One of the spawn from Nintendo’s ill-fated deal with Philips Electronics, Hotel Mario frequently holds court on “Worst Games Ever” lists. I played it expecting it to be a huge parking lot full of dinosaur shit. Instead, I found a tolerable, slightly below average game.

The cutscenes are hilarious. I can’t get enough of them. I think they outsourced the animation to a head injury ward in Djibouti. Mario and Luigi have been invited by Princess Peach to a dick-lick (maybe it was “picnic” in the script but I’ll be damned if that isn’t what Mario’s voice actor says), only to discover she’s been kidnapped by Bowser. Mario and Gay Luigi (or maybe it’s “Hey, Luigi!”…the dubious voice actor strikes again) journey to Bowser’s hotels to rescue the princess and ensure that there will be further Princess-enabled picnics/dick-licks in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Hotel Mario is simple to play. Each of the seven hotels contains 10 stages. To clear a stage, you have to shut all the doors. You can use elevators to ride from one floor to the next, and also to avoid enemies. All of Mario’s usual bête noires – Goombas, Koopas, and so forth – are out in force, and they can be fought either by jumping on them or by killing them with fireballs. Mario titles are usually platformers but this one verges on being an outright puzzle game at times.

The backgrounds (designed by Trici Venola) are colorful and fun, and drive home the visual theme for each hotel. The animation works well for this sort of game, and there’s enough of it to make the levels seem “alive” instead of just a collection of tile graphics (a common fault in these games). The final boss fight is fun. If they’d kept up that level of imagination and intensity throughout the entire game, we might have really had something (where “something” is defined as Claw, Gruntz, or Jazz Jackrabbit, to be precise).

The downside? The controls suck, the music sucks, the level design is repetitive, gameplay is not so hot, and I don’t understand how shutting doors in a hotel helps you rescue the Princess.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with those fucking cutscenes? Who signed off on them, and why didn’t he bring his seeing-eye dog into work? They look horrible. It’s like someone inked them with a projectile vomiting toddler instead of a brush.

I wonder if Nintendo’s bad experiences with the Philips CD-i is the reason they shied away from CD-based platforms in the mid 90s. It’s an interesting thought. This tiny obscure game might be the reason why you spent your early teens blowing on N64 cartridges like a retard.

Then again, that might be too interesting a backstory for this very uninteresting game.

Tucker Max retired from his lifestyle, and gave us this final book of adventures as a parting gift.

Sloppy Seconds collects all the Tucker Max “backwash”, all the little bits and pieces that weren’t good enough for the first three Tucker Max books. You’ll recognise some stories from his site. Others have already appeared in other books. As for the rest…well, Tucker himself admits that the signal to noise ratio is a bit spotty. Obviously these stories were left out of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell et al for a reason.

Still, I had fun. Unlike the women in the stories.

The Great:

— The Duke Campout story…this is amazing, one of the best things he’s written. Favourine line: “She was the type who would cockblock endangered pandas at the zoo.”

— The buttsex story, an old classic. Tucker gets a girl to agree to anal sex, and he tries to covertly film it for posterity (posteriority?). This comes from Tucker’s early twenties, when he claims he was perhaps the worst person in the world.

— The Slingblade movie reviews. Holy shit, these were funny. I need a whole book of them.

— “Fuck the fucking headboard”… this one killed me. Tucker is railing some chick on a cheap hotel bed, she breaks off the headboard by accident, and she won’t stop obsessing about it. I feel like I’m being given a crash course in female psychology.

— A fair few “sexting” stories. Some of them are funny…

The Okay

— …some of them just go on too long and overstay their welcome. Tucker goes for surreal Kaufmanesque humour, with mixed results. By the end I was thinking “thanks, I get the point, let’s move on.”

— Some stories from Tucker’s childhood are found here. Not always funny, but they are interesting. He has never spoken much about his childhood except to say that it sucked so this is a side to Tucker you don’t often see.

— The Junior stories. Junior was one of the more memorable characters from IHTSBIH, along with Slingblade, and here he gets some more prime time in the spotlight. “Junior’s Marriage” was just…woah…

The Retarded

— A detailed description of how Tucker learned to masturbate.

— Some completely unfunny stories that amount to “I’m getting a blowjob while writing this”

— No, Tucker, I don’t care about your dog.

Sloppy Seconds is definitely a fun collection of some rare and hard to find Tucker Max material. It’s value is a little questionable as the two big stories, Campout and Buttsex, have already been published (and are still available for free on Tucker’s site.) Definitely something to get once you own I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Assholes Finish First, and Hilarity Ensues.

When you’re 12 years old, you read things like Hideshi Hino and think it’s the coolest thing ever.

You don’t stay 12 forever.

I would describe Hino as gory spooky-themed kiddie manga, heavily influenced by western comics in both story and aesthetic, with a weird art style (and not in a good way), and a strong imagination. The Collection is a heavily “enhanced” biography of Hino’s, presented as a series of short comics about all the sick shit his mother, father, brother, grandfather, etc do.

Between each episode we have Hino himself providing commentary (a framing device similar to EC Comics’ Crypt Keeper…Hino’s from Japan, but his muse lives on the other side of the Pacific!), and the stories themselves are just plain bizarre. The most memorable sequence in The Collection stars comic-Hino’s grandfather fighting a sword battle against an evil sentient tumor that’s attached to his own body.

If you’re looking for something more than wacky gross-outs — anything more — you will not find it. The stories are like bare threads connecting one gory bloodbath to another. The blaring one-note characters are not sympathetic or interesting. Hino’s Klasky-Csupo approach to art cuts the legs out from anything resembling atmosphere or scariness. Violence aside, The Collection seems like something written for children.

No, it’s worse than that. Kazuo Umezu’s “The Drifting Classroom” was written for children. By volume three I was engrossed in an amazing post-apocalyptic survival story and I didn’t care. The Collection is a series of bloody jokes. The first couple of pages involve a woman driving down a road at night. Who is she? Where’s she going? These are questions another mangaka might have asked (and found entertaining answers to), but Hino doesn’t care. He just skips right to the part where she dies horribly.

It’s cliche to refer to something as a joke with no punch-line. Hideshi Hino’s The Collection is actually the reverse…all punch-lines and no jokes. It’s a series of boom-boom-boom climaxes with scant substance to give them context and meaning.