Played this with a friend for a whole evening on 2 player on my Sega Mini. I always heard it was extremely weird. I can see how it got that rumour, because it's true. I don't think I've played a game that I could compare it to.

It's about exploring a map with these islands. with a lot of quirky characters and bizarre situations scattered around. You find small gifts with strange abilities.

Without always knowing what you are trying to find you'll eventually find something that makes you progress. An elevator taking you to the next stage, even if you can fall back to the last level if you are unlucky.

It does feel like exploration is the main theme. With 2 player the screen splits, and it does have a unique feel to it. I quite liked it. Very novel and weird game.

One of my favorite games of all time. Encapsulates pretty much everything I love about gaming: a focus on the vibes rather than deep gameplay, an element of RNG to keep the game funny and entertaining, and fun social interactions with the people I play with.

The game is a slow paced roguelike where the idea is less about defeating enemies and more using your randomly generated items effectively to survive whatever potential hazards the game throws at you. If you can live long enough to find all 10 ship parts, yeehaw you win! Everything is randomized, so every playthrough is different and you gotta think on your feet on what choice of action would be the best. Do you risk opening an unmarked present or do you wait for a carrot man? Do you use the bonus hi-tops to get out of a sticky situation, or will a different item suffice? Things like that keep the game engaging despite its very relaxed and slow pace.

The multiplayer is phenomenal, this is one of the best multiplayer games on the mega drive easily. The game has dynamic splitscreen that allows both players to have total freedom in the map, as well as plenty of mechanics that encourage cooperation like items working for both players if they are on the same screen, or the togetherness item that can reset someone from getting knocked off the edge of a level by teleporting them to the other player. I make an effort to play this game at least once with each of my friends, and it has been a fantastic experience every time. All time great here.

If you have been around the video game scene for the past decade or so, then you may or may not be familiar with the rouge-like genre. For those of you who somehow aren’t familiar, these are essentially games that typically have you going through a set of levels in dungeons, caves, or what have you, that are all procedurally generated. This makes it so that every playthrough you do of the game won’t always be exactly the same as the previous, and as such, adds a lot more replay value then what you would typically see from other video games. There is a reason why this genre has exploded in popularity in recent years, but this genre has been around for much longer then you would think, dating all the way back to the early 80s, and while it definitely wasn’t the most prevalent genre, there were plenty of games made around this time that were in this genre… even ones that you wouldn’t think would be part of it from just glancing at it. One of these examples of early rouge-likes would be with, surprisingly, ToeJam & Earl.

Just like with a lot of the games I cover here, I had known about ToeJam & Earl from a long time, and I thought it looked cute enough, being incredibly 90s to the point where it physically hurts, and the gameplay itself looked interesting enough, but never enough to where I wanted to immediately check it out. After all this time though, I figured I may as well check it out to see what I was missing, and I was pretty surprised to find that it was essentially a rouge-like. Just, you know, minus a lot of elements that you would typically see in one of these games. Despite that, I ended up playing through all of it, and I ended up really liking it. It is very charming, and the game itself can be pretty fun, but it definitely has some things holding it back from true greatness, and I can see how others can’t get into it like I did.

The story is very simple, about these two goofy-ass aliens crashing onto Earth, and they need to find all the parts of their spaceship in order to fly back home, so it is essentially just Pikmin without the slave labor, the graphics are very charming, having plenty of bright and colorful characters and enemies, while also having an aggressively high amount of 90s scattered all throughout the game, which I can’t help but unironically love, the music is actually pretty great, with there being plenty of tracks that, while repeated several times, got me bobbing my head and humming to myself often, and some of the tracks have definitely stuck with me after playing it, the control is good enough, even if you have a pretty slow default movement speed, and going through the maps and menus can be complicating at times, but you can get used to it quickly enough, and the gameplay is pretty unique for one of the more noteworthy Sega Genesis games, and it was one that I quickly grew to enjoy, despite seeing the faults in it.

The game is a rouge-like adventure game, where you take control of either ToeJam or Earl, or maybe even both with a friend, take on a set of 25 procedurally generated levels, explore the land to find plenty of enemies, presents, and hazards that have quite a lot of variety to them, use these presents to assist you in many different ways throughout the game, and locate all of the parts of your space ship in many of the levels while finding the exit elevators to move on forward. For me at least, there are very few other games that function like this that I have seen from this era, and this caused me to get sucked in pretty quickly, and have a lot of fun with it, not just in terms of the gameplay, but also its style.

Like I mentioned before, this game is trying so damn hard to be as 90s as possible, and in many ways, it actually somewhat works in presenting a lot of its charm. Not only are ToeJam and Earl themselves so stereotypical of this style, and they are entertaining enough with all of their expressions and reactions to everything, but also all of the different enemies and hazards that you will find throughout the game are very odd, but incredibly charming, such as an ice cream truck, a mad scientist, a crowd of ducks with a bazooka, and a gang of nerds. It may be stupid, but it is stupid enough to where I can smile and have a great time with it. Not to mention, there are many different temporary abilities you can get from the presents, such as being able to throw tomatoes at enemies you come across, having running/rocket shoes to help you get around the levels much faster, wings that allow you to fly over gaps, and a pogo stick that will allow you to jump. They do come in at random, and some of them can be pretty unruly to use, but these items help you out A TON when it comes to finding the ship parts and elevators. I cannot tell you how many times I used the rocket shoes just to blaze through the levels as fast as possible just to see if I would get lucky and find either the elevator or ship part immediately, it was a pretty good time.

But, of course, the game isn’t perfect. One thing I didn’t mention about the presents was that, while a good number of them can help you out a lot of the time, a lot of other ones are meant to punish you, such as ones that hurt you, or others that give you rainclouds that zap you or make tomatoes fall from the sky to hurt you. What’s even worse is that you don’t know what is in a present till you open it, so needless to say, I got screwed over several times by opening up some of these presents, and I am not a fan of that system at all. In addition to this, while it is cool that all of the levels are procedurally generated, a lot of them end up being extremely repetitive. Throughout the entire game, you are going along the same grassy plains and sandy areas, avoiding the same enemies and collecting the same items. And keep in mind, you are doing this for 25 whole levels, and it does get pretty finicky and difficult in later levels with how quickly enemies can bum rush you, so yeah, I wasn’t really a big fan of either of those things.

Overall, despite how repetitive it can get, and the present mechanic being a bit annoying at times, I surprisingly had a pretty great time with ToeJam & Earl, and I think it is one of the more unique and really good titles from the Sega Genesis. It is definitely not gonna win everyone over, but it sure managed to win me over at the end of the day. I would recommend it for those who wanna experience more of the Genesis’s stand out titles, as well as for anyone to try it out at least once, because you may end up finding something you’ll really like out of it. Let’s just hope that the sequel manages to take this formula and expand upon it to- WOW, the next game is a platformer? Damn, didn’t even wait a whole two entries before unnecessarily switching up what the genre was. Bravo, Johnson Voorsanger Productions.

Game #372

Really annoying. I can't speak on whatever experience you could have in the preset world since I used a random world, but this game really enjoys throwing random bullshit at you with not many feasible ways to get away from, especially on the later floors. The enemies basically range from annoying to "you are basically dead if you encounter this" and those deadly enemies can just completely block your way as well! The only way to escape some of the Turbo Fuck™ enemies are to make use of the items you collect, which you have no clue of what they do until you use them, but and they can hurt you too, even outright killing you in some cases. And thankfully the collection I played this on had a fast-forward feature since game is pretty slow too. Your movement speed paired with how elevators and ship parts can be very far from the start of each floor can make the game a real slog to play.

Also I remember getting a quicksand covered floor with multiple ice cream trucks swarming me all at once and I can't say I was happy with that experience.

just so boring. i like the idea with the presents and how they can help you and can speed up the game but when you have nothing to help you in your inventory and youve been walking around slowly for the past like 5+ floors i just cant take it anymore. i try to be patient with slower games like this but the gameplay loop is just so so repetitive and slow and by the time i got 5 ship parts slowly walking around a world that constantly looks, feels, and plays the same i just feel drained on playing it and that im not gonna be missing out on anything from the second half of the game i have left