Junk Food for the Brain 

…and Onechanbara: Samurai Bikini Squad 

By Coxster 

You know, some games are so goddamn awful that I’m surprised they ever make it to the shelves.  Most of the shovel-ware games that are released these days are luckily (or unluckily) set forth on the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 2 like a horde of demons sent to lower the standards, but there are more than a handful of titles that should be avoided on the Xbox 360 as well.  Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad is one of them…and I can’t stop playing it!

No, this game is not as awesome as this screenshot implies...seriously

I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t the richest kid growing up and ended up playing a lot of the budget games on the old Megadrive and Amiga 500 or if it’s simply because I have low standards, but I really have no idea where that little voice inside my head comes from that tells me that playing fundamentally flawed games is somehow fun.  To show how depraved I am, I actually chose to play Onechanbara over Halo Wars (which is freakin awesome by the way).  I found myself content to wander around a city slaying zombies in a game that has some of the worst graphics and gameplay available on the Xbox 360.  And no it wasn’t because they are Samurai Bikini zombie slayers, as awesome as that may sound, it was because I love crap games.  I find something funny about the budget game’s approach to level design, to piss poor presentation with menus that should’ve gone extinct when the Megadrive did, to gameplay that is simply reduced to a series of button mashing.  Seriously I love games like Dynasty Warriors where tapping the same button over and over again sooths and amuses me.   

OMGZ! OMGZ! BEST GAME EVER!.. um..WRONG!

Recently I had a go at my girlfriend for watching shows like Big Brother, the Biggest Loser and Masterchief, and she replied that after a long day at work, sometimes your brain just needs to sit down and watch some junk food.  While I initially scoffed at her comeback, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.  I like these crap and simple games because they don’t require any thought process to play them.  Their repetitive and unchallenging nature allows me to veg out in front of the TV and relax.  At first I thought that maybe I was playing them because I’ve always thought the worse something is, the better, now I think that maybe it’s my way of getting visual junk food to the brain.  Maybe all my book reading, all the documentaries I watch and the work that I do have reduced me to a simple button masher at the end of a long day.

[Insert Free Willy Jokes Here]

The critic in me says that you should avoid games like Onechanbara like the plague, but the lazy man inside my head says you should buy it, veg out and press x over and over again.  You really shouldn’t listen to lazy people.