You know, as much as I like the ‘saving people from themselves’ theme of the game, when you’re hung up on a story boss, it really just makes me wish Main Character could just run up and give the “victim” a good solid slap and yelling-at for not heeding the “DON’T SAY IT!” in each Shadow encounter to the point it becomes kind of hilarious. You know, in a Candle Jack kind of w

I’ve been having an aggravating amount of creative misfires on this site lately. Sure, I’m still playing games, and are they all good? Hell no. Blame it on the mass ADD of WEB TWO POINT OH, but it seems like it’s harder and harder to get a good, satisfying volume of bile out in one serving as I did back when posting articles was a process that involved throwing together table based layouts from scratch and wanting to be damn sure the end result is worth the maybe four or five extra clicks involved in doing things the old fashioned way.

Yes, I realize that makes no fucking sense, the new, streamlined and easy-to-use interfaces of TEH FUTURE should mean there should be an almost non-stop torrent of content spewing out of my… uh. Ear, I guess.

So, many times I start to write about a game or topic, then give up on it due to running out of steam, or having a sudden pang of conscience that holy crap- this is not working. So, in lieu of writing about something interesting, it’s time to begin what amounts to a clip show of things that were unfit to air. GO TEAM!

Transformers The Movie The Game- I think I did enough complaining about this one in largely unrelated postings to get the point across. It’s a horrible movie tie-in game, made even more shameful by a half-decent portable version coming out a week before to less fanfare. When I get started about this game, I can’t stop myself- and while that would have made for a feature in length, it wouldn’t have been anything I hadn’t already said:

• Crap physics (slow, floaty debris, can’t pick items up without kicking them away, explosions knock you backwards- even when the explosion hit you in the back…)
• Annoying missions (FIGHT SOME DRONES! THAT ONE’S INVINCIBLE TIL YOU THROW SHIT AT IT. WHOOPS, GOOD LUCK PICKING UP SHIT TO THROW! NOW RUN TO THE NEXT ‘ACTION ZONE’ IN TWELVE SECONDS OR GAME OVER)
• The Worst Kind of Replay Value (collect Xty Energon Cubes, faction symbols, golden bananas to unlock cosmetic changes to the characters you can’t select freely!)

Already I can kind of feel my blood boiling thinking about that game, paying full price for it at release, rushing home like a giddy 24-year old kid, then finding out that it’s a crappy simulator of shiny robots throwing things around, and if you’re an Autobot, being scolded for throwing so much stuff around.

Knights in the Nightmare- I’m not entirely sure whether I love or hate this game. I jumped to an early reccomendation on Yggdra Union since I desperately wanted it to turn out as unique and fun as Riviera: The Promised Land, though in the end it was about the only Atlus game I purged from my collection with a passion.

Knights is fun, but the learning curve is like the stone wall in those Japanese cartoon bath houses that the perverted male lead always tries to climb over or peek through to see the neighboring women’s bath. It’s a straight vertical climb, with little cheating your way through or around it, but once you reach the summit and have an unobstructed view of jiggling, wide eyed girlflesh, the struggle somehow seems worth it, and you can’t get enough, even though you can’t actually go down and touch them or you’ll get comically flattened. Uh, I guess what I’m trying to say is if you like confusing, abusive relationships with people who speak another language and seem mysterious in spite of being two dimensional templates with neon hair, you’ll probably dig overcoming KitN’s learning curve. Grasping the plot might be even harder, though, but similarly rewarding when you realize that Knight #24 is THAT GUY who was there when X happened.

And perhaps, one day, STiNG will begin drawing the casts of their games as actual adults and teens instead of attempting to create some unholy union of the moe craze and Ride of the Valkyries.

Kamen Rider (SNES)- I couldn’t stop Rider Kicking left and right long enough to think up anything especially witty to say about a crap Final Fight knock-off that adheres slavishly to the original rubber suit designs. People, when you’re drawing the action, it’s okay to make them not look like men in floppy lizard costumes!

Star Fox Series- Maybe one day I’ll work on this one again. Basically, along the lines of Contrapalooza, a tribute to Nintendo’s red-headed stepchild (who isn’t Nester) until I realized that, yeah, there’s not a lot to defend as Nintendo tries to fix the unbroken with awkward on-foot exploration, pseudo-RTS play, and uh, Dinosaur Planet in general. I have a feeling if a Wii Star Fox is announced, it will begin with a spectatular shooting stage with a control set that’s simply poetry in motion, followed by six hours of shaking the WiiMote to keep the alcoholic and ailing Fox hard for his girlfriend. (Note: Star Fox Command features numerous endings best summed up with the phrase ‘drunken downward spiral’ at one part or another.)

Mighty Flip Champs!(DSiWare)- It’s a puzzle platformer from WayForward, combining their love of old school simplicity and game play and skinny anime women shakin’ dat ass. Not really a lot to comment on other than page after page of jokes about how the lead female seems to be dating a bloated fish person.

That New Bubble Bobble Game- My Bubble Bobble review was inspired by an IRC chat about stock features in modern games, applied to the silly and slapstick NES classic. About a week later, an actual new Bubble Bobble game came out on WiiWare alongside a new Adventure Island. Just for the sake of experimenting, tune in next week for something I like to call Roman Polanski’s Kickle Cubicle.

Bible Buffet- I got kicked outta Sunday school for giving Jesus eye lasers and finding the name ‘Dorcas’ hilarious. I simply cannot comment impartially on this shitty, shitty piece of shit.

Tagin’ Dragon- what.

I’m still playing Knights in the Nightmare, and a weird thing happened. The game system is making sense. I’m actually strategizing around the movement patterns of my units and not cussing the DS out because Duelists can inexplicably only move up and leftward.

So, I ask of you, gentle reader- is it a good thing that I’m putting the seemingly arbitrary rules behind me and working within them, or is it becoming rather inexcusable for games to not do things more flexibly and naturally? A knight can only move diagonally in chess, but chess probably only came about because armies murdering each other in life size scale is rather costly for non royalty.

If I start spouting nothing but Atlus propaganda, then the game has probably finished rewiring my brain completely. In this case, notify my next of kin (a housecat) and get your anti zombie shotguns ready to go.