"Once you’re sure she needs a brain surgery, start shaving her gorgeous blonde hair and prepare her for the long surgery hours," the game instructs. "Then feel free to dig into her brain and make sure you use the right doctor tools to cut out her little obsessions, to repair whatever you find broken and to reactivate the dead synapses snowflakes." Dark.
Of course, Elsa Frozen Brain Surgery is just one of the weird little games hoping for a sliver of the explosive princess brand recognition. Today I also found Baby Elsa Spinal Surgery, where the starring princess becomes a child with inexplicable but deeply-unsettling back wounds, as well as Olaf at the Dentist ("The pain and the shame are unbearable, so he is asking you to play the dentist role for him.")
My friend Peter Yeh has offered us an eye-opening look at some other items out there: Apparently, poorly-cloned Disney princesses need everything from slimy makeovers to new bathroom wallpaper, in addition to appearing in barely-functional knockoff Super Mario-alikes and hundreds and hundreds of paper doll dress-ups.
Apply nitrous to Princess Anna's face in her birthing simulator. Then, of course, there is Spank Elsa Butt (maybe don't watch that at work).
Peter's piece will set you on the right track toward the very weirdest bootleg Disney games. You can find even weirder ones if you want, I bet. Peter just sent me the following "Sins of the Frozen" video, a haunting compilation of everything from Elsa Toilet Decorator to some odd-looking accelerated-aging game. Probably just don't do any of this at work. Or maybe ever.
I have been loving Shieldwall, a strategy game where you and your Roman legion attempt to kick the crap out of other Roman legions! This game reminds me of a 3D Starcraft, with (thus far) a lot less complexity. You start with one base and attempt to take others from other CG teams! More bases […]
Matt Ruff is one of science fiction and fantasy's most consistently brilliant and innovative authors, whose recent work includes The Mirage (an incredible alternate history in which the Global War on Terror is kicked off when Christian crusaders from the blighted, tribal USA fly a plane into the United States of Arabia's Twin Towers in Dubai, giving the hawkish CIA chief Osama bin Laden the chance to launch the all-out war he's been champing for), and Lovecraft Country (an anti-racist reimagining of Cthulhu set in Jim Crow America where the real horror is white supremacy -- now being adapted for TV by Jordan Peele). In his new novel, 88 Names, Ruff adds to the canon of MMORPG heist novels (Charlie Stross's Rule 34, Neal Stephenson's Reamde, and my For the Win, to name three) with a unique take that he dubbed "Snow Crash meets The King and I."
At this point, it’s every single person’s responsibility to reduce their own carbon footprint and transition to a more sustainable lifestyle. But if you consider the grim fact that the biggest culprit of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the U.S. is burning fossil fuels for electricity, things, like pivoting to metal straws and […]
Companies that don’t have their own in-house design teams (which means 99 percent of all companies these days) face lots of serious questions. Among those questions is how you keep up with all the design requirements of a 21st-century company without the personnel. It isn’t just a website or an annual product catalog anymore. It’s […]
In case you’re one of those computer shoppers who instinctively turns up their nose at the very mention of the word refurbished, here are a couple myths worth dispelling. Refurbished equals junk somebody didn’t want. While desktops, laptops, notebooks, Chromebooks and tablets marked as refurbished may have been unboxed at some point, meaning they can […]
