Ever have one of those moments where you're introduced to something that's infamous and "everyone" knows about it but you've never heard of it? That's been happening to me a lot lately. The latest one was Hong Kong 97, a homebrew SNES game known far and wide among retro gaming dorks, but I'd never heard of it until just now. Cause I'm not a retro gaming dork. Anyway, here's Hong Kong 97. Read on for more info and to watch gameplay.
Hong Kong 97 is a homebrew SNES game created by a Japanese journalist in 1995 as a protest of the UK giving control of Hong Kong back to China in 1997. It is full of anti-Communist imagery and actually tasks you with killing off all 1.2 Billion (at the time) Chinese flooding into Hong Kong.
And it's freaking terrible. It's a sort of shoot-em-up where you move around and shoot upward at enemies moving down the screen at you, but it is incredibly difficult. It's hard to see what is going on and you instantly die the moment anything touches you. When you die you have to sit through the opening text screens. Over. And over. And over.
I, admittedly, didn't play especially well. Apparently you're supposed to collect the round green things that pop up, but on my initial play of the game I must of gotten hit by something else at the same moment and died, so I thought the green things also killed you. My bad.
I didn't even know this game existed until Andrew told me about it so, thanks. I guess.
