What up everybody! It's Four Job Fiesta season, which means I'm going to be binge-speedrunning FFV at least ten times over the next month and a half and that makes me happy.

Problem: Looking back over the last couple of years I realize that I tend to view games I play between June and August more harshly because they take precious time away from me and my next FFV run.

Solution: Play games that I'm pretty sure I'm not going to like anyway!

Enter Gadget Twins, an obscure '92 attempt at a mascot-shmup that I actually read about in a gaming magazine around the release date (Megatech? Segapro? Can't quite remember). The screenshots actually looked really appealing at the time - a cutesy brightly-colored shmup starring two anthropomorphic planes with a big arsenal of built-in slapstick weapons a-la Grounder from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog was such a cool idea! Nevertheless, the Backloggd average rating has spoiled me on the fact that this probably isn't going to be a hidden ge - whoa, I knew it wasn't going to be great but I wasn't expecting it to be quite this bad.

You need a button to toggle which direction you're attacking in (this is clunky as sin). That button is the B button (which every player is conditioned to think of as the attack button) and cannot be remapped. The default weapon is a boxing glove on a spring, which sounds cute until you realize it has all the range of a T-rex throwing a hook and enemies are flying at you as if this were a normal shmup where you had actual ranged weapons. Then you die 5 seconds later because there is no mercy invincibility. And if your soul remains uncrushed long enough to upgrade your weapons to something resembling usable, you realize that the first mid-boss was actually the hardest boss in the game, and everything after that is more tedious and clunky than actually challenging.

I'm not sure what possessed me to finish Gadget Twins - perhaps its colorful world and delightfully-odd boss designs (including an octopus with a mallet and boxing glove and a big fish whose face seems eternally frozen mid-orgasm) gave me just enough curiosity to see everything this short game had to offer. That's one of the few redeeming qualities of Gadget Twins - a game with a really cool premise that somehow seemed to blunder into a perfect storm of amateurish and plain clunky design.