Film Review #23: Shotgun Funfun (game)

I don't know what to say about this.  Just your basic 2D shoot-em-up zombie game, more or less, perfected in simplicity.  Plenty of blood.  A couple cheat codes.  A shotgun.  Zombie-vampire things (they just look like worm-people to me).  A nice little high-score thing.  No real loading time, just fast play.  Which is nice.

But.

This is not over.  Nuh-uh, buster.

We're going to talk about...
CHEATS, EASTER EGGS, ETC. IN VIDEOGAMES!

As you go back in time through videogame history, you see more and more cheat codes, easter eggs, and assorted ridiculousness.  It was pretty much consistently high for a good number of years.  HOWEVER, NOWADAYS, this brilliant tradition has begun to dwindle.  WHY?  WHYYYYY - - -
Anyway.  Cheats are fun.  They completely change gameplay, generally for the better, and almost always in the interest of ridiculousness.  You know when you play a game and there's, say, a rocket launcher that's just insane, but you can only fire it once in the entire damn game, and you're like, REALLY?  Why would you bother making this if you're only gonna let me play with it once?  Well, that's where cheat codes/easter eggs come in.  They're the things that grant the stupidness that should exist in every videogame.  Easter eggs are most often hidden jokes of various sorts, or special stuff, or whatever.  The point is it's hidden, and when you find it it's like, oh damn, awesome.  Like, say, in (I think) Halo 2.  There's a gun you can find by breaking the map and flying off to a concealed location in the background, which fires massive missiles like bullets from an LMG.  Bungie (Halo makers up to Halo:Reach) actually had plenty of easter eggs throughout their games, mostly just hidden jokes, but still.  Anyway, in most games nowadays you can't find ANYTHING.  Not even an unfunny little inside joke, or a cheat for invincibility.  A few game companies (Rockstar, Infinity Ward, Bungie possibly, Avalanche) maintain this tradition, even if only to a very slight degree.  But still!  People, stop taking videogames seriously.  It's a goddamn videogame.  Make it fun.