Bum Bag Bangin'

In case you are not aware, there’s a game jam event taking place every four months called Ludum Dare, which has indie developers all over the world come up with a prototype of a game in a matter of hours on a given theme. For the 40th edition of Ludum Dare, the theme is “The more you have, the worse it is”, so there are quite a few interesting ideas being submitted.

Bum Bag Bangin' is an interesting endless runner in which you control a proud man as he waltzes around town trying to show off his greatness and his new waist purse. As you can probably tell already, this is not a serious game, and there are plenty of jokes in it to keep you laughing for a few minutes. However, the mechanics are pretty challenging, especially if you manage to survive for long enough.

The main character can only be controlled in a very limited manner, which means that you can go up and down in order to avoid obstacles, as well as shoot some kind of energy ball to obliterate other characters. These characters do not actually attack or damage you in any way, but they do compliment you a lot, which in turn increases your ego.

As it turns out, there is only so much your ego can handle, so it bursts once it reaches a critical mass. You can keep an eye on the ego and shoot the other people before they get a chance to say something, but that gets harder and harder as you progress. Thus, soon enough everyone can utter entire sentences before the bullets even reach them, which kind of forces you to keep shooting at all times, hoping to hit enemies as soon as they pop on screen.

It’s worth mentioning that the game looks quite neat, and the artwork is especially enjoyable as well, with high-resolution backgrounds and smooth animations. Granted, the background buildings repeat themselves over and over again, which be a bit annoying after a while. The difficulty level also spikes up quite rapidly, so that’s pretty frustrating as well.

In the end, Bum Bag Bangin' is undoubtedly funny and enjoyable, but only for a couple of minutes, because it becomes repetitive pretty quickly. However, this is only a prototype designed in a matter of hours, so there’s only so much it can do.