Or change the main character’s species and call it Tembo the Badass Sloth. The ironic self-aware thing to do would have been to call the game Tembo the Gentle Elephant, with all the violence and commando action intact. They are the world’s largest land animal and you’re in serious trouble if you get in the way of them when they’re protecting their young. Elephants don’t commonly put on war paint and go on commando missions, but they’re pretty badass in their own right. It gets halfway there by picking an adjective that intensely overstates Tembo’s qualities, but this particular verbal plane would only have gotten off the ground if said adjective were being applied to something not usually considered to possess those qualities. I’m presuming that was the intention with Tembo the Badass Elephant. Because that’s got an air of sarcastic self-awareness about it. Like if you made a game about a dreary balding man going to work at his accountancy firm, and called it The Incredible Journey of Captain Fucking Amazing. It is, however, something you can get away with if you’re doing it with an intentional sense of irony. If your game turns out to not be badass or awesome then it’s going to seem all the more ridiculous (see Awesome Possum). To self-describe as ‘badass’ (or ‘awesome’ of course) is lacking in humility, which if nothing else is tempting fate. And Michael Jackson was only ‘bad’ if the meaning of the word ‘bad’ has shifted again to mean ‘prancing ninny’.īut it’s less the nitpicky issues I have with the word itself and more its prominent placement in the title. And I find that impossible to take seriously ever since it became associated with Michael Jackson. ‘Badass’ is also rather hopelessly quaint, since it’s rooted in that now rather tragically retro use of the word ‘bad’ to mean ‘good in a sort of thuggish way’.
![tembo the badass elephant tembo the badass elephant](https://d2x7js8mtamps9.cloudfront.net/trumbo-2015-03-04-10-50-00-25.jpg)
When I read “Tembo The Bad Arse Elephant” it feels more like I’m reading aloud the name of a children’s book about a mischievous elephant who learns a valuable karmic lesson when his scheme to give all the other jungle animals bum diseases ends with him contracting the worst anus infection of all. It’s like the verbal equivalent of a slowly deflating balloon. “Bad arse” just doesn’t flow as well when it loses that punchy assonance. It was once reserved only for the most extraordinary of mind-blowing sights, was gradually reduced to mean ‘at least as good as getting through the day without getting punched in the stomach by random strangers’, and now mainly evokes in my mind images of Sunset Overdrive sitting looking pleased with itself like a cat next to a puddle of fish-scented vomit.Īpart from anything else, it loses a lot when you read it aloud in a British accent. In much the same way that the word ‘awesome’ will never be the same again. There’s something about anything that self-identifies with the word ‘badass’ that comes across as obnoxious and just a little bit desperate. So that’s something let’s over-analyze that. The only thing that still lingers with me is that it puts the word ‘badass’ in the title, and for that reason, I feel a strange sense of irrational hatred towards it. It passes the time in a way that wasn’t quite interesting enough for me to care that much. Meanwhile, the most you can say about Tembo the Badass Elephant is that it is what it is. That’s where you and a group of friends tie lit sparklers to your ankles and kick a firework around the back garden. Rocket League is fun, but in a very simple, feature-deficient kind of way, like a game of Amputation Roulette.
![tembo the badass elephant tembo the badass elephant](https://www.inkme.tattoo/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/hamsa-tattoos-57.jpg)
Neither of them call for much over-analysis, really.
![tembo the badass elephant tembo the badass elephant](https://pressakey.com/gamepix/3283/Tembo-The-Badass-Elephant-128793.jpg)
I’ve been sitting here staring at this page trying to think of something additional to say about those two rather shallow games I reviewed last week, and the well-tightened toothpaste tube of my feelings about them isn’t yielding a whole bunch.