Yeah, so I'm a bad loser. I hate playing games I can't win, and I hardly try to get better if I suck beyond redemption at the start. I'm also one of those people who have to google for validation on my opinions now and then (subsequently bitching about it on my blog if I fail to find any).

Going through my collection of PSP games to lend a friend, I chanced upon marvel nemesis: rise of the imperfects, a game I had (I think) angrily thrown in a corner, having not been able to go past stage two after repeated tries over half an hour. (I also hate games which startle me, and this thing had the enemy blasting stuff at me, coupled with ominous music. Not fun at three in the morning.)

While the game had glowing reviews for its xbox version, much to my chagrin, it shockingly had fair reviews as well for the PSP. How is that possible? For a game which has, having already started badly, been stripped and dumbed down even further because of the PSP's lack of a second analog stick, what we're faced with is a button-smasher pretending to be a lot more complicated.

Don't get me wrong--I love hack-and-slash games, like dynasty warriors, to name one. But there isn't any pretence on the part of the latter, and it's a button-smasher with style, embellished with semi-accurate historical accounts and stylish martial arts flourishes.

But marvel's imperfects are just that. They give you tedious "player ups" with cards that you earn with each victory, allowing some increases in power (in all, not worth the effort made in earning them), and make you play through ten stages just to unlock more characters. A mistake they made was only allowing you two characters to begin with: Johnny Ohm and The Thing. Johnny who? For a casual marvel fan, I would've preferred it if wolverine or cyclops were available, instead.

Yes, this is a fighting game, and if people didn't expect complication or a proper storyline from street fighter or tekken, why should this be any exception? Only because both of the aforementioned fighting games had sufficiently diverse controls to keep you occupied--to make them truly fighting games. Button-smashers need some sort of style or storyline or drama to propel them through, and marvel imperfects just lacks any of that.