Kris Kross will hopefully be remembered as a fun-loving and rather successful rap group. Hopefully, they will NOT be remembered for Kris Kross: Make My Video.

In 1992, Sony Imagesoft released three separate games in the "Make My Video" series, each featuring a different music group. INXS received the treatment, as did Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. The third group was Kris Kross. And let me tell you: this is painful stuff. I don't know how anyone could justify paying top dollar for software this pathetic. Before I could go ahead and "make my video", I had to listen to the over-the-top verbosity of a fake video jockey, Boyd Parker, as he spouted out a string of lame, stereotypical rapper jargon, complete with both "diggety" AND "wiggety". It was probably considered cool at the time, but it's just embarrassing now.

Once the great Boyd Parker has wound himself down from taking forever to say nothing, the player can choose to hear from a number of callers who want to request a song from the VJ. Unfortunately, you only get to select between three different songs: "Jump", "I Missed the Bus", and "Warm It Up". Sorry, fans of the rest of Kris Kross' first album. Once you select your "caller", you have to watch another scene with Boyd Parker interacting whoever is calling in. (Also, if you take too long to select a caller, Boyd will complain about it. We should be the ones complaining!) I first chose a guy named Norman, who wanted to hear "Jump". And, in typical early 90s fashion, Norman was portrayed (vocally) as a white person trying to earn himself some "street cred" by using the same dialect as a rap artist. Norman is then berated by Boyd Parker and is now considered "wack".

This is the entire game in two screenshots. The owl is the best part.

Then we finally get into the game. Well, okay, it's not really a "game" as much as a primitive video editor. As the song plays, it becomes the player's duty to splice footage in and out in real time, along with adding some terrible visual effects. There are three different reels of footage showing at the same time. One is of Kris Kross actually singing/rapping, but the other two are just random stock footage dug up from who-knows-where that really have nothing to do with the song's content. By pressing A, B, or C at any time, you can have your video switch between the feeds. At any given time, you can also add effects such as changing the colours, pixelating the footage, or flipping it upside-down, all with the flick of a switch. There's nothing particularly impressive about the editor. Sadly, the actual footage used is so small (the final product, along with the rest of the video, is only several inches tall at best) and of such poor quality, you can't get that much enjoyment out of it.

Worse yet, after you've made your video (requiring you to listen to the entire song and make those edits), Boyd Parker forces you to watch your final product again in its entirety and gives you a grade at the end. He might call it "dope", if he feels so inclined. Then again, he seems easily impressed because the video I made was terrible and would never have realistically made it to air, even with the low standards we've already seen in various music videos throughout history.