Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit

Here's the Steam page for this one. Worth looking at pictures of, if nothing else.

Like probably everyone who reads this, we have a gigantic pile of unplayed Steam games, and sometimes its fun to pull a few out. Hell Yeah was chosen pretty much arbitrarily because it was colourful, with no expectation that it would even be much good. We were right: it's not very good. But that's not really the point. The point is that it came out in the year 2012 and was available on the Xbox Live Arcade. That era still feels so recent, even though it's more than a decade ago, but the specific markers of time and place are so prominent here that we couldn't help but notice them. Exactly 12 achievements, for example. The instruction option on the pause menu. Things that were mandated by platform holders leave a distinct footprint. In some ways it feels like technology hasn't advanced much since then, but Hell Yeah doesn't play nice with non-XBox controllers on PC, and also didn't like the Steam screenshot function. So you know, things DO change. It's still easy to remember a lot of the really important games from those days, even if it's maybe a bit gauche to admit to liking Braid at this point, but in order to really remember what it was like, ya gotta play the also-rans. The games that were fine for 15 bucks but didn't light the world on fire. That's Hell Yeah.

All of this must lead to actually talking about the game at some point. Hell Yeah could broadly be called a Metroidvania if you can stomache doing that, though it's actually more of an Arkham-like. Progress is very linear and there aren't many things to find in old areas, but you do revisit them as part of the story as you gain more abilities. Your little man is named Ash, and he's I guess the king of hell, but someone took a picture of him with a rubber duckie and now he's going to kill all 100 dudes who saw the picture to restore his image instead of just using the propaganda arm of the state he controls. Everything about this is exactly like what we imagine Invader Zim was like. They even use the descriptor "Of Doom" for attempted comedy. This, too, is 2012, or even a bit earlier honestly. These days the closest thing is like Hazbin Hotel which has musical numbers and tries to be very heartfelt about it. Here, there's essentially nothing. The premise exists only half-heartedly, and few narrative beats connect the areas you visit. Ash's butler gives some instruction, and some of the major enemies have a line or two, but very little of it feels like its trying to be more than perfunctory. The idea or general vibe of a sense of humor is here, but the actual jokes in dialogue are rare. It's not all sauceless, though: the environments look nice, and the music is good. Most of the character, though, comes from the goofy Warioware minigames you have to do to finish off a monster once its health is fully depleted. See, most areas are at least a ltitle bit open, and the way you dispatch the 100 guys will vary a bit from basic shooting to little puzzles for environmental kills, but you always have to do a little quick minigame that gives you no prior preparation to finish the job. There's a good number of them, with more introduced periodically, and while the animations are sometimes way too long and they repeat too often, it's the closest thing to sauce that you'll find in Hell Yeah. There's jokes! A lot of it is just reference humor but it's an identity at least!

Oh, there's an exception to the minigame thing. Well, bosses don't have them but the real exception is that sometimes you get the hint that you need to zoom the camera out to kill someone. There's a dedicated button for that, which pauses the action. Really, it feels like a concession to the camera being way too zoomed in for the action much of the time. The first time you have to use it for a puzzle feels clever but much like most of the longer animations, it really quickly stops being cute. It's all like this really, you get a set of new weapons and its just slightly better versions of the ones you have but you still have the old ones so it's a pain in the ass to switch to the right one.

The controls seem to have taken a lot of flak in contemporary reviews, but we're much less down on them. They have some eccentricities for sure, but if anything that's one of the few shakes of salt the game is getting. In short, they aren't that weird. Most of the game is played inside of a vehicle anyway, and so the way your jump slows as you approach its apex has a certain level of artificial to it that helps. Digging through dirt can be slightly tricky when you have to move up against gravity, but you don't have to do that much anyway. You need to be holding a direction on the right stick to shoot because this was the era of the twin stick shooter, and that can be tricky if you also happen to be platforming. Not actually a negative, though. If everything was cool, you wouldn't worry about that. The game didn't need to be any smoother that's for sure.

Probably the funniest little feature in here is the island. See, when you kill one of the 100 monsters they, I guess, don't die-die because it's already hell. Instead they go to an island where you assign them jobs that will very slowly produce little gift boxes for you to send back to the main game. But you have to back out to the main menu to go there. We quit playing at 80-ish monsters killed and had recieved a total of one gift, which was a health restore for 30 health on a bar that starts with a max of 250 and can go up to 550. We were already full when we used the gift so it was wasted. Sometimes your captured monsters get mad or mad and you press a button to send them away for a bit to fix that. It is a profoundly useless section of game, but we wonder what the big plan was you know? It feels like something conceptualized and then cut back when the game changed out from under it. That's fun to think about!

Hell Yeah was published by Sega, and if anything made us happy it was the fact that Ristar gets referenced in text at one point. Ristar fuckin rips dude, and the people who made the game might also have loved Ristar. The company itself only released one more game, the year after that. We've talked some shit on this game, but it represented some significant investment of time and energy and creativity from real people, and nobody is going to celebrate it like even a Meat Boy. Or even a Hard Corps Uprising from your friends at Arc System Works! Okay it's just us who're way into that one. But still, only looking at the stuff that made it big doesn't give a real, full view of the era. Hell Yeah isn't the totality of everything either, but it's got a lot in common with a pretty significant number of those XBLA releases. Remember Raskulls? No, you probably don't, but it existed. Anybody not looking for full historical knowledge has little use for this game, but it was real, and it was there, and on some level anything forgotten is a little bit sad. Here's to remembering an also-ran, just for a few minutes.