Stardash

Stardash hates you. It hates you and it wants you to fail. More than that, it wants you to curl up in a
ball, weeping and clawing at your scalp.

Sure, it looks like a cute and endearing trip down memory lane, to the time when handheld gaming meant the Game Boy, and summers seemed to last forever.

But don't be fooled. It hates you.

Stardash is a platformer that looks like it's wiggled its way out of the early '90s - all black lines and blocky sprites. It casts you as a bobble-headed Alex Kidd lookalike whose job it is to get from one end of a level to the other without dying.

Simple, you might think. Wrong. Stardash calls for pixel-perfect timing, split-second reactions, and the sort of rapid finger work that would make Liberace cry.

You work your way through 40 stages, leaping on the heads of your enemies, collecting coins, and dying at almost every turn. This is hardcore gaming at its most unforgiving, and it makes no bones about that whatsoever.

The slide out D-pad and buttons on the Xperia Play are a godsend, allowing far more precision than you'd be able to get from touchscreen controls, but even then this isn't a game for the faint-hearted.

In spite of its toughness, Stardash still manages to be fun. Sure, it's difficult, but it's charming enough that you can forgive it for trying to kill you all the time.

Stardash hates you, but it hates you in a way that means you can't help but love it. It's stupidly hard, utterly unforgiving, and a little bit brilliant.