#mse's playing dead head fred

[ettadunham]

the 00s were a lawless time.

would i recommend dead head fred, a video game that's been aptly described by eurogamer partially as something that was seemingly 'designed by teenagers desperately trying to be edgy' in 2007?

no. of course not.

did i do a full playthrough of it despite all the gross, annoying and janky aspects of it?

......yeah.

please judge me.

okay, so i do want to get out the positives first. this game is clearly going for a wacky, out there premise and tone, and for better or worse, it commits to it. you play as fred, a detective that was murdered by the local mob boss, and now has been resurrected without his original head (hence the whole brain in a jar aesthetic). Part of the game's gimmick is that you can put different heads on fred, and they can do different special actions and are good against specific enemies - including a mannequin head where your special fight action is just finger gunning at people.

sigh, truly my favorite of the heads.

another fun aspect of the game is that there's a surprising amount of side missions and mini games involved. you can play pinball(!), billiard, fish, raise mutant roosters to brutally murder other roosters in a cage match... you know, the usual stuff. the voice acting, music, etc is also solid, and carries the same general wacky tone through.

what else, what else...

no, i think that's it. that's all the positives.

now for the real talk.

when i say that this m rated game really is a 12-year-old boy's idea of peak edginess in 2007, i really do mean it. there's a lot of gross out stuff, you murder most enemies by some brutal special attacks or beheading, and some of your heads are just... well, gross. but also, there's the racism, the form they chose for fred turning small in particular doesn't feel right, doesn't feel organic, and i'm pretty sure that one of the fish specialties you can buy from the asian stereotype seller is just a slur.

and yes, before you ask, there is of course a morgue assistant who's just a necrophile. obviously.

another fun little thing is that when our edgy protagonist's girlfriend gets kidnapped around the climax of the game, his reaction is pretty much just to go 'oh well, i guess kill her then'. but then somehow he still expects her to fall into his arms by the end??? and she pretty much does????

do you see what i mean that this game is a 12-year-old boy's idea of an edgy power fantasy at the time when south park was at its peak?

but hey, at least the gameplay's gotta be fun, right?

nope.

there are a lot of fights, and they're pretty much all bs. there's no health bar for your enemies, and you have a limited amount of tactics you can use, despite the variety you'd expect from the multiple heads. it's tedious and often miserable, for example, it can be almost impossible to kill an enemy if they keep blocking you and won't use their special attack that you'd be able to counterattack.

it's a big part of the game and it is baaaaaad. and it doesn't really changes or gets better.

okay, but this is also an adventure game, right? surely it has puzzles, like...... 3d platforming. oh no.

but sure, i'm a notorious hater of 3d platformers, it might not be that bad... except that this game was made before controllers started to have a second analog stick for camera control, so there's limited options of controlling the view. and even that is noticeably janky and bad to the point that i'm reading it as a complaint on that same wikipedia page from multiple review snippets as well. so yeah, for once, it's not just me it seems. needless to say that i absolutely hated every minute of those sections, and used almost as much profanity as the characters in the game as i was trying to get through them.

did i mention that this game also insults you and calls you an idiot when you die?

fuck off.

fuck right off.

god, i hate this game actually.

[ettadunham]

i kinda hate this game actually

[ettadunham]

video games were really just used to do anything huh