Artwork is flatly par for the course, animations leave a bit to be desired, but I just hacked at a weird, pelvic-thrusting goblin-thing in the face with the axe from Quake. What's not to like?

Bit.Trip Runner delights the senses with cheerful, dynamic techno music as your adorable pixilated character runs across a surreal, minimalistic 3D world. Despite the simplistic setup, you'll find yourself having a wonderful time careening across the map leaving streaks of rainbows in your wake.

Then level 11 comes along, you've spent two hours just reaching the halfway point of the map, and your hands are shaking from the ____th time you messed up that pixel-perfect hop and slammed into a wall and the music is starting to grind against your eardrums and you don't even want to think about getting gold anymore and who thought repeating that UFO jump eight times in a row was a good idea and the game froze for a split second ruining your run-

Bit.Trip Runner is an excellent game for people that like to get pissed off at terrible video games. As for sane players, avoid the game like the plague, punch anyone in the face who praises it, and set fire to any Gaijin Games developer you see.

Bionic Commando is a game that is hampered by a case of consolitis, a shitty save system, horrible swaths of deadly blue fog that kill you if you so much as even LOOK at it funny, and a twist climax that's such a horrendous slap in the face you'd swear the writers accidentally swapped scripts with someone's anime fanfiction.

But if you can manage to stomach that, you'll find a game with a tricky-but-surprisingly-fluid and intuitive swinging mechanic, lovingly-rendered maps, and the best game music ever composed . Evading streams of tracer-fire with frantic rappelling before launching yourself off of a bridge with a perfect swing that allows you to zip-kick a gunship set to the tune of "The Gauntlet" was one of the most exhilarating experiences I've had from a piece of software in a long time.

If you ever find yourself with a few extra bucks and some time to kill, give this underdog a try, then lament at how its commercial failure will ensure that a sequel will never happen.