Regina & Mac is a 3D platformer that stands in the tradition of the classics from the late 90s and offers a fair challenge even for genre aficionados. Join the macaw Regina and the tyrannosaurus Mac on their adventure as they try to escape a lifeless research lab. The only way out? To find the golden Floppy discs on which the memory of the lab's computer system U64 is stored so that it can help the duo to find an exit.
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I initially purchased Regina & Mac with the intent to play it on Wii U, but quickly discovered that I would never be doing so any time soon. The developer released an unfinished version that didn't support TV Play. At all. Best you're getting is a black screen. Fifteen Canadian Dollars.
Before they could patch this, the developer supposedly did something to lose their license to continue developing for Wii U, and so any chance of the game being playable on that console seemed to disappear for good. Later, Diplodocus Games re-released it for Nintendo Switch, and I bought it a second time. Another Fifteen Canadian Dollars.
There's a very real possibility that I may have invested more time, money, and mental energy into Regina & Mac than any other person in the world. What is it that draws me to this strange little game like a siren destined to forsake me? Was it the novelty of a Wii U game released years after its console of choice was discontinued? The kitschy Grant-Kirkhope-cover-band music? The feeling I felt when staring directly into Mac's dead eyes? Or maybe it was the way his perfectly still, clumsily-sculpted clay-like corpse glided robotically above his spherical Rayman extremities across vast landscapes comprised of hundreds of resized variations of a single cube model.
If anybody reading has ever grown up with Roblox, the way this game is assembled may begin to jog some fuzzy memories. Back in the early days of that platform, kids used the primitive blocky building tools available at their disposal to try to create their best fuzzy facsimiles of Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie. "Adventure games", they were categorized as. These 3D platformers for the most part fell very short of their lofty ambitions, but sometimes the greater the gap between intent and outcome grew, the brighter they shone. There are real pieces of shit from back in the day that I would still be cheering on if you sat me in front of them today. Nowadays, these sorts of endeavors are painstakingly-polished affairs made by teams of professional Roblox devs, but Regina and Mac feels exactly like the sort of clunky, improvisational mess that only 2008 could bless/curse upon us.
Despite the way this game begs me to eviscerate it, I can't help but want to be kinder. As I glitched my way through platforms, repeatedly gave myself headaches from the obnoxious sound design with every play session, and at one point fell out the world only to loop back around the sky into a duplicate, slightly-different version of the world, still, I couldn't muster the strength to flat-out reject Regina and Mac as the utter refuse it ought to be regarded as. Perhaps it's the resemblance to the sort of thing kids like me would have been making all those years ago. It'd feel unfair, like striking a mirror image of my younger self. However, as much as I wish to follow through on such a mercy, it certainly wasn't a troupe of tykes who obtained a Nintendo Developer license and published a game on Wii U and Nintendo Switch. This is not a free game you can launch from a browser. I paid in totality Thirty Canadian Dollars for this. That's fifteen toonies!
The sort of Roblox magic I described earlier was often born from the wild, messy, impulsive dreams of the children who were making them. They were bizarre, risky, and unpredictable in the way only games that look like this could and should. The reality, unfortunately, is that this game is an unimaginative retread. A game whose gap between intent and outcome results in no unexpected jazzy flashes of brilliance, but rather an inescapable dullness. It is the product of risk-averse adults with access to far more sophisticated development tools and resources who used all their might to make the bird say "hell" sometimes. The potential nostalgic feelings that this game bubbles up that would turn me into an unabashed Regina & Mac Lover fail to ever make it to a boil, never paying off in any sort of way that would have made it worth my time or money in retrospect. Undeniably, it is half-baked.
The final boss of Regina & Mac is a Sonic-Colors-Terminal-Velocity-styled mad dash towards the camera as you're chased by a giant red cube. It comes so close to the sort of thing I'd be cheering on in a Roblox game, but instead here I only felt tired, just ready to get it over with so I could put the game down already. The deeper you delve into the bottomless pit that is Regina & Mac, the further the light fades, and the more of your soul you lose. Perhaps in the end it's befitting that the bird makes reference to the eponymously hellish fiery realm of eternal suffering. If past the first few worlds still you do not yield and burrow deeper past the surface, its fabric becomes ever more loosely-knit, coming apart at its seams until it ultimately rips itself to shreds completely and fails to resemble anything it was designed to do.
I came out the other side of Regina & Mac to live to tell the tale, but I don't think I came away with as much to say about the game as I did myself. Perhaps you will come away with this sort of growth too, if only you have the fortitude and the Canadian Dollars to do what I did. Sometimes you just need a bad game like this every now and again to appreciate what you have.
Before they could patch this, the developer supposedly did something to lose their license to continue developing for Wii U, and so any chance of the game being playable on that console seemed to disappear for good. Later, Diplodocus Games re-released it for Nintendo Switch, and I bought it a second time. Another Fifteen Canadian Dollars.
There's a very real possibility that I may have invested more time, money, and mental energy into Regina & Mac than any other person in the world. What is it that draws me to this strange little game like a siren destined to forsake me? Was it the novelty of a Wii U game released years after its console of choice was discontinued? The kitschy Grant-Kirkhope-cover-band music? The feeling I felt when staring directly into Mac's dead eyes? Or maybe it was the way his perfectly still, clumsily-sculpted clay-like corpse glided robotically above his spherical Rayman extremities across vast landscapes comprised of hundreds of resized variations of a single cube model.
If anybody reading has ever grown up with Roblox, the way this game is assembled may begin to jog some fuzzy memories. Back in the early days of that platform, kids used the primitive blocky building tools available at their disposal to try to create their best fuzzy facsimiles of Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie. "Adventure games", they were categorized as. These 3D platformers for the most part fell very short of their lofty ambitions, but sometimes the greater the gap between intent and outcome grew, the brighter they shone. There are real pieces of shit from back in the day that I would still be cheering on if you sat me in front of them today. Nowadays, these sorts of endeavors are painstakingly-polished affairs made by teams of professional Roblox devs, but Regina and Mac feels exactly like the sort of clunky, improvisational mess that only 2008 could bless/curse upon us.
Despite the way this game begs me to eviscerate it, I can't help but want to be kinder. As I glitched my way through platforms, repeatedly gave myself headaches from the obnoxious sound design with every play session, and at one point fell out the world only to loop back around the sky into a duplicate, slightly-different version of the world, still, I couldn't muster the strength to flat-out reject Regina and Mac as the utter refuse it ought to be regarded as. Perhaps it's the resemblance to the sort of thing kids like me would have been making all those years ago. It'd feel unfair, like striking a mirror image of my younger self. However, as much as I wish to follow through on such a mercy, it certainly wasn't a troupe of tykes who obtained a Nintendo Developer license and published a game on Wii U and Nintendo Switch. This is not a free game you can launch from a browser. I paid in totality Thirty Canadian Dollars for this. That's fifteen toonies!
The sort of Roblox magic I described earlier was often born from the wild, messy, impulsive dreams of the children who were making them. They were bizarre, risky, and unpredictable in the way only games that look like this could and should. The reality, unfortunately, is that this game is an unimaginative retread. A game whose gap between intent and outcome results in no unexpected jazzy flashes of brilliance, but rather an inescapable dullness. It is the product of risk-averse adults with access to far more sophisticated development tools and resources who used all their might to make the bird say "hell" sometimes. The potential nostalgic feelings that this game bubbles up that would turn me into an unabashed Regina & Mac Lover fail to ever make it to a boil, never paying off in any sort of way that would have made it worth my time or money in retrospect. Undeniably, it is half-baked.
The final boss of Regina & Mac is a Sonic-Colors-Terminal-Velocity-styled mad dash towards the camera as you're chased by a giant red cube. It comes so close to the sort of thing I'd be cheering on in a Roblox game, but instead here I only felt tired, just ready to get it over with so I could put the game down already. The deeper you delve into the bottomless pit that is Regina & Mac, the further the light fades, and the more of your soul you lose. Perhaps in the end it's befitting that the bird makes reference to the eponymously hellish fiery realm of eternal suffering. If past the first few worlds still you do not yield and burrow deeper past the surface, its fabric becomes ever more loosely-knit, coming apart at its seams until it ultimately rips itself to shreds completely and fails to resemble anything it was designed to do.
I came out the other side of Regina & Mac to live to tell the tale, but I don't think I came away with as much to say about the game as I did myself. Perhaps you will come away with this sort of growth too, if only you have the fortitude and the Canadian Dollars to do what I did. Sometimes you just need a bad game like this every now and again to appreciate what you have.