it has super mario 64 loosely draped over it, but in reality this is meat-and-potatoes platforming platforming: linear levels, hazards galore, and not a single NPC in sight. would be fair to say it has quite a lot of crash in its DNA, although gex completely jettisons the on-rails setup of crash in favor of more spacious locales. to try to wed its two influences, gex tends to set up its areas as narrow gauntlets at the start with forks in the road around the middle of the level so you can access each objective (red remotes that serve as this game's equivalents of mario's stars). for the majority of objectives, which slap a series of platforming challenges in front of a red remote, this is more than serviceable. it becomes more tedious when occasional objectives require you to find X number of thingamabobs strewn throughout a level; in these you get the unenviable chore of playing the same level forwards and backwards, swinging the camera around in the hope that you'll see a thingamabob tucked behind a wall. this is not to say that gex doesn't have some tricks up its sleeve: the early level Out of Toon starts off with a wide open area for its collectable jaunts (and a hidden silver remote too!) before tightening into a line for the rest of its duration, and the more experimental level Poltergex from late in the game provides a haunted mansion locale with doubly-layered rooms, giving two stacked paths that combine and loop back with a couple of branches off at key points (including a secret third and fourth layer of rooms on top). perhaps this game would be more interesting if it leaned more into these styles of level-building that took more advantage of the full 3D space.

gex's toolkit is brief and functional: he gets a tail bounce after any starting jump, and he gets a flying kick that gives a quick burst of speed while tying him to a particular direction momentarily. these are small additions to an otherwise standard run/jump/tailspin verb set, although the smooth implementation allows for seamless transitions and minor momentum conservation to those looking to speed up their gameplay. the obstacles in each level follow suit, providing a nice overview of traditional 3D platformer obstacles at this nascent point in their history. there are seven primary locales with a handful of levels each that reappear over the course of the game, and thus the gimmicks from earlier ones tend to be iterated upon for later entries. the best of these is probably the Circuit Central stages, which have a variety of manipulable platforms for the player to move across its vertically focused areas, such as a platform that rotates around a center pillar until it is struck, sending the platform off in its tangential direction. these levels also center an time-based energy power-up that allows gex to turn on other platforms and walkways when in contact with them. most other level gimmicks are cycle-based: flying table/drawer-platforms in the haunted mansion areas, rotating flat platforms suspended in air in the space areas, dripping lava in the prehistoric areas. very traditional platformer design, but at the same time it becomes hard to tell which of these were really new ideas in '98 when thinking through the slurry of platformers I've played from this period. it becomes even harder when said challenges are seemingly dropped at random throughout a level without real mechanical through-lines to grasp onto.

I went in thinking the voice lines would be trite, but they verge on nonsensical; it sort of presages a family guy-esque "look at the reference!" formula without the nicety of setting up some punchline in the process. gex rarely emotes anything relevant to the situation (outside of an eyebrow-raising chinese accent in the Kung-Fu Theater areas), instead preferring to sing bars from schoolhouse rock songs or drop random schwarznegger lines. or he just says "it's tail time!" over and over and over again. wanted to dunk on the simpsons writer who apparently penned much of this, Robert Cohen, but looked into his history and found out that his one primary simpsons episode credit was.... Flaming Moe's. very unfortunate, because that episode is a series-defining classic.

I get a bit defensive at this becoming a meme game as one of my earliest memories is picking it out as the game I wanted at Circuit City. I lived the Gex life, spoke the Gex language, walked the Gex walk. Not only that, I didn't have a PS1 memory card for years so everytime I sat down to play Gex or Spyro it was with the intention of completing it in one sitting.

Spyro is a very lovely game so no issues there, but Gex? You go play all of Gex in one sitting and tell me you don't feel some darkness creeping into you. I am curious if Gex gave me genuine mental decline.

It's a very fucked up game, the game is notorious now for its fucking nonsensical humor that has never made sense to anyone, but I think the game's camera should be more infamous. If Earthworm Jim 3D didn't exist this would be a contender for most violent game camera, the way it whips and snaps is unpleasent and unnatural, like the guy who programmed it was working on secondhand knowledge of what the third dimension was.

Gex's controls are actually pretty tight, but his weightless jump and lame tail attack really bring into stark contrast how much more fun it is to play as Mario. Mario is weighty, requires finesse to get good with, and has a ton of moves that can segue into each other. Gex can jump and maybe even bounce if you are feeling spicy.

Which is a shame because some of these levels are creative, they look downright incredible for the hardware, with really great animations, lighting and texturing. Soul Reaver runs on the Gex engine, which is a funny enough sentence I'm injecting it here for you to deal with.

I think there is fun to be had with Gex, it's not just fucking terrible to play like aforementioned Earthworm Jim 3D, it showcases more passion and creativity than most 3D mascot platformers, it's just a shame it's so fucking annoying just SHUT UP Gex fucking ZIP IT.

It's SUPER MARIO 64, but about two-thirds worse in every single aspect, and instead of saying "wahoo" and "yippee", your guy does Austin Powers lines.

It boring to talk about the voice over in this game because that's all anyone does, but it is also truly the only notable thing about it, so! Dana Gould seems like a smart and talented guy, and there is, of course, a perfectly serviceable in-universe reason for Gex the boob tube burnout to only speak in movie quotes, but unfortunately that doesn't mean it's not annoying. That character choice and the style of game put this high in the running for Most Dated Game Ever. And if it were a better play, it could be forgiven. But it's not, so it isn't.

Rumor has it, if you try to talk to Dana Gould about Gex he'll put the Gex Hex on you and you'll wake up in the TV world, condemned to an eternity of making shitty pop culture quips. "That's for 12 years of Full House!" you'll shout as you jump weightlessly between platforms, collecting remotes that you hope will grant you freedom from this hell. Unfortunately, the lousy camera in Frankensteinfeld's castle causes you to fall into a pit for the third time, "File this under 'ouch'!"

Enter the Gecko is a "meme game," something it owes entirely to Gex's obnoxious quips. There is no singular element otherwise that is worth remembering. The platforming doesn't feel great, the camera is bad, Gex's movements feel awful, but they're also not bad in a way that is remarkable or especially egregious when compared to the countless other 3D platformers of the late 1990s. There is nothing special about it, other than the fact you get to hear Dana Gould belt out lines like "I'm flaming--in the manly way..." and "Terminator? Phone call for a Mr. Terminator."

It's a bit of a shame too, because the original Gex was a pretty decent 2D platformer, but by 1998 those kinds of games just didn't sell like they used to, the third dimension was in. It is a bit funny too how overly complicated Gex's character model is. It uses a skeletal system with "more bones than a real gecko," and all this to make the character exist in the most bland 3D platformer imaginable, but it does at least make it more immersive when Gex offers up one of his many hysterical one-liners, like "If I had a life, I'd be glad to get back to it!"

I was convinced to add Enter the Gecko and its sequel Deep Cover Gecko as bucket list replacements for Tomb Raider II and III, because there was just no damn way I was playing more of that. If there's one nice thing I can say about both of these games it's that I think I made the right choice in caving to peer pressure.

Super Tap Water at Jerry Garcia's 64.

Terrible tennis game but a pretty alright 3D platformer as far as first impressions go. The Looney Tunes level was great and I really like how the game looks. Also I'm just gonna say that the most hilarious thing about Gex to me is not the stupid one-liners, but how Gex just says them out of fucking nowhere, lol.

No one:
Literally no one:
Gex: I FEEL LIKE I'M TRAPPED IN BOY GEORGE'S PANTS

one immutable thing about gex is that, whether you love him or hate him, if you grew up in the 90s and played video games, you probably know him. this was back during the mystical bygone era of the midbudget title, back when games were allowed to be shamelessly inspired by other groundbreaking ones (in this case, super mario 64) and they were allowed to just try to ape the design as best they could. and as much of a meme as the "15 million sales" claim is, gex was still a memorable entity, even in the peripheral. it's '98-'00, you go to blockbuster, look at all the games available for rent, and even if you didn't rent gex: enter the gecko, the box art with gex in a dynamic and memorable pose stuck with you. i think something like this is one of the largest reasons gex has endured as a recognizable mascot, even if it is almost entirely ironically. but, irony can only get you so far, and there is genuinely goodwill for these games that has also endured for a lot of people, myself included.

it's fun coming back to these games i played disposably as a child and actually trying to assess the game design and development/production aspects that i would've otherwise never contemplated. in particular, i'm able to say that gex: enter the gecko actually has some fairly solid level design. the levels are engaging, they have loads of landmarks that help the player not only mentally map out a level, but also create memorable platforming segments. these don't always pan out, and i'm not going to sit here and tell you that every single level is a homerun, but there's definitely more interesting and memorable levels than there aren't. in particular, i think some of my favorites are poltergext, mazed and confused, samurai night fever, frankensteinfeld, and fine tooning. each of them has either some genuinely creative design or otherwise memorable platforming sequences that help put this game ever so slightly above the other contemporaries trying to replicate grab the super mario 64 crowd. tell me, does anyone still feel this passionately about croc or, god forbid, bubsy?

it's not all roses down memory lane. anyone who's played this knows and will tell you the camera is angry video game nerd voice like piss soup seasoned with wet diarrhea. the best you can hope for is to set it to manual and just babysit the damn fucking thing as much as you can, and even then, the game still fights you tooth and nail whenever you try to adjust it with a wall anywhere near it. it's not only made the game aged incredibly poorly, but it was something that, on launch, made the game stumble out of the gate. gex: enter the gecko is actually enjoyable in those moments you can escape the burden of camera control and just mock the stupid shitty and sometimes vaguely racist things gex says. there's probably a good argument to make that this game is one of the better mascot platformers of the time because there was at least a solid design foundation here. i don't adore gex in the way that i could really defend his games to anyone who didn't grow up with a playstation/N64, but there is value in them.

if nothing else, this game takes a lot of swings and most of them hit in some capacity. again, we're not dealing with high water mark platformer territory here, but this is fun in a very approachable and simple way. just remember to forget about the camera as much as you can.

I honestly thought this wasn’t going to be that bad. I mean we all like to make our jokes about the Gex series but I thought there would be SOMETHING to like here. It all comes down to the level design. Levels have multiple objectives, but often just place them Wherever instead of having clear sections for different objectives. It’s like if someone translated the level design of bad Amiga maze platformers into 3D, it’s impressive to see someone fuck up the collect-a-thon format this bad. Super Mario 64 had so many mountain levels for a reason, this is like if those were made completely flat and spread out as to be made as tedious as possible. I got my head i my hands here, I didn’t think I would end up preferring Gex 1 to this. Let’s hope Gex 3 has anything worth salvaging or else the next person I see shitposting about Gex is getting fucking choked. I never want to hear anyone invoke that devil.

"Licking my way to the top."
Same studio who made Soul Reaver and Tomb Raider 2013.
A game so violent and unpleasent it makes The Last of Us 2 look like Super Mario. The camera swings violently, plotting against you at all times, while Gex's rigid and jagged movements feel so stiff and unnatural. Meanwhile the audio design is working against you actively, annoying ass and cacophonous music coupling with Gex's inability to shut the fuck up to create a vomitous concoction that only the most bold gamers may feast. During the "Circle of Shit" section of Salo, they were eating Gex.