A child is crying in terrible fits in the corner of some bleak and purple alley. It’s night and she is desperately clutching her stuffed bear. There are ravenous dogs searching for her and she is hiding in cars whose trunks can be opened with dance magic. And then you or me or whoever happens to be hovering over the controller, a desperate gaming hunchback salivating over pixels, initiates that dance magic. Then the dogs dance. All of them. Their leader, supposedly a shaman hound made of glistening white fur, dances so incredibly hard that he has a brain aneurysm and collapses. You killed him with genital thrusts so powerful it cut off the blood flow to his brain.

The girl is saved and she thanks you and then flies away on a hover board made of blue luminescence.

This is Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker.

1990’s Sega Genesis adaptation of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker has scenarios, settings, and characters that are the epitome of the bizarre charm that is synonymous with the 16-bit era. I think the delightfulness that exudes from that silver age of gaming is of such a peculiar uniqueness that we will very rarely ever see something like it again. Moonwalker is a side scrolling beat ‘em up, and it is that genre in particular that was such a boisterous representation of the gaming world at the time. Filled with these eccentric adolescent concoctions that they called plots and characters that were even more compelling because of their nutty nature: Assassin robots wielding nunchucks and crumbling enemy soldiers down with jet boots. Men riding around in 1950s American sports cars with mounted machine guns while killing stampedes of thought manipulated velociraptors. Random crime bosses punching your girlfriend in the uterus. A baby inside a robot.

But the difference here is that Moonwalker has Michael Jackson being represented in what is arguably one of the most celebrated {and controversial) times of his life. He’s dead now, if you did not know. And though that is the inspiration for this particular review, I like to think Joe Pesci’s current state of healthy vitals should be as equally celebrated. He does after all play the brilliant nefarious drug dealer Mr. Big in the film the game is based on (of which there is a wonderful analysis of here), a man with grand dreams of getting kids high and building gigantic laser cannons on the moon.

Perhaps examining the game itself would show how it is such a beautifully rendered example of the mid-1990s beat ‘em ups. Regardless of all the things mentioned previously, the game is deceivingly simple. Michael Jackson is some sort of sorcerer dancer, whose feet and hands emit a sparkling poison that can knock men clear across the screen. He’s searching for kidnapped children, all of them the exact same WASP-y child clutching the exact same bear. In the process everything from frog-leaping zombies to pool hall prostitutes gets in your way.

On the most simplest of levels the game is actually rather enjoyable. Almost in the way that those classic one punch one kill games like Kung Fu Master and Ninja Warriors were. But the enjoyment – like Ninja Warriors – is quite frankly derived from the batshit insane and absurd things you will fight and see. The introductory paragraph is not some completely made up fantasy. I did indeed have Jackson’s flamboyant avatar jive and groove so hard that his enemies – what were essentially angry canines – danced themselves to death. One of them, whom I assumed was the leader, was already doing some sort of voodoo dance to control his minions when I arrived to face him in combat. So, seemingly, it took little provocation to make him dance even further, and then eventually to the point of death.

You can make most everyone dance themselves to death. This is not, as you have most likely guessed, the strangest of things that happens during the course of this game. At one point I threw my hat and made a zombie explode. Children hide in windows, doors, car trunks, bushes, sewers, teleporter rooms, and within vast spider caverns. Near the end of a level a monkey flies in on a beam of light, places himself upon your shoulders, and like a jonesing crack addict continually points in the general direction of the boss fight. Once there Joe Pesci arrives, but is in the game apparently played by a broad Latino dwarf, and he says “Hahaha, you’ll never catch me!” and then runs away. He does this I would guess about twenty times.

At one point you simply scream and turn into a robot.

Soon after you’re a space plane, and you blow up other space planes. Once you’ve blown up Joe Pesci’s space plane the credits roll and Michael Jackson decides to dance with a random black child.

After I was done playing I found it hard to look at the game objectively as if this was a real professional review. It left me awestruck, shaken, and perhaps even a bit aroused. I like to think that’s how Michael, in the end, would have wanted me to have felt.