- Get your game face on, and then lose it when you keep mouthing “what the f***” at these games.
Today, video games are more popular than ever. But that’s not to say that they weren’t relevant before – we’ve gone over several video gaming crazes over the years.
The continuing popularity of these games means that there must be thousands, if not millions of video games. Some of them are lauded as masterpieces of digital entertainment, others as some of worst things mankind has ever come up with, while some are just… Plain weird.
Here we’ll be focusing on that last category. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, here’s Oddee’s list of the most mind-blowingly bizarre video games ever made.
1) Attack of the Mutant Penguins
Attack of the mutant anything is probably going to get pretty strange. But Attack of the Mutant Penguins – released for the Atari Jaguar in 1995 – is one of those games that just defies all classification.
It’s hard to even say what this game is about. You control a penguin, and you go around massacring the titular mutant penguins who are trying to jump into something called the Doomscale.
But watch out – there are also good penguins who help you fight the mutant penguins. What’s the difference between them? The evil ones wear hats for some reason.
If the number of mutant penguins in the Doomscale grows higher than the number of nice penguins, the thing goes nuts and destroys the world. Or something. We really can’t tell.
There’s a whole bunch of other weird things in this game, like opening treasure chests with little creatures called gremlins. Look, we just don’t know. Just play it and see the weirdness for yourself.
2) Seaman
Sega Dreamcast’s Seaman, from 1999, has become something of a cult hit. It was never the most popular game on the console, but we can kind of see why some people would be into it.
In the game, you take care a strange frog-like lifeform with a bald human head. It evolves from a parasitic larval form through several life stages into the its final form… That is, if you don’t manage to kill the extremely sensitive animal (maybe?) in its infancy.
The hook of the game is that the creature will talk to you. Using the Dreamcast’s microphone module, you’re supposed to keep the thing entertained by answering its increasingly personal questions.
There’s also the game’s weird backstory. Apparently, the creature you’re raising is what the ancient Egyptians venerated as an omnipotent messenger of the gods that guided dead pharaohs’ souls to reincarnation.
Oh, and the game’s narrated by the late Leonard Nimoy. Because why wouldn’t it be?
3) Cho Aniki
Oh boy, where do we start. Cho Aniki, released for the Super CD-ROM2 System in 1992, is a side-scrolling shoot’em’up game. And that’s the last normal sentence we can write about it.
You control some kind of a superhero character who flies through various stages. Over the course of the game you fight anything from oiled, hyper-muscular, thong-clad muscle men to human-machine-hybrids to weird, tubular objects that resemble… Okay, they’re just straight up penises.
You get to meet a purple bodybuilder rising from Venus’ clam shell and a zombie Elvis space ship. One of your sidekicks grows flowers in a hole in his head. There’s some kind of a Thomas the Tank Engine-like train person.
We just can’t explain this game. The gameplay is actually pretty fun, though, so definitely give it a try if you can. As long as you don’t mind lots and lots of male physique.
4) LSD: Dream Emulator
We’re not sure if this game does a very good job of simulating the effects of its titular drug. But the creators were absolutely on something when they made this thing.
Released for the original PlayStation in 1998, LSD is an exploration game without any kind of a grand goal. It drops the player into a bizarre dream-like world, where they’re free to roam as they see fit.
You might encounter walking teddy bears, psychedelic colors, ominous music, faces in the walls… Anything goes. You’re in a dream, after all.
Gameplay in each world, or “dream,” lasts 10 minutes or until the player does something that ends the dream. As the game progresses, the dreams become increasingly surreal and weird.
5) Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
This game isn’t all that strange, compared to others on this list. It’s a fairly generic Sega Mega Drive platforming game from 1990 where you go about defeating bad guys and rescuing children.
But it is a game about Michael Jackson. He’s the main playable character. That’s weird enough as a concept that it warrants a place on this list.
You traverse a series of levels inspired by Michael Jackson’s music videos. You kick fairy dust at enemies and can defeat everyone on screen by forcing them to do one of Jackson’s iconic dances. Or you could transform into a giant robotic Mecha-Michael if you catch a shooting star.
And yeah, you also go looking through closets for hiding kids. In hindsight, that wasn’t probably the best objective to give for a game about Michael Jackson.
6) Hatoful Boyfriend
Hatoful Boyfriend, released for various platforms in 2011, is a Japanese visual novel game. These kinds of games are sometimes called dating simulators, and although that’s not an accurate descriptor for all of them, it’s fitting here.
You assume the role of a teenage girl who gets to meet and date a slew of high school heartthrobs. There’s just one catch – they’re all birds.
The game takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth in 2068 when a massive outbreak of avian flu nearly killed off mankind. They did find a cure for the disease, but it also gave some birds human-level intelligence.
For something that started off as an April Fool’s joke and involves dating pigeons, that’s a pretty grim backstory. And it gets even darker, but we’re not going to spoil the fun if you want to go take a flight on the wings of love yourself.
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What did you think about our list? Did we miss a game you feel should’ve absolutely been on there? Let us know in the comments!