HOLY SHIT, MAVIS BEACON'S BACK!

RUN, GODDAMMIT, RUUUN!

Arfenhouse is a cult classic flash cartoon born of a several different internet-centric idiocies. It features a lot of 'classic' gags like leetspeak and sprite comics, and will probably remain popular as long as author characters and bad animation are still fodder for jokes.

Introduction

Before it was a flash cartoon, it was a tiny, purposefully poor RPG made with a popular RPG toolkit. This original game was intended as an awful but brief parody of popular games in the same vein. Viewers demanded sequels, and go t them. A sequel was made. The third was just natural, and was made as an ending to a trilogy. The fourth movie came into existence as a side story, and began to actually resemble an enjoyable game in design. There was a polynomial rise in the time spent in the creation of each successive game, and this extended on into the movies; the hopefully final installment, Arfenhouse 6 - I say final because everyone dies - was years in the making since the one before it (Kill Billy).

So how did this monstrosity, so completed, become a flash cartoon? It just did. The movie starts where the fourth game left off, though you wouldn't really know it or even probably care. Of course, the funny stuff is in movies two, Kill Billy and six. See those, in that order, if any of them.

The Games

The games are not very exciting, unless you have a sick sense of humor, but form the basis for the characters and events in the movies. The games are made with OHRRPGCE, a small but apparently useful RPG toolkit for Dos/Windows.

Arfenhouse, or rather, 'ARFENHOUSE!!!1', takes 5-10 minutes to complete. In it, you, the housemaster, owner of the arfenhouse, note that Evil Kitty has invaded your Arfenhouse, and you must stop her. In the second game, Evil Kitty is back with Dahg and Old Man, and you must thwart her again with the help of Pikachu, your pet, and Joe, a normal person stuck in this bizarre, stupid world. In the third, you must join forces with Evil Kitty, now known as Good Kitty and also your sex partner, in order to save the planet from a meteor threatening to destroy the planet.

I must admit I did not finish the third game. Actually, I suppose it's more to the point to admit that I did finish the first two. I have not played the fourth game, so I'm not exactly sure what's going on there.

Note that Billy, the 'author' of all of these, appears at the beginning and end of each games, and apparently has an 'author character' role in the last two games. He plays a minor role in the second movie; expect a repeat appearance in the third.

The Movies

It takes two or three viewings of each movie to get a really good grip on what's going on. The animation and script are terrible by design, but the Flash production values ramp way up in the real fourth-wall breaking humor, which occupies about half of each movie.

The best I can give you on the plot of the first movie is this: Housemaster, Joe, Pikachu, Good Kitty and Dahg are summoned to the moon to battle a fiendish insect thing on a lego vehicle who's name is something like 'the pincushion man', as well as his friend Amy. They defeat the pincushion man in time to return to earth for the running of the bulls in "Spayn". I should note that you wouldn't know much of this if I hadn't watched it enough times to get a good grip on things.

The second movie is much more non-linear. It features the return of Billy, the author character introduced in the games. Woogies are constantly screwing around in odd places, the Arfenhouse is blown up and a new one procured, Starcraft is parodied, Pikachu falls and breaks his goddamn ulna... Uh... That's about it.

Kill Billy is a fairly self-explanatory parody of the Kill Bill trailer. Three and four aren't worth explaining, and there wasn't a fifth movie.

Arfenhouse six ends in a bloody slaughter closely following a video clip of Cave Story. That's about the best we could have asked for.

Newgrounds

I would be remiss not to mention Newgrounds; the flash cartoon aspect of Arfenhouse is as much a spoof of the terrible content constantly flowing into (and horribly, remaining on) Newgrounds, which is a site for user rated flash content. Arfenhouse is mainly distributed through Newgrounds, and has for a great deal of time been one of the top rated submissions, and has accumulated over a million views. You can view both movies with a flash player by visiting the site and searching for Arfenhouse.

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