Kuso Culture

Kuso? Literally, it’s Japanese for “shit.” But before you turn the page in mock disgust, that’s about as scatological as it gets - though it gets a lot, lot odder. Known as “ok gao” (odd doings) in Cantonese, “kuso” comes from the Japanese “kuso-ge” – “shitty game” – a term evolved to describe the enjoyment we derive from games that are so bad, they’re good. It’s evolved since, and now even mainstream culture can be kuso – Stephen Chow films, for example; or the overblown, overhyped, we’re-over-it Bus Uncle.

Essentially, kuso is pop-culture parody. From making fun of awful games (and people) to doctoring movie posters to making silly music and movies, kuso is user-generated content, done for the reason that most things are done nowadays on the internet: for the hell of it. Kuso as a phenomenon started in 2000, and spread from Japan to Taiwan, and then to Hong Kong. One example known as “Iron Fist Invincible Sun Yat-sen!” features Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-Shek as martial artists in a wuxia novel.

Kuso Games

Kuso games are where it all started: Games so horrendously bad that the only way to enjoy them was to appreciate quite how AWFUL they were. Here are two of the worst.

Hong Kong 97

One of the pioneers of the genre (and of particular interest for obvious reasons), “Hong Kong 97” was a Japanese game made for the Super Famicom (SNES) console that’s achieved legendary status on the internet for even more obvious reasons – it’s outright terrible. The “plot” of Hong Kong 97 is, well, a masterwork: After the handover, an influx of mainland Chinese to Hong Kong sends the crime rate through the roof – and so the Hong Kong government hires Bruce Lee’s brother Chin (allegedly a misspelled Jackie Chan) to, um, exterminate the 1.2 billion-strong population of China. Meanwhile, Chinese scientists are engaged in a top-secret plan to resurrect the (prematurely dead) Deng Xiaoping as the ultimate weapon - “extermination with Chinese characteristics”?

This doesn’t translate to the abysmal gameplay, which by all accounts, is impossible. The introductory sequence segues immediately to the game, where Chin has to shoot at a screen full of Chinese sprites spitting little white blobs across the screen. Touch anything and it’s immediately game over (your reward is a picture of a mutilated corpse). Survive the blobs, and three cars attack. Survive them, and you fight the boss – the giant Deng Xiaoping head recycled from the title screen. And that’s it – the game repeats. The backdrop for the entire game is a random photo – ranging from Maoist propaganda, to the ATV logo.

The English subtitles for the game are bizarrely vulgar: “The year 1997 has arrived. A herd of fuckin’ ugly reds [sic] are rushing from the mainland.” The Chinese subtitles make absolutely no sense. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game didn’t exactly do well – but it has survived in the collective hearts and minds of kuso-ers everywhere.

The Cho Aniki series

Possibly the oddest and most kuso of all kuso-ge. In the case of this SNES game, pictures (above) tell more than all the words in the known universe.

Kuso Celebrity