selectparks - Super Kid Fighter - Subverting and Perverting Gameboy

Carbon Defence League and Critical Art Ensemble. 2002.us Nintendo GameBoy ROM hack Homepage http://www.carbondefense.org/writing_4.html

"Critical thinking is not introduced to intellectually developed children; they must wait until theyâ€™re adults to be exposed to it in any radicalised form. What passes as teaching children critical thinking is limited to teaching what is needed to prepare them for success in a given specialisation.â€ Super Kid Fighter, by the Critical Art Ensemble and the Carbon Defense League is based on the premise that due to the ideological influence of games in childhood development - children should be the primary target of tactical media activism, making a GameBoy the perfect perpetrator. Super Kid Fighter is visually naive, and play is uncomfortably stilted. However, the project is highly successful in illustrating the difficulty of delivering alternative information to children, via their highly censored, conservative and mainstream information sources. To deliver a challenging ideology to this social group it was necessary for the artists to illegally hack a predominant media format of the targetted social group; the GameBoy. The hacked GameBoy ROM requires the player to wag school, sell drugs, work for the mafia and kill a policeman to obtain the reward of the game - free admission to the town's newest brothel. It should be kept in mind that this project was conceived prior to children gaining easy access to the internet. The project was coupled with a media package for teenage boys titled Child As Audience, which included radical software, instructions on how to hack a GameBoy, a CD of hardcore music, and a pamphlet on the oppression of youth. Exactly the sort of xmas present I was hoping for as a kid. Instructions on win xp: Launch play_superkid_fighter.bat Ignore message, click "ok" hit key "1" to start up/down arrows to scroll storyline Use arrows to navigate map numpad zero key to select option A numpad decimal key to select option B If the controls stop working because of other computer processes you might need to relaunch. Download here.