on his blog the other day, edmund mcmillen wrote, “it seems like shooters hit a wall with metal slug.”

weapon of choice is an xbox community game in the spirit of contra or metal slug: a lone soldier with a gun as big as her body shooting holes in horrible monsters as she cuts a path through the jungle. i sometimes enjoy games that are gleefully violent, and this game is that: gleeful. most of these “run and gun” games promise an image of a frenzied rush through the heart of a fight, a glorious mess of energy and chaos, that is utterly at odds with how they play: methodically, tediously, the tiniest misstep meaning the death of your avatar.

weapon of choice is full of ideas, but its genius idea is called “deathbrushing”: when your character is close to something dangerous (like a monster or its glowing death-spit) the game slows down until either you’ve maneuvered your character away from the threat or she’s been incapacitated by it. it’s not a new idea, but in this kind of one-hit-kill run and gun game it’s revelatory: there are no more cheap losses, no more tedium. the player is liberated from precision, given the freedom to be sloppy and to run right through and to make a mess.

all of the game is that same great mess of creativity, wet with the energy and enthusiasm of hobbyists. it’s the sort of game a kid who loves videogames might design in a daydream, and it looks like the sort of pictures that kid might doodle while daydreaming, in all the hot colors of imagination. it costs the equivalent of i think five us dollars; or you could spend the same amount of xbox points on an awful version of the original contra by digital eclipse / backbone entertainment, the consistent source for cheap, disrespectful ports of games that deserve better.