The youth culture of the 1990’s was characterized by a radical attitude, a raditude if you will. A rebellion that in reality was prepackaged and sold by cable television and video games of the day. Raditude was everything people in high places (i.e. MTV and Nickelodeon) thought kids liked; shitty rap music, shitty rock music, neon colors, spray paint, surfing, ninjas, surfing ninjas, etc.. Have you seen the movie 3 Ninjas? Imagine an entire decade like that movie and you have an idea of what it was like to grow up in the 90’s. Why anyone liked this crap is beyond me.
Kid Chameleon is the ultimate example of raditude in excess. Released for the Sega Genesis in 1992, the game got decent reviews and enjoyed good sales for it’s day. It was marketed straight toward kids looking for “cool” games in the way only Sega’s ridiculous marketing department could.
There is not a single original idea in this goddamn game. I am dead fucking serious. Not. A. Single. One.
The game was a platformer, a genre that was already so overstuffed with also ran titles that it was a joke then. Walk down the game aisle of any store in 1992 and at least half of the titles on the shelves were platformers. Shitty platformers where you played The Noid looking for Dominos pizza. Now I’ll give credit where credit is due because the makers of KC (that what’s those of us with enough raditude call it) were aware of this and at the very least they knew their game had to have some hook for it to stand out. Their idea: each new area you get access to a new power that let’s you deal with the enemies and traps in different and “fun” ways. You gain these powers by hitting blocks and collecting power ups. This was great because no one had ever though of this idea before. Ever.
Now I know what you’re thinking: they copied Mario, so what? Except they copied Mario poorly. The controls were stiff, the powers you could get were often useless (and they were always boring), and the level design, the real key to Mario’s success, was terrible. Not to go all Angry Video Game Nerd but the game was about as fun as having your balls attached to a car battery while a 9 year old in a neon orange ninja costume squirts water on your dick and shouts “TUBULAR DUDE!”
This in and of itself is enough make the game despicable but what really puts it in the dark land of Shittslevania is the proverbial icing on this ass cake (ok I'm done with the AVGN shit).
The story is about this particularly rad kid named Casey. In addition to being a top skateboarder in the neighborhood, wearing a boss leather jacket, and rockin’ a bitchin’ pair of shades, Casey is the local arcade champ. Clearly Casey was designed to be the god-child of raditude. The final product of some bizarre eugenics program funded by Nickelodeon/Sega meant to give us the ultimate rad master race. What’s sad is how quickly kids lapped this donkey jizz up (oops). This probably had something to do with how much parents were put off by raditude, and if Mom and Dad hate something kids have to like it.
Things go south when a mad scientist comes to town with a new Virtual Reality machine for the Arcade that traps the kids who play it inside the machine. Naturally Casey is the only kid rad enough to save them.
If I may go on a tangent here Virtual Reality was the biggest load of bullshit ever in the history of civilized man. In the 90’s we were pretty much promised by the powers that be that by 2010 we’d have entire rooms in homes devoted to our VR machines where we would spend all our time because it was the future every goddamn thing was going to be awesome. We were going have fucking holodecks just like on Star Trek!
Clearly that did not happen because I still have to masturbate instead of coming home to a virtual brothel every night.
What’s even sadder than that is I know the exact moment when I realized Virtual Reality was bullshit. It was on a trip to an amusement park (probably King’s Island, but it does not matter, all those places were really the exact same shit hole) and they had their own VR machine in the arcade. I had to try it, just to see what the future would be like. You know what it was? A terrible shooting game with terrible graphics that my terrible computer could demolish. I told the guy running the machine it was awesome.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the story.
So like every other video game created you’re trying to stop a mad scientist that kidnapped your girlfriend.
Criticizing a video game’s story, particularly one from the 16-bit era, is a bit like yelling at a blind kid because he can’t hit a baseball. Just a bit obvious (but not mean, that kid has to learn he can’t achieve his dreams somehow). But it’s stories like this that helped create the “ironic” sensibilities that hipsters have. Decades of shit pop culture like this are what gave birth to the hipster hive mind that has corrupted modern pop culture. I remind you that nothing personified shit pop culture like raditude and that once again Kid Chameleon was the ultimate in raditude. Kid Chameleon (while not intending to) helped create fucking hipsters, and that just isn’t cool.
Kid Chameleon is a testament to how sick and depraved our race is. It is a monument to diaper filled garbage everywhere.Whenever Sega produces a “classic” Genesis collection it is always included. It is as if they put it out there as a warning to future generations: “This is what we made, good help us should it be done again.” But you still stay far away from Kid Chameleon, your balls will thank you later.
