This is peak 2D Mario. It's colourful, vibrant, the music is catchy, the controls are tight, the difficulty is perfect. It's just an all around stellar 2D platforming experience.

The amount of secret exits really promote re-playability, and the world map feels a lot more involved, opening up and becoming more alive as you find more exits.

My only real complaint is that water levels still suck. Other than that this game is amazing.

Croc is absolutely full of loveable charm, from its colourful visuals, music, character designs and sound effects.

Unfortunately it suffers from having a rather terrible tank control scheme. For a platformer it makes playing the entire game somewhat of a chore at times, and often too slow.

However what survived quite well was the actual platforming. I almost never felt like I missed a jump due to the fault of the game, which is quite impressive for such an early 3D platformer.

Level variety and enemies don't differ too much unfortunately. It kind of feels like playing the same levels, just with a different theme for each world.

The last world on the other hand turns a lot of this on its head (or at least the last normal world - there is a secret world that I never bothered to unlock because I didn't think it was worth it). On one hand there is so much more variety in this world, from brand new, interesting enemy types, new types of platforming sections and puzzles. On the other hand this is where the not-quite-perfect but accept platforming goes to hell. The amount of tiny, moving platforms, at different levels, with no real sense of distance made some of these levels a huge pain.

Some existing IPs absolutely bombed with their first 3D game, while Croc showed promise. Tighten up the controls a little bit and it could have been great. I haven't yet played the 2nd game, but based on this one alone, I think the series died too early and with some improved technology it could have been something special.

Despite its problems, this game is way better than it has any right to be. The stages are nice and varied, and fun to explore.

Controls felt responsive and fluid, but when it came to grabbing onto ledges, which is a big part of not having to replay the last 5 minutes again due to falling down the huge "mountain" you just climbed, it felt 50/50 if Buzz would actually grab hold or not.

Lots of fun boss fights though, using mostly game-specific characters like "Buggy Buzz".

Genuinely surprised how good this game was for a movie licensed game, especially in the PS1 era.

(Review was made in 2019 and may not reflect the current state of the game)
Mario Kart Tour implements a lot of features that make the game work for a mobile game. The points-based system rather than a straight up race adds a whole new layer to the game, making every little action feel important. The way that different courses have different favoured characters/karts/gliders means that no one combination is ever the best, and unlike the actual MK games, you'll find yourself making use of the wide variety the game gives you.

Unfortunately, and it's a big one, the game is awful from a gacha standpoint. The amount of premium currency you get as a f2p is some of the worst I've ever seen in a gacha game, and they have a subscription based service which gives you not only extra unlockables, but even unique karts and gliders.

The game has a coin shop which is pretty neat and allows players to buy what they want when it shows up, rather than relying on RNG. Unfortunately the gold-pass unique items and even the spotlight items will not be included.

The way that banners are done in this game is also very greedy. Each banner has a total of 100 items inside, which includes the spotlight items, and one other random ultra rare item of each type (character, kart, glider), meaning that you might not even be able to pull the item you want. While each tour is 2 weeks long, the banners only lasts only 7 days, and then it swaps out for a "new" banner, which is the exact same banner, but with the spotlight character changed, meaning all your pulls from the last pipe are reset.

Controls are awkward, as you can imagine with a mobile racing game with a ton of drifting and item usage.

There was so much potential for at least a fun mobile game here, but instead they chose to go for the worst option for a f2p game, locking things behind a paywall and making it as unfriendly as possible for anyone not willing to whale on it.

I wanted to relive some of the old Yu-Gi-Oh days, but this one was TOO old. There's absolutely no real synergy you can make between decks with such a limited pool. A huge amount of the packs are full of weak vanilla monsters. The game is just stack your deck full of heavy hitters and OP trap and spell cards.

There's no story to follow, you just end up dueling the same opponents over and over. Granted they do have little unlockables that happen when you reach certain milestones, but overall it's way too repetitive.

The mechanics of the actual duels also feel unpolished. For example in the battle phase "attack" isn't the default option, meaning you need an extra cursor move or two for every attack. For spells or traps that can be activated at any time you'll get a prompt for every damn action, and you can't do something like hold down B to stop it showing up. It's just full of these little things that add up and make the game a bit of a slog. Other oddities in the duel mechanics being stuff like when you use a card like tribute to the doomed, which destroys any monsters on the field, the select cursor defaults to your own monster instead of the opponents for some crazy reason.

There's no pack list anywhere in-game, so you'll never know how many cards you've already got in a pack.

Oh and I hope you don't plan on editing your deck much. The filter options in this game are abysmal.

Just meh. A few duels are nice to get the feeling of old school YGO back, but playing the game longterm feels way too much like a waste of time. I gave it some extra points for the neat way the game adds extra stuff at times to give some level of progression, but there's too many flaws to justify giving it any higher.

I managed to get the to the end of the Marik pyramid, which I guess counts as the "story" in the game. I know there's a bunch of extra stuff, like unlockable characters, but there's no way I'm wasting more time on this.

Sorry to be a negative nancy but I just don't get the point of this. Exercise games are a great way to merge gaming and exercise, but this isn't a game. It's an animation of a rabbit skipping rope.

If your form of exercise is miming jump roping, why wouldn't you do it while watching your favourite show instead of...this?

You could argue that the counter makes it worth it, but it's so sensitive that I often made it go up by accident just by slightly moving my arms, so chances are the counter in the game isn't even accurate to the amount of jumps you've actually done.

Rating these is always hard because technically I think the overall rating of the game is lower than the highest rating I'd give an individual game in the collection. Most of the games in the collection are either ones that you'd play once and never again, or just ignore completely.

To be fair though this one is a lot better looking and highly polished than many of these type of games, which is expected since it's from Nintendo.

I guess if you absolutely love board and card games this is a great way to have them all available at once while saving space and set-up time, although you lose out on a lot of the satisfaction a physical game can bring.

I'm pretty lukewarm on most of these games, so an average rating of 2.5 seems right.

The whole transforming into animals thing has always made Bloody Roar stand out among the many fighting games to me. It just feels so cool and even allows personality to show through via the animal choices.

The age of the game means it doesn’t particularly hold up very well anymore, but it’s definitely at least playable unlike some PS1 fighting games I’ve played.

There’s a few combos in the game, most of them are nothing special but there’s some fun ones. Unfortunately there’s no way to see them in-game, so you’ll have to either blindly practice or look them up. It also felt like very few times was a combos able to lead into a special move.

There's a whole ton of unlockables, from game-changing rulesets to fun aesthetics like giant head mode.
Unlocking everything is easy to cheese because not only do you not have to play above level 4 (except for one run with Alice), but if you have no walls mode unlocked you can pretty much just transform at the beginning of the match next to the opponent and almost every time they won't block it and it'll send them flying out of the ring instantly. Unfortunately this doesn't work with the unlockables tied to time attack and survival mode as they have pre-set rules. Luckily these are mostly easy to beat regardless, but match 14 and 15 in time attack were easily the most I struggled with in the game (match 16 was surprisingly easy).

One thing that becomes abundently clear early on is that this kart racer is not a Mario Kart clone. I only managed to get to stage 7, but in that time I only had a single race. In fact every single stage is a different type of game, and honestly I respect it for that. They make these wide open stages to accommodate the playstyle too.

And then there's the items which they didn't just paint over the standard MK items like a lot of Kart Racers, these items feel truly unique. I didn't even learn what every one of them did.

And the roster is massive and each has fun voicelines that add personality to them. The fanservice in this game is insane.

So why the low rating? It's the damn physics. Nothing feels good in this game. Whenever you get hit your kart reacts as if it's made of cardboard. The irony is if this was a straight kart racer it'd probably get a bare pass as a PS1 game because the controls themselves are fair for the era, but the type of gameplay here involves way too many precise movements.

And unlike the standard cup format of Mario Kart, or any racing game, this game has you try to win all 14 stages in a row, with only 5 continues. Honestly I could probably even let the game slide if it just separated into cups of 3-4 stages, but the difficulty of the physics, combined with the fact you need to learn a new gameplay objective every single stage makes getting 14 wins in a row pretty damn hard. Like I said I only got up to stage 7 so I can't say what the last half of the game is like. And it's such a shame because they really tried so hard to make this game stand out from the competition and went full force with the South Park brand.

A weird mix of a quiz show with general knowledge, Mario Party-esque minigames all with a South Park coat of paint.

The biggest downfall of the game is that when playing single player the other characters don't fill in as CPUs, meaning you're basically answering questions and playing minigames to try and win against yourself.

If you can somehow get some friends together I could see this providing a tiny bit of fun. Especially when it came out.

A great sendoff to the Sonic Advance series.

Gathering the Chaos Emeralds is a much more manageable task than it was in SA2. Although admittedly it’s still a big grind, they’ve added so many quality of life improvements that I noted were missing from the last game, such as the fact the chaos you collect between stages don’t reset. I do think that they should have either gone with just keys or chaos though, making you collect both is a bit more tedious than it had to be.

Special stages themselves are much better than the first game (I never played any in the second). Managing to actually hit the rings doesn't feel like a horrible trick on your depth perception. Unfortunately the enemy hit detection is still a bit wonky in these stages. Most of them I got through on the first try, the 6th one took me 2 tries and holy hell that last one was a bitch cos of all the enemies.

I like that the game no longer requires you to go through it several times with every character to be able to play the true ending. In fact all characters share a single save slot now and you can pick and choose who you want per stage. They compensate this by making 3 acts per zone and making the acts themselves longer.

Level themes are on par with the 2nd one, with a nice mix of classic zone types and unique ones, like Toy Kingdom. This is the 3rd game in a row to use an ice themed zone, and I think I love the aesthetic of this one the most. Bonus points for not using Green Hill Zone clone as act 1 again, although I feel like city-themed stages are almost as much of a cliché in Sonic games now.

Lots of fun types of enemy designs too, especially in the toy kingdom.

I was pretty happy with the team system. It never felt like it overtook the game, it was just a nice bonus to have. Plus the fact each pair gives a unique playstyle is a really great way to make the characters stand out and make you try different combinations.

A small problem I had with the game is that the level designs feel worse than before. There’s way too many insta-death crush blocks now. Plus I feel like they reused a lot more assets between worlds, like the “clacker” things. It’s not so bad that it breaks the game for me, but if this had the level design of 1 and 2 I think it’d be a 9/10 for me. Either way it’s still a fantastic 2D Sonic experience that manages to stand out due to the partner system.

Oddworld works so much better in 2D, but there’s definitely a good game in here, it just needs to be polished up a lot. This entry goes for a more classic level-based progression. Each stage is sort of like a world in Mario 64, but instead of having multiple objectives you have a big puzzle to solve to get to the end of the stage, and a side mission to rescue as many mudokons/fuzzles/eggs as you can. Honestly it works pretty well. There aren’t many different themes – I think all levels fall into 3 types of aesthetic, so they become memorable purely by the layout and tasks you have to do, and in that sense some levels definitely stood.

As for the inclusion of Munch…well he plays really well in the water, but otherwise there’s nothing he can really do that you couldn’t have just let Abe do. It does add an extra layer of puzzle solving by having 2 characters at once, but it comes with the drawback of having way too many times when you need to keep catching one character up to the other, and it just feels slow.

Speaking of padding the time out, the new carrying mechanic for Abe leads to waaaaay too many sluggish paced sections where you have to pick up, throw or carry multiple Mudokons to get past an area or over a barrier. And then there’s the eggs you need to save one-by-one in the final levels. It just slows things down to a halt and is really annoying.

One of the biggest difficulties I had with the game was how many tasks are assigned to a single button. The B button (Switch) is used to jump, pick up objects and interact with things. And don’t get me started on the amount of times I pressed Y to run, but ended up burping/farting instead

Another way it’s rough around the edges is the sound design. For some reason some sound effects are insanely loud and drown out the dialogue of the spirit guy who gives you hints throughout a level. Even just the sound of a Mudokon scratching (which plays CONSTANTLY thanks to Abe doing it himself) feels way too loud.

While the overall feel of the game is different from the first, the cutscenes feel right at home, with the same charm and quirky dialogue. Unfortunately there’s far less of them now, replaced instead by newspaper shots between levels.

It's a decent entry to the franchise, but it really shows its age more than the originals ever will.