Happy 1925, Earnest Evans

I realize it's far too late to make some post recapping everything that happened to me in 2007, and that's just as well, because I decided not to write about it and ended up playing El Viento instead. I didn't like 2007 anyway.

But man, do I like El Viento. It's hardly the best action-platform game for the old Sega Genesis, but I can't get enough of all the thoroughly insane crap that Wolf Team threw into it with no regard for logic or cohesion. This delicate theme runs through the game itself, what with Al Capone driving a hi-tech tank (in the 1920s, no less) on the first level, Annet surfing on a dolphin in the fourth stage, and the second level being a Mount Rushmore maze full of trampolines and smiley-faced gun turrets.

Yet it's even more nuts in the story sequences, which are nonsensical mash-ups of Indiana Jones movies, Prohibition gangster stuff, and vaguely Lovecraftian conspiracies about burbling preternatural gibbous squamous eldritch horrors from unknowable realms beyond the veils of space and time. It's also hard to tell just who's saying what, since almost every cutscene consists of a single bizarrely framed image.



This one's my favorite. It's like that picture-making minigame in Super Mario Bros. 3, but someone screwed up by landing on anime Al Capone's face instead of Annet's authentic native Peruvian belly shirt.


And that's El Viento, probably the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth best game I played last year. Happy 2008, everyone.



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