Day 282 - Fish Hat
Short and Free, Text Adventure, Dress Up ·
Skeeter’s Take:
I was going to have us re-review Bluejeweled today since, being the mega-evolution of idiot I am, I thought Bluejeweled was just the single level. If I can explain my stoned-ass logic from yesterday: I figured the game was programmed to just drop blue diamonds, and it was likely the dev just cleared the first level of gems and had the gems drop all blue. Listen, I have a very rudimentary understanding of how programming works or how to make a game, which really makes me one of the worst candidates for this kind of project. I assumed that the dev just hadn’t programmed the imaginary pre-screen gem wipe for level 2 and there were no further levels.
And then Sam informed me there were ten levels, all of which have different gimmicks around the blue diamond. The first level is all blue, second level drops only blue but starts as a standard Bejeweled board, and for the third level? I still have no idea, but Sam said there is a level where the gems you swap turn blue and that sounds lit.
All that being said, I didn’t think it warranted a complete re-review - I know he’d find something clever to do, but I have no idea what more Sam would talk about. I just felt like I had to mention my dumbassery and double down on the recommendation. I will 100% check out the other levels on my own time.
But for now, I’d like to direct your attention to Fish Hat.
Welcome to Fish Hat! You get to decorate your own Fish Hat! How do you do that, you might be asking? By dragging and dropping any combination of words exclusively from the phrase “WOMEN WANT ME FISH FEAR ME”
As a guy who has seen more Newgrounds dress-up games than the average human brain is supposed to be able to handle, this was so fucking funny to me.
For those not familiar, the standard Newgrounds dress-up game experience generally centers around dragging and dropping from an assortment of MS Paint clothing and accessories and using them to dress up a character. Normally, this character is from a popular IP or a “sexy” person that you dress in “sexy” clothes.
And sometimes you just put clocks on Strawberries:
I went into Fish Hat fully expecting to drag and drop fishing bauble jpegs someone found on Google onto the hat to decorate it. I had expectations that there would probably be a text entry feature where I could write something custom and immature like “butts” on the hat.
Fish Hat feels almost defiant of the dress-up genre. “Oh, you wanted to make a Fish Hat? Oh, you wanted to be unique and different and add a feather? You wanted to show off your individuality and quirkiness to the world? That’s cute, here’s a combination of 5 words - go express yourself.”
There technically is a “correct” way to build the hat - “WOMEN WANT ME FISH FEAR ME”, however Fish Hat starts with that phrase already plastered on the hat. It’s already taken the obvious phrase from the player. If the hat was blank upon load in, I would be interested to see the statistics of the amount of people whose first hat says “WOMEN WANT ME FISH FEAR ME”, or even the other obvious give:
But Fish Hat doesn’t give the player that option. Instead it challenges the player to find a unique phrase of their own. It encourages them to embrace the absurd and make something so incoherent or stupid that it makes them laugh.
It’s simple, it’s dumb, and it’s exactly the kind of humor I love.
I left out a small part of why we didn’t re-review Bluejeweled today. I got curious when I went to the itch.io page for Bluejeweled and decided to check out the developer to see what other games they had worked on:
Fish Hat brought me so much enjoyment that I really wanted to talk about it today - sorry Bluejeweled, I still like you.
Good shit, brandonhare, you’re 2/2 in my book.
I do wonder where you got that sick photo of the famous Fish Hat, though.
Oh, never mind.
Recommend: YES
Replay Percentage Chance: 5%
Time Played: 3 minutes
Sam’s Take:
First of all, let’s all just appreciate that 4 days ago Skeeter told me “I think I’m done, I’m just doing shitposts from now on”, then proceeded to write 47 paragraphs about the word-hat game.
Second, I’m currently trying to find out where this hat comes from, and I guess this is just an actually popular thing to put on fishing hats? It’s popular enough that now people do parodies of it, which ended up with this guy owning a shirt that just says “I fuck the fish”. I’m not sure where the Canadian Softball song plays into this whole thing, but it’s a part of this.
I have much less to say about the hat word game than Skeeter did. I’m very sorry to have failed you all.
Recommend: Me
Replay Percentage Chance: Fear
Time Played: Me
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