Talking about the greatest games gone by has made me realize something: I am totally over this release season. My two most anticipated games, Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge, have come, been played out, and re-shelved, and I have a feeling very little will touch those two titles in terms of uniqueness and ambition.
Normally I would turn to my 360 backlog in this situation, but the NXE is actually turning me off to the system (my verdict: they made some cute fluffy characters for the grandma demographic, then put them in front of a sickeningly ad-riddled interface that will look to grandma like the deck of the Enterprise. Yes, the best part is the blade-based guide system, but that used to be the entire dashboard. The whole thing is an exercise in corporate cynicism, flushing a well-meaning and needed update straight down the tubes).
So instead I’ll turn to the next best thing, GameTap. I love GameTap because it gives me access to a lot of weird, weird games for a monthly fee that is unreasonably low. It also has this little GottaGettaGame spinner which picks something out at random for you. This is by far the best thing about the service. So let’s give it a spin and see what I have to play today:
Awesome, something I’ve never heard of. Time to do some research!
GameTap says that Paddle Fighter is a Sega Genesis game from 1991, released by Sega only in Japan. All signs point to it being an internally-developed game. It was released in a variety of clumsy ways—on Sega’s archaic MegaNet internet service, on a compilation disc for the Sega CD called Sega Games Can Vol. 1, and in a shovelware collection packed in with the JVC WonderMega console. These are not good signs! But the wheel picked it for me, so what can I do.
After some Japanese language plot, I’m told that I’m BinBowie, a boy who rips his sleeves off all of his t-shirts. I am about to face, apparently, Joe Camel, in…
Space air hockey?
Yep, this is an air hockey game. It’s spiced up a little bit with a power bar that lets me use special moves like goal shields and puck grabbing, but other than that it’s just plain old air hockey. The AI is atrocious. All it does is repeat going down the same diagonal paths, over and over and way too fast. It makes the game look like it has a nervous twitch.
This makes me feel bad for Paddle Fighter, so I let it win. Once again GameTap has shown me (and now, you) horrors that would otherwise never have been found. I think we can all agree that this is better than scrolling around pages of Microsoft-endorsed content.