Good – Advance Wars (GBA, Nintendo)

I do like the art style for the first three Wars games we saw in North America, although the gameplay isn’t my cup of tea. This box sums up the core of the game pretty well, I thought. The three leads on a big tank, some battling in the background, plus it’s colorful, well-drawn and eye-catching. Excellence all around.

Bad – Zero Wing (Arcade, Toaplan)

HOLY CRAP there’s so much going on

Zero Wing is infamous already for its delightfully awful Engrish translation rendered upon it when it came out on the Genesis:

…but this arcade flier isn’t much better. It’s loaded with gaudy colors, a frenzy of alien monsters and ships stuffed into practically every crevice, it too suffers from some odd English phrasing (“Catch, Shoot + Beat them Down”..?), and it even has potentially racist imagery in the top right corner. Freakish, overbearing and offensive all in one fell swoop. “Somebody set us up the bomb” indeed, with one big dud of promotional material.