Punk

No, you aren't going crazy. Yes, that picture is accurate. That is Mario, and he is indeed fighting an MS Paint shit monster. I should add that a MIDI rendition of The Phantom Menace battle music is played throughout this scenario. I should also add that this boss fight is broken and obtuse, and so far I can't figure out how to pass it. I think this segment encapsulates the experience of Mario's Adventure for me, and is pretty fucking hilarious. Super Marco (Mario's autistic cousin) is also entertaining in the same MST3K kind of way, and is tantamount to playing a platformer made by Andy Warhol circa 1986. Today is an exploration of amateur design, a meditation on the earnest and unintended Shit Games out there.

I don't often feature two-player games, with people whacking on the opposite site of the keyboard, because, well, the basic dynamic sucks. And anyway, we PC gamers are basically recluses. If we had friends, we'd be playing board or tabletop roleplaying games, and even when we play online, we generally prefer to solo instead of dealing with a bunch of whining guild mates. So I'm left testing a 2-player game playing left-hand-against-right, which really sucks, and anyway, I suspect the portion of our readers who'd play such a thing is small.

But Make My Head Grow is a hoot.

Billy Suicide is the flagship title of Mike Lasala, who has the trademark style of featuring a protagonist who may as well be him, with photoreal frames circa the 3DO era. This game is somewhat similar to a game I wanted to do back in 2007, except in my take on it your suicide was inevitable and the things you did beforehand would determine how people behaved at your funeral, and the resulting aftermath. Billy doesn't dig quite as deep as that causal model may have, but the episodic structure of this game suggests that the one-day-at-at-time model could bear out in interesting ways.

He's done it again, Paolo Pedercini has made a fun, polished, punk-positive satire, but this time instead of focusing on a particular industry or scandal, he's taking a broad-view of a world economy driven and chained by oil. In Oiligarchy you play the CEO of an international oil company, drilling your way to riches and dominance. I've been looking forward to this game since Paolo mentioned it to me at Games for Change in June, he told me "the better you are at the game, the worse you'll do."

From the maker of ROM Check Fail comes a parody of Little Big Planet that subverts the gameplay as well as the nameplay -- like a lit'ol something I did when I was high.

The first thing I thought was "what are those, ninjas?" It turns out, there were not ninjas.

When I first heard of Muslim Massacre I figured I'd pass. It was only after Danny sent me a link, in light of his parley with the creator, that I decided to give it a serious look. The game is dank, addicting, well crafted in its Robotronic glee.

The Free Culture Game is not up to the standards of Paolo's usual propaganda, but the angle of this particular piece kinda puts you in a meta-statement mood regarding the analysis of games as propaganda, otherwise persuasive, and how games about markets and social systems can sometimes also be about games in general, both phenomenologically and in terms of the metaphysical boundaries of what games can be.