Disorder Reviews: 177 (1986)

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Martintox

Mister Disorder
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Apr 3, 2020
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I have a new album and a new Disorder Reviews blog. I have recently recovered from a stroke, and I am now in serious debt.

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177


Developer: Macadamia Soft
Publisher: dB-SOFT
Release Date: 1986
Systems: PC-88
Genre: action, simulation

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Here is a fun fact: the saying "don't judge a book by its cover" dates back to an incident regarding two German Protestant monks in the early 16th century. Both worked as librarians in a monastery, until one of them vanished with seemingly no explanation. It took a full-fledged investigation on behalf of the other tenants (this served as the inspiration for The Name of the Rose, by the way) to find out that the surviving monk had killed him, presumably for hogging their collective stash of Biblical pornography. They didn't do so by discovering the body or any traces; the killer was particularly cautious not to leave any evidence... except for a lone book that he had used to bash his victim's head in. While he had removed the blood on the cover, it had also stained multiple of the pages. (For your general information, the culprit was found guilty and made to continue being a Protestant as punishment for his actions.) Thus, the classic statement came to life, though its sinister undertones have been lost to time. Even so, what's important to remember is that it's not merely an appeal to the principles of indulgence and scrutiny: it's a warning.

Little is known of Macadamia Soft (no relation to Little Witch Macadamia), the company behind 177 and a preceding title known as Macadam; it's one of those cases where the fact that we know it exists in the first place only leads to more questions, especially since both games are Japanese, and longtime readers of Disorder Reviews know that can't mean anything good. (My assumption is that they were a group of propagandists that operated on musician logic, since they made their first game self-titled.) It's possible to play 177, but even that won't help much: the game's primary goal is to chase a woman, whose extremely concerned expression takes up about 20% of the screen, all while avoiding obstacles. There aren't even any fat jams to make this pursuit any more vibrant: the only sound effects you get are the lady's panicked footsteps as she rushes to the safety of her home. When facing such a scenario, it's tempting to utter the eternal words: "what did the developers mean by this?" It's precisely at this moment that you should remember the adage, and instead of merely looking at your copy of Karl Marx' Grundgrisse as a vain acknowledgement that you should check it out, actually read it instead of playing more Japanese games.

Still, in such a conundrum, it's best to proceed with extreme caution. This sounds obvious nowadays, but you have to understand it took some time for the general populace to develop such a sensibility. Many people will tell you that Ted Bundy's usual demeanor was completely unlike what you would expect a criminal of his caliber to behave: he's been seen as charismatic, intelligent, ambitious, yet he was out strangling women and having sex with dead bodies. He took advantage of his sympathetic exterior to lure many of his victims in secluded places, generally by pretending to be either injured or some sort of authority figure. Put yourself in the place of one of these women: a guy comes up to you in a public place with an arm plaster, asking you for help moving something into his car in a location where no one can see the two of you. Nowadays, it's easy to wonder "what's his endgame?", but that's not exactly something they considered back in the 1970s. (On an unrelated note, Bundy's tendency to blame his murders on all sorts of other things, such as his family issues, the media, or pornography, very much brings to mind weeaboos who blame their gacha addiction on the lack of government-mandated girlfriends.)

Nowadays, it's much less likely for someone to follow a random person into an alleyway -- for that matter, if the McMartin case and the Satanic panic mean anything, it's that Americans were asking what people meant by this a little too much for a time. Even so, it doesn't mean that Ted Bundy-style scenarios do not occur anymore. One example that is rather pertinent in these trying times is that of Trey Sesler, primarily known in the late 2000s and early 2010s for his anime reviews under the appropriate name of Mr. Anime. At first glance, he is your standard soft-spoken YouTuber, but the later years of his career saw the release of videos with concerning titles such as "Knife in chest effect" and "On the recent shootings in the U.S.". These, combined with his bizarre fixation on showing his firearms in reviews for no particular reason, certainly raised a few eyebrows. That being said, he hasn't uploaded anything in 8 years (fine by me, that means he can't sue me for using "Mr." in my name), so we can only guess what he could have meant by all of that. If anything's wrong with him, I hope he's been working it out with his family.

In any case, the underlying point is that I haven't played 177 but I have major concerns about what it may be about. Something's a little off about controlling a guy who stalks a woman in the middle of the night, with close to no sound effects, don't you think? Why's he going after her? Why does she look so afraid? Doesn't really sit by me, you know. I couldn't tell you why, but I feel like I should be watching Irréversible instead, so I recommend you do the same.

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PERSONAL RATING: ****
RECOMMENDATION RATING: **
LETTERED RATING: B

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Fat Hippo

Prepare to be Gnomed
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Did he? I was under the impression he was talking about 'ground-grease' because Martin can't read. If he did, he wouldn't have signed the contract.
I don't know whether Marx was so greasy he left a trail of it on the ground behind him, but I'll take your word for it.