Introducing the Mazda5 Game Project

Last month, my trusty Mazda Protege was rear-ended by someone a half-block from my apartment. Seeing as it was an 11-year-old car, even the modest damage it suffered caused my insurance company to total out the Protege and pay me off. This forced us to move forward early on a plan to get a bigger car for the family. We settled on the Mazda5.

We like the car a lot; it drives well and seats 6 if needed. The one we bought came with a DVD system. We weren’t in the market for one, and frankly don’t need it, but it was the only Mazda5 at the dealership that otherwise fit our needs, so we took it.

A couple of weeks after getting the new car, Queta did some investigating and found that the DVD system also came with a wireless game controller, and 30 games pre-loaded onto it. Usually, a discovery like this would warrant joyous cheers. Then we tested a couple of the games.

What’s the opposite of joyous cheering?

Though I have only sampled a few, I have extrapolated that all the games are cheaply made, sub-NES piles of crap. The controls are terrible, the sound and graphics harsh and grating, and the amount of fun produced from them somehow in the negative range. So, I have decided to do what any sane, non-masochistic person would do in this situation: I’m gonna review them all.

My plan is simple: provide a review of two games each week on this very blog. These will not be in-depth reviews by any means, not only due to time constraints, but also due to the fact that I can’t see myself playing any of these games for any longer than a few minutes before I pull a “nanny from The Omen.”

Me after only four.

Following is the complete list of 30 games, so you have a rough idea of how bad this could get. I don’t plan on going in order; I’ll just pick two that stick out for me each week.

1. Super Fight 1
2. Exist
3. Blob Man
4. Hitting Mice
5. Highway Racing
6. Pop Monster
7. Table Tennis
8. Edacity Snakes
9. Triple
10. Shooting Balloons
11. Robot
12. M Day
13. Danger Zone
14. Hua Rong Dao
15. Aether Fighter
16. Helli Mission
17. Final Man
18. Twin Cards
19. Archer
20. Corridor
21. Horrible Area
22. Maze Puzzle
23. Convection
24. Close Quarters
25. Pulverize
26. Diamond
27. Undersea
28. Twin Copters
29. Way Out
30. Hot Speed

God help me.