Let’s start off whacky!

I am a very nostalgic gamer—memories of eld, faded games gone and passed. They have fueled the core of my gaming identity in recent years. Video games have come a long way, and as a 35-year-old whose gaming adventures started in the 16-bit era and continued through every generation to this day, I often find myself in a state of reminiscence. Core memories that break free from the vault and send me back to shining gems and beloved classics, all the way to the obscure and niche.

This series—Nostalgia Mode—reinvigorates my passion for video games by remembering the glory of my yesteryears. Starting with a gem that I rarely, if ever, hear about. It’s crazy, ridiculous fun. It’s Whacked!

Released on the OG Xbox, Whacked! is a third-person PVP battle arena game. It is set in a game show called Whacked!, where players select a contestant and battle against each other in various arenas. It features a story mode, local co-op and Xbox LIVE. Its greatest quality, in my opinion, is its humour. It’s witty, slapstick and mature, and it is featured everywhere: in story cutscenes, character design and stages. Even the ad breaks in story mode were bizarre and hilarious. The mature aspect really shone through on this one. When I think about it, I played some great games that were designed for adults when I was a wee bubs. Some that have their own nostalgia mode.

When I played this game, I was in my early teens. How I came to be in possession of this masterpiece, I am still not sure. Like many games I owned as a kid, the memory of acquisition is still fuzzy. I just remember sitting in my shared bedroom at the end of the hallway, staring at the CRT TV. My brother and I, only a year apart in age, shared many things growing up. Although we have different interests for the most part, playing video games was, and is still, our main bonding activity.

My Whacked! era began when we shifted from the end hallway bedroom to one of the middle hallway rooms. Because my brother and I shared the bedroom, we either sat on one of the beds or on the floor. We often played video games with some boys from our street. By this time, we had all become good friends. The bedroom was small, but the four of us would generally find room to sit—sometimes somewhere obscure because of all the random things lying on the floor that we gave zero thought to tidy.

Our go-to mode was battle mode because we could play ‘houses’. You know, houses? Where you claim a section of the map and pretend it’s your home? No? Anyone?

“I live on the fan! Don’t come on here.”

This mode of play was very common in our friend group. Someone would always get the coolest place to live. The sink, the fan, the ice cave.

However, the coolest places were usually the most hazardous. The sink would suck you into the drain, which meant instant death; the blades of the fan could kill you if you fell between them, and the ice cave was a death sentence if your friends were feeling sadistic that day. To us, though, hazards never reduced real estate value. Cool was worth every scream of anger and all lives lost.

Of course, we also battled it out in all of the different rule sets, combat being the most frequented. There was something satisfying about the way the stars would burst out of your enemies when struck with a flying plunger or skewered with a shish kebab, and the progress bar at the bottom of the screen showing who was in the lead got my adrenaline pumping when I watched our characters’ little icons go back and forth as we gained and lost stars.

As mentioned before, Whacked! has witty, mature humour etched into it. A lot of that humour is in its dialogue. Its absurd one-liners are so quotable that it gives Buffy the Vampire Slayer a run for its money. There is an advert on one of the stages that repeats the same voice lines over and over again that it, so pleasantly, became a staple quote—along with a codex of memorable character death lines.

“Ooh, it hurts so good” – Lucy

To this day, I still think of Whacked!. In an era where many gems sank to the bottom of the memory chamber, and passion in game development was truly something else, Whacked! will remain a classic on my shelf, and its legacy, I hope, will find the resurgence it deserves.