Harem - A Harem of One - MCIHAD
4Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Yes, cultural insensitivity runs rampant through every facet of this 10 minute orgy of self-indulgent prattle, and yes, there is a direct reference to ‘A Case of Spring Fever,’ the didactic short film featured on the penultimate episode of Mystery Science Theater. For the latter we apologize sincerely, for the rest, only facetiously. Anyway, with the formalities out of the way we can get to educating you on this oddball bit of arcade obscura.
Harem seems to be a game about running amok in a vast desert highway, destroying assorted vehicles both manmade and borne of nature and kidnapping the newly immobile women to your chamber of sexual horrors. Not even GTA has plumbed such savage depths as the barely-lucid psychopaths of the 80’s arcade developer industry did every day of their blighted lives! Just look at High School Graffiti Mikie!
P.S.: The movie we allude to is Alena, starring Amalia Holm Bjelke. Keith shares a go-nowhere anecdote about sharing a hookah with her in Morocco in yet another desperate bid to create the impression that his life has occasioned something other than references to ennui and pop tarts.
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If you're cool and smart enough to be reading this blog, you'll aware that modern videogames, especially the big-budget AAA titles are full of casual misogyny and racism, though it's the subtle kind of misogyny and racism that hollywood movies use all the time, so it mostly goes unnoticed. There are, however certain relics from the distant past that act like videogame equivalents of The Black and White Minstrel Show or Love Thy Neighbour, examples of the bad old days when overt hatred was the norm. The most widely aknowledged example obviously being the rapacious and imperialistic Atari 2600 title Custer's Revenge.
Harem, the only known videogame output of the Italian company IGR is another such example. In it, the player controls a slightly portly beturbaned man who roams the desert kidnapping women and carrying them back to his harem. Attempting to stop him are knife weilding guys who live in tents, who will run around trying to catch the villain (which is you, obviously).
http://lunaticobscurity.blogspot.com/2014/08/harem-arcade.html