Travis Touchdown is a hero for the geeks. He’s an overgrown kid who never outgrew the childhood fantasies of vanquishing evil with a toy sword and a blanket for a cape. His apartment is a shrine to the otaku lifestyle, decked out in luchador masks, posters of busty anime babes, and shelves of collectible figurines. His side-kick is an obese cat and his training ground is an armchair, plopped in front of the TV for rounds of the playable shmup, Bizarre Jerry 5. When nature calls, Travis drops trow and unloads a deuce like everyone else, except Travis’ bowel movements save games.

The daily life of Travis is crass, irreverent, and completely engrossing. Desperate Struggle is equal parts balls-to-the-wall brawler and schizophrenic homage to the fickle tastes of the attention-deficit generation. You can shop for the latest threads at Airport 51, relax with an episode of the BJ5 anime adaptation, or put the cat through some cardio. I never thought that I would sit down to play with a digital cat, but there I was after each fight, flitting cat toys about the floor and massaging her belly before filling her bowl. Of course, vintage t-shirts and gourmet cat food aren’t cheap.

Side-jobs were sore points in the original game. Mowing lawns and collecting coconuts felt like arbitrary busy-work. Picking up other people’s trash sucks in real life and it isn’t any better in digital form. I won’t get into how much invisible walls infuriate me. Desperate Struggle eradicates these concerns. Traveling is instantaneous and most of the three-dimensional sequences have been traded out for retro-inspired 8-bit iterations. You deliver pizzas Rad Racer-style and do a little plumbing ala Pipe Dreams. Powering up at the gym recalls memories of Kung-Fu, albeit with a colorful trainer and his conspicuous packaged crammed into a pink leotard.

Despite the outlandish character designs, rampant sexual innuendo, and the prevalence of severed, talking heads, I hesitate to call Desperate Struggle “bizarre.” In the tradition of filmmakers like Takashi Miike and Quentin Tarantino, Suda 51 is a collector of influences who is intimately familiar with geek-culture. He contorts and blends conventions and expectations into forms we subconsciously desired, but never thought we could have. The battles are incredible and every sequence is drenched in pop-cultural wit. Even the soundtrack amazes with a constant assault of rockabilly and punk. In a way, Desperate Struggle is the definitive example of a gamer’s game – a work of self-gratifying passion that is absolutely engorged with style and intensity.