Free Agent 3: Buddha Labyrinth Breakdown
by William D. Tucker
My favorite variant on Beverly Hills Cop 3 is the completely unauthorized dungeon crawler Buddha Labyrinth Breakdown, which adapts the third movie in the franchise into a Shin Megami Tensei-style first person role playing game. This game was created by the mysterious IktomiA.M., who were the same creative team behind the Void Castle chain of environmental immersion amusement centers.
I say mysterious because much of the information about IktomiA.M. has been censored from the official intranets . . . but, this dev-group has such a bizarre and intriguing career that some slack has very obviously been written into the censorship protocols to distribute some of the more accomplished creations among the management, possibly the executives-though I would hope our fearless leadership would have better things to do than fuck off with video games-and, of course, these creations have filtered down to the lowly half-brain shits like myself. I don't have the access to prove it, but I'm convinced that some management doctrine must have been authored to justify the spread of these vintage games even down to partial rewrites like myself.
Because surely no one on high would just accidentally let these sorts of entertainment products with contraband themes and ideas slip into the mix, right? Info lockdown, cultural control, ideological correctness-fearless leadership would never, ever fucking let the quality control degrade, right?
Obviously, I'm not cleared to know. Nor do I actually know.
Also, since lowly shits like me only use half our brains to crunch . . . whatever it is they have us crunching, there may be some efficiency gained by letting the other half of our brains run free playing immersive video games. I think. Maybe. I operate under the perhaps foolish assumption that there is a plan, that the part of myself that is blocked out of my consciousness is being put to some good use, and that I am not a completely fictitious being despite all evidence to the contrary. A story is written, and I have been partially re-written many times over-do I not meet the definition of a written, fictional creation? Makes sense to me, even though I am confident that I am wrong about everything. All I have is a dumbfuck intuition. And we all know how reliable dumbfuck intuitions are in this glorious lockdown world!
But I wanted to tell you about Buddha Labyrinth Breakdown. It is a video game adapted from one of my favorite movies, Beverly Hills Cop 3 a seriously underrated installment in the ever-expanding Beverly Hills Cop universe, and the last official entry in the series back during the heyday of old school copyright and intellectual property regimes. Buddha Labyrinth Breakdown was actually my introduction into the expanded Beverly Hills Cop universe. Long before I was able to watch any of the original movies in something like their original forms, I played this game which took on many of the characters from the third film, and remixed them into a bizarre, yet engaging remix of the comical cops-and-robbers action flick formula. You have Three Paths to choose from:
The Orthodox Rebel Path-this is basically where you play as Eddie Murphy, and you go against the system in just the ways the system wants you to do in order to create “Rebeltainment.” This is kinda like the Neutral Path in SMT.
The Tradition-By-the-Book Path-this is the one where you play as Hector Elizondo, who’s the grizzled veteran character actor collecting a paycheck character from the original movie. This is where you go by the book, and the bad guys get away, but at least you keep going to retirement, right? This is, by far, the longest, grindiest path to take, since playing as this character basically carries you far beyond the boundaries of the original film and into the character’s retirement years, where you have to deal with declining health, and rising eldercare costs, not to mention there’s a major fork where you have to decide who dies first: you or your long-suffering spouse. If wifey dies first, then you have to endure an even longer endgame where your perception is impacted by severe grief spiked with delusional regrets that you never took the path of Rebeltainment-no, instead of elaborately staged shootouts with cardboard pop-up bad guys, you just had to do it by the book didn’t you? You just had to trade your balls for a secure future! Look at yourself. You still lost it all in the end, anyways, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU?!?! This whole sequence is like a jacked-up psychothriller version of that one movie where Jack Lemmon refuses to admit that he’s getting old? What was that movie? There’s the scene where he’s all outta breath on the exercise machine? It’ll come to me, it’ll come to me . . . anyways, this is somewhat equivalent to the Law Path in SMT. It’s a bit much.
And then there’s the Wacky Cop Shenannigans Path-Judge Rheinhold, natch. This is the path that I never take, because, although it’s supposedly the comedy path, it ends up being the most torturous to get through in anything under one hundred and seventy hours. You lose ranks every time you fail to be wacky doing every-fucking-thing. This is actually a distortion of the surprisingly endearing performance Judge Rheinhold gave in the movie, which isn’t “wacky” per se-he’s more of a foolish believer in the obviously malfunctioning technocracy that the Beverly Hills PD is trying to bootstrap itself into becoming and less of an Ace Ventura-era Jim Carrey-style rectal-clown. My guess is that the censorship regime disagreed with any content that suggests that technology can ever be truly problematic-it’s the meatbag rectal-clowns(human beings) that fuck up everything. I would say this is equivalent to a Chaos Path, but the system dislikes promoting the idea that one can live according to this sort of “Chaos,” but the SMT fans out there know what I mean.
As tedious and traumatic as it can be to live through, I prefer the Hector Elizondo path, because, despite its drawn-out nature and downer ending full of madness and self-recrimination, it does offer the hope of death, which isn’t exactly a thing anymore, is it?
I know, I know-I’m such an Old Fuck.
Copyright 2020 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved.
