Okay, I'm on a board dedicated primarily to Sonic The Hedgehog, where the most popular games are the original Sonic games. The tenants of these games: haul ass, beat enemies, beat bosses and then go again. You can explore, you can dally, but when its time you go on a high-speed blitz through the level operating entirely on instinct, timing and NERVE.

So why, on a board that so loves Sonic the Hedgehog, has there been no talk about the closest thing I've seen to old-school Sonic in years: 'Splosion Man? It boggles the mind. It really does.

So what is 'Splosion Man? It's this guy.

He is a being that is made out of explosions that was created in a lab for... some reason or another. To what purpose, nobody knows. But what they DO know is that he explodes. Everywhere. All the time. He explodes to attack, he explodes to jump and sometimes he explodes because it's something to do. He's also COMPLETELY NUTBAR INSANE, so this makes him basically a cross between Mad Stan, Sonic and Freakazoid.

So he gets out of his cell and gets to work escaping the lab and 'sploding scientists into literal meat piles all in glorious 2.5D. But this lab was designed by the infamous architectural firm 'Death Traps Inc.' This lab would be a terrible place to work, filled to the brim with acid pits, flooding water, laser gates, floor spikes and exploding barrels EVERYWHERE. OSHA would not be happy.

The level puzzles alternate between 'figure out how to get from here to here' to 'run like hell' to 'hope you figured out how to get from here to here because it's time to RUN LIKE HELL'. You'll die. Many times. You will die over and over and over again and get kicked back to the checkpoint until you gnash your teeth with fury. And then, it clicks and you enter that zen state where every button press is timely, every movement is calculated and every single thing just falls into place JUST RIGHT and you finish the level. And then you get ready to do it all over again, because there's 50 levels, each with different deathtraps to get you back to that zen feeling. And hey, sometimes you even enter the zen state early and beat a challenging level on your first go, making you feel like a big damn hero.

'Splosion Man is old school. 'Splosion Man is funny. 'Splosion Man is 800 MS Points. 'Splosion Man has a demo that's free.

I guess what I'm saying here is "If you have an Xbox 360, you should try 'Splosion Man".