Top 10 most bizarre gaming plotlines

2: Super Monkey Ball

Many puzzle games forego the need to provide a story. Tetris didn’t have a story, Pac Man didn’t have a story, Paperboy didn’t have or need a story and none of these games suffered because of their lack of one. You simply complete the various puzzles or tasks standing in your way and achieve your gaming fix. However when Japanese developers decide to give their puzzler a ‘storyline’ they rarely hold back.

Super Monkey Ball was one such puzzler. It’s a great game - your little monkey rolls through mazes in a glass ball whilst you control him in an evolved Marble Madness concept. The multiplayer game is even better, loads of brilliant games built in pure Nintendo fashion with fun at heart; rolling round tracks in monkey ball races, floating down rivers in monkey ball boats, gliding through the air in, erm, monkey ball gliders – its multiplayer brilliance. You even get four stereotypical monkey characters to choose from: the big monkey, the cool monkey, the girl monkey and even the cute little baby monkey.

However, the designers decided that this simple concoction needed a story, a plotline to improve the experience. And thus Dr Bad Boon was born. The underlying theme to Super Monkey Ball is that Dr Bad Boon wants to steal all the bananas to attract the beautiful female monkeys’ attention. What ensues is a crazy adventure in an attempt to thwart Dr Bad Boon and his monkey molesting mannerisms. The four good monkeys travel through dangerous worlds traversing increasingly difficult platforms to save their village, rescue all the bananas and stop monkey evil from prevailing.

As you play through this wild and wacky adventure, Baby monkey, for some untold reason, opens up each level with a rendition of her favourite song which goes something like: “Blah… blah… blah… EI, EI, POO!!” I am continuing the search for anyone who understands this random set of events. Despite the storyline, which makes you seriously question whether your own rational capacities have ceased to function, the game borders on genius, thus proving the point that even if your puzzler has a storyline like the mind of a 5 year old who has eaten too many blue Smarties, it can still be bloody brilliant.

1: Katamari

Katamari Damacy is king of the crazy games. Which is quite ironic, considering it revolves around a King and a Prince, of sorts, who are trying to put the universe back together. Let me explain. The King of All Cosmos accidentally destroys all the stars in the sky whilst on a bender. He then does what any sensible King in his position would do and employs his 5cm son to rebuild the stars. The question is, how one would go about doing such a task?

The fact that the son builds stars by rolling a big ball of junk around around does not, apparently, detract from the plotline or even make the idea of a story here unfeasible. Rolling around the world rolling up everyday objects in to a large ball of katamari results in a pile of junk large enough to make a star. The developers even decided to expand the story in the PSP game Me and My Katamari. The King and the Prince decide to go on holiday to a tropical island to take a break from all their star constructing.

However, as can be expected when dealing with the King of All Cosmos, everything goes wrong (how did this guy actually become King?) and his son has to go about rectifying things by building custom planets for the islands inhabitants, such as a tortoise and an ant. Arguments ensue, but eventually the 5cm wonder child is sent off the Sunflower Continent as that’s the best place to build planets from… Apparently. That's without counting We Love Katamari, which has a self-referential plotline dealing with how the King reponds to his new-found fame on Earth.

The music adds to the sense of insanity, as a strange Japanese chap recites "Da dum, dee dee da da dum, dar dar, dee Katmari Damacy..." repeatedly.

The thing with Katamari is that the ridiculous nature of the plot actually complements what you’re expected to do. It’s ridiculous but it makes sense, it's crazy but it's right, it’s the perfect combination of insanity and gaming design brilliance. The Japanese have always seemed one step ahead when it comes to crazy games. Look at the two biggest gaming characters ever: a plumber who travels down pipes to save princesses named Peach and Mushroom and a bright blue hedgehog that can run really, really fast. The great thing about gaming is that the icons aren’t realistic; they are a bit crazy, a bit off the wall. Long may bizarre games reign!

Conclusion

That concludes our whistle-stop tour through the world of bizarre games. There are plenty of others I haven't been able to list, and I am sure there are plenty more to come as developers continue to get more and more insane - pushing the boundaries of bizarreness even further. Bizarre plotlines are the cornerstone of the gaming industry. They allow us to achieve escapism when we play games and make the dull reality that we all live in a far more habitable and happy place. Why not pop into the forums and tell us what your favourite bizarre games are?