A Week of Garfield is one those NES oddities where a developer took a wholly American concept like Garfield the cat and released a Japan-only game. The game was published by Towa Chiki in 1989, and its inclusion in a recent Big 20 race put many eyes on the title this year.
The game is known for its … lack of quality. However, I respect that some people have stuck with the game as a speedrun – perhaps limiting their exposure to the game in short bursts like it is some sort of radiation.
One of those runners is CatsOnUrHead, who you should follow for quality speedrunning and Japanese gaming content. She also releases her own ‘zine!
I’ve shared two doodles with CatsOnUrHead based on the Week of Garfield game. In honor of the speedrunning, I re-configured Sanic for a “Gotta Garf Fast” icon:
Secondly, Cats uses emulation to review values in game ROMs and retools them to “hack” the games. This is a topic that was even covered in one of her ‘zines. In messing with the game, she got the Garfield game to freak out and result in a disembodied Jon character for a cutscene. That drew inspiration for the following doodle, which you’ll just have to believe me resembles the glitched screen with new dialog:
My last handful of updates have been based on doodles, but I’ve been prepping for future content on the site. Honestly, most of the delay has been in my frustration that VidMe videos won’t display in posts without paying to enable plug-ins for the site. I’ll likely suck it up and make YouTube uploads specifically for GemuBaka, as I need to catch up on my experiences at the T20 competition and 12-Hour Challenge.
Until then, happy gaming!
GemuBaka 
Leave a Reply