Muscle March — Huge Bods, Small Balls, Awesome Gameplay
Welcome to a world of men! A manly world with men doing manly things! Welcome to a world where everyone is oiled making their bulging muscles shine in the sunlight. Welcome to a world where everyone wears a thong because that way you can show off your awesome junk! Welcome to a world where the men are manly, the women are manly, and the polar bears are also manly. Welcome to the world of Muscle March.
Muscle March is a game for the Wii that puts you in the role of one member of a body building club. The worst thing that could possibly happen to your buff and manly club has happened. Some jerk has stolen your powdered protein! He immediately takes off and it is up to you and your body building friends to stop him! The only problem is, he is jacked from all the protein. He is so jacked, that he has the power to run through walls! Without your godly protein shakes, you have lost some of your manly muscle power and simply cannot break through walls the same way this devious thief can. Fortunately enough, as everyone knows, powdered protein has the side-effect of making people strike manly body builder poses every few seconds. This causes the holes your thief makes in the wall to be shaped like the very same poses he has been doing. As a result, you decide to use your brains, not your brawn, and put your power of flexing to work. You and your body builder friends decide to mimic the poses to fit through the holes in the wall to eventually tackle the offender and claim back your protein powder for all of muscle kind!
If this sounds weird to you, dear god it is! Muscle March follows in the footsteps of other weird and distinctively Japanese games such as Katamari Damacy. There are bright colors everywhere, random sheep, a giraffe that barks instructions at you, and much much more. You will chase your offenders, of which include football players, aliens, demons, and magicians, through locker rooms, crowded city streets, business offices, and even time and space itself! The colors are bright and vibrant, the sounds are loud, the gameplay is flaily, and the whole game will just have you shouting “what the fuck!?!”
Oh right, the gameplay. Well, as I said before the entirety of this game involves flexing your body into particular positions to fit through holes in walls. You have two arms over your head, two arms below your head, and two positions of one arm in each. That, is basically it. You watch the screen as you and your train of body builder friends heads toward the human shaped holes in the walls and flex your ass off whenever you get to one. Since it’s a Wii game, the controls are all motion sensitive. Just flex away. Sometimes the controls don’t register but more often than not you will find them responsive enough. Screw up enough times, and your dead. Well, not dead per-say. You will just have to walk to the store and get another jar of protein powder, and I mean, that’s still pretty bad for muscle men like you. I mean, when was the last time you went to the store to get anything? Normally people just give you presents because of how awesome your body looks.
It is a simple enough game that only has two modes. You can play in arcade mode that puts you through stage after stage of protein chasing madness, or endless mode, which has you chasing a silver surfer wannabe with the speed and reaction time needed ever increasing. The game is single or multiplayer, which is good because you can beat single player mode in about 30 minutes, but the laughs you’ll get from playing this game with friends will last you for weeks and months to come. Not only that, but the later levels actually do constitute quite the workout. The rapid pace that you move your upper body in is great for your arms, pecs, and back. It’s not really designed to be a workout, it’s just a nice side-effect, and with the addition of some simple wrist weights from my local Sports Authority, I found Muscle March to be an awesome sweat dripping muscle burning addition to my normal gaming fitness routine consisting of Wii Fit Plus, and EA Sports Active. I’ve not only lost weight, but also I now feel like the manly manly men the game is about. Maybe I’ll grow an afro and let a bird nest in it next.
Muscle March sells itself solely based on WTF factor, and it sells itself well. It comes from the same family of baka-ge/kuso-ge games as the Japanese Cho Aniki. For those of you who don’t know, baka-ge translated into stupid game, and kuso-ge translates into shitty game, so basically, the genre is totally sold on how kitschy it is. Don’t believe me? Well consider that Cho-Aniki, which is the kuso-ge poster boy, is a space shooter that featured a robot cyborg body building man whose penis was another man all together.
Muscle March may not be that hardcore but it happily continues the baka-ge/kuso-ge tradition with gusto. It makes you feel awkward while playing it but laugh your ass off while doing so. The J-Pop soundtrack blasts in your ears and gets faster and faster as the game goes on, which gets your heart pumping and your body sweating and the whole thing is just so zainy your brain would aneurysm if it wasn’t too busy trying to make your body flex like Arnold. Best of all, the game costs 500 Wii points. For the uninitiated, that is five dollars. Five … whole … dollars. You will not find a better deal in gaming, period. That’s like, the price of a Wendy’s extra value meal. So I guess the real question is, “Is Muscle March more fun than a Wendy’s extra value meal?”, and the answer is TESTOSTERONE, MUSCLES, POLAR BEARS, PROTEIN, POWER BAAAAAAAARS!
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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