GameCola Podcast #46! Starring almost all of the people who have previously edited the GameCola Podcast—Alex Jedraszczak, Nathaniel Hoover, and Michael Gray. With this all-star cast, we cover such exciting bulleted topics as:

• Reviews from our iTunes page
• Comments from Podcast #41
• Comments from the Turnabout Musical Podcast
• Comments from Podcast #44
• Listener-submitted e-mails

Other topics mentioned in the podcast include the fictional stylings of Diana Lily and Isabella, the GameCola Bottom 50, Paul cosplaying Bebop, Nathaniel’s Backloggery, emoticons, and what exactly is a tanuki.

If you’re ready to take in all of this excitement, you should click on the podcast below! Check it out! The Podcast Commander commands it!

GC Podcast #46

Forum posters and bloggers for other, less-exciting websites have been saying that 2011 was one of the best years ever for videogames—and they are absolutely, unconditionally right. Let’s look at the facts:

FACT: 2011 saw direct sequels to not one, not two, not four, but three former GameCola Games of the Year: Batman: Arkham Asylum, LittleBigPlanet, and Lego Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy. (Yes, somehow we didn’t give Portal Game of the Year back in 2007, despite the fact that it topped our Top 50 Games of All Time list a few years later.) This is completely unprecedented, unless it’s happened before.

FACT: The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise finally broke its years-long dry spell by releasing a game that was, as many put it, playable.

FACT: For the first time in a decade, we got to know Jack. We also got the closest thing we’re ever going to get to a new Chrono Trigger, and the closest thing we’re ever going to get to a Final Fantasy VII remake.

FACT: Some popular shooting games were probably released, maybe.

FACT: Fans of the Back to the Future franchise were delighted to play as Marty McFly once again in a game that in no way involved giant balls of poop (at least, until the inevitable DLC comes out).

We gather here today to celebrate these games. Well, not these games. None of the games I’ve mentioned so far (save for one) actually won any GameCola awards this year. But others did, and we’re here to discuss the crap out of them.

Who are we? Well:

• Matt Jonas, news reporter, reviewer and video-er,
• Kate Jay, author and illustrator of “The Gates of Life,”
• Mark Freedman, reviewer and author of “What the Crap?“,
• Elizabeth “Lizo” Medina-Gray, editor as well as occasional reviewer,
• Vangie Ridgaway, author of “Gamer Girlfriend” and occasional podcaster and reviewer,
• Christian Porter, artist, blogger, news reporter, podcaster, reviewer, video-er and organizer, as well as author of “Poor Player’s Paradise,” Top of the Heap,” and “Power Gloves & Tinfoil Hats,”
• Alex Jedraszczak, the podcast master,
• Jillian Dingwall, reviewer,
• Michael Ridgaway, reviewer, podcaster, and former author of “Quantum Geek,”
• Nathaniel Hoover, editor, reviewer, podcaster, video-er, YouTube administrator, artist of “Sprite Flicker” and author of “Flash Flood” and “Impaired Closed Captioning,”
• Daniel Castro, author of “Don’t Be That Guy,”
• And, finally, me.

So join us today in celebrating 2011: the year that was, and, as always, be sure to tell us in the comments exactly where we went wrong. Here, I’ll start:

Where the hell is Gunstringer?!

Best Licensed Game

Batman: Arkham City

Christian Porter: The Batman: Arkham (Progressively Larger Geographic Location) series has been full of surprises. Arkham Asylum not only shirked convention by being a good superhero game, but it was actually an amazing game to boot, winning GameCola’s coveted 2009 Game of the Year title. Now Arkham City shirks convention by turning the sequel into a sandbox without making the game seem crammed with filler, and the game is still just as fun as the original. The same high-quality writing and voice acting also return, with tons of Batman villains around every corner, but somehow not feeling like they’ve all been shoehorned in. It’s an amazing adventure and, any other year, would be a shoo-in for Game of the Year.

Honorable Mention: Back to the Future: The Game
Last Year’s Winner: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game

Best Remake/Re-release

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

Daniel Castro: What else can be said about this game? It’s freaking Ocarina of Time, a game remembered as one of the best games ever made—and now it looks so damn awesome that we won’t feel at all embarrassed showing it off to future generations. It’s not the perfect remake, since there aren’t any new additions besides prettier aesthetics, but I guess not everyone was waiting for newer mechanics or anything else for the game that they cared about and loved so many years ago. And, hey! The 3D effects are gorgeous, it’s portable, and you can aim by tilting your Nintendo 3DS in front of your face, which means I can finally play Ocarina of Time on the bus, drunkenly trying to aim at anything with the slingshot, while other passengers play shitty music on their cell phones. It’s fun!

Honorable Mention: No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise
Last Year’s Winner: Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck’s Revenge

Best Use of Motion Controls

Child of Eden

Jillian Dingwall: Child of Eden is an arcade-style shooter in which you use your hands to target and destroy various enemies. It’s set in space, and the object of the game is to rescue a super-hot fairy girl who has been eaten by what appears to be the Internet.

This game is HARD. It’s quite confusing to begin with, and the enemies come flying at you from all angles resulting in flailing arms, sweaty armpits, unattractive facial expressions and frustratingly continuous failure. As a “game,” it’s not that great; however, you can switch off the super-death mode and play the game in the much less challenging  ”Feel Eden” mode (Eden being the name of the environment, not the fairy—that game would be called Child of Molestation), and this is where you begin to appreciate the genius of the game’s concept.

Child of Eden combines its  surroundings, music and motion controls beautifully, and when you remove the fear of death, the game becomes a highly enjoyable, exciting and ethereal experience. Shooting different enemies produces different effects which blend together seamlessly to create your very own, unique sound. The motion controls are impressively responsive and make you feel as though you really are in control of the celestial surroundings. I agree with those who feel it may not be the best game in the world, but as an experience, it’s definitely a worthy winner. Motion control is still in its infancy, but if Child of Eden is anything to go by, we have a lot to look forward once it hits puberty.

Honorable Mentions: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword; The Gunstringer
Last Year’s Winner: N/A

Best New Character

Wheatley
(Portal 2)

Christian Porter: Homer Simpson, Rose Nylund, Jenny McCarthy—everybody likes a lovable moron. In Portal 2, Stephen Merchant fills the moron shoes perfectly. (I mean that in a good way.) Valve really hit the nail on the head by letting Merchant ad lib to his heart’s content, with some of the best comedy in the game coming from standing around and waiting to see what Wheatley will say next. No matter how many awful situations his rampant stupidity gets you into, Wheatley is simply impossible to hate.

Honorable Mention: Cave Johnson (Portal 2)
Last Year’s Winner: Sheep Man (Mega Man 10)

Most Innovative

Bastion

Alex Jedraszczak: To say that Bastion is the most innovative game of 2011 is a little odd. The game itself is a pretty solid action/adventure type game, but that genre has been around long enough to be fairly finely tuned. The innovation is all in exploration and storytelling.

The world literally drops from the sky as you explore. More than a cool visual effect, this leaves you always knowing when you’ve been someplace before. It’s pretty obvious where you’ve been, and this guides you where you need to be without needless exposition.

The game’s main claim to fame, however, is the storytelling. Rather than reading through boring text before getting to play the game, the story is told as you’re playing. The end result is a game that flows very well, and can be pretty entertaining when the narration is tailored to your in-game actions.

Honorable Mentions: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective; Catherine
Last Year’s Winner: Heavy Rain

Best Story

Portal 2

Portal 2

Nathaniel Hoover: Hmm…Portal 2, you say? Is it really the funniest game of the year? Absolutely. Unless you’re adopted. Or obese. Or a sympathizer to either demographic, for that matter. However, we here at GameCola are horrible, insensitive people, so we think it’s pretty hysterical. Eminently quotable. From the mad ramblings of Cave Johnson to the moronic assertions of Wheatley to the sarcastic barbs of GLaDOS, there’s no shortage of creativity in the humor. Throw in a prophetic talking turret, legions of its dimwitted cousins, a droll male computer, outrageous personality spheres, a few wonderful sight gags, and all the hilarious situations afforded by portals, springboards, and bouncy goo—especially in (un)co-operative multiplayer—and you’ve got pretty much the only game we could have voted for this year.

Honorable Mention: No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise
Last Year’s Winner: No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

Best New Peripheral

3DS Retractable Stylus

Paul Franzen: Oooh. Oh, baby. Come here, my baby. Let me slide this thing in. And slide it out. Slide it in. Slide it out. Over and over. Aren’t we having fun, my baby? You can touch it, if you’d like. Just don’t scratch up the screen; this thing cost me $250 and still doesn’t have any games.

…Wait, what? What did you think I was talking about? I’m talking about the new stylus that comes bundled with the Nintendo 3DS! It’s retractable! That means you can make it whatever length is most comfortable to you! Stop it; there’s nothing sexual about that. And it’s fun to play with, too, while you’re playing with yourself. I mean, playing games! With yourself. Phew. I can’t believe I got through this whole thing without any innuendo.

Honorable Mentions: Wappy Dog; Pop Star Sparkle Gloves
Last Year’s Winner: Pokéwalker

Best Multiplayer

Portal 2

Vangie Ridgaway: In the Portal 2 co-op mode, GLaDOS has finally found a more self-sufficient mode of conducting her scientific testing at Aperture Science. Her latest creations are P-body and ATLAS, a modified turret and personality sphere, respectively, who are now possessed of arms, legs, and portal guns of their own. Together, the two of them explore a completely new set of testing areas, which are specifically designed for two players, and require both guns (meaning a total of four active portals!) to complete. The new puzzles require a fair bit of cooperation on the part of the players, which ironically seems to annoy GLaDOS, as she is constantly trying to set her two new testers against one another through her unique brand of “encouragements.” Expect more cleverly designed puzzles, a fun twist on the original portal gun mechanic, and more of the humor that the Portal series has become famous for.

Honorable Mentions: Trine 2; Gears of War 3
Last Year’s Winner: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game

Best Indie Game

Bastion

Michael Ridgaway: I could go on and on (and have) about Bastion’s fun Diablo-style gameplay, its beautifully vivid graphics, the poignantly shattered apocalypse it centers around, the amazing use of narration in the storytelling, or the awesome soundtrack that I find myself listening to at least once every few days. I could talk about those things, and they’d all be true, but for the moment I want to focus on how earnest the fans are and how keen Supergiant Games is to return that affection. For instance, one gentleman wrote to them asking for help in making his wedding ceremony extra special, and they delivered. A soldier in Afghanistan was not able to get a digital version of the game, so they specially made and sent him a physical copy of the game. Bastion really is the full package here, folks: an awesome game with awesome people behind it.

Honorable Mention: Orcs Must Die!
Last Year’s Winner: Super Meat Boy

Best PC Game

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Mark Freedman: If someone says the name Elder Scrolls to you, and all you can think of is your grandpa trying to figure out how a mouse wheel works, it’s time to get on the Skyrim bandwagon. I can’t think of any other game where, after playing 60 hours, you can still feel like you’ve only scratched the surface. Compared to other open-ended worlds, this game has the scale of an entire galaxy. Even if you’re not interested in combat, there’s so many beautiful mountains, lakes, caves, and forts to discover. With over 60,000 lines of dialogue and hundreds of hours you can spend playing, you’re definitely getting your money’s worth here. Kill some bears, craft your own armor, learn some spells, betray some townsfolk, or reanimate the dead…it’s all up to you. Despite its many bugs, this is truly a breathtaking adventure.

Specific to the PC version, some really great mods are finally coming out that make it feel more like a PC experience. There haven’t been a whole lot of beards in videogames, but Skyrim majestically integrates the tenacity and allure of beards in to such an epic quest as ever you’ll see.

Honorable Mention: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Last Year’s Winner: Mass Effect 2

Best Console Game

Portal 2

Kate Jay: The original Portal made its mark on the gaming world with its witty dialogue, innovative concept, and fast-paced gameplay. Fans asked for a sequel, and Valve gave us everything we asked for and more: Portal 2 took that theme and ran with it, releasing with a fully-fledged story with actual character development, backstory, and, of course, more snarkiness. Playing through Portal 2, we learn more about the history of Aperture Science and the men and women who made it what is was (before GLaDOS killed everyone, that is). Valve added new Aperture Products, including three types of gel, robots for the multiplayer levels, and defective personality cores. To add more frosting on this delicious, theoretical cake, Valve also provided players with plenty of free—yes, FREE—downloadable content for the multiplayer and single player campaigns. Portal 2 is clever, quirky, and charming, and it most definitely takes the cake.

Honorable Mention: Batman: Arkham City
Last Year’s Winner: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Best Portable Game

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Elizabeth “Lizo” Medina-Gray: What if you were dead, but you didn’t know how or why you died, and you couldn’t remember who you were? And then what if you found out that you could manipulate objects in the world, and even go back in time and save other peoples’ lives? And what if you learned of a mysterious conspiracy tied somehow to your murder, and you had only until dawn to figure everything out before you disappeared forever? Then you’d be the main character in Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective!

Ghost Trick is a new game from the creator of the Ace Attorney series (and we all know how well-loved those games are here at GameCola). Fortunately for all of us Phoenix Wright fans who were hoping for another great portable game, Ghost Trick delivers in full. The characters are quirky and well-developed, the graphics and music are awesome, and the mechanics are unique, challenging, and fun. But, like the Ace Attorney games before, the thing that really made Ghost Trick stand out for me was its story. Many times, I’ve played a game and found myself disappointed because it didn’t surprise me in a big way—sometimes I feel like the ideas I have and the guesses that I make while playing a game are more interesting than what the writers actually do. With Ghost Trick, though, I had the exact opposite experience. I didn’t come close to guessing the ending, but beyond that, the story went places that I never saw coming, and that was a great thing for me. Plus, the story’s just really cool!

With awesome characters, a compelling story, only a couple of annoying puzzles among the many good ones, and probably my favorite graphics on the DS to date, Ghost Trick is definitely a winner.

Honorable Mentions: Pokémon Black/White; Super Mario 3D Land
Last Year’s Winner: Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

Best Downloadable Game

Bastion

Kate Jay: It’s not often that I download Xbox Live games, but then, it’s not often that games like Bastion come along to entice me. At a glance, this indie games seems like your typical RPG: a young hero sets out to save his world from destruction. However, Bastion takes a different approach to the whole “rebuilding the world” theme—the world literally rebuilds itself around you as you move around the richly colored isometric map. To make the experience even more unique, your adventure is narrated blow-by-blow in the mellow tones of Rucks, an NPC voiced by Logan Cunningham. Gameplay is fast paced, if a little repetitive, but the story moves pretty quickly, keeping the experience fresh. A sensational soundtrack rounds out this refreshing game, making it a must-buy for any RPG fans.

Honorable Mention: Trine 2
Last Year’s Winner: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game

GameCola Staff Member of the Year

Alex Jedraszczak

Paul Franzen: A lot has changed since Alex (real name: Jeddy) first won this award in 2007. GameCola changed formats, from a monthly e-mail newsletter to an actual Internet website. All of our writers decided to grow magnificent beards. Our site started having actual fans. But while he won last time because he was the only person who consistently submitted his articles in on time, this year, he won because he helped bring GameCola to an all-new level in 2011—and the fact that we have actual fans now is due in no small part to him.

The GameCola Podcast, under the Jedraszczak regime, has way more listeners now than ever it had before. I mean, it has actual listeners now! Listeners who send us e-mails, ask us questions, record covers of our theme song on their saxophones, and draw pictures of us as the cast of Phoenix Wright. (Note: This hasn’t actually happened yet, but here’s hoping.) Kevin Leacock won this award last year for making the site much more accessible to new fans; this year, Jeddy’s winning for drawing those new fans to the site. Whether he’s role-playing as Metroid, singing the theme songs to old Nickelodeon shows, or just sitting back and letting us argue the merits of Ace Attorney Investigations, you can bet that, if you’re listening to a Jedrazcast, your next hour is going to be awesome.

And he still gets everything in on time, too. You can set your calendar by it.

Honorable Mentions: Matt Jonas, Christian Porter
Last Year’s Winner: Kevin Leacock

Game of the Year

Portal 2

Michael Ridgaway: Man, what was it with 2011 and awesome storytelling?

Portal 2 refined and added a lot to the platformer/puzzle elements from the first game for yet another amazing quantum-tunneling exploratory experience, but where it really shined was the story. In addition to the ever delightful GLaDOS, players were introduced to Wheatley and Cave Johnson, voiced by professional actors Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons, respectively. I’m not sure I ever stopped laughing while playing the game, and it very squarely fell into the category of “games I can only play with Vangie around or she will straight up cut me.”

Portal 2 proved that it was possible to tell an exciting, entertaining story in the context of an excellent game, and it raised the bar not just for videogames, but all other forms of media, as well.

Honorable Mention: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Last Year’s Winner: Heavy Rain

With all the quality reviews, delightful columns, and hard-hitting game journalism you can find here at GameCola, it’s sometimes hard to believe that the site’s written by regular people like you and me, and not a race of evolutionarily advanced superhumans. To help bridge this divide between staff and reader, we’ve set up this column so you can get a look at our staff’s personal opinions on serious issues. Serious issues like the following:

This month’s question was submitted by our own Jillian Dingwall, and it is:

What movie would you like to see turned into a videogame?

Matt Jonas
The Neverending Story

It would be a wide, open world role-playing game laced with J-RPG elements. You play as Atreyu, following the guidance of AURYN, as you quest to save Fantasia from The Nothing. What would be ironic, though, is that the film is concerned with the growing problem of children not reading books or using their imagination as much as they used to, something that videogames themselves are partly responsible for. Therefore, the game should focus on using complicated puzzles to tax the mind of the player. The game should also shatter the fourth wall at the end, but in its own fashion, different from the film.

(Matt is a staff reviewer and news blogger.)

Stuart Gipp
Indecisive Bastard

I’ve been throwing a few suggestions around, nothing too in-depth, but a broad succession of brief pitches that may interest.

Perhaps a PC title based on Nicole Kassell’s challenging piece, The Woodsman? Gameplay could take the form of QTEs in which Kevin Bacon sees small children off in the distance, and must rhythmically press “B” to fight his urges and re-integrate into society.

I also feel that there are real financial prospects for a game based on the seminal stage musical-turned-film, Mamma Mia. The main character must investigate three potential father figures to determine which one is, in fact, her father. Investigation mechanics are handled through a mixture of basic deduction and Bemani song and dance routines. A secret bonus mode would take the form of a reverse tower defense game where the player is a male attempting to leave the movie theatre without being stopped or noticed by his wife.

A game based on Last Tango in Paris, where gamers take the role of Marlon Brando and use the Kinect to apply butter to Maria Schneider’s anus before simulating rough anal sex.

Finally, it’s always been obvious to me that, though critically savaged, 1993’s Bob Hoskins-starring Super Mario Bros. would make for a compelling videogame, given a few small changes.

(Stuart Gipp is a staff reviewer and the author of “Ctrl-Alt-Del: The Animated Series: In Review: Diary of a Madman.”)

Kate Jay
Return to Oz

I’d like to see the old Return to Oz movie turned into a game. But developers would have to keep the creepy, dark feeling to it, including the part with the hall of screaming heads. It would adapt pretty well to a game format, with plenty of potential sidequests, explorable areas, and twisted humor. All in all, nothing like the actual Oz books, but then again, neither was the movie.

(Kate is the author and illustrator of “The Gates of Life.”)

Paul Franzen
Super Mario Bros.: The Movie

Imagine, if you will, an alternate-universe edition of the Super Mario games, where Goombas are giant lizards with little tiny heads, the mushroom power-ups are sentient, and the giant fish that eats you in Mario 3 is, instead, an enormous black woman with Thwomps strapped to her feet. Also, you’re playing as Bob Hoskins, digitally inserted into the game ala the characters in Mortal Kombat, and Yoshi is a goddamn tyrannosaurs rex. And in the final boss battle, Bowser (as portrayed by a digitally inserted Dennis Hopper, of course) has a gun that can turn you into a monkey.

Just tell me that wouldn’t be the best Mario hack ever.

(Paul is GameCola’s Editor-in-Chief as well as author of “Minus the Pudding: The Best of Xbox Live Indie Games.”)

Mark Freedman
Spaceballs

Spaceballs: The Video Game. I got the idea when someone made a multiplayer character mod for Jedi Knight 2 where you could play as President Scroob with a purple lightsaber. (I would have much prefered to play as Dark Helmet, though.) The Star Wars franchise has made so many great videogames like Knights of the Old Republic and the Super Star Wars series on SNES, so it should be easy to do the same with Spaceballs and add in a hearty helping of comedy. Unfortunately, Rick Moranis is fully retired and didn’t even make an appearance in Ghostbusters: The Video Game, so we’d need a suitable replacement for Dark Helmet. Keep firing, assholes!

(Mark is a reviewer and the author of “What the Crap?“)

Christian Porter
Battle Royale

I think the Japanese splatterfest, Battle Royale, would make a perfect multiplayer shooter. Even the film’s tagline—“Could you kill your best friend?”—encompasses what people who play shooters like doing best. The short version of the plot is that Japan has decided kids are too unruly and violent, and the best way to solve this is to dump one class per year on an island to brutally kill each other with no rules until only one is left standing. No, I don’t understand the rationale, either. My pitch for the game is that the island is procedurally generated—different every time, weapons are assigned to people at random (sometimes you get an Uzi, and sometimes you get a GPS and a frying pan). Also, the teacher calls out certain areas of the map every few hours where the students aren’t allowed to be. If they’re still there after a given period of time, then the exploding collars they were fitted with are set off, solving the problem of camping rather quickly. It’s pretty perfectly suited for a videogame.

(Christian is a reviewer, author of “Poor Player’s Paradise” and “Top of the Heap,” and creator of the video series “Speak American.”)

Jeff Day
The Wizard

If playing NES games is fun (which it undoubtedly is), then playing a game about playing NES games must be fun, too! Though it might be difficult to get the various publishers to cooperate, can’t you just picture it? Each level requires you to go to a different location in the United States and play a level from a classic NES game. Castlevania? Ninja Gaiden? Double Dragon? Friggin’ Rad Racer? You know it. (Good luck getting the rights to that last one.) The grand finale comes when you have to complete the first stage of Super Mario Bros. 3—what a challenge! And when Lucas Barton shows up to cause trouble, the game switches to a Street Fighter II format where you can beat the living crap out of each other. Haley is an unlockable character whose special powers include Irritable Scowl and False Molestation Accusation. And running from that creepy old guy who’s been hired to catch you turns things into a knockoff of Home Alone for the NES. *shudders* Now let’s just see if we can get Jackey Vinson to do a few voice-overs. You know he’s not working much ever since…well…you know…the incident…

(Jeff is the author of “Gamera Obscura.”)

Daniel Castro
The Terminator

More than any one movie I’d like to see in videogame format, I have a lot of movie-based videogames I just want to see done right! Among those I’d love to play is a well-made Terminator videogame.

Remember the first shots in the original Terminator movie? That post-apocalyptic future is the perfect setting for an awesome action game. That said, the game based on Terminator Salvation was horrible—not only because it was merely the cash-in movie-related videogame we’re all used to, but because the Terminators in that game are way too easy to defeat compared to their big-screen counterparts.

I don’t want to fight hundreds of useless Terminators—I want to face just one. I want to be scared shitless being chased by an almost invincible T-800. That is the trademark this movie is well remembered by, and it’s something no videogame has been able to pull off.

(Daniel is the author of “Don’t Be That Guy.”)

Jillian Dingwall
Deliverance

I have long felt that the movie most overlooked when it comes to videogame potential is Deliverance. There really is a whole world of variety involved in bringing such a timeless classic into your living room. The game would be divided into three sections: character design, motion control, and handheld control. Let’s begin with character design. In some games, like Tiger Woods Golf, for example, character creation is a game in itself. Deliverance would have all the time-consumption of Tiger Woods Golf, except you would have nothing but 250 moustaches to choose from and four outfits, all of which would consist of different shades of double-denim. Once your character is ready to hit the canoe, the game would move on to the motion control stage. Here you would row yourself down the river, contending with a few rapids along the way, before picking up your virtual banjo and spending the next thirty years trying to learn how to play “Dueling Banjos.” Finally, the violent sodomy scene. This is where the hand-held controller comes in. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but let’s just say that it would work in a similar way to lock-picking in Skyrim. In short, Deliverance would combine all the versatility of 21st century gaming with the excitement of ’70s facial hair. What’s not to love?

(Jillian is a staff reviewer and blogger.)

Nathaniel Hoover
Serenity

I’d love to see a videogame adaptation of Serenity, Joss Whedon’s 2005 space western that follows the hit (read: cancelled) TV series Firefly. A depressingly serious wisecracking third-person role-playing adventure game with a handful of first-person vehicle missions and a mix of real-time, turn-based, and event-based combat would not only make for the most difficult-to-classify game of the year, but also the only game with enough variety and nonstop challenges to properly capture the essence of Serenity. There are enough characters to pull off a Knights of the Old Republic-style rotating party system, and Heavy Rain’s open-ended story structure would still allow all your favorite characters to get killed off unexpectedly, without impaling them in a contrived, prescripted cutscene. Throw in a few bonus missions where you can play as the bad guys—including a horrifying Dress-the-Reaver character customization screen—and I swear to you, I will get very choked up. Honestly, there could be tears.

(Nathaniel is a reviewer, author of “Flash Flood“ and the “Sprite Flicker“ webcomic, and creator of fine videos.)

A race across three continents…

…into the homeland of the enemy….

…in his search for the Holy Grail.

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE.

Have the adventure of your life…

…keeping up with the Joneses.

We’re halfway to the end. Beware: The games you’ve seen up until now were a walk in the park compared to these. What follows is pure, untamed garbage. Weapons-grade crap. Steel yourself.

25. Wall Street Kid (NES)

Just read my review. Wall Street Kid manages to find the small sliver of goodness found in investing fake money, rips its heart out, and stamps it on the ground, just like the kid’s in-game girlfriend who only loves you if you buy her a house and a car. For no apparent reason, the game starts on April Fools’ Day, but you’re a fool for buying this trash regardless of what the calendar says. It’s just awful.

- Mark Freedman

24. Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (Xbox 360)

This game can be played with one hand. The other hand can either be used to pleasure yourself, or it can be used to repeatedly punch yourself in the face. The latter is preferred.

Breast physics and skimpy outfits, terrible unplayable minigames, and a game of poker that doesn’t operate like actual poker (not like I know how to play poker, anyway). Do these elements form together to make a game? Do they fuck.

- Matt Jonas

On the Other Hand…

I’m mostly going off of Matt Jonas’ review, which cited casual gamers’ disinterest in breasts as a primary strike against the game. I feel it’s unfair to judge a game by its audience, so I took it upon myself to do excessive extensive research of screenshots and gameplay footage before casting my vote.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, when you’re sifting through a thoroughly unredeemable pile of filth to determine which 50 games are most deserving of a New Mexico landfill, things like an absurd storyline, grating voice acting, profoundly flawed gameplay, and the blatant objectification of women are secondary when there’s just so much titillating eye-candy. We can still watch these absolutely terrible games without playing them, so it makes sense to offer a little amnesty to the better-looking games with the sexy, sexy slot machines.

I mean, c’mon, Wall Street Kid doesn’t have a casino that pretty.

- Nathaniel Hoover

23. Yaris (XBLA)

An on-rails shooter with sloppy aiming centered around a flying Toyota Yaris somehow results in an absolute mess that isn’t even remotely playable. The game doesn’t make any sense! What are you supposed to do in it? Why does it feel like you’re piloting a penguin on ice?

- Matt Jonas

22. Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis)

Complicated controls. Confusing interface and inventory system. Enemies that just won’t die. I had to play this game to get an Achievement in Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, and I haven’t touched it since. It wasn’t even designed for the Genesis originally; the SegaNet modem wasn’t exactly known for “great” games.

- Matt Jonas

21. Space Quest: The Lost Chapter (PC)

Whoa, how did this fan-made adventure game make it to the list?

This game that’s totally unknown to all but the diehards in the Space Quest fan community, and the chosen few who’ve read my GameFAQs review?

The game with a text-parser interface that doesn’t recognize words?

The game that’s dominated by unnecessarily huge, dreadfully bland, confusingly repetitive, and excessively swimming-intensive locations?

The game with the giant squid maze that—OH WAIT. THE SQUID MAZE. PRETTY SURE YOU SHOULD AVOID ANY GAME THAT MAKES YOU NAVIGATE A MAZE OF TOUCH-ME-YOU-DIE TENTACLES THAT BORDER AND BLOCK YOUR VIEW OF THE THREE-PIXELS-WIDE PATH STRETCHING ACROSS THE ENTIRE SCREEN THAT YOU MUST SWIM THROUGH TO PICK UP A STUPID BONE THAT’S NOT EVEN AN ITEM YOU OBVIOUSLY NEED, AND THEN SWIM BACK OUT THE WAY YOU CAME IN.

Also, there’s a bunch of grammar errors.

- Nathaniel Hoover

20. Rocky and Bullwinkle Adventures (NES)

All you really have to do is look at the game, and you’ll know why it made this list. A 5 year old could’ve scribbled this together. I know the animation from the actual animated series was never superior in any way to…well, anything; but this looks like one of the lowest-budget, gotta-get-it-done-in-two-days-or-the-boss-will-probe-me kinds of games. And what kind of a game forces you to hurt yourself when you attack? That’s exactly what happens when you use your antlers to charge as Bullwinkle: your health decreases. Rocky can only barely fly, too; wasn’t he supposed to be a FLYING squirrel? Yeah, way NOT to fly. The music is terrible, as well, causing eardrums to shatter across the nation. Quality assurance at THQ must’ve consisted of a man picking up the cartridge, looking at it, and saying, “Yup, it’s a cartridge, dagnabbit!” before applying the stamp of approval.

- Jeff Day

19. Timecop (SNES)

You can tell I’m the most qualified person on staff to discuss Timecop, because I watched five minutes of some guy playing it on YouTube.

The graphics look like a digitized cardboard cutout festival, and the levels seem to consist of you getting shot in the face and falling down three stories just to get shot in the face again. Ammo for your gun appears to be about as plentiful as ham sandwiches at a Bar Mitzvah, and the only other way to kill all three of the different enemies in the game is to do pilates until one of them trips over your foot. It’s like a poor man’s Batman Forever, and that’s a statement that makes puppies cry.

- Nathaniel Hoover

18. Two Worlds (Xbox 360)

There are many emotions that I like to experience whilst gaming—excitement, fear, happiness, slight arousal—but the only thing I felt when playing Two Worlds was embarrassment. I was embarrassed for this game, to the point where I was struggling to look it in the eye. For starters, all the characters look the same (like the malformed survivors of a nuclear holocaust), yet strangely, every villager talks with a different accent. And I don’t mean like one talks with a southern English accent whilst the next is a bit more northern; I mean that the local farmer sounds like a Scottish fisherman whilst his daughter sounds like she’s from Texas. Finally, let’s talk about the voice acting…Sloth from The Goonies could do a better job. Now get out of my house and don’t come back until you’re better than Skyrim.

- Jillian Dingwall

Throughout all entertainment mediums, one fact is universally true—there sure is a lot of crap out there. H.L. Mencken once famously said:

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

The fact that Michael Bay movies are continually global blockbuster hits proves that this is true all over the world. Film and television live and die by this motto, and videogames are no different. Games that copy well-worn formulas are much more likely to be released than ones that try something new and clever, no matter how fun they might be, because publishers don’t like taking too many risks. Largely because of this, so many bad games get released that we’re barely even surprised by them anymore.

But our tolerance has its limits. Some games go beyond being a bit trite or a bit lazy, offering an experience so poorly crafted and terrible that you’re offended that such an abomination could even exist. The kinds of games that are just so loathsome they invade your subconscious thoughts until you find you’re sitting at work thinking of nothing but how sick it makes you that there could be somebody out there who actually enjoys and pays money for such terrible things, contributing to the offending developer and causing the cycle to repeat itself, and that this person is allowed to continue living each wretched day of their life without being publicly crucified with white-hot rivets in front of their weeping mother while you look on and just laugh at them as they breathe their last breath. Hahahahhahaha…

…or maybe that’s just me.

Regardless, here’s a bunch of games that are awful. Just awful.

50. Super Noah’s Ark 3D (SNES)

Where do I begin? For starters, Super Noah’s Ark 3D is a blatant rip-off of Wolfenstein 3D, reportedly even down to the SNES version’s code. This wouldn’t be terrible except that, yes, Wolfenstein 3D for the SNES was pretty bad, and somehow Wisdom Tree managed to make it even worse.

Scratch all the stuff about Nazis, killing, or anything interesting. Let’s replace all the soldiers with animals. And then we’ll replace your gun with a slingshot that fires tranquilizing pellets. Let’s also replace the somewhat colourful surroundings of German prisons with the inside of an ark. That’s more suitable for this game, but now the environments are all red and brown. If I wanted to see a ton of red and brown, I’d eat at the Olive Garden.

But perhaps most importantly, this game is bad because it’s a Bible game. No Bible game has ever been awesome—aside from Bible Buffet, anyway, but that’s only because it was more focused on the buffet, and very few vegetables are religious.

- Jeff Day

49. Winter Games (NES)

Ah, the bitter cold of wintertime. There’s not much to do outside, so you’re probably thinking about bundling up inside with a nice classic winter sports game. Can’t find your copy of NHL ‘94? Well, pop Winter Games into your cart slot and get ready for a bumpy ride. No, I’m not talking about downhill moguls; I’m talking about the overall cesspool that is this game. The controls are basically nonexistent, whether you’re doing Hot Dog Ariels (whatever that is), speed skating, or figure skating. While its crappiness does have a certain charm to it, it amazes me how such a steaming pile has an official Nintendo Seal of Quality on the box.

- Mark Freedman

48. Wolverine (NES)

How did LJN get their hands on so many licenses? And how could they possibly ruin a game about Wolverine? There’s so much they could’ve exploited: so much badassery, a whole assortment of enemies to fight against. Hell—they could’ve copycatted any decent action sidescroller and called it a day. Instead, the whole game setup just yells “generic.”

You may not know everything about Wolverine, but the one thing we can all agree on is that he has claws, and he shred enemies with them. But in this game, you won’t be using Wolverine’s claws all that much, since they are limited by a “berserk gauge.” Also, the claws aren’t very impressive; they’re only a few extra pixels attached to Wolverine’s fists. That’s lame!

- Daniel Castro

47. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (PC)

I honestly don’t understand how this game happened. I can’t fathom a scenario where it was looked upon by anyone in the company, and that person said “Yes, we can release this now. It is finished.” I’ve downloaded viruses that have done less damage to my computer than this game. I am genuinely concerned about the people who playtested it; someone should go look for them. If they thought this game was adequate, I guarantee they are still trapped in whatever room the testing occurred in, as there is no possible way they can operate a doorknob.

This is theoretically a racing game, but it is the first racing game I played where the other driver seems to have abandoned his car, probably because he was too embarrassed to be featured in this steaming pile of fail. The other truck doesn’t move, and after growing tired of waiting for him to do something, I tried to push his car along only to find out that I’VE BEEN DEAD THE WHOLE TIME AND PILOTING A DAMN GHOST TRUCK because I went right through him. Either that, or the game didn’t bother to include any collision detection, as you can drive through anything and the game doesn’t seem to have any problem with that.

Big Rigs is less a game and more a practical joke on the gaming community—the equivalent of a company releasing a game that Rick Roll’d you when you tried to play it. I would call this game trash, but I feel like that is unfair to trash. So instead I will say that there is absolutely nothing good about this game at all and that the spouses of everyone who worked on this game now have legal grounds for having their marriages annulled.

-Nikola Suprak

46. Karnov (Arcade)

Karnov for the NES is an…OK game. Nothing special, but if I can finish it, there must be some merit to it. However, that game stems from an arcade version that will violate you mentally…and possibly sexually, if you play it the wrong way.

The biggest issue is the game’s difficulty: boss battles often require you to avoid so many projectiles that you might as well be wearing a bulls-eye on your forehead. Enemies are also quite plentiful and have no problem killing you in one hit. But what’s worse is the timer: It’s practically impossible to beat the final level, not ONLY  because of all the obstacles you need to overcome, but also because there just isn’t enough time to get to the final boss and defeat it.

Karnov is also filled with weird characters that really don’t make any sense being there. Where can you find dinosaurs living in the same region as a circus? Why are buff bodybuilders trying to slaughter you? Why are there half-centaur, half-caterpillar women in existence at ALL? Karnov is the only drug you will ever need. Plus, the ending sucks. It just sucks. Sucks!

- Jeff Day

45. Rambo (NES)

Whatever you do in this life, for the love of God do not play Rambo for NES directly after completing Platoon for the Commodore 64. You will be more disappointed than Anne Frank was when she got a drum kit for Christmas. In all honesty, my memory is a bit hazy on this one, as I have not touched the game since 1990 (and even then I couldn’t bring myself to complete it), but from what I can Google-remember, it was just straight-up boring. All you do is kill animals, which, considering I refuse to even kick a chicken in Fable, only made me depressed. In the end I gave up because I kept getting lost in its terribly designed layout—and, like most 9-year-old girls, I just wanted to kill some humans, anyway.

- Jillian Dingwall

44. Samurai Shodown Sen (Xbox 360)

SNK Playmore? More like SNK should “play more” games! Every massive flaw in Samurai Shodown could have been avoided if the developers compared it to the games that they were up against at the time. Shodown Sen is one of those games that goes beyond so bad it’s funny into just completely awful. Destroy all copies on sight.

- Matt Jonas

43. Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion (GBA)

Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion is a fairly good game. I like it a lot, and…wait, we’re talking about the GBA version? Ugh, forget it!

This is a great example of a bad port. Almost all the animation, voice acting, music and sound effects were cut out. Hope you like playing in complete silence! The graphics quality has taken a steep dive, and it’s impossible to figure out what to do unless you’ve played the original game. Perhaps worst of all, the GBA version retains the hideously difficult endgame challenge, which forces you to remember twelve different Chinese symbols and put them in the proper order.

The most positive thing that anyone has ever said about this game is, “The loading times aren’t that bad.”

- Michael Gray

You might recall my dorktastic proposal, and it should be no surprise that the wedding was equally sweet and geeky (sweeky?). If you’ve got time for a sweeping tale of near-epic proportions, I encourage you to visit the aforementioned geek blog to check out the seven-part story (which, I believe, may still be shorter than my review of Mega Man 10). However, as this here is a vidjagame website, I’ll be spotlighting the more gaming-centric elements of the wedding.

So, sit back, relax, and read on! Deadly robot spiders have been deployed to ensure compliance.

~-~

The Bachelor Party

Wow, putting “The Bachelor Party” in bold and italics makes it sound like a misleadingly titled Wii game where nobody jumps out of a cake and you all have root beer floats instead. Which, appropriately, is exactly what happened at my bachelor party: I had root beer floats and murdered my friends.

Well, let me clarify before the county sheriff takes an interest in me again: It was self-defense. My groomsmen had lured me into one of the fanciest rooms in the hotel and began to fire at me with pistols, semiautomatics, lasers, rocket launchers, and banana peels; what was I supposed to do? I spent my last hours on Earth (as a bachelor) playing GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, and Mario Kart 64 with my friends.

They had set up a projector screen in the middle of a room furnished with a couch and comfortable chairs. A Nintendo 64 was hooked up to the projector already, but I also spied a GameCube, an NES, and piles of games to go with them…plus ice cream and root beer. These are people who know me well. I can do big, loud parties, but I would sooner have a small, subdued Mario Party. Playing a heated game of “Tug o’ War” with my pals across a deep ravine is about as crazy as I get.

So, I spent my evening reminding my friends how much of a jerk I am by picking them off one at a time from across the level with my FarSight XR-20 alien sniper rifle, hiding proximity mines on every ammo box, thrusting poisoned throwing knives into their corpses to ensure their vision would remain blurry after respawning, and, most heinously of all, forcing them to play Toad’s Turnpike in reverse. It was fantastic.

~-~

The Wedding Reception

Yep, we completely skipped the wedding and went straight to the reception, where the guests (including several members of my college videogame club and a few GameCola staff members) lost all gamer cred trying to play “Name That Videogame Tune.” My new wife and I entered to Lucca’s theme from Chrono Trigger, and there were OverClocked Remixes in abundance—selections from Castlevania, DuckTales, Gradius, EarthBound, Final Fantasy, Mega Man 2, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Super Metroid were at least on the list, even if there wasn’t enough time to play them all. In fact, the last slow dance was a lovely acoustic guitar remix of “To Far Away Times,” the ending theme from Chrono Trigger, and it was something special to see even my parents on the dance floor for that one. Also in the air were the unremixed original versions of the soothing underwater tune from Donkey Kong Country and, appropriately, the Marrymore town theme from Super Mario RPG.

Perhaps the crowning achievement of the reception was that the aforementioned Paul and Lizo, who were married some five months prior, shared their first dance as a couple at my wedding. Shocking. Now, I know they say you’re supposed to wait until marriage, but even if they don’t specify whose marriage, you—oh, wait; we’re talking about dancing, not the other thing. Jeez, I hope they didn’t wait for that on my account, too.

~-~

The Wedding Favors

My now-wife took the liberty of ordering a case of one hundred blue pog containers to house our wedding favors. We said we’d figure out what we were going to do with them eventually. Probably fill them with dirt; we were on a budget, you know.

We settled on a homemade fold-up board game with a tiny six-sided die and Smarties candy for game tokens as the gift inside the containers. However, once our guests ate the contents (including the die and the paper game board, which I suspect may have been more fun to eat than to play), there wouldn’t be much stopping them from eating the containers, too. You’ve seen me play Deja Vu; you know how this works. We had to make those little blue tubes memorable enough for our guests to at least stop and stare at them before popping them in their mouths.

Fortunately, I have played excessive amounts of Mega Man.

Disguised as the life-replenishing Energy Tanks from the Mega Man series, our army of pog cylinders instantly became my favorite geek touch of the wedding. Not just because of the connection with my favorite game series, mind you—those who’ve read my Top 10 Favorite Games List know I’m a huge fan of the NES game Crystalis, and I had the most amazing opportunity to slip in what may be the most subtle and fantastic (and, considering the relative obscurity of the game, only) Crystalis reference in history on the back of the label.

~-~

The Wedding Gifts

Paul and Lizo got us these:

Mike and Vangie got us these:

Christian Porter got us this:

The Honeymoon

I’m sure you don’t want to hear about how I played Mega Man Battle Network on my honeymoon. I’m sure you’d rather see a picture of the stained glass Triforce I made.

We stayed at a series of bed & breakfasts on our honeymoon, and our first stop had an art studio where the proprietor taught classes on throwing pottery and stained glass. (Pause for a moment and let my syntax form a funny mental picture. OK, so it’s not that funny.)

Now, I’m not much of a Zelda fan, but a few interlocking triangles seemed like something elegantly simple that even a ham-fisted bozo like myself could pull together. I seem to have overestimated my skill and dedication to the craft—if it weren’t for frequent interventions from the instructor and my more artistically inclined wife, you’d be looking at a picture of the legendary Biforce.

~-~

So there you have it. Absolutely nothing else happened before, during, or after my wedding. At all. Related to videogames. That I can think of. Right now.

Join us next time for “A Very GameCola Wedding 4: Live Free or Wed Hard,” starring [insert name of two staff members who are clearly involved romantically] Jeff Day and the disembodied narrator from “Gamera Obscura.”

With all the quality reviews, delightful columns, and hard-hitting game journalism you can find here at GameCola, it’s sometimes hard to believe that the site’s written by regular people like you and me, and not a race of evolutionarily advanced superhumans. To help bridge this divide between staff and reader, we’ve set up this column so you can get a look at our staff’s personal opinions on serious issues. Serious issues like the following:

What is the strangest game you’ve ever played?

Paul Franzen
Chulip

I feel like the only games I play are strange games, like point-and-click adventure games based on the Beavis & Butt-head cartoon, first-person FMV games starring Tim Curry, and of course Kissypoo. But the one weird game that’s coming to mind right now is Chulip, a PS2 game that came out in 2007, way after the PS2 stopped being relevant. You play as a young man in love with the girl next door, and you’ve decided that the best way to win her over is to, I’m so glad I’m not making this up, kiss literally every other person in the entire town. You spend the whole game trying to figure out what makes everyone happy, making them happy, and then making out with them, so that the girl you actually like will fall in love with you…which of course makes a lot of sense.

Chulip also bears the distinction of being the only videogame I’ve ever pre-ordered, because it came with a cool keychain. Another fun fact? The only way I could get my PS2 to actually run Chulip was to flip the console upside-down.

(Paul is GameCola’s Editor-in-Chief as well as author of “Minus the Pudding: The Best of Xbox Live Indie Games.”)

Jillian Dingwall
Samorost

The strangest game I have ever played is also one of my all-time favourites. Samorost is a beautifully original point-and-click adventure game in which your character has to protect his home planet from an imminent collision with a spaceship. “Sounds like a reasonably normal premise for a game,” I hear you say—and you would be right, except your character is a pajama-clad gnome, and his home planet is a moss-covered lump of tree-trunk which is about to be hit by rocket-shaped foliage. Each level of this game is more surreal than the last and uses a mixture of animation and still photography to create some seriously awesome environments. A couple of hours with Samorost made my experience with magic mushrooms seem positively normal, and I spent that entire night staring at a packet of cookies, utterly convinced that I looked like Ozzy Osbourne. Which I loved.

(Jillian is a staff reviewer and blogger.)

Alex Jedrasczak
Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!

Games based on media tie-ins are known for erring on the side of ridiculous, but this Home Improvement-based failure goes one step beyond. Gameplay issues aside, Tim wields a nail gun, a flame-thrower blow torch, and a beam-wave chainsaw to fight against dinosaurs. Yes, dinosaurs. All this and more in the slowest Sonic ripoff ever created. Prepare to get killed by an ant while you’re trying to hit a pterodactyl with your particle-beam chainsaw. Wikipedia tries to tell you that there were mummies and robots, but you’ll never get far enough into the game to find out that those levels don’t exist.

(Jeddy is the host of The GameCola Podcast.)

Matt Jonas
Linger in Shadows

Strangest game? Now that’s a tough question, because in my line of work strange games are like furniture. They come fitted as standard and you’re too scared to go searching in them for lost change. Picking the strangest game is like asking me which piece of furniture is least likely to have some kind of dead animal stuffed inside.

Of all the games I have played, perhaps the most disappointingly strange is Linger in Shadows. It doesn’t try to be anything even remotely playable in the slightest. The game exists for two reasons: one is to show what the PlayStation 3 is capable of, and the other is to hand out Trophies like a stranger giving away candy. The electric chair is too good for a game like this.

(Matt is a staff reviewer and news blogger.)

Daniel Castro
Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road

This game just blew my mind when I was a kid. It’s a top-down shooting game where you must fight against a variety of alien creatures, and collect the hearts of everything you kill. I’m not talking about cutesy heart-shaped icons; I’m talking about weird-looking red palpitating hearts that enemies leave behind when you kill them. And you have to collect them because they serve as the game’s currency. That’s strange, right?

For the longest time I couldn’t remember this game’s title, because the label of the cartridge that was lent to me was gone. For several years I kept asking any NES-savvy person I knew if they ever played a game about a guy collecting enemies’ hearts, entering bars to buy items (with the hearts), where you could even pick a fight against any of the other clients (for hearts!).

“Oh!”—I always mentioned—“and at the start of the game, the character yelled (in a poorly synthesized voice from the NES era) furgsraurgsrr fight!” Nobody ever knew what I was talking about.

(Daniel is the author of “Don’t Be That Guy” and the creator of the “River City Pixels” webcomic.)

Christian Porter
Incredible Crisis

I like weird—weird is my beat—but figuring out exactly what’s the weirdest game I’ve ever played is impossible. Though, there is one that sticks out in my mind. It’s a PS1 game that proves my theory about Japan that if you censor a country’s porn, you will slowly drive everyone insane. Incredible Crisis is the manifestation of that insanity.

The game is basically a bunch of minigames strung together to form a story that reads like a drug-addled maniac penned it. It follows a family of four through their day and begins with you doing dance aerobics in your office. You eventually escape a giant runaway globe, balance on a flagpole, stop a gang of furries from robbing a bank, find a flying, robotic alien clam who shrinks your brother to the size of an ant and turns your teddy bear into Godzilla, get cannonaded by a construction crane, and find a terrorist’s G spot in a ferris wheel right before she tries to blow you up. It’s actually a pretty fun game, and all the music is by Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, who I’m a big fan of, so that’s a plus.

(Christian is a reviewer, author of “Poor Player’s Paradise” and “Top of the Heap,” and creator of the video series “Speak American.”)

Nathaniel Hoover
CannonCrotch

While other staff members have their obscure games, indie games, and foreign games to provide a steady supply of strangeness, “strange” for me is a game that doesn’t involve Mega Man. I keep a list of such games to review for my “Flash Flood” column that I swear I’m still writing, but CannonCrotch easily thrusts its way to the top.

As everyone knows, Adolf Hitler was cryogenically frozen at the end of World War II; the Nazis revived him, and Lt. CannonCrotch (who, ironically, has a cannon for a crotch) must infiltrate their base, Contra-style, to put an end to their nefarious plot to fire a devastating superlaser at the moon. To top it off, the cutscene music is an 8-bit remix of the windmill theme from Ocarina of Time. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose it’s more ridiculous than strange, but somebody’s gotta choose a game that doesn’t have “Wario” or “Cho Aniki” in the title.

You guys did choose at least one of those, right?

Crud. I get the feeling I just wasted a perfectly good vote for a WarioWare game on CannonCrotch.

(Nathaniel is a reviewer, author of “Flash Flood“ and the “Sprite Flicker“ webcomic, and creator of fine videos.)

Mark Freedman
Katamari Damacy

Gotta go with Katamari Damacy. The name alone is intriguing enough to give the game a spin. What more could you ask of a game where your mission is to roll up sushi, milk cartons, cats, people, and rainbows into a giant ball? The King of Cosmos is about as close as you’ll get to The Burger King these days.

(Mark is a reviewer and author of “What the Crap?“)

Jeff Day
Chō Aniki: Kyūkyoku Muteki Ginga Saikyō Otoko

Considering I’ve played too many odd games to recall in order to write my monthly “Gamera Obscura” article, this is a very difficult decision. It is, however, a possible decision, thanks to the PlayStation Network. The strangest game I’ve ever played is Chō Aniki: Kyūkyoku Muteki Ginga Saikyō Otoko for the PlayStation, originally only available in Japan, but subsequently released overseas 15 years later, courtesy of the demented minds at MonkeyPaw Games.

The Chō Aniki series is entirely strange and features far too many muscle-bound men in less than flattering poses with each other, but this entry is in a league all its own. The introduction alone is strange, featuring pictures of bodybuilders amidst a dancing blue creature; the sequence looks like it was strung together in a few minutes in Flash. Surprisingly, most of the graphics in the game look realistic, as if cut and pasted in via Photoshop. The gameplay involves you taking on the role of a rather large man (taking up a significant part of the screen) who must fight his way through hordes of other men and strange creatures in horizontal shmup fashion; more grandiose foes include a giant half-cyborg with a smaller man as a penile implant, and an enormous frog in a snail’s shell. This…is…strange…and unusually homoerotic. Wait…did I pay money for this?

(Jeff is the author of “Gamera Obscura.”)

The moai, the merrier, I always say.

Here’s the premise, summarized from the instruction manual for the sake of the illiterate: Gradius, a peaceful Earth-like planet (a contradiction in terms, I know), is under attack by the eeeeeevil Bacterions. (It’s written like that in the manual: “eeeeeevil Bacterions.”) You, the person holding the controller, have blasted off in the direction of the Bacterion superfortress in a prototype space fighter called the “Warp Rattler,” a name no doubt derived from the nauseating motion of OH GREAT GRADIUS WHY DIDN’T WE TEST THIS FIRST!? Evidently someone forgot to install a guidance system before liftoff, because instead of plotting a safe course around all the hazards between you and the final boss, you pilot the last hope of your people directly through the densest concentrations of Bacterion forces in the galaxy, pretty much guaranteeing the utter annihilation of your civilization.

These turrets look like they’re howling at the moon to mourn my passing.

The game itself consists of virtually nonstop sidescrolling space-shooting action, and the learning curve is excellent. By the end of the first stage, you’ll have mastered the basics of dodging, shooting, and collecting/using powerups. By the end of the second stage, you’ll have gained some exposure to maneuvering your ship through tight spaces and tackling enemies with more unique attack patterns. By the end of the third stage, you’ll be dead. Perfect learning curve. Still, progress is not impossible; it just requires the right balance of reflexes, practice, and strategy. However, if you want to actually beat the game, you’ll need Game Genie and dumb luck.

You’ll also need to shoot at the enemies from time to time instead of taking screenshots.
But that’s an advanced tactic.

Aiding you in your mission to at least get as far as Stage 4 are the power capsules left behind by certain defeated enemies. With the exception of the rare green capsules that obliterate everything on the screen (except you; that would be stupid), each power capsule you collect advances the powerup meter on the bottom of the screen. At the press of a button, you can activate whatever ability is highlighted, instantly upgrading your ship to drop missiles, fire lasers, or speed up enough to turn off your four-way flashers and pull out of the breakdown lane. Your spacecraft is woefully inadequate against the forces of galactic domination at first, but each stage begins with a relatively tame “hunting ground” where you can mow down enemies to snag powerups before entering the main part of the stage where you’re just going to die and lose everything anyhow.

Fortunately, the explosion noise you make when you die is pretty sweet. For all you know, I did this on purpose.

Rounding off the powerup list are glowing orange doodads called Options that follow your ship and copy whatever attacks you make, a protective force field that delays your unavoidable Game Over for a few more seconds, and a multidirectional double shot that you’ll only ever activate by accident. In concept, the ability to fire bullets in two different directions is pretty neat, but the fact that you cannot combine Double with Laser makes for a sad decision between the mighty beam that tears through entire rows of enemies, and the dinky double shot, which reduces your rate of fire and occasionally flicks a bullet toward the ceiling at a funny angle.

Battles fought with Double simply aren’t that exciting, no matter how hard the boss tries
to liven things up by firing exclamation points.

I’m exaggerating the difficulty of this game to a certain extent, but only because it’s utterly impossible; things don’t necessarily get easier as your power increases. Oh, sure, eventually you can tear through enemies like a bazooka through potato chips, but the game is balanced so that even the beefiest Warp Rattler isn’t so unstoppable that it can’t be…stopped. Enemy projectiles are easily obscured when your Options are littering the screen with missiles and laser beams. Too many Speed Up uses, and you’ll find yourself redecorating the walls with pieces of you and your ship at the slightest twitch. Grow too powerful, and you’ll suddenly discover that the bad guys have way more ammo at their disposal than they’ve been letting on. I had no idea that adaptive difficulty was even a concept back in 1986, but here it is, still kicking my butt.

Ongoing efforts to teach these creatures to do “YMCA” have been met with limited success.

Gradius is a solidly planned and challenging-yet-fair shoot-’em-up that should at least hold a minimum appeal for any fans of the genre. The powerup system adds a level of complexity to the gameplay that’s perfect for players with more of an interest in strategy and customization—the fun of Gradius isn’t just from reaching full power and blasting everything apart (except yourself; that would be stupid, unless you’re doing it for the cool explosion noise); it’s also from nurturing your sitting duck into a graceful bird of prey. For those of us with an appreciation of noises like “browmp,” “tik-tik-tik,” and “kuh-foom-foom-foom,” Gradius offers a bevy of satisfying sound effects. The visuals are no less enjoyable, with a respectable amount of creativity and detail going into every memorable stage. From erupting volcanoes to upside-down erupting volcanoes to doughnut-vomiting Moai heads, this game has everything I just mentioned in this sentence, and more.

I would like to retract the phrase, “doughnut-vomiting Moai heads.” Now this image just looks gross.

Not only is Gradius a strong game in its own right, but it’s a game that stays relevant amidst sequels and spinoffs that might already have condemned it to obsolescence in the hands of another company. Whether through sincere reverence or abject creative poverty, Konami has continually brought back enemies, weapons, and locations from Gradius in the games that followed and as Easter eggs in other titles such as Blades of Steel and Castlevania: The One In Which You Kill Dracula. The ideas set forth in this game have become an institution, and you can’t swing a photon torpedo around without vaporizing a hilariously undefended final boss that can trace its roots (or brain stem) back to here.

Because an unarmed brain makes a credible final boss.

Fans of the sleeker, more customizable follow-up games might argue otherwise, but I say Gradius is a classic. I’ve played the original Metroid enough times to know that being the first game in a series shouldn’t automatically qualify you for “classic” status—the great concepts that define a series aren’t always polished or cleanly executed in the first installment. However, in the case of Gradius, I’d argue that any improvements on the game have been to modernize and expand on a foundation of solid gameplay—not to fix anything that was broken.

This is so cool. I have no idea what this is, but I will kill it, and it will be so cool.

If you enjoy relentlessly difficult space shooters, or if you just enjoy smashing spaceships into big rocks, Gradius should absolutely make its way into your Backloggery. Whether you play it long enough to discover every hidden 1-UP and warp zone or whether you’re totally lame and give up before making it to Stage 4, it’s a memorable experience thanks to the iconic enemies, the nifty scenery and sound effects, the pulse-pounding challenges, and the catchy, energy-filled soundtrack that I’m only just bringing up now in my concluding paragraph. Nostalgia or no, Gradius still holds up against its oft-superior successors…even the ones with adjustable difficulty settings.

Screenshot from the popular spinoff, Metroidius.

This is, of course, Thanksgiving as performed by the cast of EarthBound, the quirky SNES RPG that has previously appeared on YouTube in Paul Franzen’s Foppytastic Playthrough—the one that yielded that infamously mangled travesty of transcription, as you may recall. Drop whatever you’re doing and watch this video, or the pilgrims will eat you.