Mars for the Rich
released on Aug 13, 2019
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Only a year after the first wave of indie throwback shooters (Dusk, Amid Evil, etc.), Australian jam band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (what a name) saw the potential in promoting their thrash metal album via a mini-FPS. I'm not about to say it went well, or did anything a more evocative music video could have done better, but the effort's appreciated. Infest the Rats' Nest deserved way better, though. Back in my day [grandpa voice] our free FPS flash games let us shoot Bill Gates for the crime of Microshaft Winblows! This honestly just does way too little with the single's subject matter and feels like a last-minute promo.
We've basically got just one little combat arena available from the jump, with usable but very basic movement and controls. Then there's a super limited bestiary to fight, pulling as much from the iconography of albums like Nonagon Infinity as it does Infest the Rats' Nest. Building even a small demo game for the latter's top single—a roaring banger satirizing Elon Musk and other techbro imperialists' dreams of abandoning Earth—shouldn't be difficult. Just have two or three punchy guns, simple yet replayable levels to blast through, and some of that juicy, inscrutable Jason Galea psychedelia. What could go wrong?
It could just be a big fat nothingburger, that's what. The arena's all you get, as are a bunch of annoying bats to shoot at. Low-end Serious Sam/Painkiller noodling under weed-excited skies isn't all that engaging, sorry fellas. And while the music does the heavy lifting as it should, I just don't think Flightless Records committed any ambition to this beyond ticking a marketing checklist. Seriously, the very idea of a King Gizzard boomer shooter is awesome. The band's variety of genres, their loosely-connected musical multiverse with albums and videos nodding to each other...so much potential, yet it's hardly hinted at here. The most I'll say is that this isn't abominable to play, just an annoying reminder of what could be. Maybe I just gotta work on my Doom mapping chops and start a community project to fill the gap.
A full-bore King Gizzard WAD would have to cover the following key points:
•Has to loop in on itself (last map leads into the first)
•Total conversion of all graphics, monsters, weapons, and power-ups (aka some real GZDoom shit)
•Copious references to everything throughout the Gizzverse, from Han-Tyumi's barf bag to a trip down The River and into the Crumbling Castle
•Game flow that just feels like a series of effortless, chaotic band jams, transitioning between incidental and slaughter combat
•Some breather levels playing off the folk pop/rock songs; similarly, the secret maps could use concepts from Gumboot Soup and the band's demos
•Full MIDI remixes of relevant KGatLW songs, alongside the originals themselves if the player desires
•The band's gotta stream themselves attempting to play the thing on Ultra-Violent at least once
I could go on. Basically what I'm saying is we live in a timeline where masterpieces of music industry multimedia like Frankie, Ed Hunter, Spice World, Tomarunner Vs L'Arc En Ciel, and Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style exist (among others). Something's going terribly wrong if the likes of zero-to-hero Aussie maximalist rockers are settling for this by contrast. They can go harder, cheesier, zanier...more extra in every way, just like their music videos and performances, yet look what the Mars for the Rich online game has amounted to. Sorry state of affairs, or just a mistimed and under-resourced gift to fans excited for the album? I don't know—it just irks me. Maybe I'm underestimating the labor and budgeting a longer ludonarrative experience requires, but I doubt it'd break the bank to make something simple but more involved and replayable than this.
We've basically got just one little combat arena available from the jump, with usable but very basic movement and controls. Then there's a super limited bestiary to fight, pulling as much from the iconography of albums like Nonagon Infinity as it does Infest the Rats' Nest. Building even a small demo game for the latter's top single—a roaring banger satirizing Elon Musk and other techbro imperialists' dreams of abandoning Earth—shouldn't be difficult. Just have two or three punchy guns, simple yet replayable levels to blast through, and some of that juicy, inscrutable Jason Galea psychedelia. What could go wrong?
It could just be a big fat nothingburger, that's what. The arena's all you get, as are a bunch of annoying bats to shoot at. Low-end Serious Sam/Painkiller noodling under weed-excited skies isn't all that engaging, sorry fellas. And while the music does the heavy lifting as it should, I just don't think Flightless Records committed any ambition to this beyond ticking a marketing checklist. Seriously, the very idea of a King Gizzard boomer shooter is awesome. The band's variety of genres, their loosely-connected musical multiverse with albums and videos nodding to each other...so much potential, yet it's hardly hinted at here. The most I'll say is that this isn't abominable to play, just an annoying reminder of what could be. Maybe I just gotta work on my Doom mapping chops and start a community project to fill the gap.
A full-bore King Gizzard WAD would have to cover the following key points:
•Has to loop in on itself (last map leads into the first)
•Total conversion of all graphics, monsters, weapons, and power-ups (aka some real GZDoom shit)
•Copious references to everything throughout the Gizzverse, from Han-Tyumi's barf bag to a trip down The River and into the Crumbling Castle
•Game flow that just feels like a series of effortless, chaotic band jams, transitioning between incidental and slaughter combat
•Some breather levels playing off the folk pop/rock songs; similarly, the secret maps could use concepts from Gumboot Soup and the band's demos
•Full MIDI remixes of relevant KGatLW songs, alongside the originals themselves if the player desires
•The band's gotta stream themselves attempting to play the thing on Ultra-Violent at least once
I could go on. Basically what I'm saying is we live in a timeline where masterpieces of music industry multimedia like Frankie, Ed Hunter, Spice World, Tomarunner Vs L'Arc En Ciel, and Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style exist (among others). Something's going terribly wrong if the likes of zero-to-hero Aussie maximalist rockers are settling for this by contrast. They can go harder, cheesier, zanier...more extra in every way, just like their music videos and performances, yet look what the Mars for the Rich online game has amounted to. Sorry state of affairs, or just a mistimed and under-resourced gift to fans excited for the album? I don't know—it just irks me. Maybe I'm underestimating the labor and budgeting a longer ludonarrative experience requires, but I doubt it'd break the bank to make something simple but more involved and replayable than this.