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September 20, 2010
Atlantic Yards: The Videogame
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It was only a matter of time before someone came up with an Atlantic Yards-themed videogame.
Well, almost.
Introducing Nail Household Fighting Against Demolition Squad.
The Wall Street Journal, Fighting Eviction: The Videogame
A new online game lets players join China’s ongoing battle between property developers and homeowners.
Nail Household vs. Demolition Team, released by Mirage Games in August, is set in a cleared pit, empty except for a lone three-story house marked “chai” — the Chinese word for demolition.
The goal? To defend your house against guards and gangsters brandishing knives and bouncing on jackhammers. The characters you can play include a woman in curlers who throws sandals at encroaching attackers, a pot-bellied man who drops dynamite from the roof, and an old man with a shotgun.
When you win a level, the woman appears, pointing a finger at the Forbidden City, the symbolic center of the government’s power. When you lose, the house collapses in a cloud of dust.
The game is the latest example of how chai is bleeding into Chinese pop culture. Earlier this year, Li Chengpeng drew attention for “Avatar: An Epic Nail House Textbook,” which compares the plight of James Cameron’s Na’vi to the people who live in “nail houses,” so named because they stick out of construction sites like a nail out of a plank of wood.
...Nail Household vs. Demolition Team is popular online, with more than 50,000 comments about it on social-media site Renren.com and more than 10,000 users discussing the game in their online diaries.
But players complain that they can never complete the final “survival” level, where swarms of demolition workers overwhelm the house’s defenders.
“The cruel fact from the game is: Even if you survive the previous six levels, your house will be demolished at the end anyways,” a Twitter user named “windchaos” wrote.
Play the Game, in Chinese
Play the Game, (partially) translated version
NoLandGrab: We've made it to Level Four Five Six the final level. But is it any surprise that "your house will be demolished at the end anyways?"
Image: Mirage Games
Posted by eric at September 20, 2010 6:32 PM