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Playing viscous goo

If you briefed Tim Burton to design a modern Super Mario Bros, and sequestered Roman Dirge to do the character art, you might end up with something as good as Gish. There are two things in particular that have won my heart:

1) You play a grinning tarball, so one of your most effective methods of dispatching an enemy is to land on their head, attach yourself, and wriggle around until it pops off their body. I never knew I always wanted to do that.

2) The musical score is brilliant, and contributes significantly to the hilarity. The track in the third region, "the seven planes of hehenna", is a kind of Persian-inspired death metal.

I play computer games very infrequently these days (in a former life I built them) and most of the jokes at Penny Arcade go over my head now. But I'm hooked on Gish. The only thing I'd change is the name, which reminds me of that old and mopey Smashing Pumpkins album of the same name.

Joseph | | Comments(3)