The day after 9-11 I mowed the lawn on the rider, burning gas to halve flora on non-food producing land, then I played a videogame using brown electricity. Had I been playing Stallions In America or I Was In The War then the circle of life would have been complete - unfortunately we didn't have the technology back then.
Cactus' game is an action shooter, using the ASWD and the mouse to run and gun. You play four superstuds with soy-processed American Cheese(tm) names like Cody and Mitch, and you go through every US State slaughtering everyone, birds, bees, pigeons, peacocks, men, women and children. The moral of the story is, I guess, that they hate us because we're free.
I Was In The War by Bisse takes an inverse approach, you're one guy (looking oddly like a character from Earthbound) trying to avoid confrontation in a war zone. You move with the arrows, jump and flip across a thin red line using the A and S keys, and grow as you move, trying not to get hit too much and shrink down to death. New threats progressively launch on you, tanks and missiles, helicopters and hopping guerillas, and then a final threat that concludes the game. Upon being reincarnated you see a message emerge, which I won't spoil. It takes PTSD and blends it with Vanilla Bean and Half-n-Half for one smooth shake, with a hint of satire.
Cactus and Bisse are both Swedes and members of the Poppenkast, which Derek Yu has mentioned are like the surrealist/impressionists of the early 20th century, but for games. I'd take it a step further (as I tend to do) and say that their minimalist emphasis on gameplay also gives them tremendous freedom to warp that play into psychological dimensions; a power they have maybe even more of when working with 3-hour dev cycles and 16-color pallets. They're also obviously given a bit more leeway in putting the American Dream in the mirror, it's not their dream, so bursting the bubble tends to carry less political backlash than if they were embedded right in the heartland. It also gives them more license to melt that mirror into a fun-house parabola. I wonder if these sleights of play might cross the motley one day and get the massive audience and serious reception that other mediums of satire do, but in the meantime I'll enjoy the high score.
