A Game of Death -- taste-testing the summer ice cream stock. Let's see what deliciousness you got for us this year, Kedi Mart.

Corn Guy

Faceless Magnum Guy

Lame Pea Guy

Vanilla and Pond Scum Sludge, Cup of

Frenchie Vienetta, Cup of

Banana Boy

Mango-Lime Swirl Guy

Spiky Fruit Creamsicle

The Most Bogus Thing Ever Conceived of By Man

Ice Cream that Looks Like Real Food Guy

It’s that time of year again. Weather is getting hot, the ice cream man commeth, and it's time for the annual SmartShanghai Kedi Mart Ice Cream Russian Roulette.Incidentally, this is also a great way to chart how much personal growth one has managed to avoid over the years . Just a side observation there.But back to the ice cream. What will you choose for the summer, two-kay-one-one?Here’s what’s languishing at the bottom of the Kedi freezer this year. Proper names for these things are, as always, a total mystery. Price is under 10rmb. Let’s do this.***Corn Guy is a corn kernel-embossed, corn-flavored wafer coat wrapper around a corn-flavored vanilla interior. Presumably, it’s geared towards people who are looking to imbue their ice cream experience with the dizzying sensation of eating corn on the cob. What? Yeah. What?We meet again, Corn Guy. Full circle. Serpent eating its tail. I’m a forgiving guy. I’ve totally forgotten your earlier offense, oh so long ago, and I’m willing to let bygones be bygones. Come on, then. Let’s have a taste.Corn Guy tastes like shit. It just tastes like utter shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. It comes on you right away with abominable fake corn flavor and it just pushes hard right until the end. Your teeth pierce this wafer horseshit at the start and you’re thinking, ‘oh, that’s just bad’, but then the corn-vanilla on the inside hits you and you just want to kill yourself. No exaggeration. You just want to kill yourself.Suicide is painless. Corn guy is not.It’s back again: China’s premier ice cream treat that is not Hagan Dazs but is like Hagan Dazs but is not as good as Hagan Dazs but is cheaper than Hagan Dazs. A whole slew of these are available everywhere in every flavor. Think even Buddies has them. And all Buddies sells is tea eggs and paralyzing grief.We went with like a coffee or caramel one. I forget which now.What am I going to say. It’s alright. It’s just alright. It’s a pretty tasty enough ride. Mature presentation but cheap to buy. Magnums… I don’t know… there’s no personality here. What can I say. It tastes like Magnums. Tastes like taking the subway to save money on a taxi.Ice Cream tautology. A Magnum by any other name is a Magnum. They taste like Magnums.Lame Pea Guy is a simple little number. Mashed up green peas, frozen. Add water and a bunch of sugar. Comes at you in a soupy, pea green iced bar set-up. No frills. There’s no getting around it. This is sweetened frozen peas or some chemical facsimile thereof.LPG is, to my mind, the poster-child of the school of “let’s make ice cream out of things that should not be ice cream”. And there’s a lot of that going around this year. But case in point: green peas. This tastes like frozen, crushed up, sweetened peas. A bit sock-like, and a bit sweet and grainy around the back-end. I did not enjoy. But maybe it’s a cultural thing. I’m willing to acquiesce to a cultural bias here.It’s like buying your immutable whiteness, frozen in a bar.This guy is pretty straightforward: soft-serve vanilla on the top with some unidentified green mixture awaiting your efforts at the bottom. Some purple chunks of miscellanea in the green bit as well. All frozen up and hard like trigonometry, as if liquid nitrogen was a key part of the process.It looks like the Incredible Hulk had himself a lil’ barf in a cup, they threw some vanilla on top of it, and then they shot it into space to freeze it all up. I was not expecting good things. Vanilla on the top is pretty offensive. Like someone went dumpster diving at Dairy Queen and scooped out all the uneaten vanilla from Blizzard cups and just refroze it. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience. And when you get to the green stuff…… the green stuff has absolutely no taste at all. More so than having no taste, it completely erases whatever taste you had in your mouth from the vanilla. It was anti-taste. It’s the antidote to taste. Green stuff is the Kaiser Soze of taste. So I guess it could have been worse.If the best thing you have going is “it could have been much worse” it’s time to keep looking.Frenchie Vienetta is layers of fluffy vanilla with a chocolate dip betwixt layers and a dusting of chocolate cocoa powder on top. Frenchie Vee trades heavily on the grandeur of the Europe’s fine tradition for upscale deserts, seeking to recreate that in an affordable, mass-produced ice cream confection.Your body was the Champs-Élysées. Your body was the Champs-Élysées…We were Apollonian lovers. Our search for the ineffable gave fire to our erotic pursuit. We were two dreamers and writers, hand in hand, in secret cafes, trading our screenplays against the days, and letting life like wine drain from our strawberry lips.And yet one night my hand reached out into the moon light and was met with the cold air. The cold air. The cold. Air. You have left me, Frenchie Vienetta. The candlelight of our love has been extinguished as if by the breath of Kierkegaard himself.God. Is dead.Banana Boy is a jovial little bit of wonderful coming at you in a banana shape. An icing dip exterior houses frozen banana pudding, start to finish. Simple.Delicious. Really quite good. The icing exterior isn’t too sweet and the banana flavour inside doesn’t taste too strong. Tastes a lot like cold banana pie actually. Look at it! You can’t help but smile, hanging out with Banana Boy.It’s a party! We’re gonna have a party!You brought a little sunshine into my life, BB. Thanks for that.Fruit-juice based, Mango-Lime Swirl Guy is interlaced lime and mango, maximized sugar content, and designed to pack a wallop. Might not even be legal.When you’re mass producing ice cream, it’s hard to mask the process of the thing, which must involve an army of chemists, huge vats of corrosive chemicals, and a lot of cold, menacing, silver machinery just churning this shit out. Usually, the ice creams that warrant a second purchase manage to mask this process somewhat, and taste a bit home-spun.The committee of scientists behind Mango-Lime Swirl Guy went in the complete opposite direction. They realized that’s there’s no disguising the artificiality of the MLSG, so they might as well go for broke and turn its very artificiality into a selling point. Mango-Lime Swirl Guy tastes like it was concocted by Australian bikers with stolen high school chemistry lab equipment in some dank bathtub in some awful and demoralizing Australian suburb.This one gets you tripping crazy balls, you start seeing far out shit, and by the end of it, you’re holding whole clumps of your hair in my hands, not knowing how it happened.I could do another hit of MLSG but I’m worried about accidentally getting a bad batch and getting a dose of rat poison for my troubles. Not to mention meth teeth. This one is probably the ice cream of choice for crazy drug barons who never leave their apartment, never change out of their sweat pants, own several crossbows, and like to throw fire crackers at the passed-out hookers on their couch, cackling with insane glee.Spiky Fruit Creamsicle is like some sort of fruit or vegetable-flavored pudding, milk-based thing, I don’t know what. I think I’ve seen those fruits or vegetables before but I don’t know what they are.Literally, like they used breast milk to make it. It tastes like how I imagine breast milk to taste. It’s like tangy, spicy milk, that’s got a gross vitamin edge to it. It just slides down your throat and sits in your stomach. Tangy, yellow, titty milk. I’m not joking. Titty milk.Titty milk, my friends.Slightly intrigued. Might give it another whirl. I’m open.Mark it down: The Most Bogus Thing Ever Conceived of By Man was wrested from the Kedi Mart freezer in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Eleven, at roughly 2:30pm today.Behold the face of evil: a frozen rice base with a single over-sized kernel of corn, three withered chili peppers that might also be pork strips, a single raisin in the western quadrant, and black rice (rat shit?) speckled conservatively throughout. All frozen harder than marble and designed to withstand the vicissitudes of history, ultimately intended as a permanent and undying reminder of the villainy and tyranny men inflict on one another.TMBTECOBM is evil incarnate. It was here when man first staggered out of the primordial ooze and it will be here long after every trace of life has been wiped from this planet.It was around when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain. It stuck around at St. Petersberg, when it was a time for a change. Killed the czar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain. Rode the tank, held a general’s rank, when the blitzkrieg raged…The nature of it’s game?Tasting like the grand sum of human misery. I have not the words. Imagine freezing pure immitigable suffering and add on to that -- for a larf -- whatever is underneath the first refrigerator ever.Why must we hate each other so? Why do bad things happen to good people?Another ice cream intended as a deliciously devilish ploy on real food. Look inside this thing. You’ve got your veg, your meat, and your rice right there. I don’t know what any of this is. Green stuff, white stuff, purple stuff.Bad. Real bad. Fucking. Bad. The green stuff on the outside is definitely shades of Lame Pea Guy, but more granular, and inside is a mixture of sweet and savory. It’s like it’s trying to fool itself into thinking it’s a real meal, along with whoever is unfortunate enough to bite into this thing. I don’t know what the purple stuff is. Like seeds or something. And the white bit is like cake icing.The whole experience is like getting your taste buds to punch your stomach in the face.And it just lingers with you... I'm going to be smelling this on my unborn childrens' breath.Stay away. Far away.The votes are in and let it ring out into all the heavens:BANANA BOY! BANANA BOY! BANANA BOY!***