Play Stupid ‘White House Arcade’ Games, Win Stupid ‘White House Arcade’ ... Nope. No Prizes.

Ethics in gaming journalism!

In the world of dick joke journalism, there are your VRY SRS hard hitters, you know the ones, the writers that take on the hard stories, the important news, the kind of stuff that requires a level head, a firm grasp of the issues, and an encyclopedic knowledge of genitalia related wordplay. You’ve got your Evans, your Doks, and now even your Brookes. (Robyn keeps it ladylike.) And then there’s me, your humble Shypixel. Sometimes a bit of news comes down the extremely clogged and smegma-tainted internet pipes that can only be handled by someone with a particular set of skills, skills acquired over a very long career, in this case mostly involving playing video games. This news is that the White House has released a brand spanking new section of the official White House website! This “Arcade,” as they’re calling it, features a motley collection of five games to enterdoctrinate your little crumb-snatchers with traditional MAGA values. What? You would have preferred “indoctain” or maybe “entertrain”? Anyhow, in the Wonkette tradition of “we watched this shit so that you don’t have to,” your Shypixel will “play” these “games” and tell you all “about” them, so that you don’t have to. (Because [SPOILER ALERT] you really don’t want to.) Bam! Ethics in gaming journalism!

Before I get started, I want to fend off any questioning of my credentials (read: brag). In addition to having played video games from the days of the Atari 2600, I have actually coded a couple of my own games, worked at Nintendo as a Game Play Counselor during the height of Nintendomania (1989-1990), managed an Aladdin’s Castle arcade, helped lead the Rebel Alliance on the Ahazi server in Star Wars Galaxies, and was an admin on the first public Minecraft server. I can up up down down left right left right B A start with the best of them, is what I am saying. Now that you are duly impressed and/or wondering how the hottest nightlife columnist to ever come out of LA ended up with such a nerd, I give you my expert review of each of Dear Leader’s newest gifts to the world.

1) FLAPPY BILL

I approached the first game with my liberal outrage sensors at maximum, as one does. After the Auto-pen portrait bullshit, I kinda expected Flappy Bill to be game about Clinton’s penis, but surprise, it was just a Flappy Bird clone. The programmers behind this one have worked a miracle in that you can use either the space bar OR the mouse button, OR EVEN BOTH!!! to propel your little sprite of a bald eagle holding some form of document upwards, as you navigate an increasingly same series of obstacles (columns) against the backdrop of the National Mall. The gameplay is fine. It is common for Flappy Bird clones to be clunky with oversized sprites or mismatched hitboxes, but this one is fine. Not good, just fine. It never gets more difficult, it never gets faster, you just click until you die or get bored, or both maybe.

But what about the document? What is it? Is it the Bill of Rights? Is the eagle carrying it to the fires of Mt. Doom, for destroying? Probably. Or maybe it’s the Epstein Files, also going to Mt. Doom, also for destroying. I dunno, I’m reaching here. I fully expected to find things about this game to be outraged about, but there were simply none. I looked for the Trump Arch in the background, or maybe vandals vandaling the Reflecting Pool, spent so much time watching the background scroll by that I kept dying. Honestly, I would have preferred the Clinton’s penis format.

Game Score: 2/5 - Passable clone of a mindless game, should get faster with time

Outrage Score: 0/5 - Unless you pretend it’s the Epstein Files.

2) BUILD THE WALL

Have you ever found yourself wondering, What if Tetris, but without the Tetris? Wonder no more, you get Build the Wall. Protect the border from the coming horde. That is your mission. Hordes of what? Brown people? No, silly, as the game’s title screen informs us, this is a ZOMBIE horde, even though there is a sign clearly marking the border being defended as the Southern Border, and the “zombies” look either like aliens or the UFOs from Space Invaders. So I guess Alien zombie brown people?

The gameplay is Tetris, but the lines never vanish. Because of how, apparently, you are building a wall. With a bunch of holes in it. While little alien zombie brown people, who are green in the game, walk into the wall, and explode, though this last seems to have no impact on the game or your score. I tried leaving a path for them, like a digital Harriet Tubman, but nothing different happened, don’t call ICE on me. If it was legal to sue the President, I bet Tetris would have one hell of an IP case, something they know a thing or two about.

Game Score: 0/5 - Turns out that when you take the Tetris out of Tetris, you’re left with “ ”

Outrage Score: 2/5 - If plausible deniability was a broken game clone, it would be this one, but we can still hear the dog whistle.

3) RIO RUN

Growing up in suburban Seattle, little Shypixel always dreamed about the day when he would grow up to become a balding old white man in a suit who would spend his time wandering around a checkerboard desert gathering immigrants into an ever growing conga line. Just kidding! I was dreaming about deporting them. And now I can, and you can too, in this Snake clone. But why is the character balding? And old? Somebody get Pete Hegseth on the phone. LOW T! LOW T!

As Snake clones go, this is a boring one. Your speed never increases, again, you just go until there is no more room, or you get bored, or you hit the wall. You die if you hit the wall, just like the zombie alien brown people from Build the Wall. Maybe YOU are the REAL zombie alien brown people! I thought the way that each of your victims is dressed in random clothes but then gets changed into prison orange when you capture them was a nice attention to detail, but the game could really benefit from some background music. Preferably a conga.

Game Score: 1/5 - The slow pace really drives home the old man vibe, and the lack of music ruins the dance

Outrage Score: 17/5 - After a lot of gameplay testing, I found that you occasionally round up an immigrant with the same skin color as your old man, SO IT CAN’T BE RACIST. Except for how it is.

4) SUPPLY LINE

The first thing I noticed after clicking the link, which promised the chance to sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again, was the overwhelming stench of sweaty jeans. “Bare Rides,” it says, “Treated Comes Off.” Now that everyone has pictured Not-A-Dr. Brainworm having unprotected sex of some gross kind, we’re all on the same page here. The object of the game is to punch the bad items off of a conveyor belt with your little punching glove, while leaving the good items, all under the watchful gaze of a brown creature with amazing abs wearing boxing gloves. It might be a kangaroo, most brown animals with abs wearing boxing gloves are kangaroos, but it doesn’t particularly look like a kangaroo. It might actually be a very tan RFK Jr., I can’t tell if it is wearing jeans. (That’s two jeans jokes for those counting.)

The game helpfully shows you which food items are good, and which are bad. Some of the good ones are obvious, like apple, or carrot, or broccoli. Some are less obvious, like white square with brown square inside, or brown square with brown square inside, or tan blob with scent lines coming off of it. It is unclear what the bad foods are, they all look like candy bars, pasteurized milk, or alien snacks. Each has an element that identifies it as having coloring, seed oils, additives, or of being sealed. Being sealed is a thing?

Credit where credit’s due, this game actually gets a little bit harder as you go along, at least until you reach the audit stage. You punch off the bad stuff, you let in the raw stuff, presumably including milk. Signs remind you that seed oils BAD and beef tallow GOOD, and another rather confusingly says READ THE LABEL but has a red line running through it, so i guess reading labels BAD? Punching good foods lowers your score but letting bad foods through actually CRACKS YOUR SCREEN! Wait, false alarm, it was just a graphic.

Game Score: 2/5 - I gave it a whole point just for getting harder with time

Outrage Score: 3/5 - Make a game about the benefits of raw milk without actually saying anything about raw milk. Also, made me think about RFK Jr.’s wiener.

5) TRUMP SAVINGS TYCOON

I love a good tycoon game. The formula is always the same: Start out with nothing, and build your empire with hard work, ingenuity and by (checks notes) catching money with your money catching net. The object of the game is to move your money catching net around and catch the various wads of cash, diamonds, bonds, and paper towels that Trump throws at you. As you grab them your Trump Savings Account increases. If you catch a bald eagle, which is a felony, you get $250,000! You can’t catch the helicopters, or the jets, I tried. A lot.

All this plays out, again, in front of the National Mall, but this one does include the Reflecting Pool, but in blue, not its actual green, and what appears to be a construction crane, a little homage to Don the Builder. There are what I can only assume to be vandals around the pool, but you can’t catch them, and just like in real life, you never actually see them touch the pool. Or even move. At all. Also, there is a kite that looks a bit like a fat Trump with a really long red tie floating in the sky. You can’t catch that either.

Game Score: 1/5 - I thought these people were against handouts

Outrage Score: 0/5 - it’s just all too dumb to care about.

A sixth game is either promised or threatened, take it as you will. All five of these games leave me with the same question: Why? What hole in the video gaming universe was the White House trying to fill with these low effort, almost certainly AI-coded, retro game clones? Don’t answer that. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the White House Arcade is that we finally know why the eagles didn’t fly the One Ring into Mordor. The fucking columns. But the games themselves? Are they racist? Sure, but in a deniable way. Do they promote crackpot food theories, maybe, but also deniable. Do they imply that Trump will throw you diamonds? One of them does. Are they trolling the liberals, baiting outrage about things where they can plead innocence, claim we see racism in everything? Absolutely, on a few levels. After all, it’s just a game …

And now it is your OPEN THREAD!