The uDraw still managed to make a few dollars. Then THQ went completely insane by releasing it for the Xbox 360 and PS3. There hasn't been such suicidal marketing since the Alamo's "New Year 1836 Half-Price Ammunition for Mexicans" sale. THQ claimed that market research indicated a "strong demand" for these products, which only proved that THQ shouldn't have slept with market research's wife. That year's top-selling Xbox games were Modern Warfare 3, Skyrim, and Battlefield 3. The only color that console's players wanted to paint was red, with close-range shotgun blasts and an enemy corpse.

Marketing a cheap coloring tool to the PS3 crowd was like offering magnetic poetry to stick on the side of a nuclear reactor: Anyone who wants to use such expensive hardware like that isn't allowed near it. They might as well have offered HAL 9000 a Speak & Spell. Over a million unsold units contributed to a company-wide loss of $56 million for the quarter. They would have lost less money if they'd told their CEO to wipe his ass with thousand-dollar bills and locked him in an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. It would have been a more dignified suicide if they'd performed seppuku with a banana and a kazoo soundtrack.

Homefront turned this automatic racism dial up to 75 million filthy Koreans. It's so ludicrously gung-ho, it would make Red Dawn cheer for the minority characters. The Koreans in Homefront were responsible for more bloody agony than the Koreans in M*A*S*H, and were less sympathetically represented. The cities make City 17 look like Disney World. Koreans contravene the Geneva Conventions like there's an achievement for 100 percent completion. They violated more clauses than a horny reindeer. In the intro, you watch them breaking up families, beating innocent civilians, executing prisoners, and starting a work camp, all through a window both liberally and literally spattered with the blood of patriots.

THQ
Subtlety is for communists.

The only reason the video game Koreans don't bite the heads off puppies is because they put too much work into cutting their puppy eyelids off and making them stare at salt. The worst part is that the game clearly thinks it's serious. This could have been the ultimate parody -- Hot Shots: The Shooting unAmericans Game -- but it acts like God personally bled the red into the white and blue to defend America from filthy foreigners. Which is weird, because if he'd wanted to defend America from foreigners, he could have done it much easier with a few hurricanes around 1492. The game was so insanely violent, Rambo would have dropped his guns to give it a hug.

Pit Fighter was one of the first games to realize that you could use digitized graphics instead of gameplay, and THQ's SNES conversion forgot the graphics. The arcade game was a revolution in graphics back when that meant "someone knows how to use a camera." Its only selling point was massive digitized graphics, and THQ released it with tiny sprites. The only thing less fun when shrunk while still screwing people so badly is an actual penis.

Atari
The arcade game is accurate, because two men grappling while dressed like that does usually involve joysticks.

THQ
Even worse than regular midget pit fights.

The cartridge is a violent attack on the concept of entertainment, and that was its only successful blow. It was so poorly programmed that one character had a Flash-like advantage over the others simply because he had fewer animation frames. It was direct proof that the programmers destroyed everything they touched: He had the upper hand specifically because they spent less time working on him.

The entire soundtrack was a single sample shorter and less melodic than the average ringtone. In 1992. The game had worse collision detection than a ghost, and was less responsive to control than that ghost's original body. If anything should have killed THQ, it was this. Pit Fighter was a worse use of $50 than hiring a sex worker to screw your kid, because at least then one person involved in the disaster would know what they were doing.

So why should we mourn their passing?

The Space Marines don't have a cover button, for the same reason they carry guns instead of white flags made of frilly lace panties. Health recovery is via execution -- if you take a second to kill an enemy with a particularly brutal move, you recover health. That's badassery as a core gameplay mechanic. When you're about to die, your impulse reaction becomes "diving at the enemy to destroy as many as possible" and "wondering why that's not always the case." It's made very clear that if you ever have full health, you're not doing it right. You're not playing endless shooting galleries; you're an engine of war powered by enemy blood.

THQ
"And THIS is what I think of your waist-high walls!"

In A Fistful of Boomstick, it was possible to run out of gasoline and be left clutching a useless power tool. Meaning that at least one programmer thought a video game about a zombie-shredding chainsaw was the place to work through his impotence issues. THQ apologized with Evil Dead: Regeneration. The game is an alternate sequel to Evil Dead II, where instead of traveling back in time, Ash has traveled to a criminal asylum, because that's what happens when the police find you connected to a chainsaw in a shack full of girlfriend parts. In this game, Ash can replace his chainsaw with a harpoon launcher, flamethrower, and grenade launcher, providing an omnipotent trinity of answers to the previously unanswerable question, "Why would you ever replace your chainsaw hand?"

It also understood gamers by giving you an annoying sidekick character and then letting you immediately repeatedly murder him. One of the first things you can do is punt him into a wood chipper. Note: I want this team working on Duck Hunt: Regeneration. Picking up pages of the Necronomicon in the game unlocked DVD extras of interviews with Bruce Campbell, proving that they understood Evil Dead fans, because anyone still buying Evil Dead games in 2005 has reached a point where it's medically impossible to get enough Bruce Campbell.