After years away from this game, I thought "oh, I've gotten significantly better at matchy puzzle games. This will allow Dr Mario to innovate by making it a Vs Puzzler, my favorite version of the puzzle! And I actually understand the cute Wario Land 3 theming! It'll be great!"

It is incredible that the game manages to be inferior to the original in almost every way - and I don't even care for classic Dr. Mario all that much! Every addition that the title makes outside of the vitamin drop preview is to its detrement. The Story Mode proves to be a rather agonizing slog, especially on higher difficulties where it increases the virus count in addition to the CPU difficulty, which merely prolongs games and highlights the massive issue the game has. The "garbage" system of the game, rewarding you by hindering your opponent when you do a cool combo, is to rain two randomly-colored pill parts on two random columns. However, as Dr. Mario is a methodical game of adaptation, this does not create a situation that pressures your opponent - it either has a chance of nothing happening or, more than likely, causing them to just have to work around it for a little bit. The issue being that every single time it plays a slooooow animation as garbage sloooowly rains from the sky, but not in a way that better pressures your opponent. It is incredibly difficult to eliminate yourself via clogging the play area in Dr. Mario, meaning that the end goal for both players is to simply prolong the match and waste the other player's time as much as possible, which is... really decidedly unfun and goes against the point of a lot of Vs-style showdowns. When it expands to four players - a requirement for the penultimate fight of Story Mode - sprites are squashed to an eye-straining degree and garbage allocation is dependent on the color of the pills that caused the combo... which is often too slow a process to be targeted, turning the entire affair to be heavily reliant on random spawns if you get to play the game at a remotely decent pace. Dr. Mario is an inherently alright puzzle game, but this adds surprisingly little and the main attraction is flawed in a way that's difficult to repair.

Rudy has surprisingly good music, though.

Played this long enough to the point where if it were on Steam, I couldn't refund it. Of all of the Mario-themed puzzle games where it starts really hectic because there are a lot of things to clear at the start and you just kind of wait for RNG to give you the solution as the endgame of a given stage slows to an agonizing crawl... wow it's weird that they made three of them in just as many years, huh? But between this, Yoshi's Cookie, and Dr. Mario, this is certainly the worst of them. Forcing the game into a match-two system, solely vertically, takes out any sort of thrill from potential chains or strong building of anything; it's a purely reactive puzzler with a few moments at the start of rounds where you're shuffling around columns. If you are a fan of Mario's Puzzle Party from Mario Party 3, that will give you far greater depth for a match-two puzzler than Yoshi can give. There are moments where it's engaging, but you will either get past that in the first 20 seconds of a round or lose.

Strider is the most aggressively "pretty good" game out there. Physics feel pretty good, level design is pretty good, flow is pretty good, boss patterns are pretty good, spectacle is pretty good, voice acting is intentionally hilariously hammy with no sense of irony and I appreciate it. Some of the background art is nice to contrast the 2010's-era bland models, everything WORKS, this game would easily get an A in a game design course. The issue is that it really has no idea what it wants to BE.

Occasional moments of exhilerating platforming are often set back by dull segments of mashing the attack button through enemies. Neat movement upgrades like an omnidirectional air dash or a slide kick are never utilized except in specific points to make progress. You get a freezing attack that you use for platforming once in the whole game and then just use to break enemies who have blue shields that are allergic to ice but not explosions. You have a very fast attack that's satisfying to use and homages the old Strider well, but every single enemy has mountains of health that slows the power fantasy of the game to a crawl. There's a really neatly realized map of a futuristic eastern block dystopia that the game never has you explore by telling you exactly where to go at all times, and not in a Zero Mission "go to Ridley now" way, I mean a proximity alert to get to a checkpoint or screen transition. The game seems to realize that enemies can clip you for no reason and ruin your momentum, so there's tons of health pick-ups all around, even in the final boss fight, so you're very rarely in danger of dying. Bosses other than Solo are not reactive to your presence and just damage sponge their way through your attacks while you're only KINDA inclined to dodge theirs as you can probably tank through 80% of their attacks and still win unless it's a rapid-fire shot.

Strider is a game that has moments of fun; Strider inherently has a nice feel to him and jumps good. There are even some stretches that are legitimately nicely designed levels that work with the flow of the game. It is remarkable how a game can do everything so neatly and, through simple game design choices to make everything feel as standardized and fair as it can be, make for a dull, repetitive, forgettable experience for long stretches of its run time. I am not upset, I'm just disappointed.

I feel like you can tell who was a kid when they owned a Gamecube if their eyes light up upon hearing one of the following phrases: Chao Garden, Rogueport, City Trial, Delfino Plaza. I am one of those, so there is a significant tinge of joy to seeing this game. Upon revisiting it, it's rather incredible just how sloppy the entire affair is. Multiple lines seem mistranslated, story scenes plod along almost incoherently at times, direct translation is taken to an extreme so the characters seem to be having three different, stilted conversations between each other that somehow reach a conclusion, the homing attack requires very specific timing to work and hit the right target, there are a LOT more bottomless pits than in SA1 so it messing up is a lot more time-destroying, the gravity-based sections feel like a struggle to get your character to walk in the right direction at times and sometimes we'll just leave the gravitational field entirely, the final boss has voice lines that clearly reference cut Super content for how and when to transform that are just tossed in there, the emerald radar system of SA2 is just kinda frustrating when you're actually trying to A-rank the hunting stages, I still have no idea how you're supposed to properly fight Sonic 2 or Shadow 2, but they're not HARD by any means, I just seem to incidentally win. It's a near incoherent mess of a game that me summarizing the whole game's plot to you at Age 10 would probably give you a better understanding of what goes on in it than actually playing the game.

... anyway once you stop playing story mode and just keep going for missions it gets really good. SA2 has an almost hypnotic feedback loop of learn level, find secrets, chao garden, rinse repeat. On replaying, I was VERY pleased to find the mech levels were a lot better than I gave them credit for, figuring out targeting timing and just how long I could hold a lock in order to maximize score. They're very neatly designed for second playthroughs of each level to smash through. Speed stages take a ton of time to get the proper feel for, but once you get them, they feel GREAT! Treasure hunting stages... are actually worse than I remember, I won't mince words there!

There is something to be said about the sheer level of freedom SA2 gives you to break and exploit it. It's a bit of a mess, but it knows it and wants to provide every opportunity it can for you to have fun with and play around with the seemingly endless ideas it wants to throw out. I am sure mods would create a significantly better experience that smooths out the... I wouldn't say "rough edges" because the same's so slippery that roughness would actually help keep you on track, but I wanted the core experience, to learn the jank of the game's systems. And I'm willing to forgive its failures because it's ultimately probably the best of Sonic's 3D offerings at asking you to replay stages again and again at just its base level. SA2 is a pain of a game to beat. SA2 is a joy of a game to memorize.