Backflip Madness

Backflip Madness shouldn't be any good. This is a game that holds up to no scrutiny whatsoever, features a paper thin premise, and trades in frustration rather than difficulty.

And yet, even as you try and despise it, raging against the ugly graphics and stupid controls, it weaves its nonsensical web around you. And before long you're laughing. Laughing as your backflip artist crumples into a mutilated heap, pixellated blood spraying from his hideously bent limbs.

Flipside

The game is controlled with a single button. You play as a tracksuit-wearing acrobat who looks like a piece of clip art, and it's your job to do flips in a horrible-looking 3D world. You tap the button to start your crouch, then tap it again to jump.

You tap it again when you're airborne to tuck in your legs, and a final tap straightens you out again for a perfect landing. Or, more often than not, a painful and hilarious imperfect landing. The finest I've performed thus far involved ending up impaled on a tree.

In a world of believable physics engines and motion capture, Backflip Madness is an anachronism. It trades on its ugliness and incompetence to create an experience that's not like anything you've ever played before.

That's not necessarily a good thing, and there are times when you'll want to hunt down whatever twisted mind made this game and get them to fix it, but there are also times when you'll be grinning from ear to ear.

As the game goes on you'll be able to add extra moves to your flips, stretching your legs or posing in mid-air as you plummet down the side of a three storey building.

Playing Backflip Madness is sort of like listening to a conversation about a joke you've never heard. Sometimes you'll laugh, sometimes you'll be confused, and sometimes you'll wish that you were doing something else entirely.

This is a game that's impossible to recommend, but one you should probably play. And that's Backflip Madness in a nutshell. It's a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a nonsensical game about jumping up and down.