Syobon Action

The Good
Heavy on the gimmicks and light on the content, Syobon Action (or Cat Mario) is a monstrously hard parody of Super Mario Bros. If you've played Super Mario Frustration, Asshole Mario, or more ambitious games like I Wanna Be the Guy you'll know what's in store here. Just a game that relentlessly kills you at every step.

The only reason these games exist is so people can brag on internet forums that they defeated them. It's like the Olympics for keyboard warriors. "I only died 342 times!" "Pussy! I only died 341 times!" With the exception of I Wanna Be the Guy (which is a very good game), none of these games are actually fun on their own. In fact, most of them suck. Hardcore. Syobon Action sucks just as hard as the rest, but I will say in its defense that it sucks in a way that's fairly pleasurable. (Just like your mom! WAKA WAKA WAKA!)

Here is a sample five minutes of Syobon Action:

"Okay, so this looks exactly like Mario, except the hero's a cat. I'm moving right, I'm jumping to hit a...WHAT?! That brick moved away from me! Okay, I just managed to hit a brick, and it spawned a mushroom, I'll get it to roid up my cat, and...huh? The mushroom killed me! Restarting. I'm moving right, ignoring the mushroom, jumping over a pipe and...crap, something just flew out of the pipe and killed me again. Restarting, moving right, ignoring the mushroom, jumping over the pipe to avoid the flying thing, and...a brick fell on me. Great. Restarting. Move right. Ignore the pipe, dodge the flying thing, dodge the falling brick, and...the ground fell out from underneath me. Fuck that noise, does anyone have a college application?"

It's pretty unrelenting. But the game does follow its own internal logic. Basically, every time you would do something in Mario, don't do it here unless there is no other way to proceed. You know how you could ride a pipe down to a secret treasure room in Mario? Do that here and you'll end up in a deathtrap. Even the final boss isn't defeated in a typical way. Use some lateral thinking and you'll go quite a way towards making the game easier for yourself.

There's one feature I REALLY appreciated. You can press the space bar to speed up the game by 2X. You'll restart a lot of times here and it's nice to be able to blitz through the easy parts at double speed.

The Bad
You finish the game and get a weird nothing of an ending. The creator was probably paying tribute to those slap-in-the-face ending screens so many old-school games have, but it doesn't work. I've busted my balls here, and I want a reward.

As I said before, the only reason to play this game is so you can claim you've played it. It's not very fun, except in an "ouch" masochistic sense, and it's haphazardly designed in places, with lots of puzzles that you can just stumble through.

And, when you get to the core of things, it's not even very hard. Sure, I racked up a three digit death count on my first try, but all the challenges are based on memorizing the locations of boobie traps. Once you've played the game once and know the layout of the levels you'll have no more problems with it.

The Bottom Line
Treat this game like a drug. The correct procedure is to do it, and then forget about it. Sure, it's kind of cute. But it's not so much a game as a spiritual exercise in patience and perseverance. Definitely could have been better.