Soft & Cuddly by Jarett Kobek | Boss Fight Books review
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I just finished reading Soft & Cuddly by Jarett Kobek, the 15th book in the Boss Fight Books series, and I’ve got some thoughts.
Welcome to Burning Books. I’m Caleb, and I want to help you love video games even more. Today I’m doing that by continuing my journey to read and review all of the wonderful Boss Fight Books releases. I’ve reviewed 16 so far, check the link in the description below for a playlist that has all of those reviews, and be sure to subscribe to stay updated as new reviews are uploaded.
Soft & Cuddly by Jarett Kobek reminds me that there’s so much video game history I don’t yet know. In North America, when the video game crash of the early 1980s was scaring away any would-be players in the game industry, over in the United Kingdom video games on micro computers, specifically the Sinclair line of computers, were quite popular. Soft & Cuddly was released in September 1987 for the ZX Spectrum, or the Zed X Spectrum which I feel it should be called even by American’s given that the system was almost exclusively popular in Europe. So that’s how I will pronounce it. Plus Zed X is fun to say. Zed X. Zed X. Zed X. Try it. See, it’s fun.
All I knew of the ZX Spectrum prior to reading this book was that people who grew up with it admit to its flaws but love it nonetheless and that there were thousands of games for it, many, if not most of which, were homebrew games. In North America, Nintendo took a lesson from the video game crash and decided to control the production of games for their Nintendo Entertainment System, thereby all but eliminating homebrew games, but the ZX Spectrum went full in on an open platform, basically doing exactly what Atari did to cause the North American crash in the first place. But the ZX Spectrum didn’t care. Did it work out for them? Well, the company behind the ZX Spectrum, Sinclair Research, doesn’t really exist anymore, but they also arguably prevented Europe from experiencing the video game crash, so all-in-all, I’d say the ZX Spectrum is a win for gamers despite the questionable quality of its output.
Now, I’ve spent a lot of time so far talking about the game system rather than the game, Soft & Cuddly. This is actually appropriate, as the author, Jarett Kobek, does the very same thing. It’s not until page 135 of 164 that the author actually describes the game. And I think I know why he chose to ignore this description for so many pages. The game sounds incredibly boring and based on the gameplay I watched in preparation for this review, it is quite boring. It’s just a poorly designed platformer that’s more concerned with shock than anything substantive. I don’t blame the game for this at all. It’s creator was a teenager at the time and video games then weren’t burdened with the potential for high-art like they are now. This was a kid who loved Alice Cooper and had the tools at his disposal to make something offensive. I would have done the same thing.
But is the journey to page 135 worth it? Overall, yes. But at times the author’s approach is a bit aggressive. Kobek writes with the angst and vitriol of an 80s punk zinster, and as that ethos would imply, Kobek comes across as not really being for anything. He’s opinionated, but those opinions are hollow because they are aimless and often contradictory.
Most of the time these hollow opinions are entertainingly colorful and inoffensive. I like passion even if I don’t agree with the lean of that passion. But sometimes Kobek doesn’t makes sense. In one passage he dismisses the importance of plot and character in games by challenging anyone to know what the words character and plot mean.
“The strength of video games has never been in their ability to convey character and plot (And who knows, really, asks the professional writer, what either word means?)” (pg 86)
But just 30 pages later, Kobek ridicules World of Warcraft for not being able to “express meaningful, substantial doubts about the capitalist underpinning of the experience” (pg 117). Of course that’s not the point of that game, but if it was, you know what would allow the game to express meaningful, substantial doubts about the capitalist underpinning of the experience? Character and plot, those things you just dismissed, which by the way are actually quite easy to define.
But despite the hollow tone, Soft & Cuddly by Jarett Kobek is worth reading. It’s worth reading for the abbreviated history of the ZX Spectrum. It’s worth reading for a peek into the world of a 1980s teenage punk. It’s worth reading because even if Kobek’s evisceration is aimless, it’s entertaining and it does add the necessary spice to a story that might otherwise be pretty boring. At the end of the day, Soft & Cuddly is just a game created by a kid who used the tools at his disposal to shock some adults. The same thing could be said for many video games from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th generations.
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Mentioned
- Boss Fight Books review playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMKbK8vtuoicyVRhGfap2QIj5R5mWJioY
- Soft & Cuddly by Jarett Kobek from Boss Fight Books: https://bossfightbooks.com/products/soft-and-cuddly-by-jarett-kobek
- Jarett Kobek on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jarettkobek
Gameplay footage from http://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/videos/softcuddly.php
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
