Karma Chameleon - Episode 1: Schlock on the Wild Side
Published 2024-07-16
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Welp, it's time again for me to torture myself again on stream... well, more than usual, anyway. Last year's inaugural "Super High School Level Despair Game" was a pretty interesting experiment, but I didn't want it to essentially transform into a free bonus game for KI. So, I decided to expand just how many nominations needed to come from other people, just to mix things up and make sure that other people get a chance to make my life a living nightmare.
You know the old saying: no good deed goes unpunished.
Bacon ended up winning this year's spin and his choice was none other than Kid Chameleon, which is generally considered one of the most difficult games in the entire Genesis library. Apparently, Bacon had some rough childhood memories with the game and decided that subjecting me to that very title would be theraputic for the horrors this game inflicted on him in his youth.
Admittedly, I was a bit worried going into this. On most of the lists I saw, this game ranked higher than Ghouls 'n Ghosts -- a pretty good baseline, all things considered. However, I was a bit relieved when most of the articles seemed to cite the game's extreme length and the lack of any save or password mechanic as the main source of the game's legendary difficulty. Considering the fact that I planned on playing it via the Sega Megadrive & Genesis Classics collection on Steam, using interrupt saves would give me the edge over the game's supposed "fatal flaw".
Sadly, this was not the case.
I didn't even end up making it halfway through the game before I got a game over. There were a few levels that ate up the continues I collected early into the game... but I ended up recovering to an extent. Sadly, eventually, one stage in particular just utterly decimated my stockpile and I wasn't able to find any new ones afterwards. That essentially spelled doom for this first attempt.
As promised, I intend to try again on Thursday, giving Kid Chameleon at least a week's worth of attempts. If -- well, "when" is probably more honest -- I end up getting another game over, I'll call it quits and spin another game from the remaining nominees. Either way, I hope that Lady Luck smiles on my next time.