Let's Sperg JAIMAS PLAYS A TERRIBLE GAME: Smash MAGA by Twin Trouble - In which Jaimas has to take a lap.

  • 🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.

Jaimas

BIG AMERICAN FREEDOM
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Jun 27, 2014
Every now and then someone can tell you a game concept and you just know it's going to be an episode. There's no ambiguity; you know that there's only one way a game concept like this, made by a developer who is more than likely nucking futs, can really go. However, sometimes there are things that just catch you by surprise, even in the case of a game whose issues you can see coming a mile off, and that is absolutely the case with today's title, brought to you by the irrepressible @MarvinTheParanoidAndroid.

At first glance, it's another blatantly political free game that excreted itself onto Steam, made by a developer whose sole reason for making it is scoring political gotcha points on people they hate, which puts it in esteemed company like Bomber Bother and Extreme Meatpunks Forever, but there is a massive difference between today's fucking shambles and other JPATG entries, and as is the case for many of the higher-tier entries on the JPATG bottom ten, it's one of intent.

Smash MAGA may be one of the most bitter, political mean-spirited games I have ever covered for this website. It is so blatant, intentionally wrong-headed, and comes from such a place of open hostility for dissenting points of view that it's honestly a little ridiculous, to the point where it openly proves the opposition viewpoint correct just through sheer malice, and while many games I've covered may as well serve as giant advertisements for political positions that aren't those of the developer, including every JPATG title I've mentioned by name so far, I can't think of another one I've played that was this agenda-driven about it. When I am fighting to not openly make references to National Alliance's shitty FPS games from the early 2000s, you know you've hit a point where you're gonna need the booze once the review ends.

And that's not a comparison I make lightly, but.... You'll see when we get there.

I feel timing is important for this one, too - this game specifically came out a year after the 1/6 riots. By the time of this writing, Trump has been out of office for over a year, and even people I know who were froth-at-the-mouth Trump-haters think Biden is an order of magnitude worse. Substantially more people still want the BLM Riots (which claimed nearly 40 lives and inflicted billions of dollars in property damage) investigated than want 1/6 (where one person died - an old woman who was shot by Capitol Police - and every alleged death otherwise, such as Brian Sicknick, did not, in fact, die in it). The Media's been trying to push it as the greatest threat America's ever known, but no one's really bothering to care anymore. But in the distance, the developer behind this game is on the way! "Man, the people aren't buying the whole narrative that 1/6 was the greatest threat to our nation since the Macarena. I need to help!"

And lo, here we all are. If there is anything I can take comfort in, it's that most of the game reviews recommending it are, in fact, long-form shitposts making fun of it.
This is how it should be, as you will soon see.

20220109084907_1.jpg
The game opens up with this fucking spiel, before we come to our title screen.

20220109084929_1.jpg
This is it, the proof that this game isn't some elaborate masterclass trolling attempt in the vein of our favorite Marine-Trained Teen by the developers. :jace:
You know, if you didn't read the fucking interviews with the developers where they said they made the game to drum up support for ANTIFA.

The game loves video clips. It has one running at all times during the title, from the actual BLM riots that happened in 2020, complete with loud BLM screaming and images of them smashing shit up. You know, because there is no connection between BLM and ANTIFA - except the express statement of the people who made this game that they're one and the same. Sadly, there's no explanation of the controls, no Readme file, no graphic settings, to the best of my knowledge, no way to pause the game, and the About feature just tells you who made it and that the game's on itch.io.

20220109085049_1.jpg
20220109085104_1.jpg
20220109085125_1.jpg

Smash MAGA is a top-down shooter in the same vein of Smash TV, but with objectives and more effort into putting the boots to groups and people the developer hates than actual gameplay. Veterans of JPATG may remember my complaints about the likes of say, ReGiCiDe, which despite being a tiny fucking game on a simple engine, ran at about four frames a second because the developer was a fucking idiot who didn't know how to use RM2K.

This game honestly runs worse. It runs much worse.

The frame rate wobbles between 10 per second and 1 per second, and periodically freezing if there's too much on screen. For me, this game crashed twice just getting to this point. And then there's the art style: Images directly ripped from Google image search, spritified, and put out like this, alongside mediocre pixel art and excessive use of photoshop to put the maps together. It's ugly as sin, runs like garbage, and due to the terrible framerate, is nigh-unplayable, but those tend to be recursive themes for JPATG titles, so let's keep going.

You have your choice of mission, with the first one being "Vaccination Site."

Our protagonist says that MAGA Zombies are overrunning the city, and, armed with his "Mask Gun," sets out to stop them. When you arrive, they are, by and large, minding their own business, wandering around with Trump signs. In fact, the ones that aren't armed are, by and large, laughably unable to even hurt you. So this is another game where the fucking antagonist force of the game was mostly peaceable until the protagonist showed up to start shit.

Sometimes the enemies drop Cheetos, which replenish your health. I'm as perplexed as you.

20220109085242_1.jpg

A few moments in, I'm finding palettes of bricks that are just laying around in random spots through the zones. If you're not familiar with the memes regarding this, during ANTIFA riots, palettes of bricks - often shrink-wrapped and/or with metal strappings in place - have had a tendency to just show up in big cities - ones with considerable CCTV Security coverage - right when the riots are picking up, and nobody seems to be able to figure out how. Most of the time it's blamed on local construction, since local law enforcement pretends it's blameless.

In this game, it doesn't matter how they got there, they're a useful sub-weapon which the game doesn't tell you how to use. They do more damage than the mask gun you start with, but do nicely establish that we are now going from simply masking the unmasked to actually conducting violence against them for their politics. Fucking hell.

I spent a solid five minutes trying to figure out how to use the goddamn things. Eventually, I realized that you need to click on the brick icon, and only then will you be able to throw bricks, which are mostly used for smashing signs and windows since they're slow and hard to aim, but they do plenty of damage if they hit an enemy.

20220109085201_1.jpg
See those colored parallelograms on the left? The ones badly filtered over the Google Images? Those are windows. The game wants you to smash those and pick up items for points. No other purpose. Also destroying signs that you don't politically agree with.

At this point, further driving home that this game isn't satire, we have this Proud Boy enemy that takes two hits. I don't have enough time to go into these morons in depth; they're a group of sodbrain morons whose leadership are all FBI Informants that the Media tries to pretend are going to kill you and your family in the name of Donald Trump. There's nothing funny I can say about it; it is what it is.

20220109085302_1.jpg
You can find and steal a bike (any of them really) for greater mobility. Never do this. You move three times faster, but the framerate assures this is a bad idea. You actually can outrun the screen if you get a running start, and it's only a matter of time before you will need to fight, and the bike may help you get away, but good luck hitting anything while the framerate chugs.

Eventually, follow the map marker and you'll get to the actual objective: a series of tents and a hospital in this case. The goal in this first mission is to defend the hospital and its staff.

As I roam, though, I see something:

20220109085349_1.jpg
20220109085435_1.jpg


There is a giant collection of bricks, healing supplies, and nebulously brown people around a fucking hideous modern art statue. Touching any of them turns them into "Comrades," who then follow you around and support you by hurling bricks at the enemies. You may be noticing that this is about to go in an incredibly uncomfortable direction, and while I don't want to be the guy to point it out, if I don't, literally everyone reading this review is going to:


20220109085335_1.jpg

Every enemy in this game is white. Every single one. Every single ally is a person of color. Again, every single one.

AIDS.jpe
The game, of course, was created by two white guys, Jeremy Hammond and Jason Hammond, both of whom look exactly like you think they would.
Namely, like they sprung fully formed from Bike Lock Guy's ballsack.

20220109085541_1.jpg
Action intensifies as badly-artifacted JPGs of buses attack the venue and deploy more red hats for the ongoing race war started by the protagonist. It is impossible to keep track of anything; the framerate sucks too much and I'm forced to run racetrack circles taking potshots because the game is too unstable to let me do much else.

20220109085623_1.jpg

Fucking surreal.

The main objective in the first level just seems to be kill enough enemies near the hospital, before they have a chance to overrun and kill the nurses.

Do it, and the level just.... Ends.

20220109085816_1.jpg

Unfortunately, this game has five levels. Fuck me. Would you believe that the levels after are even worse?

20220109102134_1.jpg

This level flat-out opens with a burning police car (which if you touch you die from fire damage), the declaration that a mean speaker is speaking at a college campus, and we need to stop them. The game wouldn't let me screenshot it - because it was a loading screen - but unironically, in the loading sequence for the second level, argues that they have every right to hurt and/or kill their political enemies, because they, personally, feel their lives are at risk. They then give you a bunch of expendable brown people to recruit and tell you to get to it.

Dear fucking god. You get a new weapon pickup too.

20220109102219_1.jpg

Well, now I can tell the MAGA dudes to DON'T CALL ANYBODY, but that doesn't make me feel much better. You go through ammo in a second, it sucks.

20220109102337_1.jpg

This fucking sign I needed to bring up, because once more we have another great example of the developers' sheer fucking psychosis in action. This billboard has a rotating set of ads to buy guns to defend yourself and your property from looters. Being ANTIFA tards, the devs think this is a direct threat against their lives. Every fucking political point this game makes is like this. Anything that conflicts with the worldview is something to be destroyed. Anyone who believes something other than the developer is scum to be marginalized and eradicated, and perhaps the most naked part of it is that you get to see how the devs actually feel about minorities: that they're expendable assets who exist to be squandered in "the cause." The devs will talk a good game about how they're all "with it" and progressive, but they successfully made every shitposter's points for them with this shit.

20220109102423_1.jpg

It just keeps getting worse, too. You start attacking people complaining about CRT and groomers in schools. I couldn't catch it in action, but they pop up with little speech clouds. It's just driving home, over and over again, just how fucked-in-the-head these people are, where they don't see their opponents as even having the same human rights they do. And throughout all of it, you see THE MESSAGE put everywhere, because ANTIFA is totally against the Establishment, which is why it does what the Establishment wants at all times.

20220109102429_1.jpg
I hope that you're all taking the time to appreciate that I didn't just go to every single screenshot in this review and go: "Wow, this looks awful and has terrible implications." Like don't worry about that guy on the post, he's just a JPG, and don't pay any mind to that sign, just destroy the windows of this storefront. Everything's allowed when you view every political viewpoint even tangentially dissimilar to your own as the works of sub-human vermin.

Smashing open and looting everything gets a fucking bevy of the devs' brain-turds as the Protagonist says shit like "they have stolen more from us than we can ever loot."

Destroy every storefront and take everything, because fuck everything, fuck society, as long as the Dev gets what he wants nothing else matters.

20220109102456_1.jpg

Finally, I got to the central college area, without an escort of expendable minorities (I wasn't going to give the devs the satisfaction), and I ran into these guys. They're useless bystanders who do nothing but get in the way when the local MAGAs swarm in and kick your violent ass. Because I didn't take my rotating ring of minorities, I get overwhelmed as they deploy drones that actively track you down.

20220109102518_1.jpg
Just fucking look at this score sheet.
I have nothing to add about the way the people who created this see the world

I try a second time, and succeed at breaking out of the blockade.

20220109105114_1.jpg
The next thing our protagonist suggests is heading to the local prison and releasing all of the prisoners.

Before then, however, I uncover a game-breaking bug. If you get stuck on an environment obstacle, and keep pushing the direction, the Camera will continue to pan a certain distance without you, only snapping back where you let go, and where you may or may not be able to figure out where the fucking player is when the camera snaps back.

Other times, a sprite error can cause your character to just vanish and you become invincible until things calm down, at which point you die.

Regardless, we move forward to the Prison.

20220109105134_1.jpg
The cops are armed with guns and this goes poorly; a pretty beautiful representation of idiot versus gun. The game kept crashing when I tried to play past this, and when it wasn't crashing, it was trying to force-feed us the devs' stupid fucking political opinions and locking up for 10 seconds at a time. And yes: every level after this gets worse. Because the game won't let me go past here, I'll move onto the next level:

20220109110858_1.jpg
20220109110906_1.jpg
The game gets more unplayable, the framerate more unstable, the political messaging more and more going into crazytown as the mission briefing for level 3 attempts to portray Elon Musk as a harbinger of the holocaust and implies Climate Change will destroy the fucking planet - screenshots I can't give you because they take place in the fucking loading transitions. The level opens and almost immediately fucks up because the game locks up from too much shit on screen. You're then killed by Trump Supporter Gunboats.

At least that ended the level fast.

The fourth level is then a fucking tower defense where you defend your "Autonomous Zone" from cops trying to get your freeloading asses to leave. Your response?

20220109111237_1.jpg
Killing them with fire, of course.

20220109111309_1.jpg
20220109111321_1.jpg
Jesus fucking Christ.

Every level is like this. Burn, Loot, Murder. Force minorities to fight for you.

A game that literally proves every shitposter's memes about BLM correct with every disgusting frame-killing jitter.

20220109111839_1.jpg
The final major level is the Capitol Riot, because of fucking course it is. You face the same generic enemies you saw everywhere, only now they appear in enough numbers to make the game crash. You also have to shoot the founding fathers because obviously those are evil white men. It's at this point I had to stop. Not take a break, stop entirely. There is only so much I'm willing to tolerate for the sake of a review, and this game is one of the most profoundly miserable experiences I've had running JPATG. When this game isn't crashing or running like shit, it's so proud and smug in its political ignorance and willingness to encourage its player to hurt people whose only real crime is holding a political position differing from its creator that it honestly taints the entire experience. After my seventh crash on this level, I decided to end this.

I feel some fucking levity is in order now, because the game sure as shit isn't giving us any.

Super KKK Bros.gif
Kiwis, I was hoping this would be something delightfully retarded that I could make you guys laugh with, like those terrible racist Mario ROM Hacks from the early 2000s, stuff that we all could collectively laugh at together. But I'm not going to let the fucking execrable experience I just went through be for nothing.

No, Kiwis, we deserve more, and @CatParty deserves a good read too, god damn it.

So with that in mind, let me bring up a mediocre political game from about two decades ago, and go over why it succeeded where Smash MAGA failed.

Bushgame.jpg
For our comprison point, let's journey back to a time when the left wasn't defined by the craziest elements thereof, and discuss Bushgame.

Bushgame was born out of the frustration, anger, and obnoxious bullshit brought to us by the Bush Administration in 2000, and while Obama would, in due time, make Bush look like a fucking wet fart in contrast, we had no way of knowing that at the time.

Bushgame is a fucking merciless excoriation of Bush and the Neocons at the time, yet it actually manages to be kind of effective for what it is, owing to a more-or-less simple gameplay loop, straightforward game design, good music (and openly ripping a few songs off to give a thumbs-up to oldschool gamers), and throwing in no small amount of comedy - You are literally seeing Tom Ridge as a duct-tape-wielding robo-demon while Bush escapes in an Imperial Walker. The story involves Hulk Hogan hoping to show what REAL AMERICA is like, Mr. T who's dying of Cancer, and a morbidly obese He-Man uniting to save Voltron from Dick Cheney.

There's not a hell of a lot one can say to take that shit seriously, and I think that's part of why it works.

When Bushgame does whip out the Political 'tism, you can usually bypass it entirely, just by running to the next screen, unless it's part of the setpieces, and those never overstay their welcome. Shit slows down, it makes its point as you move to the next area, and that's it - and none of the points it ever makes are anywhere near as mean-spirited as Smash MAGA. It never points the finger of blame on anyone other than the policymakers, who, at the time, were basically all Neocons, and the biggest personal objection I can raise other than some questionable analysis of finances is holding certain leftists (long before Progressivism ate their brains) up on a pedastal as playable characters. Or suggesting that professional Charisma Vaccuum John Kerry was a superior candidate, but that's just me being a dick. But hey, Bushgame lets you violently kill them in funny ways by playing like shit, and the game has both a level select and infinite continues, so enjoy. Also it's like 8 megs and could probably run at a stable framerate on a computer from 1996. That said, Bushgame ultimately realized it was trying to entertain. It's not a good game, it's average at best; the sort of silly little time killer you could gun through in a lunch break.

But good fucking god, it's amazing how different this game is from Smash MAGA in approach; Bushgame never impled that half of the US was effectively stupid for voting for Bush, but Smash MAGA was perfectly comfortable saying anyone who supported Trump was a white supremacist. Bushgame kept its angle directly criticizing specific events - the invasion of Iraq, Enron, the disasters of the Bush Tax Cuts, and so on. Smash MAGA implies that looting and destruction is perfectly justified for past indiscretions that the fucktards who made it will never, ever, in a million years give actual examples of. Bushgame made fun of Howard Stern only giving a shit about Censorship because it was literally how he made his career; Smash MAGA holds ANTIFA as sacrosanct and beyond criticism. Bushgame argues that one innocent life taken because of shit policy is too many and that we should have moved from foreign interventionism to the negotiating table; Smash MAGA argues that the deaths caused by BLM are acceptable losses and that we should kill police officers. They're two completely different worlds, and just from their politics.

Now we get to the big question: where can I even put Smash MAGA amongst the JPATG bottom ten?

In terms of concentrated agony, it easily races right past ReGiCiDe, the previous title-holder, and leaves it in the dust; and it's way more cynical than either Depression Quest, Patriarchy Simulator 2000, or even Game Critic Simulator. By those illustrious qualifications alone, Smash MAGA deserves to dethrone Laura Kate Dale's magnum opus, but for my money, it's the technical problems on top of this that makes this one deserve the top spot.

Over the course of my playing this, the game crashed about 11 times, and I reached the point where even ReGiCiDe's infamous swamp section didn't give me the fucking framerate drops this fucking shambles did. I honestly reached the point where even That Really Hot Chick and Extreme Meatpunks Forever didn't fight me this much.

Between how much this game's creators fucking hate and advocate violence against anyone who isn't of their political stripe, how much of a fucking chore this is to play, how often it crashed, and how many fucking game breaker bugs I found, I have literally no choice but to declare this the new throne-holder of worst game I've played for this website. It was a good run, but four years hence, Laura Kate Dale has moved onto second worst. Huzzah.

Now leave me be to drink myself into a coma and sleep this game off like the subsequent hangover. :bluelabel:
 
...What?

Was it something that you didn't come across in the game? Because it sounds like something that should be in the review.
Packages of Diapers. They're something you can loot, same as the soup cans. Trying to imply that the only looting is perfectly legit.

It's great to see that ANTIFA still has no sense of self awareness.

Only thing that's missing is this.

yXe5gag.png
That would have been hilarious, which is exactly why we didn't see it.
 
That would have been hilarious, which is exactly why we didn't see it.
It seems that missed opportunities are kind of normal for these political games. Meatpunks could have explained why the Fash is something to be concerned about by having someone being robbed by them or something.

Only thing that the story for this needs is that some glownigger is sponsoring your actions so that the next antiterrorism bill will get passed.
 
These performance art-as-political protests are a hoot. The woke love to scream to the mountaintops about how we are perpetually minutes away from the apocalypse--depending on who you ask, it's already here--yet their master plan for dealing with the coming doom is to build absurd castles in the air or make up windmills to tilt against. Anything to be seen as someone who is Doing Something and very serious about this doomed future we are conga-lining towards.
 
Back