil doctor from Tumblepop is descending on the world, tossing out high-fat foods, and making the population obese. Your heroes are a pair of fitness instructors of 1980’s vintage (put on your spandex and try the Jane Fonda workout, kiddies!), and they are fighting the doctor’s hordes with fattening snacks of their own. But! Your heroes also have to worry about their diets, as enemy food will make them fat, and the progression is skinny –> fat -> dead. So two “hits” of food is a lost life. You must inflate your opponents, dodge any incoming meals, and eventually save the Earth from the terrible fate of a populace that could absolutely house a Golden Corral.
And I am here for this because the whole danged game makes absolutely no sense.
Ask anyone with an ounce of plotting chops, and they will tell you this game’s concept is absurd. You have a bad guy that is fattening people up? Then why are the heroes using the exact same “powers” to fight back? They are fitness instructors, right? Shouldn’t they be slimming their opponents down? Or demonstrating how they are powerful because they are fit? Like, a Superman thing, right? They are super strong, but their kryptonite is delicious/fattening cake. That would make sense! Or go the other way? The mad scientist is trying to starve the population, and your protagonists are advocating for the power of calories. Like a Herbie the Fat Fury thing where it is comical that the heroes do not look like you would expect from someone wearing spandex. “Make everyone fat”, ostensibly the villain’s evil plan, really should be a trait of the heroes, because the most fun you get out of Diet Go Go is based on fattened opponents. Why would aliens even care if humans are getting jiggly with it?
Diet Go Go is obvious in its intentions: the plot doesn’t matter, because the fun of bouncing around fattened monsters is exactly why this game exists.
The gameplay change here is straightforward: Tumblepop only had horizontal tumbling and popping, and the pinball factor of inflated opponents in Diet Go Go is a peerless improvement. It is not like it transforms this experience into The Dark Souls of Bubble Bobble or something, but it enhances the fun factor to a significant degree. So it is likely the designers of Diet Go Go worked backwards from this gameplay improvement. Why would monsters bounce around the screen? Well, because they have become bouncy spheres, of course. Why would that happen? We must forsake the Tumblepop vacuum, and add “make monster fat” mechanics. What will be the plot excuse for this? We have reached the end of our ability to care about such things. Just say an evil doctor is fattening people up, and two gym rats must fight back with food of their own. Whatever!
And it must be stated that this whole “fat factor” clearly created more work for the Diet Go Go staff. The skinny vs. fat sprites are vaguely lackluster for the main characters (they mostly just have rounder faces), but this is balanced by every single (non-boss) monster having a “chubby/stunned” and then “inflated” sprite. The artists could have simply “bubbled” these guys! Draw a little circle around a preexisting sprite, and knock off for lunch. It would have been the simplest thing in the world! But, no, you get distinct sizes of sprites for unique monsters like…
- Angry Gingerbread Men
- Similarly Angry, but different, Cupcake Men
- Super Angry Carrot Men
- Sentient Gumball Machines
- Helicopter Onions (?)
- Evil Chefs
- Immortal Mushrooms
- Dragon Quest Slime
- Kine the Fish
Joe and Mac Dinosaurs- Shin Megami Tensei’s Jack-o’-Lantern
- Audrey II
- Pinocchio
- Evil Clowns
- Frankenstein’s Monster
- Penguins (this may be a recurring issue)
- Ghosts
- Snowmen (who are often balls to begin with)
- Crabs. Just crabs.
- Frylock and I’m on top, rock you like a cop
- Pigs (this seemed like a gimme)
- Aliens
- Distinct-from-Aliens UFOs
- Distinct-from-Aliens Astronauts
- La Petite Mort
- And Satan from Bible (or possibly a guy in a devil costume)
Looking at that (incomplete) list of monsters that all needed sprites and multiple forms just to exist in Diet Go Go… Well, only one thought comes to mind: people made this for the love of the game. There was a much easier, much simpler version of this game that could have just as easily drained a few quarters from players. In fact, that game was Tumblepop! They could have just made Tumblepop 2! But, no, we have inflating grim reapers and mid-game cutscenes about two weirdos working out. There are easier ways to make a videogame! It was 1992! You could have just made that one X-Men beat ‘em up with, like, four different enemy types. We know that all you need is a guy with eye-lasers kicking a lizard man! Why bother with all of…. This?
And I must once again say what I said last week: A.I. would never.
By definition, using a large language model is the least creative way to produce an idea. It is literally based on everything that has come before! A.I. can take thousands of data points, and smoosh that into a fine slime that is the easiest, most efficient route forward. It is what it is built to do. If you are making an arcade game to impress audiences in 1992, A.I. would never offer the idea of “inflate enemies with food, bounce ‘em around”. You would never receive the suggestion of making a hundred different monster sprites of increasing goofiness. And you certainly would not see an ending where the mad scientist is fattened, explodes, and then the main characters make fun of the goofy, round face of a man that just became a pile of bloody chunks. That is sadistic! That should not be in a children’s game! A prompt would never lead to that finale. Only a human designing true art would make something so heartless!
So this one is for all the weirdos. Everyone making a piece of art, no matter the medium, that is weird? Keep doing it. We need there to be less products designed by computer-committee. We need more weird, fun stuff. There is space enough in this world for the likes of Bubble Bobble and Diet Go Go. Use your own creativity, and keep being weird.
FGC #746 Diet Go Go
- System: Just arcade this time. We did not get so much as a Gameboy port.
- Number of players: Choose your fitness instructor! Boy is player one, and Girl is player two.
- Who made this game? Literally every screen has the Data East logo somewhere on there. I appreciate that kind of dedication to advertising. This may have been the tradeoff for forgetting to include Karnov (he was in Tumblepop!).
- Power Up: Because food is deadly, Diet Go Go had to go down a different route for extra points. Your heroes are now collecting literal valuables, like diamonds. There are also rings all over the place, which officially makes this a Sonic the Hedgehogalike.
Sexual Dimorphism is a Scourge: This is the rare situation where the male population has it worse than the ladies: during in-between battle cutscenes, Boy is “fattened” tremendously more often than Girl, and the humor (such as it is) is derived from Boy having a hard time losing weight while Girl is fit and active. There appears to be exactly one scene where Girl suffers a similar fate, and that still ends with Boy getting slapped as the punchline. Sorry, bro.- But Boy is always the 1-Up Icon: Yep! So score one for the patriarchy!
- Favorite Boss: Tumblepop and Diet Go Go both use the same gameplay to end levels: your normal attacks do not work on a boss, so you must shoot minions at the main monster. It is a commendable way to make these encounters appealing through the finale. All that said, my favorite boss is either the 2-headed pterodactyl, or the Crab Cyclops Soup Creature. The pterodactyl is threatening and weird, but Soupy is game-appropriate and weird. Weirdness is on full display!
- Who was that guy? The mad scientist boss of Tumblepop and Diet Go Go is officially known as Dr. Dogedo. Despite clearly dying at the finale of Diet Go Go, he returns in Spin Master and Joe & Mac Returns. And, lest you forget, Joe & Mac Returns is the Joe & Mac title that apes the gameplay of Tumblepop. Spin Master was the prequel to Dashin’ Desperadoes. Data East made a lot of games.
- An end: Can you name all the Data East luminaries on the Diet Go Go ending screen?
No. No you cannot. - Did you know? This is one of the many arcade titles that started with the FBI’s “Winners don’t use drugs” PSA screen. It is also a game where, when you afflicted with fat, you must find a “diet drink” to get back to a safe size. Draw your own conclusions.
- Would I play again: If this pops up on the Arcade Classics line or some random collection of Data East titles, I’ll give it another (diet go) go. It’s fun! It is weird and fun and like forty minutes. I am down for that.
What’s next? ‘Tis the time of the month for Smashing, so we are going to get Zero Suit Samus out on the stage. And who knows, maybe a planet will explode. Please look forward to it!
