FIST OF AWESOME (always all caps) needs money on Kickstarter, and I think some of your money – that’s right, YOU, you reading this right now with your pretty eyes – could provide some of that money. Not convinced? That whole “pretty eyes” thing not enough to draw you in? Fine, here’re nine shouted reasons why you should fund this son of a bitch:
ONE. A lot of games don’t feature enough bear-punching, and FIST OF AWESOME is a small step towards rectifying that (alongside Drunken Bear Fighter, my seminal masterpiece). The truest, purest expression of uncomplicated manliness is to punch an angry bear square in the chops and bring it down to the ground.
TWO. This is a game in which bear-punching is very much the meat and drink of the experience, not reserved for special missions or occasional hunting challenges. It takes the already difficult challenge of knocking a bear spark out and makes that a regular occurrence – manlier still by far.
THREE. FOA is a chunky-looking pixel wonderland of over-the-top violence, much of it against crazed woodland creatures, that operates on precisely the same mechanics and feel as those titles on the Mega Drive that your mum wouldn’t want you to play – Streets of Rage, mainly.
FOUR. I remember mum looking at the Streets of Rage box, and the promise of lead-pipe combat, and I remember her shaking her head and putting it back on the shelf and my little nine-year-old heart sinking. I wanted that game. I wanted that game so badly and I had to play Aladdin or some other shit instead. Well, she can’t deny me that now.
FIVE. It’s funny. It’s genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, in parts, especially the terrified grunting noise that main character Tim Burr makes when the mythical FIST OF AWESOME first takes control of his body, allowing the player to move him around the arena.
SIX. There’s a load of charm here; mainly due to the fact that sole developer Nicoll Hunt clearly adores this concept and is doing it for that reason alone, and not to make any vast amount of money. Nicoll also did Hard Lines with Spilt Milk Studio last year, which managed to make a combination of Snake and Tron funny through liberal use of snarky comments.
SEVEN. I’m in it. Yeah. Me. Thanks to being a runner-up in a competition to name the main character, I’m hanging out on one of the levels as a captured human in a bear-operated zoo. Here:
EIGHT. Nicoll needs five grand to make this happen. That’s nothing. (Well, in Kickstarter terms, it’s nothing. It’s quite a lot of money for me, if I’m honest, but not a lot of money for one dude to quit his day job so he can realise his dream of making a side-scrolling brawler in which you fight bears).
NINE. BEARS. FIGHTING. PUNCHES. ME. KICKSTARTER. NOW.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I have received Alpha code of the game with a couple of early sequences, and no other promotional benefits beside that. Although I am in the Actual Fucking Game, albeit as a competition winner, so you should probably view that as a fairly strong bias for me wanting this project to succeed
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