48) Time Warp Tickers

And we thought Manchester (44) was royally screwed up (and it is!). Time Warp Tickers, though, is truly one of the most fucked up gaming interpretations conceivable. The whole thing looks like what a freaky, eccentric pot-smoking artist would dream if the dream was freaky, eccentric and smoking pot. The doorway window thing suspended in the background... The severed fingers you control... The unidentifiable enemies... The hands and signs protruding from the ceiling point to the madness of the game's creators. Don't say things equally bereft of sanity have been present in other Action 52 titles, because they're not. Well, except the unidentifiable enemies, they're pretty much everywhere. Time Warp Tickers' location near the final leg of the Action 52 conglomerate gives the impression the folks at Active Enterprises really just enslaved a few semi-literate vagrants off the street and forced them to write code and shit. This would explain alot. The minds of those vagrants, even though they clearly didn't know what they were doing, were starting to play tricks on them, as even they seemed to realize they were constructing an instrument with dangerously high destructive capabilities.

And yet, we haven't even discussed the craziest parts of the game. The most insane Time Warp Tickers-related feature, besides the needlessly complicated and stupid manual description ("As the ticker continues, you must stop the hour blasters and jump the time warp to stop the tickers." I certainly hope English isn't their first language), would be what happens upon the defeat of an enemy or of the pale fingers you move around. The result is not an explosion (action 52 seems to like these in case you haven't noticed), a dramatic wail or a disappearing into thin air. Rather, the defeated will transform into the word Time? interrogatively stated just like that.

These quirks aren't so far out that they completely mask what it is, and Action 52 game. The graphics and bright, clear and vibrant, and they could pass for graphics of an NES game in 1991 if they didn't repeat every eight steps. Jumping and poking at your enemies are both much more work than they really ought to be, so they perfectly fit in with the rest of the Action 52 crowd here. Still, though, leave it to the fine folks at Active Enterprises to create, unintentionally I reckon, the most insane game ever. Finally, a reason besides unphathomable awfulness to remember an Action 52 entry.