The RGM offices are quiet bastions of sanity in an otherwise crazy world. Here, gamers work out their differences without resorting to immature, demeaning tasks like bologna-eating contests or challenging one another to come up with the largest number (‘Infinity’ is not a number, Michael. –ed). So if you think my game is weak, or I cannot bench-press my weight in pudding, we put in Super Dodge Ball and settle this like men. After I win my way to victory, it’s back to the archives to dredge up new ways of entertaining the slavering beasts known as ‘readers’. Yup, all sunshine and rainbows around this place, no complaints at all, everything hunky-dory. Which is why we’ve got another happy licensed title, suitable for all ages, for this week’s installment of Revenge of the License. Won’t you join me for a smile-casting, cake-eating good time as I fire up the PlayStation for a round of Hello Kitty: Cube Frenzy?

OK, is my editor gone? That dill-hole never reads past the first paragraph, so we should be good. I just…dear lord, what have I done? What have I done? Listen to me: do not be fooled. This game is not cute, and sweet, and innocent. This game is a plot by some soul-less dark lord (or lady–women gamers are just as dangerous as dudes) to corrupt, eviscerate and destroy the happiness of anyone stupid enough to put the CD into his (or her–see above) console. This game will wreck you. It will violate the laws of dimensional abstraction in ways Boufa-N’Noo (the world’s, like, sixth or seventh-best web comic and the greatest one you’ve never heard of until today) could only dream about. And it will laugh. And it is rated as suitable for six and up! WTF is wrong with the ESRB? Don’t answer that. It’s my turn to talk, I will yield the floor in the comments section.

Customize your Hello Kitty with strawberries, a flower, or a bow. (Emo Kitty Black Pack DLC: $4.99)

Hello Kitty: Cube Frenzy is what happened when Candy Crush Saga found Tetris passed out behind the couch after the party and went all #GamerGate on its ass. Given Candy Crush Saga was not released until thirteen years after HK:CF, you can see why my nightmares lately relate to fourth-dimensional paradoxes. And rest assured, when I find the shameless ho-wrangling dildo jockey who mailed me this game, postage due no less, with a note saying “Review THIS if you’re man enough,” you sir (or madam, again, see above) are going to find yourself butt-chugging an awful lot of bologna.

So. Much. Bologna.

It looks so simple. Oh dear me, does it look simple. It talks to you in a pleasant female TV announcer voice, describing itself as “next-generation software for next-generation kids” when it boots up. The cover features an anthropomorphic cat, with a bow in her hair, a pink background, falling blocks with little hearts inside…the aforementioned ‘E’ rating…nothing about this game screams, “Lo, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds!” until you crack the case and press start. By then it is too late to take it back: you’ve opened it of your own free will, and now it will come and go as it damn well pleases, like Liam Neeson on the hunt for wolves to bottle-punch.

Go on, take her drinky-straw coconut. I DARE YOU!

The goal of the game is for Hello Kitty, Sanrio’s perpetually-expressionless-yet-eternally-adorable mascot, to have a good vacation. But this game was made by sadists who think nothing of ruining kittens. Hello Kitty’s nemesis, Badtz-Maru the penguin, and his cheery buddies, have come to ruin her holiday by trapping her in a world that can only be escaped by collecting treasures like parasols and sailboats. The problem compounds when you feel, as an adult,  it would be dishonorable to play a child’s game on anything less than the toughest difficulty level: then you have to collect them in a certain order. FML.

Hello Kitty never stops pacing along her route unless you manage to trap her with the falling blocks, but the point isn’t to stop her endless grind, it’s to help her get flowers, coconuts, and bananas. She climbs one-block-high walls, runs if you encourage her via the shoulder buttons, and  you can politely suggest she turn and go in the other direction, but that’s it. At the same time you’re controlling the blocks dropping from the off-screen rainbow block manufacturing company in the sky. Matching colored blocks disappear, which allows you to hopefully create whatever staircase-like, physics-defying monstrosity necessary for Hello Kitty to collect her belongings.

And because the designers carry rage in their heart towards Hello Kitty, there’s a time limit involved so you can’t just Minecraft your way to victory through patience, overlooking structural mishaps like a corrupt engineer. There’s even a two-player mode because what’s a little hate-sex between friends? All this would be perfectly tolerable if it weren’t for one teensy little problem: the X and O buttons were not swapped for American audiences.

My choices seem to be: do homework, get shot, or fight Wayne Rooney. Screw you, Badtz-Maru!

Imagine sitting down to play a hacked version of Super Mario Bros. where B was for jump, and A was for running. Imagine trying to control your blood pressure as one teeny-weenie little mistaken button press resulted in undoing everything you had worked the last two hours to accomplish. This, this is Hello Kitty: Cube Frenzy. A game, I reiterate, made for children by developers following the maxim “do unto others and then laugh.”

What is this trick, and how do I play it on spammers?

In Japan, this makes perfect sense: ‘X’ symbolizes ‘No’, and thus has always been cancel, back, iie, what have you. ‘O’ symbolizes ‘Yes’, and therefore is accept, next, hai, and so forth. For some dumb reason, early PS1 localizers decided American audiences should be using the X button for Yes, and the O button for No, and virtually every title which makes its way from the orient to our shores is reprogrammed thusly. Except for Hello Kitty: Cube Frenzy. A quick mistake, based on muscle memory developed over decades of play, will end your game instead of continuing, and where this happens, blood fills the playground.

I would not mess with a Hello Kitty carrying a wagon wheel in one hand and a horseshoe in the other.

Hello Kitty is crying. If you try and save her, you will be crying. Hard without being impossible, but damn it, if micro-transactions were a thing back in 1999, developer Culture Publishers would today be known as MicroYouFaceGoogleBookTubeSoft with a total net worth comprising the total net worth of everyone “renting” a game system from them. Which would be all of us, because happiness would be mandatory, and what’s happier than Hello Kitty?

Nothing.

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


If he made you laugh, drop a tip in his jar at http://paypal.me/modernzorker


(If he didn't make you laugh, donate to cure his compulsion to bang keyboards by sending an absurdly huge amount of money to his tip jar instead. That'll show him!)