Rock, Paper, Shotgun

For my sins, I hadn’t been to the essential Play This Thing for a while. But something reminded me, and exactly at the right time as I got introduced to Rom Check Fail which manages to be exactly the right game as exactly the right time. It’s not only a brilliant piece of meta-gamery (I pass it around my IM list and the best description so far’s from Simon Parkin who describes it as “Wario Ware performed by the Reduced Shakespeare Company”). It takes an assortment of retro game characters, sound files, graphics and actions, then slams it all in together. Every few seconds everything changes. So you switch between playing as the Asteroids ship fighting Space Invaders in a Bubble Bobble level, or Zelda versus Arkanoid bricks, or – meta!!!! – Pacman being chased by the Gauntlet Ghosts. For God’s sake, play it already, but there will be lashings of gibberish beneath the cut for when you get back.
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