Thanks to the participants, this competition is so special that we not only share crappy games with the entire planet, but also indiscriminately spread culture. For the affordable price of nil sextertii, you get a game and a few bytes of erudition to fill your sparse 48K of RAM. So, my knowledge-hungry colleagues, today we are going to learn about one of the BBC's best TV series:
"In France during World War II, René Artois runs a small café where Resistance fighters, Gestapo men, German Army officers and escaped Allied POWs interact daily, ignorant of one another's true identity or presence, exasperating René." - IMDB quotation.
The gendarme at the top of the photo is the one being honoured in this entry for our competition:
"Officer Crabtree is a fictional character in the BBC sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!, which ran from 1982 to 1992; he was played by actor Arthur Bostrom. Crabtree is a British policeman who is posted in France. An associate of the French Resistance, he frequently appears in sketches. He is known for his bicycle and terrible French, despite this he thinks he is fluent." - extracted from alloallo.fandom.com
Perfectly portrayed in the excellent loading screen that introduces the game. And as Lee Prince is our resident loaders master, I once again recommend disabling the Fast Loading option on your emulator for a completely different loading experience:
The pixels are displayed from above and from below to end up filling in the attributes from the centre of the image, very impressive.
"Hongmon" translates from Crabtree's pronunciation as "hangman". As a kid I used to play this game with friends, all you needed was a piece of paper and a pencil. You didn't need to plug anything in, there were no 40GB updates and the creator of the game never claimed any rights to use it. But now, as a boring adult, my brain is thinking about how cruel the idea beyond the game is.
(intro screen)
The game of Hangman, in its innocent simplicity, carries a peculiar contradiction—it turns death, the most profound of human experiences, into mere play. With each incorrect guess, the gallows take shape, an abstraction of execution transformed into a counting game. This trivialization does not arise from malice, nor from a conscious desire to mock tragedy, but rather from the deeply human impulse to make the unbearable palatable, to render horror digestible through abstraction.
Or...
Perhaps Hangman is not about death at all, but rather an amusing demonstration of gravity’s unforgiving nature. The poor stick figure is simply an unfortunate scientist in the throes of an experiment gone wrong—an accidental pioneer of gravitational research. With each incorrect letter, we are not leading someone to doom, but merely confirming that Newton was right all along. Maybe the true tragedy is not the execution, but that nobody thought to provide our dangling scholar with a parachute.
Now that my brain has been cleared, it's time to play. Reading from the intro screen:
AAFUCOR CREBTROO'S HENGMEN
Romedo un 2024 by Loo Prunco
Pross eny koy ta pley
???
The first thing that comes to mind is the lyrics of the song:
"Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six foot four and full of muscles
I said, "Do you speak-a my language?""
If I press a key, it gets even worse:
After suffering a mental block when I thought I hadn't done well in the class 'English disastrously pronounced by a foreign agent', the author kindly showed me how to solve and translate it. Thank you! A simple task that is part of the game to give the text the appearance of being pronounced by Mr Crabtree himself and which I leave to you to have fun putting some letters in the right place.
Instructions:
We are then asked:
No, I won't chengo anything. Then:
Sunglos.
Yes, it's a classic Hangman, funny also with the vocabulary that comes with the game itself. Being able to create your own vocabulary really adds to the replayability.
I found a bug. Sometimes nothing appears on the screen, but the game still runs normally.
Of course, this is no detriment to a game entering the Crap Games Competition. We don't get fussy here.
If we put all the words together, it turns out that: I really liked the detail of changing certain letters so that the game had that touch of the alleged gendarme's disastrous pronunciation, making us think twice, in the possible word and in the word with the changed letters. With a simple and straightforward gameplay, I suddenly realised that I'd played it ten times in a row without realising it.
Scrambled Smile: 8/10
Broccoli and Squid Yoghourt: 4/10
Deep Fried Ice Cream: 7/10
Strawberry Monosodium Glutamate: 7/10
Affable Hot Chocolate Sauce: 6/10
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