Sometimes, I use my own homepage as a portal to the rest of the internet, mostly because I want people who find my "Go Somewhere...Else" links to be able to, oh I don't know, be able to go there with as few clicks as possible. Once Youtube started killing adblockers, I changed the World of Longplays button to go to their website instead. Then something happened and they silently blanked all but a few of their videos from Youtube, so the website stopped being useful. I changed it to their Internet Archive page at that point, which is where it redirects now, sorted in chronological order by archive date so that the newest videos appear at the top of the list. I wanted to watch something this morning and I wasn't interested in another episode of The Joy of Painting, so I went to WOL's archive and discovered KAGE-008's longplay of CID the Dummy.
When I was a kid, my favourite toys were the Incredible Crash Dummies from Tyco. They were kind of hard to come by and my mum knew the staff at Toy Liquidators Outlet on a firstname basis because that was basically the only place you could get them outside Brazil in the late '90s. They were based on the Ad Council's crash dummies, Vince and Larry, who were created in the mid '80s to get people to wear their seatbelts; since all the horror stories weren't working, someone decided a pair of talking crash dummies doing slapstick and cracking bad jokes would work better. Well, it worked because Tyco said, "Hey, we'd like to make a toy line out of this." I suppose it was the wide array of colours that attracted me to the Crash Dummies (though, Slick and Spin had replaced Vince and Larry by the time they got to me), but for whatever reason, they were my favourite toys ever, and I still have most of them. Some of them have their limbs held on with Fun-Tak now, but I never outright destroyed my Crash Dummies for the sake of destruction.
One of the first videogames I was ever aware of was The Incredible Crash Dummies for Super NES, which was based somewhat on the 1993 3D animated kids show from FOX Kids (not closely), and I was working through a newfound Crash Dummies obsession thanks to The Sims and the new toys released by Hot Wheels when I saw a game tentatively called "Crash Dummy vs. the Evil D-Troit" on a list of 3rd-party games slated for release on the new Wii.
"Crash Dummy vs. the Evil D-Troit" got released as CID the Dummy to zero acclaim in 2009, I wasn't paying any attention anyway because of some stuff that happened that I really don't want to talk about, and we fast-forward to 2010, when my mum and I are at the store around Hanukkah. Probably in an effort to coerce people into buying quick Christmas gifts without much thought, the store had a bargain bin full of discounted Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 games near the pharmacy entrance, right next to another bin full of discounted DVDs. I looked into the bin and saw 5 or 6 copies of the Wii version of CID the Dummy, marked down to $5, along with various other flops. I picked it up, realising this was the game I'd halfway been waiting for, but it sparked no joy. I looked at the back cover to see if there was anything there that hadn't been mentioned on the project website and wondered what other things I could buy with $5. I set it back down on the top of the pile and we carried on with the shopping.
The week after the last night of Hanukkah, my mum's friend from work gets back from her brother's place in Scranton and has us over for a belated Hanukkah celebration (for how much a megachurch evangelist knows about Hanukkah) and she's gotten us presents, right? I don't recall what mum got, but I took off the wrapping to discover that she had gotten me CID the Dummy. Quite possibly the very same object that I had turned over in my hands and set back down a month earlier, she got it for me because it was cheap, a videogame, and having to do with Crash Dummies. Well, I took it home and put it into the filing crate with the rest of my Wii games and never touched it except once when I thought I might be bored enough to give it a go. I wasn't, and it stayed there in the crate until I finally took the shrinkwrap off in order to give it and most of my games to social services for Erev Yom Kippur 5778. I don't miss it, I don't regret not having played it. Every time I looked at it, I smelled that faux-vanilla air freshener, thought about all those Precious Moments tchotchkes, the oppressive feeling of being in Someone Else's House that I had whenever we had to go over to her flat.
I watched KAGE-008's longplay for about 10 minutes just now. Sure, the gameplay is basic as hell, the voice acting is terrible, and the music is repetitive and pretentious; but I also started to feel the same ick as before and I quit watching immediately. I'd been considering actually playing CID the Dummy when I got my Wii working again, but that just isn't going to happen. It's in my datahoard, and it'll stay in my datahoard, but I'm never going to play it. It's become the trigger for a Pavlovian sense of holier-than-thou evangelism which I'm afraid will get transmuted to self-hate if it ever happens again. Maybe I'm just thinking too much.