Here we go with our latest roundtable discussion.  As always your feedback and participation are welcome!  This week we’re going to tackle those “Guilty Pleasures” in the gaming world, those efforts that are pretty much universally recognized as being complete and utter balls, but hey you just can’t get enough.

Dave:  Easy one.  Pit-Fighter for the Sega Genesis.  I’m fairly certain everyone in the world hates it, even obscure, indigenous tribes in the Amazon Basin.  I don’t care: this game is in my Genesis Top 5 and I played a lot of Sega 16-bitters back in the day.

Why I like it?  Well, it’s certainly not the graphics (the low-res proto-digitized characters were cheesy in the arcades and indechiperable on the home consoles) or the sound (yeah, probably the worst soundtrack ever and how many people in the audience yell “Whooaaaa-riigghhhtttt!”) or the storyline (really, do I even have to go into the storytelling nuances of a game called Pit-Fighter?)

But Holy Cow can this game be three tons of stupid fun, especially when you find a teammate who can appreciate the lunacy.  Granted finding a Pit-Fighter fan is like scoring a Honus Wagner baseball card at a yard sale, but if you can draft a comrade there is much amusement to be had.

The brawling gameplay is primitive yet can be satisfyingly brutal.  With two of you just beating down The Executioner, then hitting him while he’s on the ground over and over and over and over, that equals good times.

The character are hilarious, too.  Buzz, the glitchy roid-rager who can sometimes piledrive dudes from across the screen (Pro-Tip: one player picks up an enemy then throws him to Buzz who can catch the flying body in mid air and slam him down!  Totally studly!), Ty the kickboxer with the dope triple-spin kick move and Kato, who, well, sucks.

And then, on the other side, you’ve got The Executioner, who talks a lot of trash and has a scary name but is a complete doormat, Mad Miles the psycho Vietnam Vet, CC Rider, Angel, the hulking Chainman Eddie (Pro-Tip!  Try this minigame: crouch below Eddie’s head ram and if you stand up at just the right time he’ll rocket you across the screen!  See who can get flung the furthest! Awesomely done!), the fetishistic Masked Warrior and, of course, good old Southside Jim.

What awaits you if you are to emerge victorious?  A pile of money stacked under your forklift and enough Power Pills to put you on the DEA watch list.

Steve: I am a lover of bad games. I always tend to have at least one less than stellar offering that i’m boosting. Most recently it’s been Two Worlds. I hesitate to call Two Worlds an Oblivion clone, because that would mean it aspires to great things. It doesn’t. Two Worlds is a bloody mess in the presentation department. Out of control bloom lighting, pop in, sketchy framerate, missing cutscenes, and some of the absolute worst, most hideous, retarded, god-awful voice acting i’ve ever heard in my life (FORSOOTH!). What it does have, is a colossal, totally open world to explore with nary a load screen in sight, decent visual design, a truely awesome inventory system, a gaggle of weapons and armor to be worn, and a very cool system of character advancment. After spending just a little time with the game on my old PC, i couldn’t wait for the 360 version, which i have since played the ever-loving crapola out of. Sure the combat feels mindless, but it looks goddamn awesome when you get your mitts on dual blades and your character starts spinning them around like a whirling spin-top from hell. I’d call the game a “flawed masterpiece”, but that’s overselling it. It’s definitely  a gem that will appeal to a very specific school of old-tymey RPG players (or fans of the even more abyssmal ‘Gothic’ series on PC). There was a great Collector’s Edition released that came with the usual trimmings, as well as a pen-and-paper hardcover Role-playing  rulebook. That takes my vote as most “oddly-fitting” and also “most Bitchin” collector’s edition extra of all time. There’s also a sequel coming. BLISS!

Forsooth! Verily tis Two Worlds M'Lady! Mayhap I be on time for thine SCA meeting?

Adam: I’ve lost count. Seriously. The worse the game, the more I played it as a kid. But one that immediately comes to mind, resplendent in its awfulness and complete buffoonery, is Time Killers (1992, arcade).

First you say it, then you do it!

After the violent explosion of Mortal Kombat in arcades, game developers got it into their heads fast that copious amounts of red would translate into green–money for them. In this spirit of shortsightedness and complete wrongitude, Time Killers was born; a fighting game that looks like it was crayon-drawn by an addled seven year-old in a mental institution. The premise: Death has traveled through time to collect up archetypal warriors in the heat of victory and dump them all into various locations to fight to the death. Why? Because Death is a douche.

As a fighting game, it was utter rubbish: mushy controls, gravity like a Slinky, confusing control schemes (a head button?) and let’s face it, stupid design elements. Again, crazy kid with crayons. But oh, did it have blood. It had stupid amounts of blood in ways that made no sense. Any move with your sword/laser sword/chainsaw/axe/whatever had a chance on connect to tear asunder an oponnent’s arm–either the right or the left one. The arm would fly off in a gigantic splurt of blood, but the match would go on. If Monty Python ever taught us anything, it is that a man can survive both arms being chopped off and live to kick another day.

It's just a flesh wound!

Do you understand what I’m saying here? You can chop both arms off a dude and he still comes at you, kicking and headbutting! Bet you were wondering about that “head” button, eh? Even more entertaining, by mashing all five butons down, you had a chance of decapitating your opponent, immediately ending the match. A special “fatality” was also included, where you went Zorro on your opponent and dismember him from top to bottom in a gigantic torso pile of arms and heads. Then, next round, you just REAPPEAR AS IF NOTHING HAPPENED. IN THE SAME MATCH. Yes.

HIS HEAD ASPLODE

Anyone who prowled the arcades would laugh if you spent any money on this game. Sure, it was fun to look at, and laugh at, but playing it repeatedly? No one did this. It was trash. It was foolish. It had a control scheme like a flight simulator. And yet, there was an oddly zen satisfaction in winning a match against an opponent by kicking and head-butting him to death, because you have no arms attached, throwing your bloody stumps into the air in victory.

Jon: I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who thought that Time Killers was the **** back in those days of fanny packs and neon coloured windbreakers.

This is a bit of a funny topic for me, because I have an odd medical condition that doesn’t allow me to accept that games are bad when they clearly are.  For example, I OWNED Pit-Fighter on SNES, I OWNED Ironsword on NES (probably because my parents bought my game gifts at Bi-Way or Canadian Tire).  This one here though, is a little closer to my heart.

Somewhere, Steve Power just started to cry.

Silhouette Mirage was hailed as a platforming classic when it was originally released in Japan for the Sega Saturn.  I scooped up a copy immediately when it was ported over to the PlayStation in late 1999.  Who was I to complain about the apparent changes that had been made when localizing the game for a North American audience?  It was an action side-scroller by Treasure.  After Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy, Treasure could’ve taken a poop in a game case and i would’ve been first in line.  Who cared that the “improvements” made for Western gamers included making that game horrifically unbalanced and difficult.

Waiter? There's a WTF in my soup.

Silhouette Mirage, like the rest of Treasure’s side-scrollers featured a rather unique gimmick.  The game’s enemies were divided by two seperate alignments, and could only be attacked with the opposite alignment.  Silhouettes could only be hit with Mirage attacks and so forth.  The player charcater, a witch named Shyna, was split down the middle with each alignment and would attack accordingly depending on which side she was facing.  If that wasn’t complex enough, in the PlayStation port, gamers were given an energy limitation to how many attacks they had, and were forced to hit enemies with their own alignment in order to refill weapon energy.  The more useful attacks all drained the energy guage within seconds, so this tedium could not be avoided without making the game unplayably difficult.  What was originally a fast paced game in the vein of Contra and Mega Man, boiled down to having to mindlessly try to hit every enemy with non-damaging attacks to try and refill energy and coins before finally killing them and moving on.  Levels took nearly 45 minutes to clear at this pace.

Something's wrong!! They're attacking us with different colors!!

The real pity here is Silhouette Mirage would’ve been Grade-A without these meaningless changes.  Side-scroller’s don’t need to be padded for length, you’re supposed to be able to breeze through them in a day or two, anything more than that is tedious.  The graphics were bright and pretty, filled with towering enemies and impressive effects for large attacks.  Bosses were standard Treasure fare, great battles with unique little twists.  It’s really only the “improvements” made by Working Designs for the Western release that made the game fall apart.  Me, I played the living hell out of Silhouette Mirage, despite having no one I can really share the experience with.  My love of this game can be summed up in the following screenshot.  One cannot appreciate the scaling effects at play in a screen capture…but that doesn’t change the fact that gamers get to fight a chauffeur clown in a hockey mask.

Duuuhhhhhhrrrrrrr!!