GB's Game Reviews: 2024-2025 Edition

2024, or at least the first half of it in particular, was the year of playing games I'd played already.

I love Backloggery. I've talked about it before. It's a really cool website that lets you compile a database of your video game collection and track your progress with them, referring to the games you own but haven't beaten yet as "your backlog". It's a great idea, but admittedly I think it's given me a bit of tunnel vision. Sometimes I think a little too much about how next to enhance how my collection looks on Backloggery, choosing what to play on the basis of needing to beat more games. This is fine, but it can go too far when I'm reluctant to play something I've already 100% completed, or have beaten but can't realistically 100%, just for the fun of playing it. When I was a kid I didn't have this problem - even if I'd beaten a game a dozen times over, if it was fun enough I'd pop it in the system and do it again. Playing a game you've already finished isn't a "waste of time" - it basically accomplishes just as much as playing something you haven't played before, as long as you still get entertainment out of it. Games are meant to be fun, after all, and trying new ones is a good idea, but I shouldn't be casting old favorites into a "never touch again" box if they can still bring me joy.

Anyway, that preamble is because in 2024 I placed an unusual amount of focus on playing older games, many of which I'd beaten before. This started out as getting 100% completion on games I'd played thoroughly but had never managed to do everything in. This was seen in my reviews last year, where I finally 100%'d a number of games I consider absolute classics, such as the original Sonic games and Banjo-Kazooie. That mindset continues into this year's reviews, with the likes of Super Mario 64 crossed off the list, but then I also spent a lot of time with Vampire Survivors, which I had started in 2023 but didn't finish. However, eventually I even started playing games I'd finished a long time ago, such as Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Trading Card Game. Since it's been over a decade since I've reviewed some of these old games, though, I will be taking another look at them here in this edition of the blog, marking the first time in this blog series I've ever re-reviewed anything. As summer became fall, I started playing more new games (though Banjo-Tooie joined the replay fun after its' surprise NSO release), and you'll see that reflected in the reviews as I start tackling a number of small indie titles as well as a few bigger games I'd never played before this year - but I do still finish the blog off with a review of a game I first played over fifteen years ago. I also end up playing a whole lot of Sonic games here as I became re-invested in the franchise that got me hooked on video games. I tried out both Sonic's newest games and some popular fangames as well as going back and taking care of some older titles I never beat. If you read my January blogpost about my history with the Sonic series and still want to read more words about that darn blue hedgehog, he's all over this blogpost.

I hope you enjoy this especially retro-flavored look at what I've been playing since April 2024!

Brawler64
System: Switch/PC
Genre: Peripheral
Year of release: 2023

I don't normally do peripheral reviews. That's because I rarely use peripherals besides the default! For most games and consoles I just stick to the standard-issue stuff, and for gimmick games like Hey You Pikachu, the accessory is required to play and usually isn't meant for any other games, so there's no point in reviewing it separately from its' game. However, I did want to give a quick shout-out to this controller from Retro Fighters for being really great.

The Brawler64 is a modern take on the Nintendo 64's unique controller. Due to the N64's one-of-a-kind button setup, modern controllers fail to capture the essence of playing N64 games. This is primarily because of the C Buttons, which have no proper equivalent on modern controllers. If you play N64 Switch Online games with a standard Switch controller, you're forced to use the second analog stick for C buttons, moving it left, right, up, and down to match C button inputs. I've tried this, and this feels awful and imprecise, especially for games like Pokemon Stadium and Banjo-Kazooie where the C buttons are used heavily and pressing the wrong one by accident can be devastating. The Brawler64 accurately copies an N64 controller's layout, bringing back the C buttons and ditching the second stick, then shoving all of that into a modern form factor instead of the N64's bizarre tripod design. Playing N64 games with this thing came to me quickly, and soon it was like second nature. The controller feels good in the hands, too, solid and strong, and it has a long-lasting rechargeable battery. It's also a versatile controller and can play a lot more than just N64 Switch Online games. Use the charge cable to plug it into your PC and it can play games there. There's also a mode-switching button that allows you to transform the controller from an N64 controller into something the Switch recognizes as a standard Pro controller, which gives you access to the X and Y buttons that the N64 controller lacks, letting you play other games with it. It's not perfect since there's no second stick, but most games that don't need that stick should play great with this controller, such as the other consoles available on Switch Online and other retro-style games such as Vampire Survivors. And while normally you'd expect Nintendo to be the standard-bearer for product build quality, even after seven years they somehow still have made no effort to end Joy-Con Drift, which leaves high-quality third parties like Retro Fighters to pick up their slack. I don't expect this stick to start drifting any time soon and if it does I'll run back over here with a VERY ANGRY edit!

Like most controllers these days, the Brawler64 is a bit pricey (expect it to run you somewhere around $50, maybe less, maybe more), but you get what you pay for. I've played a whole bunch of games with it since getting it in January 2024, including every N64 game in this year's blog (except Dr. Mario which is fine with Joy-Cons) as well as Paper Mario TTYD64 and Banjo-Kazooie from last year's blog, and it was also my controller of choice for my revisit of Sonic Origins. It's a great-feeling controller and one I hope to keep using for years to come.

Super Mario 64
System: N64 (played via Nintendo Switch Online)
Genre: 3D Platformer
Year of release: 1996
At this point I think it might be fair to say Super Mario 64 may be Mario's most popular and memorable adventure overall, and if it isn't, it's gotta at least be in the top three. Mario 64 has achieved a sort of immortality online over the years, first by being dissected for strategy guides and "L Is Real" rumormongers, then torn apart by speedrunners and challenge runners who have found so many glitches and tricks that they can skip the entire game and save the princess in minutes, and then it became a beloved target of horror creators as its' crude, simplistic graphics and environments and wistful nostalgic tones made it fertile ground for all manner of scary stories and wild theories. Super Mario 64 is talked about regularly in ways that games like New Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Bros 3, and even Super Mario Odyssey aren't. Why is Mario 64 such a beloved entry in the series? What makes it so special, so unique, that other games can't match?

Honestly, I think a huge part of it is technical limitations.

This is most evident with Super Mario 64's gameplay design. Unlike the 2D Marios, which had all been straightforward get-to-the-goal affairs (but sometimes had some puzzle solving, like ghost houses and secret exits), Super Mario 64 was made in a time where having dozens and dozens of levels in full 3D wasn't really workable. Instead, the experience is condensed down to 15 main levels, a main hub, and a bunch of smaller side areas. Each main level has seven Stars to collect, and the goal is to get enough Stars to open the way to Bowser's boss levels, which reward Mario with keys that open up additional floors of the castle. What really changes the game is that you're largely free to choose what you want to do and in what order. There's a 'mission select' at the start of a level where you can select a mission and use its' title as a hint for what to do, and certain Stars require you to select certain missions by altering the level in important ways to make obtaining the Star possible, but in many cases you can select a mission, get a completely different star, and it's all good.

This openness is compounded with Mario's abilities. Mario has a bunch of options for movement and some of them can be used in unconventional ways to let you pull off tricks and nab Stars in ways different from the expected one, and that's without even getting into all the glitches and bugs that are used to break the game so hard that people have beaten it without even bothering to collect any Stars at all. The amount of freedom and exploration involved is absolutely a huge factor in why Super Mario 64 is so beloved and widely played even decades after its' release, especially since Nintendo has been extremely reluctant to return to this format. Super Mario Sunshine is superficially similar but removes the freedom of exploration and the ability to choose what Shines to pursue, forcing you to do specific Shines in a specific order to progress. Super Mario Odyssey came much closer to Mario 64's free design, but that's still only one game in a twenty-five year period.

It would be a crime to not talk about Mario 64's unique aesthetic, too. The whole game and its' graphical design has practically become shorthand for mid-90s 3D graphics nostalgia. Worlds are lightly populated, usually with only one or two friendly NPCs and maybe two dozen enemies who mostly don't respawn upon defeat. The enemies are designed to use as few polygons as possible and still look passable, meaning lots of round opponents made out of circular sprites that always face the player, like Bob-ombs, Chuckyas, and Bullies. The design of Peach's Castle is minimalist and has only a few of the things you'd expect of a castle, and is completely lacking in all sorts of things like kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, and a throne room. These big empty worlds feel bare and basic compared to the vibrant worlds of video games that came out just a few years later (Banjo-Kazooie is a massive step above Mario 64 in terms of graphics, for instance, and it's on the same system, and Banjo-Tooie looks even more impressive at the expense of a slow framerate) and the world ends up tapping into the same corner of the brain that made "liminal spaces" an Internet sensation in the 2020s.

While the ancient feel of this game gives it a lot of unique character and it's fun to pick and choose how you want to tackle the challenges Mario 64 lays out for you, the age of Mario 64 is ultimately what holds it back just a bit. Mario is squirrely. He controls weird, with momentum to his movements and a reluctance to turn on a dime. He can attach himself to a wall and prefer to shuffle sideways instead of turning away. Wall jumping is fiddly, much less refined than it became in later games. And of course the camera is terrible. For its' time it was a good camera, and you can center it behind Mario and enter a "look around" mode to help get your bearings, but inevitably there are going to be times Mario screws up and it's because you couldn't get the right camera angle to see what you needed to do. Triple jumping is fiddly as well, as is using the Wing Cap to glide. A lot of Mario 64's challenge comes from wrestling with Mario and the camera to do what you want. It's not as bad as, say, Sonic 3D Blast, but the difficulty in controlling the plumber is definitely a pain point for this game even though his flexibility of movement when you have him mastered and ability to skip challenges through stunts and glitches alike is clearly a big reason this game has endured for so long online as something people play and play and play to death and beyond.

All things considered, though, Super Mario 64 has aged remarkably well. In many cases, a trailblazing game trying something wildly technically new is only remembered for its' gimmicks, and when those gimmicks turn into regular tools in the gaming toolbox, it becomes clear that the title was nothing special once you got past the veneer of the experimentation. Mario 64 is not like that. Its' status as the first really popular and successful 3D platformer and the creator of what eventually became the "collect-a-thon" subgenre means the rough edges are definitely there, but the core is remarkably strong and there's a lot to love about this game... even if Mario does control like a skittering bag of hammers.

Pokemon Snap
System: N64 (played via Nintendo Switch Online)
Genre: Rail shooter
Year of release: 1999
Pokemon Snap is one of the most unique Pokemon spinoff games, and in my opinion it's honestly still one of the best. For my money, it's the best Pokemon game on the Nintendo 64. Five were released for the system (an impressive feat considering the N64 was halfway through its' short life by the time Pokemania hit the scene). Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Stadium 2 are fun and full of nostalgia but run on massively outdated game mechanics and cheaty AI. Pokemon Puzzle League is a good puzzle game, but very difficult for a Pokemon title, not to mention it's just a reskinned Tetris Attack, which in turn was a reskinned Panel de Pon. And Hey You Pikachu is a goofy novelty built around a microphone accessory that doesn't always work and a Pikachu who won't always listen. That leaves Snap, which eschews all of those things for an original and fun experience that holds up even today.

In Pokemon Snap, your goal is to work with Professor Oak to photograph all 63 Pokemon living on a remote island. (Yes, 63. For an N64 game this feels like a tragic oversight. Really should have squeezed in one more pogey somewhere.) You ride on the Zero-One, a unique all-terrain vehicle Oak claims to have invented himself. It's got wheels to roll over the ground but can also travel over water and through the air. The Zero-One drives itself, leaving you free to focus on photography but also meaning you're very likely to pass by a Pokemon without getting the perfect shot. There are exactly two areas in the entire game where you can stop and take shots freely - in one course your path is blocked by a large egg you have to actively remove, and in another course you can make a Metapod drop down in front of your vehicle to make it stop. The rest of the time, you just have to make do. At the end of each level, you select from the pictures you took and submit what you think are your best shots to Oak for evaluation. The photos are scored based on things like the Pokemon's size and pose and whether or not it's in the center of the frame. If you mess up, like fail to get enough of a Pokemon's body in the shot or take the picture from too far away, the photo will be worth a paltry amount of points, but an excellent photo can score 4000 points or more, and a major goal is to score high on as many species as you can.

At first all you can do is take photos, but as you play you unlock various upgrades. Once you're fully tricked out, you can throw food at Pokemon, lob smoke balls at them, play the Pokeflute, or accelerate with a Dash Engine to rush towards interesting sights before they're gone. These upgrades can be used to get better pictures by enticing unique reactions out of Pokemon or setting them up for a photo. Some Pokemon are even impossible to find without using the right item in the right spot.

There are only six short levels (plus a seventh "boss" level where you face off against an extremely camera-shy Mew), but all six are very memorable and clearly designed with repeat plays in mind. It's impossible to get great shots of every Pokemon in a course your first time through, and you'll want to revisit old courses when you unlock new upgrades as well as go into the course with a plan to target a specific Pokemon and put all your focus on getting the best shot possible of that one Pokemon. Some species are pretty easy to get a great picture of, but others are a real challenge and may require many attempts.

One aspect of this game may frustrate some people, but I personally like it - you can only pick one photo for each species you take a picture of on a given run of a level, so it's possible you may not pick the photo Oak would like the most. I like this because his criteria isn't too difficult to work with and it allows you to be the judge of your own work, carefully selecting the photo you think would do the best with the professor. There's also an Album function that lets you save up to 60 extra photos - this is great for if you take a shot you happen to like but that may not be a particularly amazing shot by Oak's standards. Also, unlike New Pokemon Snap, there's only one category for each Pokemon, so you aren't forced to leave useful photos in the trash.

Pokemon Snap is a brief game, especially if you know what you're doing (this latest playthrough, in which I completed the Pokemon Report and saw the credits, took me a mere two hours), but the drive to take high-scoring photos is a nice incentive to keep coming back and looking for ways to get better shots. It's just a very pleasant game that's not very difficult and is filled with good vibes for Pokemon's earliest years.

Alleyway
System: Game Boy (played via Nintendo Switch Online)
Genre: Ball-and-paddle
Year of release: 1989
The early days of portable gaming were basic and straightforward. The novelty of taking a video game on the go meant that even the simplest of video games seemed impressive, and so the Game Boy received Alleyway as one of its' first titles, a shameless imitator of other block-breaking games like Breakout and Arkanoid (not even Nintendo is immune to following the leader now and then). Gameplay is as simple as can be, just move the paddle to bounce the ball until you've broken every block. Don't let the ball go past your paddle or you lose a life. Every 1000 points, you get an extra life. Also, if your ball hits the top of the screen (which it will), your paddle shrinks to half its' usual size as a bizarre "punishment" for doing something that is literally impossible to not do.

Alleyway sports four level types which it repeats eight times before ending. First you face a normal block-breaking stage that has some sort of simple gimmick to the arrangement of its' blocks, like the use of unbreakable barriers or particular shapes made out of blocks. Upon clearing this, the next stage features moving blocks but is otherwise basically the same arrangement as before. The stage after that will feature a scrolling gimmick where after a certain number of volleys, everything will shift downward by one tile. The blocks will be erased after moving down far enough so you won't be crushed for not clearing everything, but the original arrangement will eventually shuffle offscreen and be replaced with another similar or identical arrangement, which does not get replaced. These stages take the longest since it's usually nearly impossible to clear the blocks before more start scrolling in (you'd have to hit the ball just so and get really lucky with ricochet shots). Once that's done, you get a bonus stage with the blocks forming the shape of a classic Mario enemy. These blocks can be broken straight through, but the strict timer makes it very difficult to clear the blocks in time. Fortunately, as a bonus stage, it doesn't matter much if you don't complete it. You just won't get the point bonus.

Alleyway is nothing special at all, with the Mario theming the only thing really going for it (in addition to the bonus stages, one normal level set features Mario's head as the blocks to break, and Mario gets inside the paddle in a tiny cutscene when you begin, which gives Alleyway some truly incredible box art). If you want a block-breaking game for Game Boy, here it is. No less, and certainly no more.

Yoshi's Story
System: N64 (played via Nintendo Switch Online)
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 1998
I remember seeing many people back in the day hail Yoshi's Island on the SNES as one of the greatest games of all time. I don't see people talk about it nearly as much these days, and I didn't love it as much as some people did when I got the chance to play it via its' GBA port in the early 2000s, but it's a very solid game with a cheerful, crayon-like aesthetic. Its' sequel, Yoshi's Story, has always been a controversial follow-up, and it's definitely a weird one. If Yoshi's Island was "child-friendly", Yoshi's Story feels positively infantile. The soundtrack is a ridiculous Nick Jr barrage of goofy noises and squealing Yoshis making nonsense sounds. The story is presented as a pop-up book with simple prose that feels very similar to the sort of silly little story you'd tell to a toddler at bedtime. And the levels don't have proper goals - instead you just wander around them and eat fruit until you've eaten 30 of them, upon which the level ends. Another weird aspect of Yoshi's Story is that it's only six levels long - each of the six worlds offers you a choice of levels to play but after clearing just one it's on to the next world, leaving the uncleared levels behind.

Yoshi's Story is mostly an easy game too, aside from the bottomless pits that litter a few late-game stages, and there's more than enough fruit to reach the goal without having to explore the level thoroughly. However, there is a serious challenge hidden in Yoshi's Story, and the hint of its' existence lies in the post-level score screen. Yoshi's Story is secretly a score attack game that challenges the player to score as many points as possible in each level. This is done by finding hidden hearts and eating specifically melons while avoiding other fruit (because melons are worth more points). The hearts are often hidden deviously and require thorough exploration to uncover, and avoiding all the other fruit while not missing a single melon is sure to infuriate. If you want Yoshi's Story to be hard, you can certainly make it so.

My least favorite aspect of this game is the controls. I never quite got comfortable with Yoshi, and he felt rough to handle compared to the smoothness of Super Mario World Mario or Genesis-era Sonic. Thanks to the controls, I was satisfied after a single run-through and didn't really have any desire to do it all again to see some more levels I didn't get to play before, but I certainly would have played them all if they'd just been presented in order like most games do.
 

Urban Champion
System: NES (played via Nintendo Switch Online)
Genre: Fighting
Year of release: 1986
Urban Champion is an infamous little piece of software. Renowned in retro gaming circles for being low quality, it nonetheless continually pops up on one Nintendo system after another because Nintendo themselves made it and so they can freely re-release it without licensing issues. The ultimate library filler to inflate a catalog of games to look more impressive, Urban Champion was one of a whopping seven NES games added to the Switch Online catalog on July 4, 2024, once more performing its' duty of making a pile of games look more impressive than it really was. But is Urban Champion truly that bad? It's from Nintendo themselves! Sure, they're far from perfect, but you don't hear about many first-party Nintendo games that are outright terrible - "divisive" is much more common. Well, I only spent a couple minutes with Urban Champion, but I think I saw enough to be willing to move on and never touch it again.

In Urban Champion, you play as Generic Blue Guy, engaged in an eternal struggle with your hated rival, Generic Green Guy, as the two of you slug it out on the streets of an unnamed city. You can do high or low punches, as well as a dodge. To win, you attack your opponent based on whether he's blocking high or low, hitting his unguarded area and pushing him back until he's forced off the side of the screen, and your man will pursue him to the next round. As you battle across town you eventually come across an open manhole. Force your opponent into the manhole to win the duel (and, in a cute but baffling touch, a girl will pop out of a window of the building you're fighting in front of and drop confetti on you to celebrate your lawless street fight victory). Of course, if Generic Green Guy gets too many licks in, he can force you back as well and eventually you'll be the one at risk of falling into a manhole. Once you defeat Generic Green Guy and finish basking in victory, Generic Blue Guy will walk a little further down the road only to be confronted by Generic Green Guy once again. And that's the entire game. You just do that over and over until you run out of lives.

There are admittedly a couple little extra complications. In addition to Confetti Girl, there are also building residents who will try to interfere in the fight by dropping potted plants, and every so often the police cruise by on patrol and the Generic Guys will retreat to their corners and act natural to avoid the cops, which has the effect of resetting the current round. Good if you're losing, bad if you're winning. This level of simplicity was common in the NES's early days, reminiscent of Atari 2600 and early arcade games (and, in fact, Urban Champion was also an arcade game!), but Super Mario Bros in 1985 had already shown that the NES was capable of something more, and the bar was forever raised in 1987 with The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. By the late 80s, gamers demanded more from their games than the same old basic high score chasers with better graphics, and so the audience for games like Urban Champion was small even in its' day. Nintendo has announced that the Switch Online apps, renamed "Nintendo Classics", will all get carried over to Switch 2, so if they keep carrying these apps over from generation to generation this could be the very last time Nintendo could trot out Urban Champion to pad the numbers. It's been fun, Urban Champion. Fun making fun of you, that is. Not actually playing you.

Vampire Survivors
System: Switch
Genre: Survivors-like
Year of release: 2022
Hey now, what's this doing here? I reviewed Vampire Survivors last year! Well, herein lies the perils of tossing up a review for a game I hadn't actually beaten yet! Now that I have, I've got an addendum to make to my previous review. Namely, now that I've spent extensive time with both games, I consider Vampire Survivors the superior game over HoloCure, primarily because of Holocure's higher difficulty level making finishing it far more of a challenge than Vampire Survivors, which is much more willing to let you break it wide open by exploiting various game mechanics and combos to become nigh-invincible. Holocure's still a pretty good game, of course, and it being free means it's a solid entry point to try out an auto-shooter without committing to a purchase, but Vampire Survivors was challenging enough to keep me on my toes without being ruthless, which is good because of how much time you have to invest on a standard stage run. Plus, there are plenty of ways to make progress and unlock stuff even if you don't survive the full time limit before the Reaper shows up.

I also feel I should reiterate the insane amount of content you can get out of Vampire Survivors considering its' bargain price. If you just focus on beating the main story it won't take too terribly long, though you're likely to need to do some grinding early on to afford enough permanent powerups to handle the difficulty of stronger waves, but there is a massive checklist of unlockables with new stages, weapons, characters, and items to earn. The base game is five bucks (with DLC packs varying in price but never very much) and that's if you're too impatient to wait for a sale. Vampire Survivors has also been updated multiple times since it released with new free content in addition to the expansions. If you like VS's gameplay loop enough, you could get months of playtime out of it for a paltry sum. In an age of AAA games pushing back up to $70 and beyond (a price point not seen since the heyday of large plastic cartridges) and mobile game exploitation tactics entrenching themselves into all facets of gaming, it's so refreshing to see a humble title like this find great success on a budget and pass that savings on to the player.

Pokemon Trading Card Game
System: Game Boy Color (played via Nintendo Switch Online)
Genre: Trading Card Game
Year of release: 2000
When Pokemon was everywhere in the late 1990s, there were numerous routes to getting into the franchise. At the dawn of Pokemania, I didn't have a Game Boy and so couldn't play the games, and in fact for the first year of my Pokemon fandom I had only a passing familiarity with the games. What had first gotten me hooked on Pokemon was the cards. I'd seen other kids at recess with the cards and my curiosity over what was happening eventually led to me receiving a few cards as free gifts from other kids. My very first card was a Charmander, but I still remember the others I'd picked up as additional gifts in those early days - Ponyta, Magnemite, Magikarp, and Machoke. I found the cards intensely fascinating and studied them carefully, poring over every single detail. When I saw the original Pokemon Handbook in the first Scholastic book order form of the year, I chose to get it and then spent weeks - months - obsessing over every page and committing all 150 Pokemon in it to memory (the first edition of the handbook lacked a page on Mew, but they later rereleased it with bonus content including files on Mew and Togepi). As fall turned to winter, I started building my own proper card collection via booster packs, and by Christmas of that year I had a massive collection due to asking for basically nothing for my birthday or for Christmas besides "more Pokemon". This didn't include a Game Boy, though, as we just couldn't afford a new video game system at the time, especially not one that demanded a constant supply of batteries. I did eventually get a Game Boy Color and Pokemon Gold for Christmas in 2000, but before then, my Pokemon fandom was centered around the toys, the anime, the books, and - most of all - those cards. I picked up strategy guides and collector's pricing guides, learning everything there was to know about the first three sets of Pokemon cards - Base Set, Jungle, and Fossil. I developed strategies in my head, dutifully organized my cards by how good they were in the TCG, and even messed around with a sort of "Top Trumps" game using Pokemon cards that I played with my brother, where two cards are compared and the higher HP wins, but the Pokemon's weaknesses and resistances were worked into the rules to make it more interesting. But despite all of this constant theorizing and thinking and obsessing over the Pokemon Trading Card Game... I never actually played the Pokemon Trading Card Game.

Years later, around 2007 or so, I visited Gamestop for the first time and discovered they were selling Game Boy games. I grabbed the GBC cart of Pokemon Trading Card Game for a whopping two dollars (I also picked up Wario Land II, Kirby's Dream Land, and Skies of Arcadia on the same trip, IIRC, so it was a pretty momentous day). All those old strategies and rulings from the TCG's early days were still burned into my brain, and it was an absolute delight getting to actually play the TCG for the first time. These cards, their powers, their art, it's one of the most concentrated nostalgia bombs I could have possibly imagined. So I may be a little biased when I sing this game's praises, because just letting me play the 1999 version of the TCG is already worth ten million points.

In PTCG, you embark on a quest to collect the Legendary Pokemon Cards, four special cards invented just for this game depicting the classic Legendary Bird trio and Dragonite. To earn the right to get your mitts on them, you must defeat the four Grand Masters who have them, and to earn the right to face them, you must collect eight Medals awarded by traveling to eight different "Clubs" and defeating their members and leaders. There's also a smug rival named Ronald running around who's always one step ahead of you, and it's not much of a spoiler to say he's the final battle after you've defeated the Grand Masters. So yeah, it's basically the classic Pokemon formula, just applied to a world where Pokemon aren't real and instead are just trading cards. There's no evil team to beat, though (but that would be addressed in the Japan-only sequel!).

You start off with your choice of three rather weak starter decks. You can then slowly make the deck your own with booster packs, which you earn by defeating opponents and as occasional gifts from Dr. Mason, the equivalent of a Pokemon Professor. Building a great deck and seeing the strategy unfold is very satisfying, especially once it becomes clear the opponent has no answer, and there are many possible paths to victory even when your collection lacks most of the best cards, which can only be earned through random chance. There are certainly some terrible cards that are nearly impossible to win most fights with (Base Set Gastly, Base Set Porygon...) but you can still perform well even with mediocre cards if you support them well with Trainers (Trainer cards were incredibly powerful in the original run of the TCG and later sets nerfed them drastically) and get lucky with the draw and with coin flips.

Yes, luck. All card games ultimately come down to luck, and Pokemon is no exception. You can have a long drawn-out match with someone that ends with you losing by a hair's breadth, and then you can rematch them and win in three turns because they couldn't draw any more Pokemon to support the one pitiful little dude they were forced to put in play. The element of luck is impossible to ignore in Pokemon TCG, and you'll have to accept that over the course of a playthrough, you're likely to lose at least a couple of matches just because the RNG gods decided you should and no amount of optimal play could prevent it. Making a powerful deck will lower the chances of you losing this way, but the odds are never zero, especially when using (or fighting against) Pokemon who rely on coin flips for their attacks to be at their best.

Also, using savestates with coin flips in this game is interesting. Coin flips are actually predetermined to some extent, and if you savestate before a flip, that flip will always be the same. You can try to get around this by performing additional actions that use up a flip so that you can get another go at the important flip later. It's a really unique metagame touch that gives duels bite even with savestates.

While PTCG may prove a lot less entertaining to people who didn't grow up absorbing the Base, Jungle, and Fossil cards' rulings like a sponge, it is the ultimate nostalgia trip for those who did, and a great and convenient way to play the OG version of the Pokemon TCG without needing to actually bother with real cards or a real opponent. To all Pokemania-era millennials with fond memories of ripping open Base Set booster packs in hopes of finally pulling Charizard, this is your game.

Math Army
System: PC (Played via Itch.io)
Genre: Casual
Year of release: 2024
Sometimes you just need to scratch an itch. While idly waiting in the car one day in August, I started playing Block Puzzle (reviewed last year) on my phone to pass time. One of the ads served up between rounds depicted a game where you controlled a squad of soldiers automatically charging down a corridor and passed through gates that gave you more soldiers. You'd need to choose between two gates and pick the one that would give you more soldiers, for instance if you had 20 soldiers and were offered a choice between a gate that multiplied your forces by three and another that added a flat thirty soldiers. Upon reaching an enemy squad, the two groups would fling themselves at each other and do one-to-one kill trades until only one side was left, severely depleted. This continued until you reached the end of the corridor.

It's an incredibly simple and basic game idea, not dissimilar to other mobile games with math-based objectives like the one where you need to grow your power level by beating enemies with lower levels and avoiding ones with higher ones as you move through a board. But as simplistic as it was, I felt a need to try it. I didn't want to download some microtransaction-laden shitfest onto my phone, though, so I checked online for any PC versions I could play. Math Army came to the rescue, available as a free download on Itch.io. Math Army is the exact same game idea, but with extremely simplistic graphics and no sound (sound is claimed to be present on the Itch page, but no sound played ingame for me). Instead of soldiers, you play as a fleet of goofy-looking blue guys with big binocular eyes and no other facial features. Your opponents look identical save for being colored red. The main gameplay change is that instead of multiplier gates, you instead deal with subtraction gates that will take soldiers away if you walk through them, so you have to try to avoid bad gates and go through good gates (and avoid moving too much if your army gets big, since there are no walls and your soldiers will just fall off the sides as your army gets bigger). You also earn coins for every soldier alive at the end of a level, and you can cash in 100 coins for a single additional man before a level starts. This mechanic is useless, though, considering Math Army's fatal flaw: The levels are randomly generated.

Yes, it's all random. There is absolutely no difference between "Level 1" and "Level 20", they all have the same vaguely icy background and go on for the same length of time, starting with some gates and then a mob, alternating three times until the finish. Since the gates and the sizes of the enemy mobs are random, inevitably you will end up presented with an impossible level where you cannot build an army large enough to defeat the first mob even if you manage the gates perfectly. Instead you just have to accept your defeat, retry the level, and hope the RNG makes it winnable this time since the level is re-generated upon a loss. With no thought put into the level design, no sound effects, and rapidly-monotonous gameplay, I pretty quickly got my itch scratched and no longer needed to play this kind of game any more. Thanks for satisfying my curiosity, Math Army.

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
System: Switch
Genre: Compilation/Documentary
Year of release: 2024
It's Atari 50, except extremely British and full of hoofed mammals.

Since the early days of video games, you could divide the medium into three fronts: the arcade, the home consoles (and eventually handhelds), and gaming on personal computers. In the United Kingdom, the latter was particularly popular, and LTJMS offers a window into this time for anyone who wasn't there. Similar to Atari 50, the tale is told from a single company's point of view, but this time the "company" is one guy making games on his own. The British PC gaming scene was a hotbed for independent programmers decades before "indie games" started to catch people's attention in the late 2000s.

Jeff was a pretty prolific developer and a healthy portion of his games are here, though unfortunately it's far from a complete collection even if you discount stuff they wouldn't have the license for (such as Space Invaders Extreme, which Llamasoft did the trippy backgrounds for - which means I'd already played a Jeff Minter game before this collection and didn't even know!). 42 games are present in the collection, but this number is padded a bit by counting alternate versions of the same game as separate titles, as well as including two non-game music visualizers in the total and a new graphical remaster of Gridrunner that's just the original game with new graphics and sounds layered on top of the same engine, similar to the dolled-up Yar's Revenge found on Atari 50. Lastly, Tempest 2000 is present on both this collection and Atari 50, so if you already have Atari 50 it's a double dip to see it again here.

As with Atari 50, though, honestly the real prize here is the documentary stuff. Once again you'll find lots of delightful ephemera like developer's notes, magazine articles, advertisements, and so on. There are also a number of video clips featuring interviews done with Jeff and people who know Jeff. One of my favorite bits is the Llamasoft newsletter, a several-page missive Jeff mailed out every time he had some news to share (usually a new game releasing) that contains lots of great contemporary talk about making games, playing games, and living life, as well as describing a whole lot of things as 'zarjaz', which is a Judge Dredd reference to an in-universe slang term, and boy did Jeff really like saying it in his newsletter. 'Zarjaz' basically just means 'awesome'. A whole bunch of the newsletters are included in the collection, though issue seven is unfortunately missing.

Your mileage will vary on the actual video games included - even back in their day, they weren't for everyone due to Jeff's preference for making difficult shmups with weird mechanics - but the historical value here is tremendous, and I enjoyed this glimpse into the 80s UK PC gaming scene. I've also reviewed some of the included games separately below.

Centipede
System: ZX81 (played via Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story)
Genre: Shmup
Year of release: 1981
Programmed by Jeff Minter based off of screenshots of Centipede (he hadn't played the real game at the time), this unlicensed clone is a most unfortunate version that is far inferior to the original. The only enemy is the Centipede itself, all others like the Spider and Scorpion having been omitted, and your ship cannot move upward so once the snaking centipede reaches the ground floor, you're just screwed. It also feels very difficult to hit the thing with your bullets. I do think it's amazing that a bootleg clone of a famous game is available on the Switch in the modern day thanks to this collection being put together by a company owned by Atari themselves, but this version of Centipede is merely a curiosity. Hit up Atari 50 and play the genuine article if you're itching for Centipede.

Abductor
System: VIC-20 (played via Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story)
Genre: Shmup
Year of release: 1982
This is a simple and incredibly fast-paced shmup. Your little ship moves and fires quickly, and the enemy ships come flying onto the screen in various formations, rapidly zigzagging here and there before eventually lunging down towards the defenseless humans sitting below your craft if you didn't kill the wave quick enough. Abducting them and carrying them off, you have one last chance to rescue the humans by shooting down the enemy ships, but if they reach the top of the screen, the little stick figures will turn into skulls and drop off the screen and out of sight. If you survive several waves, your ship will be permanently upgraded to fire multiple shots at once, though it also gets bigger and is therefore easier to hit. The standard one-hit kills and three allotted lives are in play. You lose a life if you get hit or if the aliens take all your humans.

The action is fast-paced and fun, but there are a couple significant flaws that spoil things. One is that the formations sometimes erupt from the floor, and there's no warning of this, so you can die instantly from an enemy you can't even see. The other is that your ship can't move far enough to the sides to rescue the human on the far left, so as soon as a ship goes for them, that human is lost no matter what.

City Bomb
System: ZX Spectrum (played via Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story)
Genre: Shmup
Year of release: 1982
An interesting downwards-firing target shooter that evolves on the sorts of "submarine" games you could see in arcades in the late 1970s. City Bomb depicts a city of skyscrapers that your bomber plane makes repeated passes over, going slightly lower each time. Pressing the fire button drops a bomb that goes straight down and eats through skyscrapers in its' path. The goal is to completely wipe out every single building so that the ground is entirely flat with no rubble left over, which allows your plane to come in for a landing. A successful landing plays a little tune and shows an image of a llama to mark your victorious genocide.

City Bomb's basic concept is pretty good but I did struggle with the actual firing of bombs. It felt like there was sometimes a delay between pressing the button and getting the bomb to fall, which is a serious problem in a game that demands pinpoint accuracy. When it works, though, it's fun.

City Bomb originally released back in the day as 'Bomb Buenos Aires' and had political overtones and an anti-war message, sort of like Missile Command being based off the Cold War and having a grim warning about mutually assured destruction hiding within it. The real-world references were scrubbed in later releases, and it is one of these generic versions that made it into the collection.

Ratman
System: VIC-20 (played via Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story)
Genre: Action
Year of release: 1982
In Ratman you play as the world's least efficient exterminator, who kills rats by mashing them with a hammer. It would be awful in real life or in HD graphics but it works well enough as a framing device for a Golden Age video game. The playfield is a simple stretch of flat ground. Rats descend from above and you hit them with your hammer. Touching a rat is death. Complicating things is a moving hole in the floor that the Ratman can simply step over but the rats can sneak through. A rat that gets under the floor is called a 'devil', as it acquires horns and a pitchfork and stands in place, occasionally thrusting its' pitchfork up through the floor to try and kill the Ratman. If the Ratman dies, the 'Hand of God' descends from the sky and plucks him off the ground, yoinking him away to the afterlife. If you can hit enough rats and survive long enough, you'll move on to a new stage where the rats drop faster, but at least you get a clean slate with all the 'devils' despawned.

Ratman would be better if it didn't have the same issue as City Bomb where pressing the attack button sometimes doesn't do anything or produces a delayed response. In the documentary content in LTJMS that's associated with Ratman, Jeff says that even back when it was new he didn't think much of Ratman and it was soon pulled from Llamasoft's catalog as he was too unhappy with it to feel comfortable offering it for sale. Points for originality, though.

Headbangers Heaven
System: ZX Spectrum (played via Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story)
Genre: Action
Year of release: 1983
This one is hilarious, don't miss the amazing in-game tutorial. You play as Chico, a "headbanger" who loves loud music and banging his head. Your goal is to cross a single screen to grab a sack of money and return to your starting spot to deposit it, then go back for more. Complicating this is a rain of hammers dropping out of the sky you need to dodge, but here's where Chico's unique characteristic comes into play: he LIKES being hit on the head by hammers, so you actually earn points if you let him get hit. You will still lose a life if a hammer strikes you in the shoulders, though, and Chico also can only endure nine hammer blows to the head - the tenth will knock him out. However, a few of the hammers that rain down are red in color instead of the usual white. These are aspirin hammers, and Chico will heal to full health if he lets one bop him. The more pain he's built up before getting the aspirin hammer, the more points you receive.

Headbangers Heaven is actually pretty fun, but it's also luck-based. The hammers fall VERY thickly and Chico's three-unit-wide body will struggle to dodge. You are bound to run into situations that cannot be escaped and where there's simply nowhere to go. Chico also isn't very agile, and trying to slip in a last-second hammer hit will just get you killed even if the hammer hit you on the head instead of the body.

Gridrunner
System: Commodore 64 (played via Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story)
Genre: Shmup
Year of release: 1983
Undoubtedly one of the most famous games in the Llamasoft library (despite not having any ungulates in it!), Gridrunner was a legitimate hit in the early 80s PC gaming scene, both in the UK and USA. It's pretty easy to see why, as it offers a twist on a proven formula and is built to please score-chasers. Gridrunner is similar to Centipede, but faster and with different enemies. Instead of mushrooms, you deal with pods that will eventually explode downward unless shot repeatedly until they vanish (if not properly killed they will regenerate health and resume preparing to fire). The centipede replacements don't behave much differently, but then there's the real problems, a pair of laser guns on the bottom and left side of the screen. Unreachable and unkillable, they move around and constantly fire attacks at a steady rate across the grid-shaped playfield, and where their shots meet, a pod is formed. These things will cause almost all of your deaths, since the other two enemies aren't particularly dangerous. Keeping track of the cannons, though, instantly makes Gridrunner much tougher and gives the other enemies more bite because you might get caught by one of them while focused on trying to avoid the cannons.

Gridrunner probably would have done pretty well in the coin-op business if it had been released as an arcade game a year or two earlier. It's got that arcade action touch, and while it baffled me at first a little bit of playtime helped acclimate me to it. I can understand why Gridrunner was so popular in its' day, even if classic arcade games can't often hook me and make me want to play over and over like they used to.

Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time
System: VIC-20 (played via Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story)
Genre: Shmup
Year of release: 1983
That title. The plot for this one is intentionally very silly, describing an extremely dramatic ongoing war between good humans (and their uplifted llama friends) and evil aliens and referencing several prior Llamasoft games, creating a shared universe in the process. It's a very simple shooter, where you play as a llama that spits diagonal lasers and must kill waves of spiders that descend from above. The twist is that your lasers bounce off the walls and the ceiling, and you can move this ceiling to help angle your shots. Once I got the hang of it, I actually liked it a good amount and I may try it again sometime. It's simple but different.

Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit
System: PC
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 2022
So, as most Sonic fans know, the Blue Blur's pre-Dreamcast output wasn't just limited to the Genesis and a few spinoffs on the Saturn. He also got a ton of Game Gear games! Problem is, the poor old Game Gear was a bit too lo-fi to handle the smooth, fast gameplay Sonic is known for, and it's generally accepted that the Game Gear releases range from "awful" to "okay, but nothing compared to the Genesis". Doing a Genesis-style remake of these old games is one of those fangame no-brainers (right up there with the Pokemon romhack I reviewed a couple years ago that enhanced the Gen 2 Spaceworld prototype into a full game), but Sonic fangame hosting websites are littered with the abandoned demos of people who just couldn't manage to actually finish what they started. Fortunately, at least one Game Gear remake project actually did see completion.

Sonic Triple Trouble has been nominated in some circles as the best of the Sonic platformers on Game Gear. It's original, has fairly impressive levels approaching Sonic 1 Genesis levels of complexity, and is full of unique ideas. However, I played it after playing the remake, and you'll get a full review of it below, but spoiler alert, it's not nearly as good as the Genesis games and is severely held back by the console it's on. This makes it an excellent candidate for the remake treatment, and brother did it ever get it. This release expands on the original BIG TIME. I would compare it to the glowup the original NES Metroid got when it became the vastly, vastly superior Metroid Zero Mission. STT16B takes a mediocre little 8-bit title that had good ideas but weak execution and expands it into a proper entry in the main line of games, achieving a remarkable authenticity that makes it feel like a lost Sega Genesis game. I'm really impressed!

Tons of new content has been added to fill out the levels and make them bigger and more impressive. The graphical detail is astounding, with deep intricate backgrounds that make the worlds fit right in with the likes of Sonic 3 and Knuckles. The levels are huge and full of secrets and alternate routes, too. I realized last year while playing Sonic Origins some more (still love it, by the way) that part of the secret sauce for a good Sonic game is having multiple ways to get to the goal, along with momentum-based platforming that allows you to tackle levels in different ways and the ability to use different characters' abilities to take unique paths. Taking these things together, you get a game that feels different each time you play it, and this is the secret that makes Classic Sonic so replayable for me. Even thirty years after I first played it, I'm still discovering new routes and secret goodies in Sonic 3K. Triple Trouble's remake has got a touch of the old magic, and the engine is dead-on accurate, too, despite not being a hack or a mod. It feels like true, authentic Classic Sonic. I had a huge smile on my face pretty much the whole time I was playing. Getting to blast through a genuine-feeling Sonic game that was pretty much brand new to me was an awesome feeling! (I did have some Triple Trouble experience going in, but I'd never finished it, and like I said, the glowup is so huge that this is essentially a brand new game that's just inspired by the original. If you play both, you get two very different experiences even if they share some content.)

Gameplay is mostly very similar to the classic Sonics, but a few new tricks come into play to make things feel like a step up from S3K (though S3K is still ultimately the bigger, more elaborate game). There are several sequences where Sonic and Tails will acquire new abilities for a short time, and you also cannot play as Sonic or Tails alone and instead are allowed to swap between the two at any time while the one you aren't controlling follows you around. Tails retains his flight ability, so you can find new routes with him and then swap back to Sonic if you prefer the Blue Blur. One fun strategic touch is that getting a shield power-up will protect both Sonic and Tails, and the CPU-controlled one will never lose their shield, so if you get hit, you can swap characters and still have a shield to use to protect those precious rings.

One word of warning, though: This is obviously meant to be a Sonic game for Sonic fans and familiarity with the series is expected to anyone going in, and to that end, the difficulty is a little high. Maybe it's just because I was less familiar with this than the Origins games, but the last couple levels have some rough sections. It's certainly not one of those ridiculous "Kaizo Mario" games where you're assaulted by ludicrously hard challenges, but if you're getting complacent in your Sonic skills from memorizing all the old games and knowing what's ahead, this oughta wake you up! However, while STT16B isn't a pushover, it's fair too. Really hard sections such as a downright nasty multi-phase miniboss fight near the end where it's very easy to get crushed or fall offscreen have checkpoints after each major segment of the battle, and you can toggle on the Coin system from Sonic Origins, which gives you infinite lives and lets you save up coins instead to use as "extra lives" for if you fail the Special Stages (you can still retry them if you keep the Coin system off, but it'll cost you a life, so both normal gameplay and Special Stages drain resources from the same pool). These are accessed via giant rings hidden in the levels, much like S3K, and consist of a "3D" race against Fang (AKA Nack) where you must reach the end of the course before him to grab a Chaos Emerald, managing a steadily-dropping ring count as you go. They can get pretty tough, but like in Sonic Origins, the coin system gave me the chance I needed to get better and eventually collect them all.

If you, like me, enjoy Genesis-style Sonic platform games and wish there were more to play, you should absolutely check this one out. I'm sure glad I did. And since this is a fangame, it won't cost you a penny!

Sonic Triple Trouble
System: Game Gear (played via Sonic Origins)
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 1994
Of course, after playing the excellent remake, I decided to go back and play the original game and see how different it was. I actually own the cartridge for Triple Trouble, but I'd never managed to get further than the second-to-last zone, Tidal Plant. Playing it now on Sonic Origins with savestate support, I can see why. The original game has its' moments, but it's also full of cheap shots and weird design choices, like a bizarre obsession with putting springs absolutely everywhere, which the remake dialed down on.

In Triple Trouble you can play as either Sonic or Tails, and Tails can fly and gets a couple exclusive powerups to make his runs a little easier. Sonic also gets a couple exclusive powerups in turn, but it's hard to beat Tails' Sea Fox submarine that makes water navigation a breeze and the item that lets him briefly fly at incredibly fast speeds to skip huge chunks of the level. The title comes from the fact that the duo face three antagonists in one game: Dr. Robotnik of course, but Knuckles is in a S3K-esque troublemaking role and there's also newcomer Fang the Hunter (AKA Fang the Sniper, AKA Nack the Weasel) who is mostly only seen if you try to go for the Chaos Emeralds, which are very difficult to get in this game.

As I mentioned in the remake's review, Classic Sonic thrives on hiding secrets everywhere and giving you tons of alternate routes, shortcuts, and out-of-the-way nooks and crannies to make every playthrough feel unique as you chart your own course through the level. Early Sonic games on Game Gear couldn't accomplish this - if you look at the maps for Sonic 1's 8-bit version, for instance, you'll see that they look much more like 2D Mario levels than 2D Sonic levels: there's only one possible path to the end, sometimes with a handful of secrets in small side areas, and playing the level is going to be largely the same experience every single time. Triple Trouble actually put effort into mapping its' levels more like a proper 16-bit Sonic title, with multiple routes and secrets. Some of the later stages get downright labyrinthian. I was not surprised that Tidal Plant had stopped me in my tracks all those years ago when I replayed it in the modern day - it's an absolute maze in there, full of gotchas and nasty traps, and it's way too easy to get stuck in a loop and not know where to go. Tidal Plant takes things too far, IMO, and shot right past "fun to explore" and straight into "where the hell do I go". The beauty of most 16-bit 2D Sonic levels is that no matter how you may wander, you're naturally funneled along a path that will lead you to the exit using smart design features like one-way gates and drawing the eye with pickups and Badniks, and only a handful of Acts run the risk of making you so confused you aren't sure where to go next. Triple Trouble doesn't quite grasp this, not helped by the smaller screen size making it much harder to direct the player without constant hand-holding, which it totally eschews. Some of the Zones come out of it alright, but not Tidal Plant. Also want to give a shoutout to the nasty final boss that really highlights how sluggish your movement can be.

Triple Trouble isn't awful and you can see where it's going and what it's trying to do, but for a game regularly held up as the best of the Game Gear Sonics, it's pretty lacking and can't hold a candle against the fab four, especially the one that it released as the "counterpart" of, Sonic 3 and Knuckles. It's held back a lot by the Game Gear's small screen and low power. Unlike so many games that get "remade" mostly just for the sake of releasing the same game again for more money (like the barely-changed Donkey Kong Country Returns port on Switch from earlier this year), this is one game that genuinely DID need a remake on better hardware to unlock its' full potential, and thank goodness it got one!

Sonic Chaos
System: Game Gear (played via Sonic Origins)
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 1993
And here's the Sonic game that released on Game Gear before Triple Trouble, Sonic Chaos. A weird game with an odd relationship with difficulty, Sonic Chaos has a number of stages that are absolute cakewalks (especially if you can find the shortcuts that let you spring or jump over huge sections of the level), but a handful of tricky bits to take your lives regardless. The two biggest killers are precision platforming over bottomless pits and dangerous bosses with fast-moving projectiles that sluggish 8-bit Sonic and Tails struggle to dodge. The final boss is an especially egregious offender, firing a bouncing shot that always seems to find your character on the cramped little screen. There also surprisingly aren't any checkpoints in any of the levels (or at least I went through the whole game and never saw one) but considering how short nearly all the levels are and that the bosses get their own Acts, this isn't too bad. Also, level design is almost on par with Triple Trouble, with alternate routes becoming prominent. The only thing resembling a maze is the final Zone, which features warp tunnels you need to hold a direction to navigate lest it take you on an automatic route you might not want. Still, though, just keep trying to go right and you should eventually bumble through.

Sonic Chaos is okay but nothing special. It would benefit greatly from getting the same kind of expansive remake that Triple Trouble got, but while one was in the works, the developer was unable to finish it - the fate of the vast majority of Sonic fangames.

Amabilly
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 2023
If you read the description, look at the screenshots, and decide to try out Amabilly, you're going to get completely blindsided when you start a new file and you're greeted with the sight of a beeping heart monitor. There's no hidden horror in Amabilly, no nasty subversions or cruel twists, but the framing device for this cute little platformer is an unexpected one: Presumably involved in some terrible undescribed accident, Amabilly is a young girl who is currently trapped in a coma. Her parents visit her at the hospital regularly, doing their best to talk to her and encourage her, but she won't wake up. Before the accident, though, she loved playing her guitar, so her father gets the idea to leave the guitar by her bedside one day. This results in Amabilly having the guitar in her coma dreams as well, and with its' power allowing her to shoot projectiles at her foes, she's able to start fighting her way through her coma, defeating enemies and bosses as she tries to wake up and see her family again.

Emotional framing device aside, this is a very typical platformer. You're presented with four worlds (a forest, a lakeside park, a city at the beginning of winter judging from the combination of orange-leaved trees and snow, and a castle), each packing 25 levels, but these are extremely brief levels that can usually be cleared in a minute or less. To clear a level, you just have to get to the goal, but Amabilly makes things a little more interesting through the use of treasure chests. Every level has a chest, and you can only open it if you find the four pieces of a diamond scattered throughout the level. Every chest contains some gems and a musical note. Gems, which are also found liberally scattered across the levels a la coins in Mario, are used as currency at shops in the hub world to buy upgrades for Amabilly that give her more health or improve her guitar's attacking ability. The music notes are used to unlock boss doors at the end of each world. You're not told how many notes you need, but it's pretty trivial to get all the notes by putting in a bit of effort to look around the stage and not just sprint for the exit. Interestingly, Amabilly includes levels based on platforming only and levels with enemies. Stages with enemies are marked with red doors and feature baddies for you to shoot accompanied by overly-dramatic rock music, but the enemy-free stages instead are built around gimmicks like avoiding arrows or spikes and have calm, silly music.

Amabilly feels good to control and gets better as you go along and get more abilities. Our intrepid young heroine earns new ones every time she defeats a boss, ranging from a submarine that lets her dive underwater to angel wings that give her a double jump. Later levels make good use of these abilities, but overall Amabilly's difficulty level is pretty low. The challenge does ramp up a bit towards the end, particularly one stage that features timed-disappearing platforms over instant-death lava, but is still quite mild compared to many other platformers. The four bosses are tougher, though only the first one took me more than one attempt to beat. You get infinite lives. There are no mid-level checkpoints, but the stages are so short that you really don't need them. You also lose a handful of gems upon death, so if you have a lot, spend them! Amabilly runs well on the Switch and has only a few small technical faults. On one occasion I got stuck on the side of a platform and couldn't walk (but could just jump off) and on another occasion a level in the fourth world (the aforementioned "platforms over lava" level, in fact) made Amabilly crash and I had to restart, but I didn't lose any progress. I wouldn't pay a lot for Amabilly (I got it for free with My Nintendo Gold Points when it was on sale for about $2) but it's a pleasant enough bite-sized game you can 100% in a couple hours if you're looking for something smooth and wholesome.

Terror Of Hemasaurus
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Action
Year of release: 2023
I've always had a soft spot for Rampage. It's a very repetitive and simple series where you just flail at buildings with a kaiju until the city is leveled, but it's good fun in short bursts and scratches a destructive itch. Remarkably, despite the massive range of titles available on the Switch and the semi-recent feature film, there is no sign of the Rampage series anywhere on the system. Plus, there hasn't been a proper new entry in the series since 2006's Rampage: Total Destruction (an arcade-exclusive ticket game came out in 2018 to promote the movie, but was very simplistic even for this series and did not get a home release). With the OG city-destroyer game MIA, it's up to Terror Of Hemasaurus to fill in the gap, with the developer happy to state they grew up playing Rampage and took direct cues from it to make this spiritual successor.

To try and make things more interesting than the famously repetitive Rampage series, TOH introduces specific goals for each level. Early levels just have you destroy stuff, but as you play you'll start seeing more gimmick levels that require you to do certain things. You might need to focus on attacking civilians and ignoring buildings, or destroying buildings with a specific tool, or fighting a boss. In addition to all the city destruction, though, the main story mode of TOH is probably the most politically-charged narrative I've seen in a game I've played, and it's here where TOH shows a complete willingness to open itself up to scorn or disgust.

The primary message of Terror of Hemasaurus is its' commentary on climate change. One of humanity's greatest self-owns, right up there with the dogged insistence on continuing to murder one another with war (and don't worry, they slipped in a cutscene that's anti-war too). In the world of Terror Of Hemasaurus, a kaiju-worshipping cult has hit upon a unique way of solving the problem: have the Godzilla-esque Hemasaurus kill as much of humanity as possible so that they stop polluting. As the cult leader himself proudly points out, the carbon footprint of a human being drops drastically once they die! However, the cult quickly establishes itself as being just as bad if not worse than the rest of the human race, the leader confessing to enjoy all the death Hemasaurus causes, seeing no issue with the cult killing its' own members (which is of course actively detrimental to their cause), and he even openly advocates for the murder of innocent children who obviously aren't responsible for the climate crisis. It's all played for black comedy, and the tiny goofy sprites make it easier to stomach even if they do still spurt out gobs of blood when killed. Possibly the best example of this game's sense of humor is the end of the second chapter: Hemasaurus saves dogs and cats from a burning veterinary clinic to rebuild his image after all the genocide, but the cult were the ones to set it on fire in the first place because it's a staged viral video. This is then followed by a parody bonus stage where you cuddle the animals, and then you get a cutscene where a mother whose worst crime was being ignorant is eaten in front of her child by Hemasaurus, who then spits her out half-digested so her innocent son can watch her dissolve into a skeleton. Ultimately TOH is more of a commentary on humans' inability to work as a collective for the greater good than anything else, especially as the plot progresses and even Hemasaurus himself starts to have second thoughts that he's doing the right thing by killing so many people. Though to the creator's credit, they include a parody of themselves in-game and make fun of their own creation in between insulting everyone around them.

Naturally, I'm not super comfortable with something this bleak even if it does dress it up in cute graphics and goofy comedy. The graphics do a lot to make this game work, though - if it was realistically detailed, or even if it was detailed-but-cartoony like a Mario or Sonic game, it would be horrifying and probably slapped with an AO rating due to all the child murder. It's also a fun game with satisfying destruction even if the message dives into "early 2000s Comedy Central" levels of utterly nihilistic black humor. Hemasaurus controls well enough and has a fair variety of moves, though TOH has the same problem Rampage does in that your character is too big and slow to avoid most enemy attacks and so you have to simply power through injuries instead of trying to dodge, then eat your way back to health after dealing with the attacker.

One important addition to TOH is the "Endless Destruction" mode. This mode ditches the story and just sets you loose to make mayhem for as long as you can, much more akin to a normal Rampage title. All you have to do is destroy at least 75% of the level, then you can leave whenever you're ready by going to the far right of the area. This is probably what you'll come back to if you play TOH for longer than it takes to just beat the story. It certainly feels samey this way, but that was always one of Rampage's two biggest flaws, the other being cheap deaths, and TOH happens to copy its' inspiration there too. TOH isn't a very hard game, but if it decides it wants you to die, you will die: every single one of my deaths in both modes was because multiple soldiers attacked me at once and unleashed rapid-fire attacks that stunlocked Hemasaurus until he died, meaning it was impossible for me to escape being killed. In the end, TOH is a pretty good Big Dumb Vidya Game that fills Rampage's empty niche pretty well on the Switch, but it is unable to take this genre any further aside from in the realm of nihilist political commentary.

F-Zero 99
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Racing
Year of release: 2023
Let's take a moment to revisit F-Zero 99! I sang the praises of this game last year, and since then it's actually gotten even better - though with a caveat.

A ton of new tracks have been added! "Mirror" versions of the three leagues are available now, but unlike the usual Mario Kart style mirror mode where it's literally just the same track as before but flipped horizontally, F-Zero 99 actually significantly changes the tracks in Mirror form. New objects and obstacles are added, including brand new gimmicks exclusive to Mirror Mode that aren't seen anywhere else, such as bumpers that spin your car around if you hit them and glowing circles that help fill your Skyway meter and give you a tiny speed boost. Even more exciting is the Ace League, which adds tracks to F-Zero 99 that were originally only available via the Satellaview in Japan (and a recent update made Mirror and Classic versions of the Ace League tracks). You can even unlock the Satellaview-exclusive vehicles as skins! There's been other goodies piled on, too, like more stuff to unlock, the "Lucky Ranks" system that gives you special Pilot Card backgrounds and helps you level up faster, limited-time events for special goodies, and emotes that let you spam grinning Captain Falcons before every race.

The caveat is, of course, that a multiplayer game is only as fun as its' community of players allows. The playerbase does rebound every time new stuff gets added, but as you can imagine, most of the people still playing at this point are really, really good at F-Zero 99, and you may find the skill barrier for finishing a Grand Prix (not even winning one, just finishing one) to be quite steep. It's not like F-Zero's known for being easy, though, so if you're a fan of the series you're probably used to struggling. You can also minimize the difficulty by playing at off-peak hours and slipping into rooms just before time expires on the event you're entering, resulting in having to face only a small handful of human opponents and dozens of low-difficulty bots. Best of luck!

Zarzon
System: Arcade
Genre: Shmup
Year of release: 1981
One of the most forgettable and generic games I've ever played, Zarzon is a bog-standard shmup featuring combat against fast and aggressive flying saucers. You do have a "barrier" button that lets you activate a colorful shield that covers the bottom of the screen, used to zap any saucers that get too low, but otherwise you're not going to see anything unique here. Even the name is just your usual alien-sounding gibberish. If Zarzon was wiped from history by a reality-warping god, nothing about the world would change.

Whack'em Funky Gators
System: Arcade
Genre: Whack-A-Mole/Redemption
Year of release: 2016
A clever idea. Whack'em Funky Gators is a digital version of Whack-A-Mole, meaning there are fewer moving mechanical parts and therefore fewer points of failure for arcade owners to worry about, as well as the potential to mix up proceedings with unique enemies. Instead of wielding a hammer, you're presented with a row of five massive buttons. On the big screen are five tunnels corresponding to the five buttons. Cartoon gators will pop out and try to take a bite out of you. Whack them by hitting the corresponding button. Don't let them linger or your remaining time will deplete rapidly. When time runs out your game's over and you get tickets based on your performance. Last long enough and you'll encounter additional rounds featuring unique gators, such as giant ones that take up two or even three tunnels' worth of space and that require multiple whacks to defeat.

Whack'em Funky Gators was originally released in 1988 as a more standard whack-a-mole style game called "Gator Panic", making this essentially a modern remake.

Halloween Forever
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 2018
Halloween Forever is a cute little NES-style platformer in the vein of Mega Man or Ghosts N' Goblins. Combining platform hopping with zapping lots of enemies, your goal is to navigate five fairly tricky levels and defeat ten big bosses.

Probably Halloween Forever's most notable quality aside from its' lovely "spooky but not scary" aesthetic is its' old-school mentality. You get three lives and if you lose them all it's Game Over and you must begin again from the start. No saves, no passwords, nothing. This is certainly intimidating at first, and a 99 Lives option is offered if you'd like to just push through, but Halloween Forever does give you the tools you need to win with minimal death. The biggest of them is the ability to unlock more characters, and while I got a Game Over on my first run as the default Pumpkin Man, I did manage to find and unlock another character along the way - the gun-toting Protagonist. Protag's long-range spread shot was a far better weapon than Pumpkin Man's short-range candy corn spit, and when I went back in for a second try, I picked him instead and ended up beating the entire game without a single death!

Halloween Forever's biggest flaw is the handful of "gotcha" moments where you can't see danger above or below you because of the lack of an ability to scroll the screen up and down. If you were able to do this and see where you were going a little more easily HF would feel more fair, but it's not a cruel game and once you know the handful of spots where you can get into serious trouble you can at least work around them. The main game is of course extremely short to accommodate the "three lives, that's it" game design, but it encourages replay value via six hidden tablets and a bunch of unlockable characters found via secret alternate routes and side rooms, of whom you can only unlock one per run. Find another in the same run, or return to one you'd unlocked before on a previous run, and you'll get an extra life instead (they're very rare otherwise). This is how you're meant to beat Halloween Forever, via finding better characters and scoring extra lives by unlocking them and trying again. It's fair enough, really, and a complete run should only take about thirty minutes. Halloween Forever is a small game sold for a low price and is a good example of an indie title that doesn't shoot for the moon and mostly succeeds at simply offering a nice little game.

Sonic Colors Ultimate
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: 2D/3D Platformer Hybrid
Year of release: 2021
Not long after revisiting Sonic Origins and playing the Triple Trouble remake, I started to get the itch to dive deeper into Sonic's catalog. Like with Mario the year before, I'd missed out on a bunch of Sonic games, having basically abandoned the franchise after being underwhelmed by Sonic Heroes and Sonic Advance in the mid-2000s. Sonic has an unfortunate reputation for consistently being unable to produce high-quality games no matter what Sega tries to mix things up, and a lot of his games have fans and detractors in nearly equal measure. Sonic Colors was supposedly one of the better games I'd missed, though, and there it was in remastered form on Switch for under $20 during a sale. I took a chance on it. Is it any good? Well... it's alright.

In Sonic Colors, Dr. Eggman decides to do some good for once and makes a gigantic amusement park, which he claims is made as penance for his evil deeds. Unfortunately it's a lie, as the park is a front for his real plan: Kidnapping a race of aliens called Wisps and draining their energy for use not only to power the park, but to make Sonic-killing devices and a mind control ray that's big enough to blast the whole world. Sonic and Tails visit the park to investigate it since they're rightfully skeptical the big egg's turned over a new leaf, and they soon uncover his plot and get to work stopping it. The cutscenes, which tend to primarily show up around the boss stages, are very silly and written like a standard kid's cartoon, but I found them rather charming in their goofiness. If you've ever encountered the "No copyright law in the universe is going to stop me!" Sonic meme, this is where that line originated.

Sonic Colors is mostly a 2D platformer, but it occasionally features other styles of gameplay and isn't afraid to swap between them multiple times during most stages. Sometimes you'll have 3D movement, sometimes it'll be 2D, and sometimes you'll be locked into a corridor and an auto-running Sonic can shift from one "lane" to another instead of moving freely. Any comparisons to the classic era Sonic games can be tossed right out the window because this is a far different beast. The numerous alternate routes I love from the Genesis-era games aren't here - this is a mostly linear experience much like Sonic Adventure's speed and shooter stages, with only a few levels having short alternate routes that usually lead to a collectible. Sonic controls much differently here than on Genesis and can't roll while running or even do a spin dash, which took me some time to get used to. They did give him a little sliding kick, but it's not reliable against enemies because if you're not going fast enough it ends too soon to clear the packs of them that obligingly stand in line waiting for him. The old momentum-based attacks would have been much more useful. His jump feels surprisingly underwhelming for a character so famous for his jumping, though he has a tiny double jump to help a bit. The homing attack introduced in 3D Blast and made famous in the Sonic Adventure series returns here, but it's not particularly reliable and Sonic will frequently be the one getting hit instead it you try to use it on something behind you instead of ahead of you. You also may accidentally home in on something twenty feet away when you're trying to use your double jump because both are activated by pressing the jump button in mid-air. Sonic's a bit clunky to maneuver and it's very easy to miss rings when running through the segments with full 3D control, forcing you to either ignore them or awkwardly double back and haphazardly grab them. A "boost" mechanic replaces the spin dash as your main method of moving quickly when no dash panels are nearby, but it runs on a limited supply of energy. Collectibles in the form of red rings can be grabbed, usually by going out of your way for a platforming challenge or solving a small puzzle, but you often only get one chance to obtain them before you're forced onward, so you need to memorize the level or use a guide if you want any hope of getting them all. The regular old golden rings are still here and that same health system is in play just like the old games, but there are absolutely no normal item boxes anywhere, and the absence of any shields or invincibility powerups is felt hard, since one hit takes all your rings away. You do have infinite lives though, which is good since some stages can actually get quite tricky, especially when they start piling on the bottomless pits (though you get a helpful notification in the form of the bottom of the screen glowing red whenever you're in an area where falling means death, which is nice). The other main mechanic is Wisp powers, obtained inside capsules scattered around the stages. A lot of the Red Rings rely on Sonic picking up the right Wisp and using it at the right time and place. You can't bank multiple Wisps for later, they eat into your fuel gauge when used (and some can't be turned off until it's all used up), and unless the Wisp is required to progress in the level it won't respawn for another try if you mess up, which makes getting those out-of-the-way Red Rings even harder. Some of these stages are very short, but others are quite lengthy and I don't fancy the idea of replaying them repeatedly for higher scores or to get the missing Red Rings.

Another thing I dislike relates to the grading system for each level, which awards you a letter grade based on your score at the end of the stage. A major component of your score is your total time - obviously, the faster you finish the level, the better. If Sonic is defeated mid-level, the timer will keep running, meaning you added a bunch of unnecessary time to your total during your failed run. This by itself is fine - taking a hit to your grade is a fitting punishment since lives are infinite. However, the timer keeps running even if you hadn't passed a checkpoint and therefore had to start the entire stage over from the beginning. If you're going for a good grade, that means you'll have to quit out of the level and load it again, sitting through a couple fairly lengthy loading screens to do so. That just feels like a really annoying punishment and I think they should have had the timer restart if you hadn't yet reached a checkpoint to make things a little more player-friendly.

This game was infamous on launch for being filled with glitches that weren't present in the original Sonic Colors, but to Sega's credit they went back and did multiple patches to tidy things up and it seemed alright when I played it. There were certainly still issues, like the homing attack problem and sometimes Sonic just did not do anything when I pressed a button and his lack of action led to him screwing up, but I don't know what's a new problem on Switch and what's simply baked into this cake. Sonic Colors isn't terrible and I enjoyed its' kiddy cartoon tone and beautiful theme park landscapes and nice music but it certainly can't hold a candle to the phenomenal original games.

Annalynn
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Arcade Platformer
Year of release: 2021
Annalynn is a love letter to the golden age of arcade games, the early 1980s. Styled to resemble the sorts of games that released in that era, Annalynn also has a few modern touches to make it more palatable to today's players.

Annalynn is a miner. While out digging, she uncovers a deep shaft rich in treasure, but also awakens a foursome of cave-living snakes who are none too pleased that she's intruding in their territory. Annalynn's task is to gather up all the goodies in every stage while avoiding the snakes as they tirelessly pursue her. Further comical cutscenes as you play (clearly inspired by the intermissions of the old Pac-Man arcade games) give personality to the characters and are a lot of fun.

Gameplay is essentially Pac-Man, if Pac-Man was a platformer instead of a maze game. Annalynn's only skill is a jump (she unfortunately broke her pickaxe in the intro cutscene), but it's a pretty good jump and much better than ol' Jumpman's was in Donkey Kong, allowing for pretty good midair control. You'll need it to avoid the snakes, who are fast and clever and able to pop into your path at a moment's notice thanks to warp doors scattered across every level that only they can use. To turn the tables, Annalynn can grab a Blinding Ruby, a red gemstone that works like a Pac-Man Power Pellet. It'll turn the snakes vulnerable for a few seconds so she can ram into them and kick them away for big points. As you play, more hazards come into the mix such as bottomless pits, conveyor belts, icy floors, and traps that spray fire into the air when stepped on. After fifteen levels of scooping up treasure, the sixteenth and final level is a boss fight, and then it ends.

Annalynn retains the challenge of classic arcade games. These snakes are relentless, and a single touch will kill Annalynn, robbing her of one of her three precious lives. You can earn more by scoring high, but if you run out, it's Game Over. Fortunately for the less hardcore among us, Annalynn actually offers an incredibly forgiving Continue system that lets you jump right back in with three more lives and all the progress you made on your previous run kept, down to the last coin collected. Even during the boss battle progress is retained completely, including how much damage the boss has taken. This sort of gentle and accessible continue system was common in arcade beat-em-ups and shmups, but is unheard of in Golden Age action games since unlike Annalynn most of them were endless. It was a very good idea, though. This allows anyone to make it through Annalynn just through persistence, though your score is cut in half every time you continue so only experts will be able to try for high scores (again, probably the right call). There's even a "Perfect" to shoot for that amounts to getting maximum use out of the Blinding Rubies to get all four snakes every single time you grab a Ruby as well as picking up the Bonus Food, a points item that appears after grabbing half of the stage's coins. Annalynn also has numerous extra cheats and features that become available after clearing it once, such as a Hard Mode, a Random Mode, a speedrunning clock, and a "Practice" mode that lets you replay any stage and try for a best time. This is a game that wants you to play it over and over, which makes sense considering a single run takes less than 30 minutes even if you Game Over a bunch of times.

Annalynn is a cute, wholesome little game that's authentic in the right ways and progressive where it counts. For only five bucks, it's worth a spin if you're a fan of the classic arcade aesthetic, even if you only play through it once.

Banjo-Tooie
System: N64 (played via Nintendo Switch Online)
Genre: 3D Platformer
Year of release: 2000
Banjo-Kazooie was pretty much a perfect game for its' genre. It's hard for me to find fault with it, and I replayed it in January 2024 and had a wonderful time. The NSO's ability to save anywhere helped smooth over what few frustrations there were, letting you instantly retry if you screw up some of the tricky platforming in the last few levels (Rusty Bucket Bay, Click Clock Wood, looking at you). With BK being so good, the question was, how could it be followed up? Rare's answer was to make everything bigger. Not "more". Bigger. There's actually fewer Jiggies in Tooie than Kazooie - 90 instead of 100 - and although the number of worlds is the same, the last world in Tooie isn't a full world but just a short series of bosses and challenges before the finale, with no Jiggies in sight (hence the loss of ten of them, though originally Cauldron Keep was a full-sized world and got cut down due to time constraints). However, those 90 Jiggies take, on average, far longer to track down and obtain than Kazooie's 100, with many of them being involved multi-stage challenges that may require swapping between several playable characters or traveling between two different worlds. "Multiple playable characters" is another major focus of this game. In the first game you had the different forms Mumbo Jumbo could transform you into, but he was only available in about half of the levels. In Tooie, all eight full-size worlds have a transformation. In addition to that, you can also play as Mumbo himself, and a new "Split Up" ability lets you play as Banjo and Kazooie separately from one another, each with their own unlockable skills to complicate things even further.

This is what leads into what people say is Tooie's great weakness compared to Kazooie: It's much more complicated, and detractors say it's too complicated for its' own good. It's certainly not like the first game, which is almost entirely linear (in BK, there is a single Jiggy you cannot get on your first visit to one world, and another that is technically possible but is much easier if you backtrack. Both involve the Turbo Talon Trot speed-boosting shoes.) You can definitely see some of Rare's Donkey Kong 64 mentality seeping in here, a game that is infamous for having what many consider to be too much character swapping and item collecting.

I've always really liked Banjo-Tooie, but I understand the criticisms. Compared to Kazooie, which has minimal wasted space and tightly-packed levels, the sprawling worlds in Tooie take much longer to complete and there's a lot of walking as you go back and forth between points of interest, swapping characters and doing this and that. In later stages such as the prehistoric Terrydactyland, navigation becomes one of your biggest obstacles as a lot of the challenge lies in getting a specific character to a specific location. It's easy enough to use Banjo and Kazooie to find a "Mumbo Pad" that only he can use, but then you have to figure out how to get the much more limited Mumbo to the Mumbo Pad by using a route you probably didn't use to get there as the much more mobile Banjo/Kazooie duo. Some of the later levels can be frustrating, too, with annoying enemies that keep respawning and tricky platforming where a fall can mean having to do it all again. (Again, the NSO's savestates help with these bothersome things.)

On the plus side, though, the worlds feel deep and immersive with how huge they are, and you'll constantly be discovering new little nooks and crannies. Almost everything has a purpose, although sometimes you may be surprised to find whole little side areas with only a minor prize or two inside, as if it was just about making the world bigger and sucking you into it. Another really cool thing about Banjo-Tooie is how many collectibles you can obtain through methods that aren't the intended ones. With this many different characters and abilities to keep track of, it was inevitable that some characters are able to do things they weren't intended to do, particularly the extremely fast and mobile Solo Kazooie and the Clockwork Kazooie Egg that lets you spawn a tiny playable Kazooie robot almost anywhere you can shoot an egg. There are ways to cleverly work around intended solutions from the very first world, and especially once you've unlocked all of the moves it's a lot of fun to see just how far you can cheese things in unplanned ways. Plus, if you're not interested in getting 100%, you only need 70 Jiggies to face Gruntilda, meaning you can skip a whopping 20 Jiggies. This allows you to bypass many of the more lengthy, frustrating, or annoying challenges, like the tedious process of helping the aliens in Hailfire Peaks or the infamous rematch with Canary Mary in Cloud Cuckooland. (Tip: Mary has rubber band AI in the rematch, so trick her into moving slowly by intentionally pressing A at a slow, steady rate until near the end of the race, then pour it on at the end and mash like hell to shoot past her before she can react.)

So which Banjo is better? Like most things, it's a matter of taste. Tooie isn't really trying to do what Kazooie did. Kazooie was an attempt at streamlining the Mario 64 style of platformer. In Mario 64, you can only get one Star at a time and have to start the level over again to get another one, sometimes resulting in slight tweaks to the levels to make the Stars accessible. In Banjo-Kazooie you can just go in there and clean up, grabbing everything in one swoop without having to leave and come back. And Banjo-Tooie is more like an open world or Metroidvania kind of game, where you're cut loose in a gigantic, sprawling world and have to work out how to get everything, and it can feel very satisfying as you go from not even knowing where to begin with a new level to having all the pieces falling into place an hour or two later. If BK was a refinement of the 3D platformer, BT is an experiment that takes it in a new direction. Both approaches are valid, and both games are excellent, but it's understandable that BK is the more popular overall since it's more accessible and there's less filler. BT is a wonderful, gigantic adventure stuffed with minigames, exploration, puzzles, and boss fights, and is a great example of just how far the N64 had come since Mario 64's crude, simplistic worlds just four years earlier. With the original dev team long since gone from Rare and the attempt at a spiritual successor, Yooka-Laylee, proving divisive, it seems there may never again be a Banjo game (or indeed any game at all) that lives up to the standard set by these two N64 titans, which is a shame, but at least these classics still hold up so many years later.

Also, quick shoutout to the NSO version for removing all the slowdown. Banjo-Tooie runs beautifully in almost all situations on the Switch, making this version much better to play than any other.

GigaBash
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Fighting
Year of release: 2023
An old guilty pleasure of mine was Godzilla Unleashed, a Wii fighting game featuring the King of the Monsters and his many enemies and rivals going at it. While I enjoyed this game and played it a ludicrous amount in the mid-late 2000s, many people disliked it or considered it of poor quality and I understood why. It had middling graphics, a lame story mode, some bugs, and could feel sloppy. But I loved it anyway. Unleashed was the third of a trilogy of Godzilla arena fighters, the first being Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee and the second being Godzilla: Save The Earth. A fourth installment in this series doesn't seem like it will ever materialize, with Pipeworks doing little these days except collab with other developers to make Madden games (they also were part of the dead-on-arrival hero shooter, Concord). But, as has been the case with so many abandoned franchises, an indie studio stepped in to make their own version, and so now we have GigaBash.

Set in a world where humans are forced to coexist with giant monsters, GigaBash was clearly made by people who know their giant monsters. The cast (a mere ten, but this can expand with DLC) covers pretty much all the bases when it comes to referencing different types of kaiju. The Ultraman expy is obvious - Gigaman, an older hero who debuted in the 60s and still suits up to fight evil in the 2020s. Then there's Rawa, an intimidating reptilian beast who seems to be "Godzilla by way of Pacific Rim". A few feel more like their own thing, such as the goofy yeti, Woolley, or the monstrous snail, Skorak. No matter which era of giant monster movies you relate to the most, be it guys in suits or Hollywood CGI, you'll find a monster here that resonates. There's even DLC featuring actual Ultraman and Godzilla characters, though the license was only bought for a limited time so these guest fighters will eventually vanish from the eShop.

The gameplay is pretty similar to the Godzilla fighters GigaBash is obviously inspired by. You're given a 3D arena to walk around in and your goal is to pound on your opponent until they are defeated. Fights can be between two, three, or four monsters, and one-on-ones run just fine, but bigger fights will induce slowdown as the Switch struggles to keep up. You have a "normal attack" button and a "special attack" button. The normal attacks are various basic punches, kicks, and blows, while the special moves get more unique, like Woolley rolling up into a snowball that can engulf opponents and carry them around or Pipijuras firing energy projectiles. Context matters for these buttons and you'll do different moves if you're jumping, blocking, or if you hold the button down instead of just pressing it. There's also a grab for dealing with foes who block a lot, and of course you can pick up and throw buildings and vehicles at your opponents for some quick ranged damage. Just like in the Godzilla games, this is an extremely effective technique that can get you out of a jam if you're struggling. When in doubt, spam buildings!

GigaBash is mostly designed around multiplayer, and when it launched there wasn't much for a solo player aside from a brief story mode that only covers four of the ten base game characters, each one getting a five-level campaign. Five of the other six only appear as opponents in the story, and the last isn't featured at all. GigaBash did add more solo support through updates, however, and now there's an Arcade-style mode to run through that does the classic "series of random opponents" gauntlet you see in most fighting games, and the minigames that were originally multiplayer-only can now be done with bots. Still, like most fighters, it assumes you're going to play with friends, so you'll get the most out of GigaBash if you can find some people to join you for it.

Mining Mechs
System: PC (Steam)
Genre: Casual Exploration
Year of release: 2023
This is a unique one! I had to look at Steam's tags to try and determine what genre this game even was, and I put two of them together to make "Casual Exploration", which I suppose works well enough. In Mining Mechs, you take control of a digging machine and go tunneling underground in search of riches. However, there is no danger whatsoever - no time pressure and no way to die or get a Game Over. You're free to explore at your own pace and dig your way through the earth to make your very own mining tunnels however you see fit.

That's not to say it's mindless, though. Mining Mechs has some light puzzle elements, particularly as you try to optimize your work. As you dig, two meters will fill. One represents the dirt your mech has taken from digging, and the other represents your load of ore. The world is grid-based, and if you dig in a square with nothing in it but dirt, your dirt meter goes up. If there's treasure in the square, your ore meter goes up instead. You will have to frequently return to the surface to empty these meters by unloading your dirt and selling the ore. You can then use the money you earn to upgrade your mech or buy a new one. Upgraded mechs can hold more dirt and ore as well as dig and fly faster. You'll need the upgrades, especially since the deeper you go, the harder the materials become, slowing down your digging without upgrades. Returning to the surface and dropping back down to work again can be a little tedious at times, but there are ways to make it easier. There's an item shop that sells teleporters that let you instantly warp back to the surface (these are prohibitively expensive early on but are trivial to buy in the lategame when they're more useful), and there's an NPC miner who operates an automated mine that goes straight down the center of the map. Dig a path for his pipe and lead it to special mineshafts and you'll start earning passive income, but almost as useful as the money earned from idling and doing nothing is that the central pipe shaft becomes a convenient way to drop straight down and get back to work (though once you go deep enough, even a straight fall down will take a good twenty seconds or more). This pipe will form the backbone of your mine and be an important landmark to help you keep track of your location (you also have coordinates in the top right corner, though, which is super helpful), with your own side tunnels branching out to nab anything that looks interesting - or if you just have a good feeling that something valuable lurks just offscreen.

You can't dig upwards, only to the sides or downwards (and you have to be standing on something solid in order to dig), so your digging will have to keep that in mind lest you make it harder to reach valuables. You'll also encounter rocks that can't be drilled through, forcing you to use explosives (sold by the item shop) to blast them out of the way. These additional considerations mean the mining has strategy to it, keeping it interesting despite the lack of danger.

Mining Mechs has a goofy sense of humor and doesn't take itself very seriously. Everyone's at least a little eccentric including your player character, and though the storyline you uncover by digging deeper has a few moments that certainly could have been played for drama in another game, it's all pretty silly in the end. The graphics are nice simple pixels, the mechs well-animated. The music is okay, but it's just a loop of a few different songs that ignores whatever you're doing in-game. I eventually shut the music off and played my own tunes. The sound effects are nice and satisfying, though. Digging up treasure sounds good, as it should.

Mining Mechs is a very solid multi-hour experience that should appeal to anyone looking for something that won't put much pressure on you and let you just relax and watch numbers go up. It only costs a couple bucks and has optional DLC campaigns that are even cheaper, and at that price I can certainly say I got my money's worth of mining.

Bore Blasters
System: PC (Steam)
Genre: Shmup/Survivorslike
Year of release: 2024
Another mining game! Bore Blasters and Mining Mechs are even sold together in a bundle on Steam. Bore Blasters is referred to by many people as a "roguelike" or "roguelite" and I'm starting to realize this term has lost all meaning. There's no permadeath and you don't lose anything upon death. The only somewhat rogueish element is that during play your level up your ship with temporary upgrades chosen from a random pool, similar to Vampire Survivors. Does that mean the City Trial from Kirby Air Ride is a "roguelike" now?

Anyway, in Bore Blasters, you take control of a dwarf and go mining, but these dwarves are heavily technologically advanced, and you're not rooting around Middle Earth with a pickaxe - you're flying between these weird flat "island planets" in a space airship, doing orbital drops to land on exotic locales. You ride around inside a helicopter equipped with a gun turret, and you shoot your way down through the earth to look for treasure. Every level is randomly generated with different kinds of blocks representing different types of terrain (stone, for instance, takes longer to shoot through than soft dirt), but the styles of the environments - like a volcano region, a plant-filled region, an ice region, and a region that looks like it's inside a giant monster - are fixed, and every level cycles between a few different environments before it ends. The goal is to reach a giant treasure chest located at the very bottom of the level. Gems are scattered throughout the level, with ones near the surface worth very little but higher-scoring gems appearing more the deeper down you go. Collecting enough gems will level up your machine, letting you add one of three randomly-selected upgrades that are offered to you. You can also use a special move that recharges periodically. At first, your special move is a brief period of invincibility that lets you instantly destroy blocks in your path. This is extremely useful early on as your chopper is too weak to deal with many durable block types. As you progress you'll unlock two more characters who each have their own super move - one fires a series of rockets, and the other fires a laser that turns every block it hits into a low-scoring gem block. All three are good for quickly digging in a straight line, but your mileage may vary as to which is your favorite. After a level is over, you can use the money earned from mining to upgrade your chopper's stats and use your more powerful vehicle to take on harder stages. And that's the gameplay loop - mine for goodies, make money, use the money to be better at mining for goodies, repeat until every level is beaten. Along the way you'll also follow a story, which is nothing too special but is a nice diversion to add some structure to things instead of just being a bunch of mining adventures with no further meaning.

Many reviews I read for Bore Blasters claimed it was excellent at first but grew somewhat tiresome in the lategame as it overstays its' welcome. I think I'm inclined to agree. I liked it a lot and the mechanics are solid, but the last section of the adventure drags as Bore Blasters pretty much runs out of new stuff to show you, yet refuses to end and just keeps trotting out the same enemies and environments over and over. However, some people complained of the last few upgrades requiring extensive grinding for money, and this I would refute. As long as you focus on mostly upgrading the gem multiplier early on and take opportunities to grab big money when it's available, you should be able to max out your vehicle long before running out of levels just by playing every level once (or until you clear it), no grinding needed.

Sonic Frontiers
System: PS5
Genre: 3D Platformer
Year of release: 2022
Sonic the Hedgehog has tried just about everything. It seems like nearly every new Sonic game since the "modern" era began with Sonic Adventure has pulled out some kind of weird gimmick or drastically different gameplay style in an effort to find its' footing. From the Adventure games having different playable characters with wildly different gameplay styles, to Heroes trying three-character teams, to Unleashed and its' "Werehog", to Colors and the Wisps. He even went back to basics with Sonic Mania. But in the 2020s Sonic decided to give open world gameplay a shot with Sonic Frontiers, and the result is... actually quite good!

The gist this time is that Sonic, Tails, and Amy set off for a series of islands after Tails detects that the Chaos Emeralds have settled there. As they approach, however, a vortex opens up and traps them all. Sonic alone escapes, soon finding that his friends are lost in "Cyber Space", a digital dimension. What's more, his old nemesis Dr. Eggman and friendly rival Knuckles had also detected the Emeralds on the islands before Sonic had arrived, and both also ended up in Cyber Space. A digital being resembling a young girl is also lurking about - her name is Sage, and she is Dr. Eggman's latest creation, a super-intelligent AI. Taking after her "dad", she dislikes Sonic and wants him to leave, but Sonic isn't going anywhere until his friends are rescued, so Sage quickly resorts to drastic measures to get rid of him, all while claiming that something terrible and unstoppable is coming but refusing to elaborate further...

Sonic Frontiers' approach to "open" gameplay reminds me a lot of Pokemon Legends Arceus. The game world isn't fully open, but instead divided up into a series of large islands you unlock one at a time. Each individual island is an open world you can engage with how you like. The objective is to defeat the boss of each world, but to make them available you have to further the plot. This is done in two ways, alternating between obtaining Chaos Emeralds and speaking to the resident ally NPC who is different on each island. To unlock the cutscenes with the NPC, you need to collect Memory Tokens which are scattered all around the island, usually as a prize at the end of a small obstacle course. To get the Chaos Emeralds you need to collect keys. Keys are won by playing Cyber Space stages which are short linear get-to-the-goal levels similar to what you usually see in a Sonic game. And to get into Cyber Space you need to collect Portal Gears, which are mostly obtained as drops from minibosses located around the island. The result of all this is a gameplay loop where you collect things to open other things that let you collect more things. You also have a map, but you need to unlock it by doing "Challenges" scattered across the island, each of which is some small task or puzzle that will reveal some of the map once finished. Bundled into all this is a level-up system that requires finding even more collectibles like Seeds and the haniwa-like Koco to raise Sonic's stats, an optional minigame involving running around and grabbing as many shiny orbs as possible, and a simple fishing game featuring Big the Cat that's paid for via the Purple Coins scattered around the island and that lets you easily obtain any collectible in the game if you're having trouble getting enough through normal means. It's a lot, but every collectible has a purpose and they tend to feed into one another or otherwise be pretty simple.

Some of Sonic Frontiers content can be annoying or janky, and while some of the time limits for things like clearing a Cyber Space level with an S Rank are really tight, others are incredibly forgiving, with little rhyme or reason behind which ones are hard and which are easy (1-2, the second Cyber Space level in the entire game, is infamous for having a ridiculously tight time limit for its' S Rank). But if you're not fiending for 100% completion you can get through just fine by focusing on whatever you have the most fun doing, with most of the required content being fairly easy to do (though I did have some trouble with a few required sequences like a chase scene where you have to avoid instant-kill attacks and a tricky skyfalling obstacle course that requires some memorization to clear). A lot of the really difficult optional content, such as finding special rare Koco that raise Sonic's Boost Gauge at the end of exceptionally tough platforming sequences, isn't even required for the achievements. It's even possible to beat the entire game skipping almost everything except the fishing minigame and earning all the collectibles through it.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack, which is a varied mix of genres that's well crafted to fit the situation you're in. While exploring the island, you get moody ambience. Engaging a miniboss triggers an electronic-heavy boss theme that's different for every type. The Cyber Space stages play all sorts of wild music, again leaning on electronic genres (there's even some dubstep). But the major boss themes are famous for stealing the show, all of them fully voiced songs that go so hard the lead singer ends up screaming some of the lyrics. Sonic's always had good music and this game is certainly no exception.

Sonic Superstars
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 2023
The people cried out for Sonic Mania 2, and Sega would at last deliver... kind of... sort of... maybe. Sonic Superstars is a full, complete return to the classic style of Sonic games, marking the first properly classic-era Sonic sidescroller since Mania, which in turn was the first one since the Genesis days. However, although it uses Sonic Mania's engine to make it play similarly to the old games, Superstars sports full 3D graphics and was developed by a different team - Arzest, a developer known for making oddball and unpopular entries in well-known series like Yoshi's New Island and Hey Pikmin. They also helped make Balan Wonderworld. This isn't exactly the company I would trust with such an important task as reviving Classic Sonic, but they actually did a pretty damn good job in my opinion!

Sonic Superstars is extremely evocative of the original games. All the "classic" character designs are in use, and the worlds are vibrant and colorful with none of Frontiers' realism, grimness, and grittiness anywhere to be seen. That both Frontiers and Superstars work equally well for Sonic shows just how versatile the character can be. I'm reminded of how Godzilla has appeared in everything from serious horror-esque films to goofy children's entertainment and seems adaptable to any genre. The plot is accordingly simple, but there is a bit of a hook in that Dr. Robotnik (it just feels better to call the classic version Robotnik and the modern one Eggman) has got himself some backup in the form of Fang the Sniper from Sonic Triple Trouble making his return as a hired gun to help Robotnik wrangle jumbo-size Flickies to power giant Badniks - and, of course, keep an eye out for the Chaos Emeralds. Adding an extra bit of intrigue to it all, however, is a new character named Trip who follows Fang around and tries to help him, but her name is accurately descriptive of how clumsy and gaffe-prone she is, and she tends to harm more than help, to Fang's irritation.

Superstars' gameplay is pulled right from the Genesis playbook - huge, sprawling 2D levels that are all about finding your way to the goal by traveling across one of many different routes. There are tons of different ways to progress in most stages, and you can play the same level a few different times and see new stuff each time by making an effort to explore and try to go in different places than you did before. This style of level, along with the momentum-based gameplay that lets you use speed and various level gimmicks to hurl your character around, is what separates Sonic 2D level design from Mario 2D level design, which tends to be a much more linear and reserved series of obstacles instead of a big open stage to tackle as you please. I love it! Arzest, to my surprise, absolutely nailed the classic Sonic feeling. These levels are fun to navigate and have plenty of interesting new ideas to spice up gameplay. Unlike Sonic Mania, all of the zones are new, but some of them are definitely inspired by previous Sonic games, though they do add their own twists to things. For instance, Lagoon City is obviously reminiscent of Hydrocity in its' design and aesthetic, but the brighter colors and setting it outdoors instead of underground actually does a lot to make it feel like its' own thing. I was also delighted by some of the additional twists to make the levels feel unique, and was especially impressed by the aesthetic and theming of Golden Capital, which is some kind of bizarre hybrid of a traditional "pinball" Sonic level with an ancient civilization aesthetic that also mixes in elements of Marble Zone from Sonic 1 to create something that felt astonishingly appropriate for the classic Sonic style while also feeling like its' own beast.

While the levels are largely fantastic, the bosses are another matter. A lot of the criticism of Superstars revolves around how difficult its' bosses are. Most of them are fine, though they can be tricky and many are definitely lengthier than Genesis-era Sonic bosses (the boss of Sand Sanctuary is a good example - not a hard fight, but a long one compared to how brief bosses were in the Sonic Origins games). Some, however, are a bit much, with the boss of Golden Capital probably being the first real example of "my kingdom for a checkpoint" and the boss of Cyber Station even having a really obvious spot to do a checkpoint and deciding against it. The bosses would largely be fine if the longer ones had checkpoints, replaced their instant-death moves with normal "lose your rings" moves, or took fewer hits to beat, and considering how easy it would be to make those fixes I'm kind of surprised Sega didn't bother, especially since Sonic Frontiers, in contrast, has received numerous patches and updates to tweak the difficulty of its' own battles since its' release. I suspect that Superstars being developed by Arzest instead of Sonic Team is to blame for that. It's a shame because the bosses tend to slow things down and cause some frustration when the rest of the game feels so good to play.

There are two kinds of special stages you'll come across as you play, too. Similar to Sonic 3 and Knuckles, giant rings are found hiding in secret areas throughout the zones, and if you enter these you'll play a weird new minigame where you swing like Spider-Man through a colorful void to catch a Chaos Emerald. There are also silver rings where you can do the same game to earn Medals instead. You can also earn Medals by playing the second minigame, which appears when you pass a checkpoint with enough rings. This game is a drastic enhancement of the special stages from Sonic 1, where you control your character in curled-up form as they navigate a rotating maze. I actually found these to be surprisingly fun, though they get tricky the more you play and some of the later ones are truly devious. Unfortunately, while Medals are fun to collect (you can also pick them up scattered around the levels like how Mario sidescrollers use giant coins), their use is solely to buy custom parts for a playable robot you can use in a multiplayer mode. If you could bring the robot into the main game and they had special abilities based on what parts they had equipped, or if you could buy other stuff with Medals like concept art or extra tries at Chaos Emeralds, they'd feel more useful, but a lot of players will probably never even use the custom robot and so Medals are worthless to them.

I'll also touch on the soundtrack a bit, as (unusually for a Sonic title) many people find it a mixed bag. Several different composers worked on it, and the music ranges from excellent to bland (yes, we get it, that is indeed the Genesis Sonic 1/2 drum sample). Nothing is really offensive, but some of the tracks won't stick in you like Sonic music tends to do, and I found most of the boss themes in particular to be pretty weak. It's a shame since Sonic is famous for having incredible music, and almost every entry in the series has some really great tunes, even mediocre stuff like 3D Blast whipping out some of my favorite video game music ever. The sound effects are very good, albeit many of them are lifted from the older games. But hey - they weren't broke and didn't need fixing. I maintain that the "boss damage" and "badnik pop" sound effects from the OG Sonic games are two of the best, most satisfying sound effects in gaming. Collecting rings always feels good with that classic sparkle noise, too.

Overall, I think Sonic Superstars is a qualified success. There are a few issues, but Superstars has a lot of fun inside it and playing a new, official classic Sonic was a real treat. Sonic Mania and the Triple Trouble fan remake also both upped the difficulty level of their own boss fights compared to the classic series, so Superstars taking it even further doesn't feel so bad. It's like that TV Tropes page, Franchise Original Sin. Mania had some really tough bosses, some of which took multiple minutes to defeat (I still don't know how you're "supposed" to beat Heavy Rider in Lava Reef and always just kind of bumble around until I manage to take her out), but the fandom largely forgave it for that. Superstars didn't get the same grace extended to it. So while it's far from perfect, I can say that Superstars is a step in the right direction, and I hope we get another game like it someday.

Battle RC
System: PC (Steam)
Genre: Robot Combat
Year of release: 2024
Combat robotics is a sport very ripe for video game adaptation, but precious few games have released in the genre. Battlebots and Robot Wars got some licensed titles back around the new millennium, of course, and there have been a few other attempts here and there (most notably Robot Arena 2), but this is still a small, niche genre with high demands for a game like a good physics engine and destructible robots. Battle RC arrived on Steam in 2024 as a small indie project that helps fill the void for a modern robot battling game.

Battle RC's gameplay is very straightforward. There are no unlockables, no single-player campaign, nothing except exhibition matches and the ability to make a simple 1v1 single-elimination tournament. In the exhibition mode, you set up a match (you can adjust the time limit, number of bots, and if it's a  1v1, 1v2, 2v2, or a free-for-all) and you fight, that's it. There are plenty of arenas to choose from but your mileage may vary as some of them have massive instant-death pits that can end fights way too quickly, especially the arena that's just a tiny circle with no walls where you'll be lucky to get a match that lasts longer than ten seconds. You can select from a decently-varied roster of roughly 20 bots covering most of the traditional designs: horizontal spinners, vertical spinners, a shell spinner and a ring spinner, lifters, a flipper, a hammer, hammersaws, a smother, and a flamethrower. There's a lack of grabbers and crushers, but this and other gaps in the roster can be filled using the Steam Workshop. New robots are created using the program TinkerCAD, which I have never tried. Also, stats are kept for all the robots such as their win-loss record, though since it doesn't track whether the robot was controlled by the player or the AI for each match, this stat won't tell you too much if you've both driven and fought the same bot multiple times.

Actually playing Battle RC can be a bit janky as it's still being worked on, but a lot has changed since I started playing it. In the first version of Battle RC I played, long thin robot parts like forks and moving arms could be bent to hinder the mobility of the machine, and wheels could be removed. A later version of the game added the ability to tear off armor in small pieces by hitting it hard with a spinning weapon, but removed the bending of skinny parts. In no version of Battle RC can you kill an opponent's weapon or tear it off. This more arcadey take on robot battling is a good idea, though, as there are other games in the genre that do it differently like Robot Rumble 2 and having varying levels of simulation across multiple games is ideal for genre variety instead of every game playing similarly.

Battle RC is a fun game to mess around with, but there's no goals or objectives besides just fighting robots for the sake of it, so you kind of have to make your own fun. I've found that running tournaments instead of single matches helps add more interest to the proceedings, especially because of the option you can toggle that lets you pick a robot to control yourself, letting you try to influence how the tournament goes instead of watching the AI.

Sonic Galactic (Demo 2)
System: PC
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 2024
Ah. So THIS is where that supposed Sonic Mania 2 went.

There are lots and lots of Sonic the Hedgehog fan games out there, but for every one that gets finished, two dozen more push out a "demo" and then are never completed as people endlessly underestimate how much work it is to make a video game. I hope dearly that Sonic Galactic is an exception, because this demo showcases an absolutely jaw-dropping level of talent, and to tease something this good and then not finish it would be the crime of the decade!

Sonic Galactic is pitched as "what if Sonic continued 2D platforming into the Sega Saturn era", and it actually works very well as a follow-up to Triple Trouble 16-Bit despite being from a different team because Triple Trouble's events are an important part of this game's backstory, with Fang deciding to team up with Sonic (becoming playable in the process) as a matter of convenience because he has a grudge against Dr. Robotnik following the events of Triple Trouble. In practice, this basically amounts to a game that's essentially Sonic Mania if it was entirely original zones, and works really well as a companion game to Mania with a similar style both graphically and audio-wise, with a magnificent soundtrack that really nails the vibe of classic Sonic without relying on the Genesis soundchip.

The levels are beautiful and designed the way Sonic levels should be designed (tons of branching paths and secrets, with different playable characters getting access to different parts of the level), and while they may remind you of other zones from Sonic's past, they have their own unique flourishes to make them stand out. Things kick off in Verdant Isle, which is a gorgeous seaside retreat that adds a very nice tropical beach flair to the typical "cheerful grassy nature" first stage you tend to see in most Sonic games. Then the action goes beneath the waves in the second zone, Coral Garden, which does some surprising twists on the typical Sonic level. The first act is actually entirely underwater save for the boss at the end, with no chance to escape the wet stuff at all, but it plays incredibly well despite that thanks to an abundance of level gimmicks and objects that replenish your air and/or speed you up. The second act of Coral Garden is a breathtakingly beautiful area that's hard to describe. It reminded me of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon - meticulously-crafted ancient ruins, statues, and mechanics, with nature entwined in harmony amongst it, and the whole act is set in the evening to make everything look even more gorgeous. After that you run into a much more modern civilization with Luminoucity Zone Act 1, which might be my favorite act yet. This is an idealistic, clean, beautiful retro cityscape with a phenomenal backing track. It definitely looks (and sounds) a lot like Studiopolis from Sonic Mania, but while Studiopolis had a strong Hollywood vibe to it, Luminoucity instead goes for a "90s nightlife urban paradise" theme. It's almost every trope I love about cities in media rolled up into ten minutes of platforming heaven, culminating in a very solid boss fight against a hard-rocking elite Badnik inside a stadium, with a crowd of characters (some you may recognize) watching and cheering for both you and your foe.

And then it ends, because this is only a demo. But it's a truly incredible half-hour (or a good bit more if you explore) of peak Classic Sonic gameplay, and is well worth trying out even in its' unfinished state. A game this good being given away for free is a triumph of video gaming as a medium. Sonic Galactic has been in development for several years now (Demo 1 included just Verdant Isle and released in 2022), and presumably that means a lot more work has been done than just these five Acts, so hopefully before the sun explodes we can play the full game.

Sonic X Shadow Generations
System: Nintendo Switch
Genre: 2D/3D Platformer Hybrid
Year of release: 2024
Sonic Generations was originally released as Sonic the Hedgehog's 20th anniversary celebration game. Although many of the games that came out soon before and soon after Generations were widely considered mediocre or outright bad, Generations stands out as a bright spot and was received warmly by many. I never played Generations in its' original form, so I was quite happy to see it get a modern rerelease - and a very substantial one, at that, considering the cart also includes an entire second game, the exclusive Shadow Generations. I wondered how well Sonic Generations would hold up to someone who had never played it when it was new, and if it could match Frontiers and Superstars. Not only is Sonic Generations definitely on par with those other games, Shadow Generations might honestly be the highest-quality game of the lot, and the complete package is one of the best Sonic titles I played in my lengthy marathon of catching up on what the Blue Blur's been doing since Mania.

First, let's talk about Sonic Generations. When Sonic's birthday party is interrupted by a giant monster that controls time and space, the Time Eater, he finds himself trapped in a huge empty void called White Space. His friends are all turned into petrified statues and Zones from past Sonic games appear in the void alongside them. Sonic has to run through these flashback Zones and free his friends, collecting the seven Chaos Emeralds along the way to make himself powerful enough to face the Time Eater and help everyone escape White Space. Along the way, he also runs into his younger self, Classic Sonic, and the two Sonics will have to work together to conquer the Zones.

It's a simple premise that obviously exists just to give us a Greatest Hits of Sonic's history from his first 20 years. Most mainline Sonic games made before 2011 are represented with a level, such as Sonic 1's iconic (and kind of overused by now) Green Hill Zone and Sonic Adventure 2's City Escape. Each Zone is divided into two Acts, a typical Sonic structure, but in a change from other games in the series you can play the Acts in whatever order you like. Act 1 is only playable by Classic Sonic, while Modern Sonic tackles Act 2. Act 1s take the form of sidescrolling stages built for Classic Sonic's small moveset (he doesn't have many tricks besides the good old Spin Dash), while Act 2s go back and forth between 2D and 3D gameplay with Modern Sonic having most of his usual tricks like a homing dash and a stomp attack. Both types of Acts are filled with secrets and hidden collectibles, a proud tradition of old-school Sonic games. Like in Colors and Frontiers, you can collect five Red Rings in every stage, with each individual Red Ring unlocking a piece of concept art you can view in the gallery room. The nine Zones are grouped into three sections, dividing Sonic's timeline up into three eras. Once you've cleared all the Zones in an area, a bunch of "Challenges" unlock. These are special missions that take place in the same levels you just beat, but with changes and special rules to alter them drastically. For instance, some Challenges task you with navigating an obstacle course unique to the Challenge, while others have Sonic either battle against or team up with one of his friends while going through a remixed and truncated version of a level. There are ten challenges for every Zone, five for Classic Sonic and five more for Modern. Complete just one Challenge from each Zone to get a key, do a "Rival Battle" miniboss to get a Chaos Emerald, then bring three keys to the Boss Gate to face a boss, get another Emerald, and unlock the next group of three levels. If you actually want to do all ninety Challenges you'll be at this game for a long time (especially if you go for the S Ranks, which require finishing the levels and Challenges quickly without dying), but it only takes a handful of hours to speed through the levels and do a few of the simpler Challenges to earn the keys.

Not much in the way of new content exists for the Sonic Generations half of this package. Lives are infinite now, though you can toggle them back on for Challenges if you want the inconvenience. You're challenged to find three Chao in every Act, but finding them doesn't give you anything - it's just an extra task to take on. And, of course, there's a bump in graphical quality compared to the original game considering it came out a decade and a half ago. The script has also been redone with a few aspects of the original tweaked or changed. One early change I thought was really good was that in the original Generations, Sonic is baffled at the concept of time travel, but here his confusion is changed to being amazed that it's being done without the Time Stones - Sonic CD's macguffins. Acknowledging that Sonic's dealt with time travel before and nodding to that older game made me smile. There are of course the usual loud voices that cry CENSORSHIP any time something changes, but unless you were really pinning your enjoyment of this game on if you could see Rouge the Bat's exposed upper back (she wears a slightly more modest version of her old costume in this game that covers her back), I think you'll be okay.

Of course, this is only half of what's on offer. There's also a brand new game in the package, Shadow Generations, that acts as a sequel to 2005's Shadow the Hedgehog, but with design sensibilities taken from Generations and, interestingly, Frontiers. In Shadow Generations, we follow what Shadow was doing during the events of Sonic Generations. Turns out he was having an adventure of his own, running across a bunch of characters from the franchise that weren't in Sonic's quest (aside from Rouge, who pulls double duty and shows up for both because she's basically the closest thing Shadow has to a friend and it'd be weird for her not to meet up with him). Shadow's quest is structured fairly similarly to Sonic's: you run through levels inspired by previous Sonic games, then do challenges to get keys to unlock a boss fight that leads you to more levels. There are no minibosses, though, and since Sonic's collecting the Chaos Emeralds, Shadow only gets to have a single one - the one he wagers in a fight against Sonic in Generations when the two of their stories intersect.

Central to Shadow's story is Black Doom, the villain of the 2005 Shadow game. Having returned from his defeat, he now seeks to exploit the Time Eater throwing time and space out of wack by manipulating Shadow into embracing his own inner Black Doom. Shadow will need to make use of his heritage by using new Doom Powers unlocked by progressing through the levels, giving him Black Doom-flavored abilities that make him play a lot differently from Sonic. No guns here, but Shadow can shoot projectiles of his own making and later will get the ability to surf across water on a Doom manta ray and even glide through the air on gnarled, fleshy wings that look straight out of 2005 DeviantArt. This is all played completely seriously and actually hits with some very emotional punch, especially when Shadow runs into a couple people from his past he never thought he'd see again.

The stages in Shadow Generations are excellent, building on the Generations template with lots of alternate paths and shortcuts, good flow, fun use of Shadow's many abilities, and fantastic music and scenery. There are a mere two Challenges per Act now, but on the flip side you have to do both Challenges to get that Act's boss key. The Acts are flipped from Sonic's playthrough - here, Act 1 is the 3D act and Act 2 is 2D. The Frontiers part of things comes in with the hub world. White Space had some limited navigational challenges in Sonic Generations, but here it's a full-on explorable overworld similar to a small version of the islands from Sonic Frontiers. There are treasure chests scattered around packed with unlockable goodies you can view in a gallery room, but to open the chests you need special chest keys that are located in the stages and Challenges. There's also a sidequest revolving around gathering machine parts for Orbot and Cubot, a recurring minigame that challenges you to collect 100 rings under time pressure, and another collectible in the form of pages from the journal of Shadow's creator, Dr. Eggman's grandfather Gerald Robotnik. This extra "level" helps make up for the shorter length of Shadow's campaign compared to Sonic's, as it weighs in with just six Zones compared to Sonic's nine.

The Great Ace Attorney 2
System: Nintendo Switch (as part of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles)
Genre: Adventure
Year of release: 2021
My lord, it's been five years since I played the first TGAA game. Gina Lestrade appearing in Season 10 of ZFRP is the proof. I've long loved the Ace Attorney series and TGAA2 was the only game left in said series that I had yet to play (aside from a crossover with Professor Layton on the 3DS that I've heard is much more Layton than Phoenix and so does not interest me). Why did it take me so long to return to the series? Part of it was because of how long Ace Attorney has been in limbo. This game first released in Japan on the 3DS in 2017 and still stands as the most recent Ace Attorney game eight years later, the series having spent the entire Switch generation just getting ports and rereleases (albeit rereleases that finally gave the West official translations of the three games that had never come out here, that being TGAA1, TGAA2, and Investigations 2). With the series seemingly in a coma, keeping one game "in reserve" helped lessen the wait for more. The other reason I didn't play TGAA2 for so long though was because the first TGAA is probably my least favorite Ace Attorney, and I have a couple reasons why, but what it boils down to is that TGAA1 isn't very satisfying. Most Ace Attorney games are very satisfying, full of "aha!" moments, explanations of how every case happened, and criminals getting caught and exposed before having epic breakdowns on the witness stand. TGAA1, however, suffers from being made with sequels in mind and leaves too much hanging to be satisfying as a standalone game. We'll come back to that in a second, but first I need to address how TGAA1 treats its' lead character.

The Ace Attorney series has always liked to bully its' protagonists. Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice both spend a lot of time being trod upon by unhelpful witnesses, aggressive investigators, uncaring judges and sneering prosecutors. I get it. It makes sense to be on the backfoot most of the time - after all, the whole point of this series is tackling seemingly open-and-shut guilty verdicts and miraculously exposing the true killer to save the accused from an incorrect sentence. But some of the "protagonist abuse" has no merit towards enhancing the story or the stakes and just serves as extremely unfunny attempts at comic relief. The amount of this "comedy" varies from game to game and works better with some characters than others - the Ace Attorney Investigations series did it best, in my opinion. Miles Edgeworth is a respected and successful prosecutor, so his comic relief focused much more on making him put up with ridiculous goofballs and having him play straight man to their antics. But TGAA1 is easily the worst in the series when it comes to putting the protagonist through the wringer. The lack of respect Ryunosuke Naruhodo is afforded is ridiculous, with even Not Guilty verdicts feeling unsatisfying as they tend to twist the knife for the sake of a joke - for instance, after solving one case in TGAA1, Ryu's next case has someone personally inconvenienced by said verdict show up in the jury on the next case, ensuring they're against him from the start. He also suffers heavy amounts of physical abuse, especially in the second case of the first game. And, being a Japanese student working in Great Britain circa 1900, he also encounters a number of extremely racist people who hate him because he is foreign. Dealing with all this crap was a pain, which sucked because the real meat of TGAA1 is actually very good. The cases are as captivating as ever, the historical setting is unique and fun compared to the roughly modern main series, and a bunch of interesting new gimmicks are introduced, most notably a jury system where Ryu must convince the jury to change their minds away from a Guilty verdict, a "Course Correction" where he alters the eccentric deductions of the famous detective Herlock Sholmes to make more sense, and a gimmick ported in from the Professor Layton crossover where you take on multiple witnesses in court simultaneously. This is why, while TGAA1 is my least favorite Ace Attorney, I'd never call it the worst. I just hate its' sense of humor.

TGAA1's other big weakness tied to not feeling satisfying is that it sets up a lot of things that don't pay off - yet. TGAA1 was built with the intention of a multi-game arc in advance, similar to the original Ace Attorney trilogy but with more confidence that they could wait to answer questions later. Characters are teased, mysteries are offered, and TGAA1 ends on something of a cliffhanger. TGAA1 proceeded to sell poorly and get bad reviews from people who were upset it left so much unanswered, and so the second one worked hard to wrap everything up and leave as few unanswered questions as possible (there is a theory going around that there were to be three games in this series instead of two and the poor sales and reception put the kibosh on that idea, and there are hints in TGAA2 that a lot of stuff got cut due to cramming two games worth of plot developments into one). Fortunately, along the way TGAA2 also tossed out what didn't work about TGAA1 while keeping and building on what did. The result is that one of my least favorite AA games is succeeded by one of my favorites.

While Ryu is still looked down upon fairly often in TGAA2, it's much more reasonable now and he's not constantly being belittled and abused. The anti-Japanese racism is also still present, but again toned down so it's not all-encompassing. He's able to get punches in more often and is not blamed for things that everyone knows are not his fault, like when he uncovers secrets other people tried to hide. His assistant Susato is also much more tolerable here after being one of the main sources of physical abuse towards him in the first game (she would judo-throw him every time he angered her in TGAA1, which was often - she only does it twice in TGAA2 and apologizes both times as one was instinctual and the second was a mistake). And most importantly, TGAA2 answers all the mysteries TGAA1 set up while not leaving any significant hanging threads of its' own. If you want answers to the vast, intricate story told across these two games, you'll get answers.

As with all plot-focused games I review, I can't speak much about the actual game content, especially since this builds on what TGAA1 set up, but if you don't know AA games very well, their main purpose is to be a series of mystery novels where you, as a defense attorney, investigate crimes (usually murder) and then defend your client in court from accusations that they're the culprit as you work to uncover lies and mistakes and expose the real perpetrator. Most AA games are self-contained, but TGAA's two games are joined at the hip to make one huge story, which makes releasing them together a wise move from Capcom. The story of the two TGAA games follows Ryu as he travels from his homeland of Japan to Great Britain where he sets up shop in London and crosses paths with detectives, law enforcement, and all manner of eccentrics as he plies his trade as a lawyer. The TGAA games differ from the main series in that they take place over 100 years in the past, around 1900 or so (the exact year is kept vague, and while real-life historical moments are referenced, they contradict each other and leave the setting as being anywhere from the 1860s to the 1910s, but "around 1900" seems to be the most likely time period since there is some hype around the 20th century being new). Color photography is somehow around in this era in this universe, but aside from that you can expect a lower level of technology, tropes and stereotypes evocative of the Victorian Era and Gilded Age, and some steampunk elements too. It's a very fun place to set some murder mysteries and I appreciated any case that would have only worked in this time period that takes advantage of there not being things like videotapes, mobile phones, DNA testing and other modern inventions. And, of course, the writing is as on point as always and there's lots of great moments both funny and serious that are written very well. Overall I can easily recommend the TGAA collection on modern consoles - as long as you don't mind the protag abuse in Part 1, or can push past it, you'll find a very engrossing series of mysteries set in Victorian London here.

Also, shoutout to the quality-of-life features of the Switch rerelease of the TGAA duology, which are a big improvement on the oldest games in the series. When investigating and using the Move menu to go somewhere else, your assistant will nudge you if you missed something. Things you've examined will have a checkmark to designate them as done. And if you still get stuck, there's an auto-play setting in the Options that does the gameplay for you if you don't want to keep flailing and just want to get on with the story.

Sonic and the Fallen Star
System: PC
Genre: 2D Platformer
Year of release: 2022
It's another Classic Sonic fan game, this one complete! Sonic and the Fallen Star features a very simple premise in line with the sort of plot you'd get from most Sonic games of the Classic era: Sonic and Tails are out in the Tornado exploring when they see something crash-land on a nearby island and decide to go check it out. Upon landing, they find Dr. Robotnik's machines infesting the island and discover that the thing that crash-landed is the titular "Fallen Star", which the big egg wants for himself as a new power source to rival the Chaos Emeralds. The Star splits into five pieces and scatters itself across the island, leaving Sonic and Tails to race against time to gather the pieces before Robotnik can get his mitts on them.

Your first impression will likely be that this fangame looks gorgeous. Sonic and his friends and foes are redrawn in a bubbly, sort of "90s Japan citypop" style that feels like a kinder, gentler take on the franchise. Sonic's still got his usual spunk, of course, but everything is very cute and colorful, almost like a Kirby game. Perhaps fittingly, a Kirby sound effect is lifted for the titular Falling Star.

Gameplay is what you'd hope. The engine evokes classic Sonic quite well, and if you're familiar with playing the old-school originals, you'll fit right in here. It's your usual Sonic structure, a series of Zones with two Acts in each, Act 1 capping with a miniboss and Act 2 featuring a battle with Robotnik. You'll also find Special Stages hidden throughout the levels, where you race through obstacle courses and try to collect enough Blue Spheres to boost your speed so you can reach a Chaos Emerald before time runs out. However, level design here isn't quite up to scratch with the originals. It's close, you can feel that they're trying, but it's not quite there yet, particularly with how it can be difficult sometimes to work out where exactly you're supposed to be going. If you're going to make the player go up and down and all around, you need to design levels so that the player is naturally funneled down the right path, or, failing that, you could at least take a page from the book of Marble Garden Zone and plop down some signs that point the player in the right direction. There's also an issue with the backgrounds being a little too colorful, and there are lots of instances where something that appears to be solid floor is actually just background decoration, using similar or even the exact same graphics and making it impossible to tell without testing the ledge by trying to land on it. Still, I can't be too harsh. This is only a free fangame, and we can't expect every fangame to be on the level of what Sonic Galactic is putting together with its' bloated development time. On its' own merits, Fallen Star is a very solid effort, and while it can't match the classics, Mania, or Triple Trouble 16-Bit, it's certainly worth a play for people who've played those already and are craving more of Classic Sonic's one-of-a-kind gameplay style.

A sequel to Sonic and the Fallen Star called Sonic and the Moon Facility was in development for a while but eventually met the fate of most Sonic fangames and was cancelled. However, a mostly-finished build was eventually dropped online and it is supposedly playable from start to finish but only if you play as Sonic. I may give this a spin in the future and tell you more.

Cassette Beasts
System: PC (Steam)
Genre: RPG
Year of release: 2023
Make no mistake, Cassette Beasts is extremely obviously inspired by Pokemon. Let's just get that out of the way. You're a normal human in a strange land where people share the world with weird cartoon monsters, and all conflicts are settled via monster battles. There's no escaping the comparisons. However, Cassette Beasts is definitely not just blindly aping Pokemon - it is very much its' own animal, sharing a genre but not coming off as a simple copy.

Your customizable playable character mysteriously winds up washed ashore on a large island filled with diverse biomes. You soon run into a girl named Kayleigh who informs you that this is New Wirral, you are just one of many people to have washed up on shore, and no one seems to know any way to leave (attempts to just sail off the island always end in a storm destroying the boat). A pleasant little town by the shore has been erected by the people who have come before you, dealing in a trade economy to exchange goods. Monsters infest the land and attack humans who get close, but the people here have discovered that the monsters can have their essences recorded on cassette tapes, allowing the wielders of said tapes to transform themselves into copies of those monsters and giving them the chance to fight back. Most people have resigned themselves to spending the rest of their lives trapped on this island, but it's not long into your adventure before your character discovers a possible way home. The general tone of Cassette Beasts is the first inkling that this isn't just a Pokemon copy, as it feels more mature and philosophical than a typical Pokemon story, but isn't bleak or gory - it seems specifically designed for people who like Pokemon but want something richer from the characters and setting that Game Freak doesn't provide (the retro aesthetic with its' emphasis on cassettes and the adult-aged playable characters also imply that these games are aimed squarely at older/lapsed Pokemon fans). Instead of Pokemon's light and fluffy sense of adventure, there's this feeling of peaceful melancholy lingering over everything, emphasized by the sweet but kind of sad song with vocals that you'll hear while in town, whose lyrics communicate that while you're lost and confused, at least others are lost and confused with you, and you're muddling through life in New Wirral together.

Once you've finished a couple early story missions, Cassette Beasts opens itself up to you. It's a largely open-world experience where you're given several big overarching quests to take on and you can tackle them how you like, not too dissimilar to how Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are structured. You just kind of go out and look for stuff, but there are NPCs in town who will give you "rumors" that will mark your map with sidequests and main quests so that you have some direction. There are gym leader equivalents who use interesting and tricky strategies when battled, two "evil team" equivalents in the form of a ghoulish gang of real estate developers and a mysterious cult, and even un-recordable "legendaries" to hunt down that lurk in ominous subway-like dungeons. Difficulty is customizable but the default is no slouch, especially since you're not allowed to carry more than a handful of healing items and only one revival item, forcing regular trips back home to heal. Fortunately, fast travel is unlocked very early on so you can get back quickly, and as you complete missions you'll earn a special collectible you can trade in to upgrade your character, including allowing them to carry more healing items. You'll also start out without the ability to access certain places, but if you record specific monsters you'll unlock overworld abilities for your character that let them get around more easily (essentially Cassette Beasts' version of the HM system), such as the ability to glide, swim, and even climb on walls.

Battles are based around elemental rock-paper-scissors like Pokemon, but with a twist: elemental strengths and weaknesses are now much more about status effects than hitting for weak points. If an element attacks one it's "strong" against, it'll do the usual amount of damage still, but it will also dish out a negative status effect like lowering stats or poisoning the target. The opposite also happens, with a monster getting buffed if its' attacked by certain elements. The elemental interactions are different from Pokemon, but every time one happens for the first time you will get a tutorial message about it (there's even an option to make the message appear every time it happens instead of only the first time if you really need that reminder), and you're also given a handy type chart you can reference while in battle to help you learn. Battles are almost always 2v1 or 2v2 (2v3 is rare but not unheard of), with you always having a single additional friend in your party to fight alongside (Kayleigh at first, but you'll gather more friends along the way to swap in and out as you like, and certain friends are needed to do certain quests). In times of need, the two of you can fuse your monsters into a single extra-powerful beast, and the better friends you are with someone, the better your fusion form is.

One interesting twist on combat is the "sticker" system. What would be considered moves and abilities in Pokemon are all stickers here. You can remove a beast's stickers (thus removing the move or ability associated with it) and put them in your inventory, then apply them to another creature, but not every beast can use every sticker, and only one beast can use a sticker at a time. It's sort of like if every single move in the game was a reusable TM crossed with a hold item. You can of course buy more stickers back in town to expand your options, and you'll also find stickers in treasure chests scattered across the land. Beasts will learn new skills as they level up, further expanding your sticker options and giving them more slots to put their stickers in. There's also an evolution system (called "remastering") similar to Pokemon, though you can only evolve your beasts at rest stops like the cafe in town or at a campfire (which is also how you heal your team, Pokemon Center style).

I like Cassette Beasts a lot. It's evocative of Pokemon without just shamelessly ripping it off, and the monster design is varied with a lot of creatures I like the look of and plenty of originality (many critters in this game are quite unlike any existing Pokemon). If you're interested in a monster-battling, party-customizing RPG adventure, Cassette Beasts comes recommended regardless of how you feel about Pokemon.

Dr. Mario 64
System: N64 (played via Nintendo Switch Online)
Genre: Puzzle
Year of release: 2001
One of my favorite types of boss battle is when you're faced with either a massive onslaught of weak enemies or a single giant entity with tons of pieces and parts to destroy. Seeing the foe start out intimidating and mighty and steadily break down, starting with you picking off bits where you can until you manage to build momentum and start dominating... it's an amazing feeling. Dr. Mario 64, unique among block-dropping puzzle games, is that in puzzle form. The emphasis on destroying viruses, starting with an intimidating pile of them and whittling away until only a handful remain, is such a great gameplay idea. Uniquely, it means every round of Dr. Mario is toughest at the beginning, when the viruses are everywhere and one mistake can prove catastrophic to your chances of survival. Once you get going, though, the latter half of the round may get a little tedious if you were sloppy with your capsules, but you're not likely to be in danger of losing.

Dr. Mario 64 is a well-rounded package of different modes to play. At the core of them all is the deceptively simple matching gameplay: make a horizontal or vertical row of four or more of the same color to make that row vanish, and use your medicine capsules to make matches and clear out all the viruses. With only red, yellow, and blue colors to worry about, it seems brainless, but it actually takes a lot of strategy and quick thinking to make the best use of your incoming two-color capsules and how best to place them. The Classic mode is nothing but this and it's a nice relaxing game, at least when it's on the Slow setting. Higher speed settings make your capsules fall much faster, adding a lot of difficulty. Most of the other modes revolve around facing off with an opponent, though, and the gameplay changes accordingly. In versus matches, the goal becomes a race to see who can get rid of their viruses first, and making combos will drop extra capsule pieces into the opponent's playfield in hopes of messing up their plans. The emphasis on speedy matches without forcing a high drop speed is a much more fun idea to me than the old puzzle game practice of "just crank up the gameplay speed so high that you physically cannot keep up". If you need to take a moment to slow down and look at your options, you can, but if you can perform quickly, you can pull ahead in the virus-busting race. It's good stuff! I also love the sound design. You hear this very satisfying sizzle noise when you make a match in the solo modes that represents the viruses burning away from the medicine, which is so so good, and they let out a little squeal and disappear when you kill the last one of a given color in the bottle. I have no mercy for viruses, I HATE being sick! TAKE THAT YOU NASTY LITTLE GREMLINS!!

Dr. Mario 64's quirky identity (a bunch of Wario Land 3 enemies wandered in and serve as opponents in the story mode and playable characters in the versus modes) and bevy of ways to play make it one of my favorite incarnations of Dr. Mario, but I've also spent time with the original NES version, the GBA port in Dr. Mario Puzzle League, and the 3DS' Dr. Mario: Miracle Cure. I even played a frankly silly amount of Dr. Wario in Warioware: Mega Microgames, because at the time I didn't have access to any other Dr. Mario games (I'd played 64 earlier, but only as a rental). You can't really go wrong with this very solid formula, and having multiple ways to play Dr. Mario via Switch Online is great news for puzzle game fans.

I also did playthroughs of Dr. Mario's NES and Game Boy versions. These OG editions of the series are bare-bones and only offer the mode Dr. Mario 64 calls "Classic", which is a series of 20 levels where you have to clear a progressively more crowded bottle of viruses. The Game Boy version is a little trickier since its' lack of color makes it a little harder to tell the viruses apart. Red viruses are filled in with dark pixels, yellow ones are blank so they appear lighter, and blue ones are checkered as an in-between. It was the best they could do.

Spilled!
System: PC (Steam)
Genre: Casual Cleaning
Year of release: 2025
Is "Cleaning" a genre? Like Powerwash Simulator? It was the best descriptor I had in mind to talk about Spilled, a cute and small game made largely by a single person over the course of two years with the help of a huge swarm of small-dollar Kickstarter backers (seriously, the credits is 99.5% Kickstarter backers). In Spilled, you play as a little boat that works in a... body of water. I'm not sure exactly what kind of water body this is, as while it resembles a series of ponds and lakes connected by rivers, the animals inside the water are mostly ocean life that requires seawater, though some freshwater animals like a frog also make appearances. Anyway, within this body of water, some nasty boats running on dirty energy have come through and made a huge mess of things, horribly polluting the water with oil spills and plastic bottles. Your ship's job is to clean up after them and put a stop to the dirty ways of the enemy boats.

Spilled is a casual, laid-back game with no fail states or time limits. You can clean up as quick or as slow as you like and take your time soaking in the sights without worrying about losing. You start out in a tiny pond, using your front scoop to suck up oil. You have a storage tank on your boat that can be emptied by taking it to a large "mothership" boat. Delivering garbage earns you coins which can be used to buy upgrades. You can make your scoop wider, enlarge your oil tank to hold more oil, or strengthen your engine to move faster. After cleaning up the pond enough, a gate will open to allow access to the second area, which introduces a new wrinkle in the form of plastic bottles floating on the water's surface. Your scoop gets extenders to help it corral the bottles, and you can push them to the mothership for a payment. As you continue progressing into more areas of the map, you'll gain access to more additional abilities to help you clean the place up, adding some slight additional complications to the affair. Herding the bottles can get a little finicky as the extenders on your scoop aren't quite long enough to keep bottles from slipping out of your grasp if you're pushing more than a few at a time and try to turn, but since there's no need to rush, you can simply deliver them in a few batches, going back for the ones that got away from you before. There are also a bunch of cute little animals to rescue, two in each area, and there are a few "sidequests" that all involve finding a special item like a beachball and pushing it like the bottles to deliver it to someone who wants it.

There's not a whole lot to Spilled, and you can beat it and get all the achievements in about an hour. Some may feel that its' normal asking price of six dollars is a little much for the low amount of content, but I had a delightful time with Spilled's pretty little world and satisfying gameplay loop and I could see myself playing through it again just for the fun of it. That said, I certainly would have liked to see more and I hope Spilled receives an update or a sequel in the future that provides more of this gameplay.

Besiege: The Splintered Sea
System: PC (Steam)
Genre: Construction/Sandbox
Year of release: 2024
Besiege makes its' return to the GB's Game Reviews series with some substantial improvements and updates! Since its' first appearance in this blog series two years ago, Besiege has changed a lot. The base game is still essentially the same as before, but there are numerous new parts and features to enhance the experience (such as keeping track of how many levels you've cleared with your own machine and without taking damage, and adding "bosses" in the form of the formerly-offscreen rulers now being onscreen enemy units), as well as a brand-new DLC campaign that introduces water to Besiege, allowing you to create boats and submarines. The achievements have been overhauled significantly to add a bunch of new challenges while removing a couple of much-disliked achievements that required multiplayer to unlock, making them impractical for people who played Besiege alone, which was most of their player base. Not only that, but when The Splintered Sea first released, it saw some criticism for being very short and low in difficulty. The devs took this offense personally and massively boosted the expansion, adding several more levels and retooling one of the existing ones to make it harder, making The Splintered Sea much meatier in the process.

If you need a refresher, the gist behind Besiege is that you are a conqueror invading foreign lands with your war machines to crush anyone who stands in your way as you try to take over the world. Each level tasks you with a specific goal, such as "destroy this" or "bring this object here" and you are given a flexible and very deep creation tool that allows you to make all manner of vehicles and machines to accomplish the task given to you in whatever way you see fit. For instance, let's say you're presented with a large stone wall and told to destroy it so your invasion can press onward past it. You can create a Battlebot-like machine to attack it directly with drills and saws. You can arm your machine with cannons to fire on the wall from a distance. You can build a flying machine and drop bombs from above. The only limit is your own creativity (and a bounding box that restricts how big your machine is allowed to get). You can save your machines to use again on a future mission, and it is possible to make a machine that can clear many different missions with minimal adjustments (and there are showoffs on Youtube who have managed to create absurd do-all machines that can clear every single mission without edits), but you'll find that it's much simpler to occasionally start from scratch with a new creation to tackle a challenge that your existing machine finds awkward or even impossible.

Besiege can have some very difficult missions. Sometimes the real challenge is simply figuring out a reasonable way of accomplishing the task at hand, but a few levels, particularly in the last world of the main campaign, are legitimately hard even if you know what you're doing, such as a level called "Ambush" that begins with you surrounded on all sides by aggressive and powerful soldiers. There's also a learning curve involved with The Splintered Sea due to the water. You can expect a lot of your aquatic creations to pitch, flip, and capsize before you can wrap your head around how exactly they're meant to work, and even though I finished the DLC I still never quite understood how to make a sub that didn't eventually flip over without resorting to using way too many different keyboard keys to manage way too many moving parts.

Besiege can be frustrating when you're stuck on a mission, but it has a powerful "wait, what if I tried this" draw to it that kept me coming back after multiple ragequits. Time away from the game cooled my head, then I kept thinking about the level and potential ways to clear it, and the open-endedness of the challenges encourages thinking outside the box and trying wildly different solutions. There aren't many games like Besiege, and it comes highly recommended if you want to try something fresh and unique that rewards creative thinking.

Mario and Luigi: Brothership
System: Switch
Genre: RPG
Year of release: 2024
Just when we all thought the Mario and Luigi series of RPGs died with AlphaDream, Nintendo surprised us with this late-gen Switch release. Brothership got mixed reviews upon release, some people enjoying it and others finding it mid. I think it's a pretty darn good game that wipes away some of the series' biggest recurring faults, but it does have some pacing issues and doesn't quite know when to wrap it up.

In Mario and Luigi: Brothership, the Mario bros are transported to the island nation of Concordia. Once a single large island, the continent was attacked and split apart and the magical tree that provided energy to the land was killed. Mario and Luigi meet up with Connie, an adorable "Wattanist" who is nurturing a new tree on the boat-shaped island Shipshape. Mario and Luigi resolve to use Shipshape to track down the floating chunks of Concordia and reunite them, connecting them all to Shipshape to rebuild Concordia. Along the way they run into a bunch of new faces as well as some familiar ones who have also wound up in Concordia.

Brothership's general format is similar to most Mario and Luigi games. You run around and do some platforming and puzzle solving, and when it's time to battle you enter a turn-based form of combat where every single attack from a foe can potentially be avoided by jumping or using a hammer at the right time, and you use timed button presses to make your own attacks as well as Bros Attacks that combine Mario and Luigi's power for big damage if you can follow along with the attack's timing. Usually you go back and forth between combat-heavy sections and puzzle-solving sections until you reach an island's lighthouse, which allows you to connect it to Shipshape and move on to the next island.

Brothership has a bunch of cool new features to make it stand out from previous games in the series. One of the best has to be the Battle Plug system, which takes a while to show up but adds a lot. Battle Plugs are special power-ups you can equip, such as the ability to automatically heal when damaged without using a turn or a boost to your attack power when attacking a specific enemy type. Plugs run on a charge, though, and each use of one will decrease the charge. When it runs out, it's turned off and put into charging mode for a number of turns. As a result, you're regularly switching around your Battle Plugs to fit the situation, and a lot of tactics can be had by making use of the plugs. Do you use that power boosting plug now or hold onto it for a boss fight? Will you be okay if you're stuck in a tough fight while your favorite plug is busy charging? You'll even get additional special effects if you equip certain plugs at the same time. This system gets really good later in the game when you have more slots to equip plugs and lots of plugs to choose from, so you've almost always got something worthwhile to use even if a good option is out of charge.

Another fun addition to the series is Luigi Logic. Luigi puts his brain to work in this game, and you unlock abilities for field traversal by reaching points in the adventure that inspire him to try something new. You can also use Luigi Logic to make Luigi go off on his own and help Mario out by smashing blocks for him, stepping on switches, or hitting buttons. Luigi Logic also often appears during boss fights, giving you a short minigame or timed sequence to perform that will give you a chance to stun the boss or otherwise gain some kind of advantage.

The Mario and Luigi series has three major recurring flaws, in my opinion: There are too many hand-holdy tutorials, too many annoying forced minigames, and too much mocking of Luigi. Brothership addresses all of these issues to some extent.

For the first issue, while you are often given pretty blatant hints about how to solve puzzles, outright tutorials don't appear too often, and when they do (such as when you're told the specifics about a cool new Battle Plug combo or how to perform a Luigi Logic boss minigame), they are brief and appreciated.

For the second issue, there are still minigames and they are still mandatory, but they're less frequent and intrusive than in older Mario and Luigi games, and a recurring rhythm game that involves pressing buttons with good timing is probably the only really annoying one when it gets some complicated variants late in the adventure (particularly because missing even a single prompt is a failure but it will make you do the rest of the song anyway, but it will make itself easier by giving you some leeway if you keep failing to clear it).

The third issue is essentially completely fixed. Older Mario and Luigi games were relentlessly cruel to Luigi for no real reason at all, with many characters insulting him or belittling him while giving Mario respect and admiration. There are very few of these "haha Luigi sucks" jokes in Brothership (and most of what remains is concentrated near the start), and for the most part he is portrayed as the silly and quirky Mario Brother, but no less brave or competent for it. This Luigi may occasionally still show fear or concern, but he is not a flailing, useless coward and in fact accomplishes some crazy feats of daring-do with his Luigi Logic that even Mario is impressed with. Love to see it.

Sailing around on Shipshape is a little odd. The boat moves automatically on a Pac-Man-like maze of currents, and you need to use a cannon to blast the brothers to an island if it passes by. While it's possible to miss an island, you need only wait until the current takes you back around again, and pretty early on you unlock the ability to speed the boat up and make a trip around a current take much less time. Probably the more annoying thing is that unless you're on a new island, a big map of the current position of Shipshape takes up the top left corner of the screen and there's no way to minimize it - a weird design choice that blocks a portion of your view when returning to an older island, which you'll need to do often for both the main plot and sidequests.

Speaking of sidequests! There are a lot of them, unlocked a few at a time as you progress the story. They tend to be time-limited and will expire if you keep progressing the main plot and ignoring the sidequests, but you are warned if one is soon to expire. The rewards are sometimes good and sometimes just a handful of healing items you could have bought at a shop, and some feel incredibly integral to the main plot or shed light on supporting characters' pasts and personalities while others are just filler. It's a very mixed bag, but most of them are pretty painless and can be done without much issue.

The biggest criticism many have against Brothership is its' pacing. It starts a bit slow, especially since it takes so long to get Battle Plugs and then even longer to get enough Battle Plugs to make the system interesting instead of just "cool, I can auto-heal!", and it has trouble in the lategame as it keeps teasing the big final battle and then delaying it repeatedly to add more content. You may get tired of Brothership before it finally lets you take on the final boss, but I personally wasn't too bothered by either the slow start or the long final arc, aside from being made to play that annoying rhythm minigame a few too many times. Brothership even gets shockingly dark towards the end, and I was impressed with just how crazy this adventure gets in the final hours. Fans of other Mario RPGs with a dark streak and a willingness to dig into normally-shallow Mario characters, like Thousand-Year Door and Super Paper Mario, will feel right at home.

It's been a long time since I played a Mario RPG (aside from last year's playthrough of a modded Paper Mario 64), and even longer since one left a big impression on me like this one did. Brothership comes strongly recommended to anyone who has enjoyed the Mario RPGs of the past. This is the first new one in quite some time (especially if you don't count the newer Paper Mario games), and combined with TTYD and SMRPG getting Switch remasters not long before it, it certainly feels like Nintendo is finally giving proper turn-based Action Command Mario role-playing games another chance after tossing them aside for so long. Mario may be famous more for his platforming, go-karting, sports, and parties, but it was always his role-playing games that spoke to me most. It's good to have them back.

MySims
System: Switch
Genre: Life Sim
Year of release: 2024
Ahhh, MySims. This adorable, wholesome game was an obsession of mine back in 2007 when it first launched on the Wii, and I happily got sucked into it for dozens of hours. MySims is essentially EA's answer to Animal Crossing, a spinoff of the Sims games that turns them from realistic humans into cute anime-esque cartoon characters. I never had any interest in the normal Sims games due to finding meter management stressful (among other reasons), but MySims gets rid of all that and instead emphasizes an easy, cozy experience with little in the way of stress or conflict. It went on to birth a franchise of MySims games spanning several different genres that came to a sudden halt early in the 2010s, but after over a decade of dormancy, the MySims franchise was brought back in the form of the MySims Cozy Bundle, a pair of games released together on the Nintendo Switch, a system that seems a perfect fit for them. I decided to do a new playthrough of MySims for old time's sake on the new Cozy Bundle... and I promptly got obsessed with it all over again.

In MySims, you take on the role of a newcomer to a town you get to name. This town was once a bustling place of happiness where Sims of all sorts gathered together, all thanks to the efforts of a special Sim who could magically build objects. When they vanished one day, the town began to decay, the Sims helpless without him. They moved out one by one until only a handful of residents remained. Fortunately, your character has the same building abilities as the old founder, and so the town's mayor is eager to work with you to revitalize the town and make it a fun place to live again.

MySims features an addictive and satisfying gameplay loop that's easy to get lost in, at least for me. I can very easily dump hours into this game. You start by building things for other residents using wooden blocks of various shapes. This can be anything from simple furniture like chairs and beds to more interesting stuff like arcade machines, pizza ovens, and turntables. You're given a lot of freedom to build things however you like as long as certain areas are filled in and other areas are left blank so the Sims can interact with the object, but there's also a blueprint you can follow as a guide, essentially a ghost image of the object that you can put blocks on, sort of like putting together a puzzle. You'll also have to use special materials, called Essences, to paint or decorate the object. Once it's done, you go deliver the finished project to the Sim that requested it, and they may have another job for you to make them something else.

Essences are essentially crafting materials. Each Essence is one of six different types: Fun, Studious, Spooky, Tasty, Geeky, and Cute. Each Sim has a type they love, a type they like, three they are neutral towards, and one they dislike, and they'll react positively to Essences and other Sims that match their interests. To get Essences, you need to gather them in the overworld. Some, like apples and cherry blossoms, grow on trees. Others, like crabs and trout, are found by fishing. Still more are acquired by doing everything from using a metal detector to chopping down trees to making another Sim happy. Once you have enough Essences, you can complete more missions and improve the town's rating. Higher town ratings unlock more blocks to build with, as well as equipment like a crowbar that you can use to open up new areas to gather new Essences. You'll also start seeing new characters appear at the hotel, and you can ask them to move in. Once you've got a new resident, you pick an empty lot and build them a house, and if the Sim owns a business, they'll have new missions for you, and so the loop continues.

This game is kind of about making your own fun by customizing your town and the stuff you build. It's cool that if someone asks you for, like, a fridge, you can build that fridge however you like and then see your creation in their house. You can also rearrange people's furniture, give them additional decor they didn't even ask for, change their wallpaper, and so on. You also have complete freedom in building houses aside from needing to stick to a small plot of land for the building. Everyone's towns will end up looking different, though one slightly unfortunate thing about MySims is that most of the early-game Sims are the same for everyone in every playthrough, and many Sims will only show up once you have a town rating or four or five stars so you don't get much time with them and will have to house them in far-off locations since your town square probably filled up ages before they arrived. Every town is basically required to have Chef Gino and his pizza parlor, for instance, as he is always the first Sim to visit the hotel due to his easy missions making him a good early-game quest-giver, and you're very likely to end up with DJ Candy and Sir Vincent immediately after Gino for the same reason (though who wouldn't want DJ Candy in their town, am I right). Of course, you can always kick out Sims if your town is full and you want someone new... as long as you have a HEART OF STONE.

So what did MySims Cozy Bundle do to improve this old game for its' rerelease? There's a graphical boost, with everything now in widescreen and looking smoother. It's not a technically impressive game but it's very pleasant to look at with an appealing cartoon style that has aged well. The motion controls of the Wii version are surprisingly completely gone despite Joy-Cons having motion control ability, and everything is done with buttons now (handheld mode lets you use the touchscreen for a couple things like camera zoom, though). But most importantly, the Switch edition of MySims features loading times of just a couple of seconds. The original Wii release had horrible load times and frequent loading screens (not to mention my Wii would make awful noises that sounded like it was ripping itself apart trying to render the glory of DJ Candy's freckles), and everything is just so much faster and smoother on Switch. This alone elevates the Cozy Bundle version far above the original. I'll trade away motion controls for speedy loading any day of the week. And one more very notable addition is that the PC release of MySims (released a year after the Wii, in 2008) added some extra content - a new area, new Essences, and six new potential residents - and all of this has been brought on board the Switch version! On the PC, the new area and Essences were tied to an online multiplayer feature, and different players could access different Essences from the new area, meaning certain ones were unavailable to you. On the Switch, that feature is gone, but in exchange we get something I think is even better - the ability to move Sims into the new area (you couldn't on PC), and to collect all of the new Essences instead of just a few. Before playing this game, I only knew about the six new characters - the new area and Essences were a very pleasant surprise, and they mean that if you played the Wii version and not the PC version, the Switch release offers a substantial increase in content, much more than I expected from a seemingly bare-bones remaster. Between the "new" stuff, ditching the motion controls, and the vastly improved loading times, this is unquestionably the definitive version of MySims, and it's a delight.

One of my favorite parts of MySims is the "cozy" aspect. The title of the bundle doesn't lie. The NPCs will all meander around town on their own, interacting with other Sims and doing things that match their interests. If you bring Vic Vector to town and build his arcade, you can expect it to become a regular hangout for Geeky Sims, who will drop by to hang out with each other and play on Vic's machines. Your Tasty Sims might get together to have a picnic. There's a day/night cycle, with some Sims (particularly Spooky and Geeky ones) being night owls who get together in the evenings to visit each other or host a seance to make contact with the town's resident ghost. And it's not all positive interactions, either - if a Sim who hates Cute things runs into a Cute Sim, they may get into an argument, bully one another, or even get in a fight. You'll see this a lot in the hotel, where randomly selected Sims not in your town are forced to share a single building with each other all day. For the most part, though, Sims tend to simply avoid Sims they dislike, preferring to be friends with like-minded Sims and enjoy themselves with dance-offs, communal book readings, or tea parties. Your character can join in on all of these things if you like, and there's rarely any tangible reward for doing so - you just do it because it's enjoyable. Seeing this tiny ghost town blossom into a bustling village full of cute characters having fun is immensely soothing for me.

Wasn't sure where else to put this, but another thing I like is that every NPC has their own unique dialog. They don't have a lot, usually just a few phrases depending on what level of stars the town is, but I prefer this over Animal Crossing's approach of having tons of villagers who all say the exact same things.

If I have to pick at some negatives... Prospecting can be a tedious way to get Essences as you slowly walk around with a metal detector to find buried goodies. Most of the "challenge" of this game is finding where to obtain the Essences you need for missions, and many lategame missions will ask you to go prospecting in out-of-the-way places. Building can be a little finicky, but you do get some help with this by being able to toggle "Snap Mode" and "Slide-Under Mode" on and off to help you position blocks just right. And lastly, maybe it's just me, but it feels like certain potential hotel guests will keep showing up again and again, while other characters you may want to invite won't appear. I lost track of how many times I saw the same handful of bland dudes at the hotel when I was looking for someone more interesting. Fortunately, you can refresh the hotel guests by going outside and sleeping on a bench to move time forward, and you can also use your Relationship Book (a list of every character you've met) to call back anyone to the hotel you saw before but missed your chance to move in. Between those two things, the randomization of hotel guests isn't terribly annoying. Oh, one more significant flaw is how difficult it is to move people. I play like anyone who's moving in will stay where they are forever because swapping houses around is a slow and tedious process that requires an empty lot (you can't just trade spots), and you have to rebuild the Sim's house instead of carrying over the old one. Also, while the Cozy Bundle allows you to move some characters into the new area, there still aren't enough empty lots to move in everyone I want to have, so hard choices have to be made. If we could have gotten maybe just one more area with seven or eight empty lots I think I'd have enough for everyone I want to move in...

If you're looking for a cute, silly game to unwind and get creative, with no time pressure or difficult challenges, you might enjoy MySims. After so many nostalgic trips down memory lane these past two years taking me back to the Genesis and N64 days, it's nice to pay a visit to the Wii era too - and without any waggle!

Oh yeah, and that second game in the Cozy Bundle? That'd be MySims Kingdom. Unlike the other MySims games - Party, Racing, Sky Heroes, and Agents - Kingdom is a life sim like the original game. I have a feeling you'll be seeing its' review on this blog next year. Until then, though, this is enough reviews for one year. Until next April!