I'm not entirely sure what I should feel in the presence of a game like this. I'm not ambivalent about my thoughts on the game. Kick Challenger sucks. It sucks harder than any game I've played in a good while. But what do I make of that? Am I supposed to be glad knowing that for all the mediocre to bad games I've played as of late (Lunar, Hacker, Medal of Honor), things could always get worse? Or should I be mad that a group of business-people convinced some unwitting consumers to pay for digitized suffering?........I'll go with the second one. What the fuck, Vap Inc.?

I mean, where do I even begin? The most notable gameplay mechanic seems a logical place to start: how you move. Rather than simply move forward, you have to move each of your tomato's feet (yes, you play a tomato with feet) individually. That means you move a foot, press A to plant it, move the other foot, press A again, and then repeat for an entire fucking level. Now does that sound like fun? What's that? It sounds needlessly tedious and repetitive? Well, that's because it is. And it's not like you can tune this out, either. You have to deliberately perform these actions all throughout the game, and the game moves at a slow enough pace that you have no choice but to watch this plodding mediocrity unfold before you. There's not even a rhythm to lock yourself into. One minute, you're plowing through a relatively easy section, and the next, you have to slowly calculate each and every step you take. It's inconsistent enough that you'll notice. It's like the game is drawing attention to its own flaws.

OK, so the one thing you're doing most in the game is the exact reason why it's not fun to play. I could probably end the review there, but alas, things get far worse from here. Like the levels. I guess the developers knew that it was a bad idea to base a game's difficulty solely around inconveniencing the player, so they designed the levels to introduce another form of difficulty. Unfortunately, it's not much better. Kick Challenger's a labyrinth game, I guess, in that the challenge derives from finding the right path through a given level. Unfortunately, it's also a labyrinth game where you essentially can't go back. Once the screen has scrolled past a certain point, you're not going back down. Not without an overly convoluted warp back to some previous area, at least. So every level just degrades into a lengthy game of trial, error, and frustration. Why the frustration? Because the level design is so needless convoluted that there's virtually no chance you'll remember which path was the right one! (There are some other problems with this set-up, but we'll get to those in a moment.) The enemies flying at you might make things better, since they're moving targets and that adds a welcome sense of urgency to the game. However, they infinitely (and quickly) respawn, making this chore of a game even more annoying.

But what really makes this game so bad are the graphics. I guess the developers were going for a Marble Madness motif, but it just doesn't work on any level. Most of the time, I have absolutely no idea what I am and am not allowed to step on. That's a pretty big deal in a game based entirely on navigation. If I can't tell what's safe to step on, the game just boils down to hateful trial and error. It certainly doesn't help that the game has no problems flippantly changing its own rules. You see that door in front of you? The door that looks like all the others you could open? Well, you can't open this one. Why? Fuck you, that's why. If you want to get by, you can kick in the wall, even though you could never do that before. Or maybe you can just walk through it, because why not? Why the fuck not? It gets so bad that I'm legitimately surprised the game shipped in such a horrid state of disrepair.

How does this game even exist? Why? Who looked at this game and thought that people would actually want to play it? It's like for every one possibly good idea Kick Challenger has, it finds the one most efficient way to make that idea as unenjoyable as possible. It's as though somebody sucked every last bit of irony out of I Wanna Be The Guy. That's the only way to explain how this game was so poorly assembled........Wait. This all sounds familiar. You know, I seem to remember Princess Tomato eliciting a similar amount of rage from me. This can't be a coincidence. What is it about tomato-based NES games that makes them so offensively horrible? Perhaps I should test this idea further.

Review Synopsis

• Who's the sadistic asshole who thought designing a game around a Zero Punctuation joke would ever be a good idea?
• I can't even think of a funny joke or comparison for how bad the level design is. It exists in its own plane of suck.
• I'm pretty sure "The Corpse of Jackson Pollock" is credited as the lead graphic designer for the game. And the programmer. And maybe even the composer.

After....that, I need something to remind me that good video games exist. So how about some motherfuckin' metal Fire Emblem?

This was supposed to be Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Unfortunately, something wasn't working with the control scheme, and I don't think I would've been able to get through the game without fixing the problem (IE I couldn't attack). So instead, we're getting Puzzle Boy, released as Kwirk outside Japan. Apparently, there do exist good tomato-based games for the NES, because this is one of them. (Let's just ignore the fact that I played the TurboGrafx version.)

Good to play, but not good to blog about. The game has one idea, and that's it. There's no story to bullshit about, or fancy graphics to gawk at. Puzzle Boy has a startlingly utilitarian focus. I can't really criticize it for that, but I can't really praise it for that, either. Puzzle Boy simple exists. That is all I can say about this game.

OK, maybe some context would help. Puzzle Boy, as you can't tell from the title, is a game about pushing. Push blocks around a level so you can get to the stairs at the end. Some of the blocks rotate on spot, there are holes to worry about, a.....no, that's everything there is to the game. Then again, the game doesn't need much else. It does enough with what it has. Eighty screens of pushing blocks to get to stairs. That may sound like too much for so little, but there's a surprising amount of variety in the puzzles. Combine that with a mildly rewarding sense of challenge and an average running time of about a minute, and you've got a game that's pretty good at burning a couple of minutes. Nothing more.

Wait. Now that I think about it, that's probably the only real complaint I have about the game: it isn't ambitious enough. I know that sounds like projecting, but you're only working with three elements the entire game: blocks, holes, and rotate-y blocks. Maybe the game could've introduced some other stuff in there to test my brain a bit more. Maybe blocks that continue going in the direction you push them, or blocks that aren't a square or a rectangle. That might've livened up the game more, because as it is, there's nothing to get terribly excited about. Not that Puzzle Boy is bad or anything. It's just....average. Really, really average. I can't really tell if that's better or worse than what Kick Challenger put me through. It's better. Duh.

Review Synopsis

• Puzzle Boy.
• Also known as Kwirk.