Nearing the end of SpongeBob’s journey under the sea, you’re tasked with guiding a ball through a giant Rube Goldberg machine in Mermaid Man’s Lair. Once you activate the machine you have to match the ball’s painstakingly slow speed while using SpongeBob’s arsenal of bubble abilities to make sure it doesn’t fall over. It’s a simple task in concept, but trying to execute it is some of the most unfun and Sisyphean gameplay in recent memory. In one section of the puzzle, all you need to do is stand on a button, and that button opens a gate for you to bowl a bubble into so you can progress. The only problem is that during SpongeBob’s wind-up animation for bowling, he walks forward. That means you fall off of the button, which closes the gate and prevents you from bowling the bubble where you intended, when you intended. These kinds of gameplay barricades are common, and force you to restart and face your demons again, and again, and again.

SpongeBob SquarePants: Ba…

Out of the numerous games to spring up under the Bit.Trip umbrella, it’s not exactly a surprise that the most accessible of the bunch, Bit.Trip Runner, would be the one to transcend its retro-styled roots. In bringing the Runner games’ mechanics to a fancier playground on the Switch, developer Choice Provisions has made its most ambitious game yet–but in doing so, may have revealed the limits to how far it can push the concept. It’s also the most difficult, and if you haven’t already invested in a good sturdy case for the Switch that might stand up to having the system thrown at terminal velocity out of a living room window, now would be a good time.

On paper, the gameplay is as deceptively simple as it’s always been. Your character runs forward automatically, and it’s up to you to jump, duck, slide, and kick down obstacles until you reach the finish line. The secret sauce of the Runner series is that every action and every item in a stage is plotted to wo…

Earlier this year, San Francisco 49ers running back–and last year’s Offensive Player of the Year–Christian McCaffrey was named the cover athlete for Madden NFL 25. But unfortunately, McCaffrey has been placed on injured reserve with calf soreness and Achilles tendinitis. As part of the IR designation, McCaffrey will miss at least the first four games of the season.

Via ESPN, McCaffrey had a history of injuries when he was a member of the Carolina Panthers in 2020 and 2021. For those two seasons, McCaffrey played in 10 games total. Since arriving in San Francisco, McCaffrey has played in 32 out of the 49ers’ 33 games. But given McCaffrey’s recent appearance on Madden NFL 25’s cover, his injury has reinvigorated talk about the so-called Madden curse.

The late John Madden was primarily featured on the cover of the video games that shared his name prior to 1998. Once NFL players were featured on the cover, it gave rise to theory that there was some sort of Madden curse tha…