The Residents
Bad Day On The Midway
By Dr. Behrend Van Muller
The concept for The Residents' 1994 CD-ROM The Gingerbread Man is an investigation of ten characters, The Weaver, The Dying Oilman, the Confused Transsexual, the Sold-Out Artist, etc. While repeating the haunting melody of the Gingerbread man this "expanded album" (an album with visual accompaniment) introduces you to the characters one by one. The interludes with each character are like this: The Characters' heads spin around and around while moaning out random details about their lives -- while you, the viewer can cut and paste the heads around the screen, and vicariously press keys to change the backdrop, make the character speak, and reveal shocking life secrets.Each character has a secret you must discover, for example: the Aging Musician shot his dog and the Old Soldier tied up and molested his daughter. If your five minutes with each character has left you without the Residents' profound message, a heavy-handed note at the end will spell it out for you.
While the Gingerbread Man is worthy of respect it honestly is not something you'd put on that often - however the Residents' latest Bad Day On The Midway is more serviceable than Donkey Kong. The Residents assemble a dazzling array of the best computer artists around today; resulting in a variety of graphic styles from Toy Story, Beavis & Butt-head, Ren and Stimpy, to the less skillful of Picasso's sculptures. You are the boy Timmy as you enter the tawdry Midway theme park (the theme is based around killing commies) and are greeted by Madame Mandrake, an automated fortune reader who tells you many wise things from "The weakest link speaks louder than words," to "The early bird is better than nothing." But you are not Timmy for long; as in the Gingerbread Man there are many characters for your brain-digging pleasure. Each character narrates his own story while accompanied by quirky surreal art. The narrations are all humorless tales of personal woe, but combined with the quirkiness of the modern artwork accompaniment you forgive the heavy-handedness and sit back and enjoy the ride. From that point you can be anyone from the seductive Dagmar The Dog Woman to Oscar the Rat (Oscar's narrative is the most colorful) as you peruse around the various attractions.
For those of you not familiar with this new breed of CD-ROM's they're a cross between a video game and a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story book. The technology has a way to go before you have near-limitless options, but the award-winning Bad Day provides more variety than any other CD-ROMıs to date. It's all clean fun but be careful not to get poisoned or strangled!