In case you were worried that this year’s federal election was going to be a bit light on for wild s**t, Clive Palmer’s just released a mobile game.
Clive Palmer: Humble Meme Merchant launched on the App Store over the weekend, complete with an AEC campaign-message approval notice on the launch screen to ensure you take it seriously.
Yes, that’s the Titanic 2.
It’s a very basic side-scrolling 2D platformer, somewhere between Super Mario and the dinosaur game that appears when Chrome’s offline.
You control a little blue-suited Cliev, who scampers at a single speed across the screen, and avoid enemies and obstacles in your quest to collect biscuits and… I dunno, merch memes?
A preview of the Clive Palmer game – further proof 2019 may be the greatest year ever pic.twitter.com/eUTMgkdDt3
— James Jeffrey (@James_Jeffrey) January 14, 2019
The main fun is spotting Palmer’s political antagonists. The goomba of this world is Bill Shorten’s head on a cockroach’s body – ouch. (No appearances in the first level from Scott Morrison – perhaps the developers were concerned we might have a different PM before the game was released?) Ray Hadley scampers around with his headphones on too.
There are those famous vague yellow billboards, “PozzFeed” pages floating around, and the sun appears in the form of the Dog That’s On The Grog, Teletubbies-style.
The dog that's on the grog. pic.twitter.com/WQJZ3mK3lq
— Clive Palmer (@CliveFPalmer) February 24, 2017
And if you leave the sound on, you can hear not the 8-bit grunts of a humble meme merchant chasing biscuits, but the full version of “Palmer’s Worth A Billion” – the ‘Karma Chameleon’-based parody song from his 2014 campaign that mysteriously can’t be found on the internet anywhere.
(Given that Clive is all over how copyright works, I’m sure he got that cleared with Boy George before using it.)
It was developed by one Tom West for Emu War Games, whose coat-of-arms-like logo includes the words “omnia nobis circa pecunias” – or, roughly translated, “cash rules everything around me”. So perhaps they’re not purely involved because they believe in Palmer’s ideological mission.
I bet the former Queensland Nickel workers are chuffed to bits that Clive Palmer has enough money to buy a database of phone numbers and make a mobile game but not, say, pay the wages and benefits he didn't pay them.
— Andrew P Street (@AndrewPStreet) January 14, 2019
So how is it, as a game?
Bloody hard, actually.
Your humble correspondent hasn’t made it out of Townsville yet, maxing out at a high score of 27 biscuits. It’s the first of ten levels, including all the state and territory capitals as well as “Rural Australia”.
The physics are a bit imprecise, so you don’t have a lot of leeway if you hit an enemy a teeny bit too far to either side; and there are no lives or save points so far – so if you die at any point during the level, it’s back to the beginning for you.
Between the tricky gameplay and the prospect of being stuck eternally in Townsville like a subtropical Sisyphus, Humble Meme Merchant might be the hardest, scariest game since Dark Souls II.