Sometimes when you skip across rocks across a stream, your foot just aces each jump and you bound across effortlessly. Sometimes you hesitate. Sometimes you stumble. Sometimes other people -- not you, of course -- just stand there, throw up their hands and give up, and decide they just can't cross the water.

OK, well maybe you don't jump across streams that often. Maybe you see this more in video games. You know what I mean: those Mario Brothers skills.

Sometimes you have them, and your character makes all the jumps, all the moves. Sometimes your Mario Brothers skills fail you, and your character perishes to her death or gets stuck on a level that is ridiculously easy just because you can't mash buttons in the right order, with the right force, with the right timing.

Well tonight, that was me -- unable to operate the game controls. I tried my hand at Gish and totally failed with the Mario Brothers skills. Totally failed.

Cryptic Sea's Gish seems like it's a fun game. Don't get me wrong. Gish is a black oozy ball of tar, and he moves through the world - down passages, up walls, through obstacles - as you might imagine an oozy ball of tar would. He can mold his shape, he can stick to walls, he can harden.

There are 32 some odd levels to Gish, and I barely made it past the first -- that's how bad my Mario skills were tonight.