Oh, Internet, what baffles me is that shit like gogo Happy & Smile isn’t ripped directly out of the developers’ hands moments after birth, caul still wrapped around the face, to be ported immediately onto a console or handheld and sold with twenty bucks knocked off the market price. I mean, was Viewtiful Joe really anything much more complex than this? Or Alien Hominid? . . . well, this basically is Alien Hominid, although the slight tweaks to play control (I’m finding it easier to dodge and more useful to execute close-up attacks, in case you were wondering) make this feel like a polished sequel. Speaking of which, when was the last time you played a sequel that actually addressed the issues of the original game without ruining the format? Don’t say Zelda II. Zelda II is never the right answer. Stupid fucking hammer. Okay, I’m digressing.

The point is, this game already exists. How hard can it be to get two comp-sci nerds to accept a steady paycheck, especially when the only tradeoff is “seeing their dream come to fruition?” That’s the object-oriented equivalent of getting signed to Merge Records. Don’t tell me they wouldn’t start drooling and kicking their legs at the thought of getting some distro. Why don’t you ask the Arcade Fire what that did for them.

And porting the game? It’s coded in Flash; alright, that’s not quite as portable as C++. Big deal; give one guy the job of coding a side-scrolling engine, a task set upon by one guys the world over since the Reagan administration. Rip the graphics and audio out of the source of the Flash game, slap ‘em in the new-old engine, pay the original creators to stuff in some new content and make sure the game plays like it did a month ago. The only thing left to do is pony up some scratch to your company’s marketing wonks and start the presses.

And the thing is: There are like seventy million games like this, and I’d buy a whole bunch of them. (See? They even come with built-in brand loyalty! It’s like the opposite of [insert your least favorite console]!) A fully fleshed-out Samorost game: Let me get my wallet. A version of The Asylum with a nursery’s-worth of stuffed animals? Hell, I’d pre-order that. You know what I’d even pay $20 for? I would even pay $20 for a portable version of Nanaca†Crash. Especially if I could compare my highest score to that of my friends? Or play simultaneously, say, on the DS, tapping the bottom screen to Aerial Crash and watching my friend’s progress on the upper screen, oh my god oh my god now I want one? Again: These games were all made with skeletal developer teams, and yet each has resonated with me much more than literally any game unique to the Xbox. The only thing that separates these games from their rightly-deserved thrones is capital.

I’d do these games some justice, but I’m about as close to being a venture capitalist as I am to being a dog. So: Game companies and the independently wealthy, get on it. Maybe when I see some more of this happening, I’ll be willing to admit that, perhaps, you are a bad enough dude to save the President. Or at least to save console gaming from another fucking Dead or Alive game.

(gogo Happy & Smile and Alien Hominid hosted on Newgrounds, whose ad content bade me click on a video depicting three sisters with breast implants, so be warned. Many of these links retrieved from the eternally-useful Jay Is Games, which will be as your balm in Gilead if you have an office job.)