endlessjess
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Back to the past with Night Trap, baby!
🕑 Added 2021-11-29 00:03:59 +0000 UTCAlright you little zoomer rugrats, gather round and hear my pointless, rambling old man story. This is Night Trap. Back in my day this game was infamous. Not Infamous the game, i mean an infamous game, as in a game that is infamously known for being infamous. Infamous for how shitty it was. It came out during the FMV trend, which was really only a trend because Sega had to market the Sega CD somehow and this was the only thing it could do that was even slightly impressive.
I had one back in the day. I think i had Trespasser on there. But i must be wrong about that because i'm looking up Trespasser now and i can't find anything about it even being on the Sega CD. It was a PC game, which is weird because i never had a PC growing up but i definitely remember playing it at some point. Maybe i just saw those tits in a magazine and wished i was playing it so hard i formed a fake memory Total Recall style.
In any case I know i had Sewer Shark, actually, it wasn't in any case, that was the problem. One time it got caught under my grandma's rocking chair and that was all she wrote for old Sewer Shark. It cracked right in half, luckily it was Sewer Shark so i managed not to be too depressed over it. Kind of a relief, to be honest. It meant i didn't have to play Sega CD anymore.
Mostly what i remember is the load times. My God. Playing that fucking thing was torture. On the rare occasion i did feel like playing Sewer Shark or Sonic CD (which i still think is massively overrated compared to the Genesis games, but that's an opinion for me to pretend to care about some other time) I'd have to sit there looking at the boot up screen for what felt like 45 minutes, wondering if it was actually loading the game or just frozen in some weird way, but afraid to turn it off and start all over again. You had to wait in this limbo every time, for every game, and the games themselves were never worth it. Fuck. I hate the Sega CD.
Anyways my point is I think Night Trap was also on there. But then again, what do I know, i thought Trespasser was on there, but apparently that was a totally wrong Nibelheim flashback that didn't actually happen. For all i know Night Trap could have been on the Lynx, the Jaguar, the 3D0, or any of the other dozens of failed 90s consoles that flooded the market and ruined Christmas every fucking year of my childhood.
Growing up i only knew of Night Trap from Magazines. It was the kind of game so famous for being a failure people couldn't stop talking about it, and it sort of became a cult artifact of its own. That's called failing upward and it's the reason all of our presidents, police chiefs, and high school principles turn out the way they do.
Games like Night Trap would always make repeat appearances in the back pages of EGM or something, usually being gleefully dumped on by the likes of Seanbaby, one of my literary heroes. But consistently poking fun at a game like this always instills a morbid curiosity. Rather than being hated, the game becomes something fun to talk about, something you're fond of in a weird way. Something unique, a failed experiment from a bygone age. You say to yourself, if i ever get a chance to play Night Trap, then by God i will.
Well, that day has arrived. This craptastic cult classic has been re-released on PS4, and since PS4 has that handy record gameplay button, you had to know i'd be down for some terrible, goddamn fucking shitty Night Trap action. Hell yeah.
Having played it, honestly. I kind of like it. I get what it was going for, and it doesn't do it very well, but what it does do entirely by accident is encapsulate an era. I can't help it, i'm in my 30s, which means I see things from the 1990s and my brain just feels safe, comfortable, at home. That's real nostalgia, the kind that can't be faked and sold to you in a bottle by Hollywood, even though they keep trying. It's a pleasant surprise to get this nostalgic feeling from a game i've technically never played before. But like me, the Oldschool Fool, Night Trap is a product of it's time, and i can't help but love it for that.
Oh sure the controls are confusing, vague dogshit. Sure it barely functions. Sure the acting and dialogue isn't what the smart ass internet critics of today would call "watchable", but seriously who gives a fuck about any of that? It's about the experience, man. The terrible, barely functional gameplay and weird story full of asinine characters who wouldn't exist anywhere is part of the charm.
Oddly enough, for a game so infamously god-awful in it's own era, time has only been kind to Night Trap. It's cringe has become kitsch. To an oldhead like me this kind of stuff ages like wine. Besides, look at the fucking BABES in this game. Babes never got better looking than they were in the 90s, that was the peak. By the time they start dancing in their underpants for no reason, playing a tennis racket like a guitar and singing the theme song of the game they are currently in, that's when i arrive at that beautiful and poignant intersection of nostalgic and horny that is my most powerful mood.
Watching these hella-fine 90s vixens shaking their sweet asses make me feel 90, but in a good way. Like an ancient, decorated WW2 vet remembering all those big tittied, hairy beaver having Italian chicks he banged in the war. A wave of nostalgia comes over me like that 95 year old hero cranking his hog to thoughts of some chick he banged in his 20s and never saw again, shooting out dust and dying fulfilled, so his grandkids can find him dead on the toilet Christmas morning.
Hey, there are worse surprises you can get on Christmas, i got a fucking Sega CD.
Comments
Chip Wiseman
It's one of the reasons, another being Mortal Kombat. With the introduction of photorealism and live-action footage in games, parents started getting worried about what they were getting little Timmy for his birthday. That's when a few publishers started self-rating their games, before eventually handing over that duty to independent boards like the ESRB and PEGI.
Dungeon Floozy
a friend of mine told me that they remembered Night Trap being why the ESRB exists, which makes the game a little cooler but it's still dookie-dogs af
