Interesting game, but not really my personal jam for 2D platformin. Whereas Wario Land 1 was more of a straightforward level based platformer akin to the Mario Land games that it piggybacked on, with the extra gimmick of being graded based off of how many coins you were able to collect, this game abstracts itself even further from its parent(?) series.

Most notably is that in this game Wario must have eaten some crazy kind of garlic or something because he is invincible now. There aren't any bottomless pits, and no matter how many times Wario gets smacked, slapped, roasted, frozen, squashed, or stretched, he cannot die. While there are certainly benefits to immortality, Wario Land 2 taught me that such a blessing can really be a curse. The level and game design has been fundamentally changed as a result, and now things are much more slow and explorative. Finding secrets is the real aim of the game here, as trying to straight-shot through the levels will only let you access 25 out of the whopping 51 levels that this game contains. As there's no threat of failure or death, the game really wants you to take your time combing the levels to find secret treasures and exits by leaving no door unvisited, no coin ungrabbed, and no wall/floor tile unchecked.

That isn't to say that there's zero punishment or challenge in this game, as while getting hit won't diminish any of Wario's health or make him any less capable than he normally is, it will put him in a cardiac arrest state for a few seconds while launching him with knockback force that makes the Belmont clan look like they have iron boots. Some enemies will instead change Wario's state like flame guys that will turn him into a fireball that can break blocks, hammer guys that will smash him into a bouncy spring form which can jump higher, hydraulic presses that flatten the lad into a pancake that can flutter, penguin lookin mfers that can make Wario drunk, and so on and so forth. You really don't know which enemies will knock you on your ass and which ones are actually powerups until you get hit.

All of this comes together to just kinda make a game that felt really annoying to play tbh. Since there's no mechanical punishment for getting hit the game usually punishes mishaps by resetting your progress whether that be by putting Wario in a state where you'd have to go back and revert or just by knocking you back down to the ground where you gotta get back to where you were before. Obviously, even in platformers with health systems mistakes commonly get punished by resetting progress by way of like checkpoints if you die or whatnot, but that's usually an automated process whereas here in Wario Land there are points where if you fuck up, you gotta drag your ass back to the starting line before you can try again. This is most egregious in the bosses, as there are a lot of bosses that punish any hit by forcing you out of the boss chamber, resetting the fight from square one no matter how far you initially got. For a game with an invincible protagonist, there's a surprisingly low margin for error in some of these levels. It makes an already slowly designed game feel even more sluggish, and my goopy gamer brain already isn't the biggest fan of slower, more explorative 2D platformers.

It still has that goofy wario charm that's all in good fun, and Captain Syrup is a fun antagonist. Instead of your typical victory animation or whatever, Wario just front-faces to look directly at you upon clearing any level to let you know what you've done. While I did get most of the endings on this playthrough, if I had this as a kid I guarantee you I would only have seen the default 25-level ending and nothing else. Definitely not my favorite game out there, but I still respect its experimentation with the platformer genre and its quirky charm.

Sonic the hedgehog is a game that was truly ahead of its time. The music in sonic 1 is so iconic, whenever you hear it you know what game it's from. The same can be said for the sound effects, whether it's collecting rings, finishing a level, or almost drowning. Each sound is truly iconic and special in its own way.

Another thing about sonic 1 that's amazing is the level design. The levels are full of spaces to explore and different routes to take. It really does baffle me how on Sega's first try they managed to get everything so right.

Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

Definitely a personal favorite of mine out of Midways 80s arcade lineup. The game is just so goddamn hectic with having to juggle counting shots to send the right number of beers and catching empty glasses while scanning the screen to course out the next plan of attack, it hits that ADHD multitasking brain real good. It definitely seems like there's an amount of luck to the game, as it seems like its entirely RNG how far a customer slides back and how quickly they finish their drinks, and that can just sometimes put you in a bad state where there's just too much going on to feasibly handle. But hey! It certainly gets me wanting to keep trying again and again to see what happens every run. If this is what actual bartending is like though imma start praying for every barkeep on earth out there. And also the ones in space too, apparently, as this game proves that even aliens need their fill of Bud.

If I ever see this at an arcade you know that's an on-sight play. I think there used to be an arcade around me that had this game, but they died a few years back...

Incredibly fun sprite work and great music, up there with Championship Edition in terms of the best versions of Pac-Man to play. My only complaint is that by world 3 or 4 things get hectic in a way that I find a lot more difficult to handle than normal Pac-Man. The mechanic of ghosts transforming into more complex, harder enemies is neat, but eventually, there's so much going on on-screen that you can't find time to stop any of them from transforming. Once I was regularly dealing with 4 powered-up ghosts and no power pellets left, I just spammed the credits button to get through the game, and death becoming trivial to me like that isn't very fun, but maybe I just need to get better. Out of all the games on Pac-Man Arcade+, this and Championship Edition are probably the biggest highlights.