-a rom hack of "Willow" for the Nintendo Entertainment System-
review by: Dr. Boogie

I've started to see a trend emerging among the rom hackers we feature on the site. It used to be enough to simply jam a penis sprite into a rom hack and call that internet comedy. Now, though, rom hackers are starting to write backstories for their hacks. Entire worlds are now being formed to explain why the player character, once a noble knight and now a dong-wielding child molester/coke mule, happens to be on a quest to rid the lands of a fearsome wizard (who, thanks to the hacker, is now an anthropomorphic anus).

This time around, frequent contributor and serial persona non grata, Koko, has trussed up the NES adaptation of Willow. The premise of the movie was that Jean Marsh called Warwick Davis a midget, and so he raised an infant to kill her out of spite. I think they expanded upon that somewhat in the novelization. In any case, Koko saw this fantasy epic and saw that it could be the framework for his own epic tale of loss and testicles. He saw...

Mr. T Ate My Balls!

You were always wondering, but now you know why Mr. T pitied so many: he was a violent scrotophage!

Yes, Koko has dug up one of the oldest memes on the Internet, from way back in the glory days of Prodigy service dial-up accounts and countless sites stuffed with cheap animated "under construction" GIFs on Geocities. At the time, Mr. T Ate My Balls spawned a whole slew of "ate my balls" web sites where people would post photos of their favorite characters along with captions about how they were eating all the balls in sight. It was a fun time to be on the Internet I tells ya. By the year 2000, those sites were all but a fading memory, and if it weren't for Koko, we may have completely forgotten about them.

You step into the bloody BVDs of Noball, a once ball-ful warrior whose balls were co-opted by B.A. Baracus.

I can think of worse reasons to get out of bed in the morning.

Perhaps sensing that the average rom hack player might not have the attention span for an action RPG like Willow, Koko decided to tweak the programming a little. For starters, Noball starts off at level 5 instead of 1, putting you almost a third of the way to the level cap, and giving you a nice power boost. Unfortunately, the game wasn't designed to take this kind of poking, and so you won't be able to enjoy the full benefits of this boost until you die and restart.

But that's not too bad a consequence, considering the second bonus Koko has given Noball: whereas Willow used "Magic Points" to cast offensive and defensive magicks, Noball uses "Ball Points". Naturally, you would think that a man named "Noball" would forever have zero Ball Points, but instead he has infinite Ball Points. And since he can use those points to both harm his enemies and heal himself, this effectively makes him invincible. Maybe I should get myself neutered...

So the game is a little easy because of that, but the real beauty lies in Koko's masterfully-woven narrative, taking Noball from the quaint huts of Norris all the way to the terrifying spires of Castle Ballgrab. Gird your loins, noble reader:

Things are shitty in the village of Poo. The village Quaker is having serious daddy issues, namely that Mr. T has used his "nutsac magic" to give the Quaker's father "Diabetus". You know what that means:

Wilford Brimley!

Don't pretend you came into a rom hack review and didn't expect to see something about Wilford Brimley. The shocking twist is that Brimley's diabetes, and perhaps even his own chronic mispronunciation of "diabetes", is all the work of Mr. T. The first step on your road to reballification is to free Wilford from his curse, once you get past his guard:

Well that takes care of the racism element. Can we assume that drugs are right around the corner?

Not just yet, it seems. First, our empty-sacked hero must retrieve the sacred Diarrhea Ball from the fearsome "faggon", Analsex. It's a journey fraught with danger in the form of flying tampons...

Amorous apes...

And land-bound mermaids with nipples the size of dinner plates!

But Noball won't be alone in his journey for long, no no. After entering Analsex's hot and stuffy lair, he finds a talking pterodactyl named Po.

At first, I was disappointed that Koko didn't at least change his name to "Pu". It's just one letter, and it makes so much sense because you find Pu very near Analsex.

Nevertheless, Koko more than makes up for it by having Po tell you that he humped the aforementioned Diarrhea Ball a little, which angered Analsex enough to start "waving his big anus around". Suffice to say, if Noball tries to steal the Diarrhea Ball, he can expect Analsex to lay some serious cable on him.

But Noball is fearless, walking right into the blast zone. Lucky for him, Analsex is willing to bribe him with a whore's cockring. It's no Diarrhea Ball, but it's just what Noball need to open Analsex's back door. Literally.

And so the quest continues.

At the shores of Lake Queef, Noball encounters the enchanting fairy, Aids Rabbit, and she gives him a leg up. A third leg.

In order to defeat Mr. T, Noball will need the help of Koolaidman, "the fagmaster of pussy". Unfortunately, Mr. T foresaw trouble from this powder-based mixed drink, and turned him into a dried-out turd.

But all is not lost. Aids Rabbit gives Noball a magic cane that, when fully charged, will change Koolaidman back to normal and "get you your wee balls back for you nutsac beings." Makes sense to me.

But it wouldn't be a Willow hack unless we had someone to sub in for Val Kilmer's character, Madmartigan:

What we get instead is a Jackson Pollack painting. What the hell was this supposed to be? Why, another rabbit, of course.

The Trix Rabbit makes a cameo as a man with busy hands. For some reason, you need to help him out to move forward. Luckily, this is as simple as finding a filthy rag that the villagers stole from him and stowed in an ornate chest:

Maybe it's like a security blanket for him.

Hey, how about we get back to the main story? Ah, you wish that's what we were doing. Now it's time for a detour into some caves to help some ghosts for no reason!

The innkeeper of the "Tavern of Animal Rapes" tells a convoluted ghost story about a "negro", a "bitch", and of course, sodomy. The short version is that Noball must reunite the two ghosts for some reason.

Girly, the bottom in this particular relationship, requests that you use his/her magical skin flute to bring the two star-crossed (sorry, I meant "ball-crossed") lovers together once more.

It turns out that Girly's lover, Mong, was transformed into a monster. And he was transformed into a white guy, because how else could Koko justify cramming "negro" into his storytelling?

The two get back together thanks to Noball. Mr.t T was involved, and thank goodness for that. I'd hate to think we just meandered into a cave and spent twenty minutes sorting out the problems of a couple transsexual ghosts if it wasn't an important part of the story.

"Wasn't there a baby involved in the original Willow," you might be asking. Or if you've never seen the movie, you might be asking yourself, "when is this shit going to end!?" The answer to both questions is the next bit in our story:

Koolaidman's help isn't enough to overcome Mr. T. Noball will also need to enlist the help of the scion of good: the infant Ugly Retard. An unfortunate name for a baby, but when your surname is "Retard", where do you draw the line? And really, is the name "Ugly Retard" any more awful than Bronx Mowgli, or Pilot Inspektor? The answer is, of course, yes.

At this point, things start to get a little complicated: Noball has to summon the two "condoms" that govern the universe and combine their powers to form the "crust of the condoms".

Is your head starting to hurt yet? What if I told you that we've got ourselves a one-way ticket to Fuckville?

That's right, Fuckville. At some point, the infant savior is going to need access to this ancient land. There are a couple problems with Fuckville, apart from it being named after the oft-marginalized Swedish explorer, Astrid K. Fuck: the bridge leading to the city is, in a word, "fucked". Luckily, a nearby old person has a pair of "bitch's sperm", so naturally that takes care of the bridge. Of more immediate concern, however, is that Fuckville Castle is currently being haunted by the monster "Abortion", and that is not a metaphor.

Thank goodness you have the noble Jack of Fuckville there to aid you. Well, not aid, per se; he gives you his Manluv sword and asks you to take care of Abortion for him. Getting rid of Abortion with Manluv may very well be some kind of perverse allegory, but there's no time to dwell on it, as our hero is captured immediately following the battle.

And what's more, he's sharing a cell with a Rorschach drawing in a grey smoking jacket! Or right, that's just Koko's strange rendering of Trix Rabbit. Trix notes that, "masturbation is useful," but it is not a useful way to escape from prison, so you rot in prison until at last, you are rescued by a pair of tiny nudists.

Finally, all the loose ends are taken care of. It's time to face off against Mr. T in the nigh impregnable fortress of Ballgrab!

Oh, what adventures you have in Ballgrab. Transforming into boob to scare a guard, prodding at giant sperm with your sword, slashing at well-hung zombies, it's hard to believe that this panoply of skull-fucking degradation is nearly at its end.

Before you can commence the final battle, you must get past Mr. T's "daughter", Wendy.

She has captured the ever-worthless Trix Rabbit and Noball, in a panic, tosses the "powder of instant boners" at her. The bad news: it misses and hits that wascally wabbit instead. The worse news: it causes him to launch into an absurdly long speech wherein he covers every bit of profanity we've thus far, as well as some brand new ones. Wendy is so moved by his speech that she utters the N-word and lets Noball pass unmolested (literally). On with the show...

Noball is waylaid by Mr. T's number #2, "Pete, the rapist of Ballgrab". Dastard that he is, Pete scarfs down Noball's one remaining ball before his very eyes. Oh, the drama!

So you kill him. Then there's Mr. T:

The final battle to determine whom will pity whom has begun!

Mr. T has one last trick up his sleeve: he can only be hurt with magic! Noball, as you recall, has infinite magic forever, so guess how the battle turns out.

Now that's an ending. Just when you think things can't get any more epic than a battle over a severed ballsack, Koko raises the bar by having Noball escape to the moon via interplanetary dinosaur with Jesus and yo' mama. Does Koko work for Bioware, because this story had everything!

There's a lot you can say about Koko's writing process. You can say that it's childish; you can say that it shoehorns offensive language into spaces that cannot contain even the shortest of profanities; you can say that going through this hack is like raising a child, only to watch that child turn out to be the next Hitler; you can say that this rom hack is a cry for help from a man with serious emotional problems, and that every line of text makes you want to walk outside and kill the first living thing you come across. You can say all of those things, but the one thing you can't say is that Koko is a lazy rom hacker. It takes determination to make a hack this long. Determination that I wish Koko didn't possess.

Man, though, I do not want to think about what kind of internet searches might accidentally link to this article.

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