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I like the original BIT.TRIP series because they were all super-unique experiences that were abstract as hell and required you to look closer to see what was going on. The whole series was a commentary on what it's like to be a person-to live and die-and for your whole self, soul and body to return back to from whence it came, to be a part of everything else.

There were some goofy cutscenes but for the most part the series remained pretty serious, while not having to have a man with 5 o' clock shadow commenting on war. It was neat because each time I downloaded one of the games, it was a fresh experience with concept presented in ways that I'd never seen or really thought of before.

Runner2 starts off and there are hills with monocles and mustaches-that's fine. Runner had trees with glasses and other stupid s**t like that (which I still complained about at the time). Then you get to unlock a new character in world 2. Spoilers below.

Reverse Merman. He's a fish on top and a man on the bottom, wearing whitie-tighties and sandals. Pretty funny and seems to be par for the course because the first character you unlock is a pickle man named Uncle Dill. Reverse Merman looks a bit... phallic, though, which is slightly strange. Oh well.

Then you play as him and see that he has huge, hanging, dangling balls. HUGE. When he gets impaled into the target at the end of a stage, they hang off (and it looks bad, kind of like a d**k with balls is going into his a**). Pretty... weird. He is also a checkpoint host for world 2, so if you don't play as him, he sits by the checkpoint and runs with you if you jump over it for a moment. His checkpoint building is a house with a giant crab on it that has a sign which reads "We have crabs!"

...Did Suda have input on this game?

It just seems really weird. I get they were going for something different, but... I don't know. I like crude humor, but having unlocked a character with big dangling balls just doesn't even seem funny to me. I cringed seeing "We have crabs!" What happened? The worst the first six games ever got was having CV dance in a cutscene or a sign that read "BURGER MOUTH."

That's what's mainly bothering me. Then there's the couple of new moves I've seen that are kind of weird-both loop de loops. Why not just add something else rather than a second one? Then there's a few issues where I can't really tell what is an enemy and what's not and stuff. Too much going on and it's hard to see what you need to see. I've also had the camera not move to snap to me fast enough, resulting in me not being able to see gold that I need at all.

And the cannon thing is ******** stupid.

Also, just found a stage called "Morning Wood." I get it. I GET IT

Now, everything's exploded, there's a whole world of gamers on the Internet, everything's connected. Nowadays, you don't go to a game store often and see a big game, like a Mario or Pokemon game or something that you didn't even realize was coming out. When you go on the Internet, it overwhelms you with information on anything you could possibly imagine. It's even got information on you.

I have nostalgia for the Internet, too. Web 1.0. People who knew about Sonic games I didn't know and had art I hadn't seen, people who'd gotten further in Mario 64 than I had, people who knew secrets about how the AI in Super Smash Bros. worked. People who made MIDI versions of Sonic music so you could listen to it even when you weren't playing the game. Yet even then, the Internet, too, seemed smaller, quieter and sort of niche compared to today. You couldn't find everything. Definitely a lot less pervasive, too. I was even blown away the first time I discovered YouTube in 2005 or whatever, and spent my lunch breaks at school alone, on the computer, just being amazed that I could search for any video or song and it would probably be there. It was the whole world in videos, I could browse forever. It was cool at first, and now it's just like, oh, everything's here. There's no mystery anymore, no point in using your imagination. With the Internet as it is today at your fingertips and up your a**, you may as well know everything there is to know, because all the information you could pretty much ever ask for is there.