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(This is crossposted from cohost, because their recent financial issues made me think about reviving this to have another place where I am just in case, and because doing mini-reviews of games I beat turned out to be a really good way to motivate me to actually beat games so I want to keep doing it.)
Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is a bad game and I don't think you should play it.
This isn't to say that I didn't find something amusing about it, but it really is as bad as they say. Which leads to the question of just why the fuck anyone would want to remaster it, and in fact that's something the remaster has an entire new video of a bunch of people involved in it talking about where they conclude that yes, bad games do deserve this sort of treatment too.
This is one of those games that gets retroactively misclassified as a visual novel because TV Tropes is a plague on all our houses, and it definitely doesn't deserve to be called that. When it came out on 3DO (presumably completely failing to justify even a single person forking over 700 bucks for an FZ-1) it was sold as an interactive movie, but it isn't one of those either because other than an extremely low-quality intro video the entire thing is presented as a slideshow with voiceovers and occasional choices that mostly lead to bad endings that send you back to the choice. I don't even know what the hell to classify that as.
What I can say is that it's clear that everyone involved in this was entirely aware of how ridiculous the game they were making is, and that shows in the results.
The story of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, such as it is, goes like this: you've got two main characters, a plumber named John (played by Edward J. Foster, who I know nothing about) and a college student who's between jobs named Jane (played by Jeanne Basone, otherwise known as former GLOW wrestler Hollywood), both of whom are being pressured to get married and start having kids by their parents. They meet in a parking lot as Jane's on her way to a job interview with an extremely sleazy executive named Thresher, who is blatantly just trying to use the interview as an excuse to have sex with her. You're supposedly meant to be bringing this situation to a conclusion where John and Jane end up together, though in practice you're invariably going to pick all the obviously wrong choices just to see whatever inane nonsense they wrote for them. Also, there's a narrator who hates literally all your choices (even the correct ones), occasionally appears wearing a chicken mask, and at one point gets his position hijacked by a stereotypical man-hating feminist who he later guns down to applause from an audience who are apparently dogs.
As you can probably tell, this is not a game that has aged particularly well, and it was sure as hell losing a lot of hair back in '94 too.
The whole experience is very bizarre. It's full of random nonsense blatantly put there just for a cheap laugh (like the aforementioned narrators, or the opening credits being presented to colour-inverted scenes of a NASCAR race that occasionally have a different photo of someone in a fursuit driving a go-kart pasted into them), there's low-quality Photoshop filtering all over the place with little if any justification, your score goes way into the negatives (not to mention the ridiculousness of even having a score in this kind of game), there's a big chase scene that goes through every random Los Angeles tourist attraction they could think to include, and the very last choice lets you have Jane reveal that she's planning to become a nun completely out of nowhere. At no point does it even make an effort to be anything you could traditionally think of as a good game.
To reiterate, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is bad. But at least it's entertaining in its badness, even if that's mostly due to just laughing at how cheap it is. And sometimes when you're looking to appreciate what's at the top it can be helpful to know what rock bottom looks like
Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is a bad game and I don't think you should play it.
This isn't to say that I didn't find something amusing about it, but it really is as bad as they say. Which leads to the question of just why the fuck anyone would want to remaster it, and in fact that's something the remaster has an entire new video of a bunch of people involved in it talking about where they conclude that yes, bad games do deserve this sort of treatment too.
This is one of those games that gets retroactively misclassified as a visual novel because TV Tropes is a plague on all our houses, and it definitely doesn't deserve to be called that. When it came out on 3DO (presumably completely failing to justify even a single person forking over 700 bucks for an FZ-1) it was sold as an interactive movie, but it isn't one of those either because other than an extremely low-quality intro video the entire thing is presented as a slideshow with voiceovers and occasional choices that mostly lead to bad endings that send you back to the choice. I don't even know what the hell to classify that as.
What I can say is that it's clear that everyone involved in this was entirely aware of how ridiculous the game they were making is, and that shows in the results.
The story of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, such as it is, goes like this: you've got two main characters, a plumber named John (played by Edward J. Foster, who I know nothing about) and a college student who's between jobs named Jane (played by Jeanne Basone, otherwise known as former GLOW wrestler Hollywood), both of whom are being pressured to get married and start having kids by their parents. They meet in a parking lot as Jane's on her way to a job interview with an extremely sleazy executive named Thresher, who is blatantly just trying to use the interview as an excuse to have sex with her. You're supposedly meant to be bringing this situation to a conclusion where John and Jane end up together, though in practice you're invariably going to pick all the obviously wrong choices just to see whatever inane nonsense they wrote for them. Also, there's a narrator who hates literally all your choices (even the correct ones), occasionally appears wearing a chicken mask, and at one point gets his position hijacked by a stereotypical man-hating feminist who he later guns down to applause from an audience who are apparently dogs.
As you can probably tell, this is not a game that has aged particularly well, and it was sure as hell losing a lot of hair back in '94 too.
The whole experience is very bizarre. It's full of random nonsense blatantly put there just for a cheap laugh (like the aforementioned narrators, or the opening credits being presented to colour-inverted scenes of a NASCAR race that occasionally have a different photo of someone in a fursuit driving a go-kart pasted into them), there's low-quality Photoshop filtering all over the place with little if any justification, your score goes way into the negatives (not to mention the ridiculousness of even having a score in this kind of game), there's a big chase scene that goes through every random Los Angeles tourist attraction they could think to include, and the very last choice lets you have Jane reveal that she's planning to become a nun completely out of nowhere. At no point does it even make an effort to be anything you could traditionally think of as a good game.
To reiterate, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is bad. But at least it's entertaining in its badness, even if that's mostly due to just laughing at how cheap it is. And sometimes when you're looking to appreciate what's at the top it can be helpful to know what rock bottom looks like
