Editor's Note: Had enough Muscle March yet? If yes, keep reading anyway -- Kris is using the bodybuilders-in-hot-pursuit game as a jumping-off point for something bigger. And if Kris's name seems familiar, you may have seen his work on 1UP and GreenPixels. -Demian

As the screaming maniac Marcus Wright from Terminator Salvation recently taught us, the difference between man and machine is the power of the human heart.

OK, there are a few other differences between man and machine, like man can't make photocopies and machines can't ride unicycles while juggling (yet?), but the heart is probably the most important. Because while a day may come when every baseball team has been replaced by soulless mechano overlords, we can find comfort in knowing machines will need to keep us alive for at least one reason: No artificial intelligence could ever be human enough to think of something as blisteringly deranged as Muscle March.

How does this game play? Is it even fun? I don't know, and I don't care. Watching YouTube videos of this lunacy is reason enough for it to exist. There's a lot about the human species that makes me less than a fan (see: callous destruction of the environment, insatiable greed, macaroni and cheese pizza), but when something like Muscle March comes around, it warms my heart. Show me the man whose mind was damaged enough to create a game where bodybuilders strike the correct poses to fit through holes busted in walls by other bodybuilders, and I will show you the cockeyed genius that makes humanity the great miracle of known creation.

The idea, to be sure, is less than original. It's basically Hole in the Wall, but with the important distinction of being wrapped in a delirious veil of awesome (well, a better delirious veil of awesome). That is essentially what distinguishes every game in Muscle March's genre -- from this title, you could draw a direct line backward through Katamari Damacy, WarioWare, and (perhaps Muscle March's biggest influence) Cho Aniki. Some see these as random, asinine hodgepodges of madness, and they are, but look closely, and you'll see how much meticulous skill it takes to pull them off well (in Muscle March, note just how right it is that an elephant and a giraffe are inexplicably on-screen).

A lot of people also seem to think this is a strictly Japanese brand of entertainment, but it's not -- it only seems that way because the insane crap we make in America sucks, and the stuff they make in Japan is awesome. It is, I suspect, culturally relative, though. I don't know for sure, I wasn't living there at the time, but there's a good chance that when Fugitive Hunter and Target: Terror came out, hundreds of Japanese writers wrote snarky blog posts about how awesomely batshit bizarre we are.

But thus is the gift humanity leaves to the cosmos. And many years from now, if we haven't nuked each other, been hunted to extinction by sentient machines, drowned in icecap melt, or been arbitrarily annihilated by a bored and ruthless god, maybe the Jodie Foster of the future will discover a mysterious SETI signal. And maybe this signal will hold in it a code of alien design, a code that teaches us how to build an intergalactic portal that'll initiate first contact with extra-terrestrial life forms. And maybe, just maybe, when they bestow on us the secrets of the universe, we can prove our worth by giving them Muscle March in return.

You're welcome, future alien harbingers.