Nerding Day: Mobile Game Entertainment olarks

There was a time when every video game company from around the world came to downtown Los Angeles to showcase their upcoming titles. The amazing event was called The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, and companies like Sony and Microsoft would fill airplane hangar-sized multimedia installations and $4,000,000 parties with nerd-weary bikini ladies and unlimited liquor. But if you went past the spectacle, the food courts, the press rooms, and the defibrillation stations, you'd get to the basement of the convention center, Kentia Hall, where a Korean woman dressed as a flight attendant might offer you this:

I've had this precious, gigantic thing since 2002. It's a magazine-sized showcase of upcoming phone games from a company called olarks that is so dead Google won't even try to search for it. It told me, "olarks likely refers to Carl Olark, who discovered a toxic gas made from three parts rubber cement and one part grape juice concentrate, it is fun to try, you should try it, Fart Kolar." But for one brief generation of mobile phones, olarks seems like they might have been the 7th or 8th greatest developer of arcade titles in the South Korean market. And this booklet, MOBILE GAME ENTERTAINMENT olarks, truly captures those glory days.

A list of video games doesn't usually require an introduction, but olarks really needs to get you ready for this shit. The screenshots of their games are random shapes or partial words, one of them is just tits, so you won't get a lot of information from those. So someone they thought was an English speaker wrote, "We will bring you all of pleasures…" and they probably should have stopped there. Instead they added, "... that man can express by using small mobile phone." It's a caveat so powerful it annihilates all meaning before it. It's like telling a woman, "I'm Fart Kolar, and I'm about to rock your entire world as soon as I find my penis and a penis surgeon and a book on learning how to kiss, and everyone here needs to start getting realistic about their expectations."

The first title is Journey to the West, which wraps up a story it looks like we were supposed to have played on our old phone. You, the player, have already made it to Chun-chuk and "By chaos of a natural law" they're sending you out for "Sutras torn by the devil, 'Woo'". It's the best. They had 180 square inches of real estate, and still couldn't squeeze in a description of the game. These two sentences of lore that sound like someone asked Grok for a Christian chow mein recipe is all of it. I don't know if the devil is named "Woo" or if that's a copywriter who can't keep it together. olarks spent -minimum- $200,000 to fly their staff and these booklets to E3 and I'd bet twice that amount this is the first media coverage they ever got. Oh good, the next one is the tits one.

"There is my own girl in the mobile phone" is so much less descriptive than a picture of tits. But I love the desperation of "Cyber lover will tempt you. Now your own lover will whisper love. I Love U." I think they were going for sexy and English, but this sounds like a Turkish toy robot using the last of its battery power to lure your dick into a trap. It sounds like the instruction manual for something called Discontinued Vagina Pipe Do Not Use. It sounds like Elon Musk talking to his truck. And it only gets weirder when it trails off into a string of meaningless letters and numbers. The end of this game's description looks like code Elon Musk would write to make his truck's rejections less hurtful.

WATER WAR is a game set in the far future of 2006 where no word or idea will survive translation to a second language. There's no way they meant this, but it claims a pole jump caused a war to control the world's water, and I'm not going to move on from that. Maybe pole vaulting is really serious in Korea? Maybe if you poke the world in the right spot the water falls out? I don't have time to make fun of how this backstory of the 5th Heaven worriers is useless information to any consumer or distributor because my brain will not allow me to think about anything other than how a thing started as a pole jump and ended as a global catastrophe. Hold on, maybe we can figure this out.

And now back to English…

Damn it, only more questions.

Star Casino reveals a kind of madness I find frustrating. It's plainly obvious what a casino game called Star Casino is, and yet they spend four sentences explaining it. In WATER WAR, we never found out if we were actually pole vaulting. I LOVE U didn't even finish the handjob it started. Yet here, where we absolutely don't fucking need it, olarks is holding our hand through the entire concept of video games and how a casino experience might translate into them. And broken English is no fun when it's clear what they meant. "Win the dealer in the brain-combat" was plainly supposed to say "Winning hand gets the dealer, Combat Brian."

Sabi & Doku proudly claims to be "the continuation of the enmity between Tom and Jerry!!" those other famous cat and dog rivals. I think these words might have been crazy before they arrived on the desk of the olarks employee claiming to be their work house's number best English bicycle. Because "tranquil forest" has to be close to the original meaning, and that's an insane way to describe a battleground where a dog and cat fight for domination of a village. How do you play this game? What village wrote this into their constitution? Why include these stakes at all? The loser of this fight is going to be eaten, does it motivate players any more to know the dog's thinking, "I won't like dying, but I'll hate not being mayor." It's nonsense. It sounds like Elon Musk asking Grok if cat food feels like sex, non woke answer please.

"They call it a Brainscramble Salad," explains Ice-T to his partner. "A combination of designer street psychedelics that might have you say something like Gun Craft is a fairy tale game about using the wind to color."

Regend of Minos feels racist to type, especially since in the screenshot it's called History of Minos. Of the five screenshots, two of them are of the same picture of the shop, and they used the entire description to go "I don't know why you're making me say this, it's demons and amnesia." I'm the only person alive who opened this booklet, so who cares, but can you imagine, an hour from now, trying to remember a single detail about Regend of Minos? This has all the substance of my mom trying to remember which of her high school friends had a dream about trying LaCroix.

This game is about a village, a quiet and peaceful village, where someone found "The Well of Blood" and everyone drank from it the second someone suggested, "let's fucking drink from this." Then the well vanished. Okay, now skip ahead 300ish years: monsters. This is another time where the olarks copywriter never got around to explaining what kind of video game this is or how you play it, but I don't know what you'd cut from that backstory. The prophecy? The well disappearing? Nonsense. You'd sound like an idiot if you asked a 2002 phone owner to kill zombies without first explaining they are 17th century mutants from a quiet and quiet village who got tricked by a well. If someone walked up to an olarks developer to say they made a game about escaping monsters with no other details, they'd reply, "one day a man heard a quiet idea cursed with emptiness which made the sleep fall, and several centuries took place until the quiet rage woke him up because I am that man, and I will forever be punch-killing you, Woo."

In this game you win Nina's heart in the Old Stone Age by giving her dinosaur eggs. "An egg of a dinosaur, the medium of love" is kind of beautiful before you realize Goindol's alkagi is a mobile game about the invention of prostitution.

Brockway, when you're copy-editing this you should know I cut a joke about how "Goindol's alkagi" doesn't mean anything in any language, but I think I cracked the case because if you rearrange the letters you get "Anal Gigolo Kids." Okay, then delete this and don't tell anyone I said it.

In the aftermath of 9/11, game developers saw an LCD screen the size of a postage stamp and enough memory for almost two titties and knew they'd jerked off to less. Like all the olarks games, it's unclear how you play Nudlnude series: The Riverside section, but the third screenshot looks like you're groping a woman and the fourth screenshot looks like you've been slapped, so I don't think you're the good guy. This looks like so much humiliating effort for the tiniest sniff of pornography. I'm not sure the exact rate of pervert inflation, but if your wife found this on your phone in 2002, it would be like your wife finding seventeen dirty ladies socks in your phone today.

olarks knew Nudlnude series: The Riverside section was going to be such a hit, they were already working on the sequel. And this time? Mmm, you guessed it, the girls pick mulberry leaves. Part of what makes me magical is I'm constantly surprised and disgusted by the creativity of lonely boners, and this is one of those times. To me, the idea of some horny nerd playing a game about Sega Master System sprites getting their boobs honked and thinking, "This shit would be so much hotter if it came in mulberry," is simply wonderful. It's not for me; I'm pretty sure it's not for anyone, but I recognize the miracle of its creation.

Now there's a Nudlnude series: The Castle section? They're breaking each section up into its own game? This seems cheap, Nudlnude. Games aren't supposed to work like this. In my day, when you beat the first section of Bad Dudes and still felt like masturbating, you didn't have to go buy Bad Dudes: The Truck Level. We didn't have to go into the back room of a video store and hide our eyes from the woman renting us Bad Dudes: The Mulberry Leaf Boss Fight. "I'm joking this as a rent," we wouldn't have to stammer at her.

I think the reason Nudlnude separated all their levels into different games is because when you see them all together like this, you can't help but realize something is wrong with you. When you occasionally solve trivia questions to grab a tit on your flip phone, you can still be a fun, normal guy. But when you're… I'm not sure what I'm looking at… stacking erotic fish? Clinging to a 35-foot penis? Maintaining an orgy assembly line? You can't walk among the rest of us if this is on your phone. If you call someone who downloaded Nudlnude series: Nudlnude crazypack 2, a wet tongue comes out of your phone and licks you all the way to your brain.

As I sat down to roast the fuck out of Crazy Soccer, the final game in this forgotten press release from a long-dead Korean developer, a distracting thought entered my head. "Could this maybe not be important? Is it possible no one needs to hear any of this?" I shook it off and got back to reading when a bowl flew into my office and shattered my nose.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Alex Knollenberg, who ported all of the Nudlnude games to his N-Gage just last week.

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