Pop CultureMay 26, 2016

Mike Hosking tried on the Chewbacca Mask and the results were catastrophic

Senior writer

Alex Casey watched in horror as Mike Hosking tried to recreate the Chewbacca Mask video on Seven Sharp.

As it is written in the bible, every viral internet craze can enjoy only a few moments of purity before being sullied by a pack of vultures led by an Animorphs-style Ellen Degeneres with James Corden bringing up the rear in his carpool of absolute buzzkill.

Let that hype simmer for few days or weeks – however long it takes our pop culture carrier pigeon to land safely in Invercargill airport – and we might even see some of kiwi battlers giving it a shot in the name of some noble content creation. This is where the true magic happens, this is the space where I will gladly tune in.

Case in point, Mike Hosking. Just two weeks ago, a mere 400 years after the running man craze had subsided, he entertained the masses with some exceptionally bad dance moves and jeans, delivering only a slightly Brent-ish finish:

Yesterday, social media lit up with the rumour that Hosking would be trying on the now-infamous Chewbacca mask, live on Seven Sharp. Of course I was going to be there. Because I’m a human being with a beating heart, that video means the entire world to me and brings more joy to my crotchety old life than the birth of my two cats. I want to have it playing inside my eyelids at all times. I want everyone around me to wear the mask. The world before the Chewbacca mask feels dull and distant.

Naturally, there is no better candidate to recreate the most joyous occurrence in the history of the internet than a scowling Dementor in his prime time cave. I nestled in with a cup of tea, and waited patiently through the other bulletin items. The nice water tree. The bad ball dresses. And then, just before the ads, there was the tease of the century:

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When we returned from the ads, Toni Street looked sunny and cheerful next to a a sullen, deflated Hosking. He furiously tapped his pen on the desk, as if trying to summon a dark ancient spirit from beneath the bowels of TVNZ to urgently release his soul from its fleshy trappings. “This clip has been giving us a lot of fodder this week…” Toni continued, while Mike released a long, final-breath type of sigh.

He looked fed up with this world and everyone in it – especially happy Chewbacca people.

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We were shown the original viral clip, and then a flashback to Mike the night before, when he claimed that ratings would go through the roof if he wore the mask. Based on the sample size of my lounge, he was definitely right. The last time I watched Seven Sharp was when Tim Wilson was trying to get people to eat pigeon on Queen Street.

Back in the studio, Mike was cracking the fuck up at himself the night before. It will be a surprise to nobody that the only thing that can make Mike laugh is Mike himself.

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Toni told Mike they could actually prove it, and a minion named Hannah presented the almighty Chewbacca mask courtesy of The Warehouse. “Oh noooooooo” Mike droned quietly, “nooooo.”

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Toni unboxed the mask carefully before Mike snatched it off her. He peered down at it like an elderly person using an iPad for the very first time. “It’s an actual mask…” he said, straight down the barrel. He simply couldn’t believe it.

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Without missing a beat, the mask was sucked onto his face with the exact pace of a certain Jim Carrey character everyone was confusedly attracted to when they were younger (just me?). This was Mike’s moment to bring joy to the masses. Would he deliver on the mask’s promise of hearty laughs? Or would he conjure up a terrifying nightmare zone of high pitched noise beneath a plastic character mask like something straight out of a horror film?

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…..I’ll let you decide….

Despite Toni prying open the jaws of the mask to release the Chewie noise, Mike could only deliver some alarmingly shrill complaints from beneath the plastic. No laughs. No tears. No buoyant joy. He tossed the mask back to Toni, questioning the craftmanship of the product and it’s relative retail value. “You must have a weird chin,” Toni suggested, driving the final nail into his comedy coffin. As a wise man once said, sometimes it’s better to just let the Wookiee win. <hr /> <a href="http://lightbox.co.nz/" target="_blank">This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.</a>

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Pop CultureMay 26, 2016

Games within games – the Spinoff mini-game power rankings

Group Think

A bunch of people

It’s gotten so developers can’t seem to help put chuck in the occasional mini-game to give red-eyed gamers a respite from the main action. A cabal of Spinoff writers have come together to provide a ranking of their favourite wee games nested within bigger games.

1) Gwent from The Witcher 3

Gwent! It’s blackjack meets Magic: The Gathering, a high fantasy blend of strategy, luck and character cards with descriptions admitting to incest.

Players compete in a best of three competition to rack up the highest score through placing various combat cards into one of three categories on the battlefield: close combat, ranged, and siege. Units can be weakened or entirely eliminated with cards that call in blizzards or rain or plagues, and buffed with cards that sound horns to rally the men. Special high powered heroes, however, are unaffected. The decks range across four different factions, each with their own unique units, hero cards, leaders and play style. Masters of each can be found across the Northern Kingdoms; beat them and gank their prized cards. Alternatively, basically every merchant in the game is ripe for a stomping if you feel the mood take you, or even if you just want to get down to Gwent’s kickass theme tunes.

I’ve racked up near 200 hours in The Witcher 3 by now, and I’d say at least half of them were spent playing Gwent. That’s not an indictment on my imagination, but a testament to how incredibly complex Gwent really is. And there’s only one way to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes… -Don Rowe

2) Go Go Space Monkey from GTA: San Andreas

Putting aside the Hot Coffee controversy (because who really needs to go there?) the seventh entry into the GTA series is infamous for being filled to the gunnels with just about every diversion on God’s green earth. There’s shitty basketball, pool, the lowrider challenge, RC plane flying and so much more. But the game also had 4 different arcade style games you could play. They were all amusing, but Go Go Space Monkey beats out They Crawled From Uranus simply because the side scroller was reasonably difficult and featured a primate riding a wooden tub in the expanse of space fighting alien bananas. Conceptually this wee game was off the hook. -José Barbosa

3) Man the Meat from No More Heroes 2

It’s a side-job you need in order to fund your true passion – killing other professional killers. All you have to do is fry the meat long enough to the man’s liking (medium, rare, well-done). If done correctly, he gives you a thumbs up and walks away. If you fudge it, he throws a fork in your face. The mini-game’s not exactly fun, and that’s kind of the point. There’s something really tongue-in-cheek about having to go away from having a fun time in a mundane 3D world to do something mundane in a fun 8-bit retro world. Out of all the side-job mini-games in No More Heroes 2, Man the Meat nailed the joke the best. -Liam Maguren

4) Home-Run Contest from Super Smash Bros.

Of all the mini-games in all the world, nothing has driven me more insane than the Home-Run Contest in the Super Smash Bros. series. A feature of the game since 2001’s Melee Gamecube incarnation, your job is to beat the shit out of an adorable punching bag for ten seconds then use a baseball bat or some other ‘power move’ to send it flying as far as possible. Using powerful and extremely un-fun calculations, nerds have managed to send the little bag near infinite distances using big baddy Ganondorf or twee bashers the Ice Climbers. My best ever is considerably less: just over 1000ft using Ness, the telekinetic cutie-pie. – Joseph Harper

5) The Pokémon Pokies

Before they were tragically phased out around six years ago, every Pokémon game featured a gaming corner. With rows and rows of itty bitty slot machines on which to gamble your
troubles (and Pokédollars) away, they were the game within the game for when everything in the Pokémon world got a little too much. It was pretty much exactly like playing real slot
machines. Time stood still. They had fun graphics and cute sounds. You never ever won, but you also sometimes won.

Were some machines luckier than others? Was there a science to timing when you pressed ‘A’ to stop the slots spinning? If you talk to some guy, then play such-and- such a machine and then rapidly press the up and down buttons would you definitely, definitely win? The Pokémon slot machines were the perfect gateway for young minds into the maddeningly mysterious yet fabulously compulsive world of virtual gambling.

Yet another casualty of political correctness run amok, the loss of the Pokémon slot machines serves as a cautionary tale for us all. What more can we lose before we lose it all? -Katie Parker

6) Paddle War from Commander Keen

Whenever those sneaky walking rocks or the gross yellow slugs in Commander Keen got too stressful, you could always hit F1 and enjoy a relaxing game of PaddleWar. It was accessible from the game’s main menu, which, predating the Pip-Boy in Fallout, was operated from a device worn on Commander Keen’s wrist.

7) Geometry Wars from Project Gotham Racing 2

Geometry Wars! It’s a well-known, top-down, dual-analog shooter, with visuals that are somewhere between a fractal hallucination and a fireworks display. It’s a great game in all of its various iterations. The most well-known is probably Geometry Wars Evolved, which launched way back in 2005 as one of the first downloadable titles on a console for Xbox Live Arcade. It did very well, mainly because it was the closest thing that the Xbox 360 had to a good, exclusive launch game. It’s had a number of successful sequels released on everything from PC to Nintendo DS. But what’s it doing in this list?

Geometry Wars began life as an easter egg in the original Xbox game Project Gotham Racing 2, developed by Bizarre Creations. My brothers and I found it in the free-roam mode in PGR2’s Garage, tucked away in a dusty arcade cabinet. If you went up to it and pressed A, you’d start playing. It was pretty simple – increasing numbers of of geometric enemies would try to suicide-kill the player character, an irregular concave nonagon. You moved with one analog stick and directed projectiles with the other. Killing enemies allowed you to cycle through different kinds of bullet upgrades, which came in handy when the screen filled with enemies.

It was a fantastic game. After a while we stopped playing the main mode of Project Gotham Racing 2 to concentrate on getting better at Geometry Wars. My brother Leon was a kind of savant at the game – he’d sit there in a trance, while he scored millions taking down wave after wave of enemies. None of us could get even close to his high scores, but that didn’t stop us trying. It was the best kind of mini-game; one that turns out to be better than the game it was part of. -Josh Drummond

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