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Metron (МЕТРОН) is a full motion video adventure game made in 2004 by a Russian ‘garage game developer’ Korban Laser Games.

Set in Korenevo, Kursk Oblast, Russia. Polina, the protagonist, finds herself investigating a series of murders committed by the evil Metron and trying to avoid becoming a victim herself.

The game was made extremely cheaply. The actors all basically teenagers, obvious ketchup as fake blood, and some pretty funny and inventive ‘special effects’. The story itself…well…it sure reads like teenage sci-fi fan fiction. It was never exported overseas or translated to any other language – a relatively common situation for lower-tier Russian game developers before the GFC and Steam. Nevertheless, it has become a popular title for Russian “Let’s players” due to how infamously corny it is, and videos of it can be easily found on YouTube.

While the retro gaming crazy has been playing itself out, there’s still a section of old games that I find is almost always more fun. Even during Games Done Quick, the bad games block seems to be one of the most popular sections.

But what if you had a WHOLE game-a-thon that’s just bad games?

Big Bad Game-a-Thon

The Big Bad Game-a-Thon comes around every year and gives some great performances. Give some of their videos a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/c/BigBadGameathon/videos

Here’s a list of the games played in the 2021 session to whet your appetite.

https://horaro.org/bbg2021/schedule?key=2021

Don’t Make Us Bored

Another great series of people playing bad games is the ‘Don’t Make Us Bored’ variety show run by Brossentia. Players come onto his show and play through some truly bad games. It’s a whole lot of fun.

Space 1999 was one of the few sci-fi shows you could see on TV in the 80’s. As a fan of Star Trek, Twilight Zone, and some original Battlestar Galactica I was surprised to catch this one randomly playing on reruns one day.

One episode in particular terrified me when I was a kid. I must have been about 10-12 when I saw it. It was the episode titled Dragon’s Domain. It contained a tentacled creature with a single, gigantic glowing eye. It devoured people by sliding them underneath itself and then spit out a gnarled and blacked corpse! I remember the glowing eye and the character hacking at it with a hatchet. That one stuck with me for years.

Sadly, the rest of the series was too slow/uninteresting for my pre-teen self. Not to mention the fact even I could see the wires ala Dr Who of the era. But hey – it is probably the one episode that really stuck with me so that’s saying something…

Combine some chemicals to create different colored flames then set up a circle of fans – and voila! Instant awesome!

In this video, expert magician Daniel Roy walks us through a series of progressively more impressive card control examples. Gives you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole goes.

It reminds me of Ricky Jay, who often had known con men show up for his shows to see if they could learn new tricks. While Daniel Roy was great in this video above, check out the even more god-like level that Ricky Jay works at…