Probably the worst console release of the original Tokimeki Memorial... is still pretty great! As I understand, this is a mostly-intact version of the original PC-Engine release, just with FMVs and voice acting stripped out, but the "Heartthrob Memorial" fan translation restores a lot of that anyway.

There's a playful innocence to TokiMemo that doesn't translate at all to the Western understanding of what dating sims are. Dating sims, as popular culture has it, are all about the romance; Tokimeki Memorial is less about that and more about capturing the highschool experience. Your goal is to win over the affections of your highschool crush, especially Shiori, but that plays out as more of a framing device for things like going to the movies, taking tests, joining a club, traveling abroad, etc. There is an entire RPG combat system as well as riffs on Konami's own Track & Field series, both of which only nominally play into the whole dating angle. I love how all-encompassing it is as a cute, larger-than-life simulation of the highschool experience rather than strictly about dating.

Also, a huge advantage to this game is how quickly time goes by. Later games are slowed waaaay down with more complicated animations, while this cycles through weeks at a breezy clip. This goes a loooooong way in making replays that much more appealing.

The reason why Telltale Games exists, even if it wasn’t their first game to come out. The story goes that a team at LucasArts was handling follow-ups for Full Throttle and Sam & Max Hit the Road, but the projects got cancelled over concerns that there wasn’t a market for adventure games anymore. Key personnel still very much interested in making adventure games bailed on LucasArts and formed Telltale. The goal was always to make an episodic Sam & Max title, but Telltale worked their way up to it, first producing a small tech demo (Telltale Texas Hold ‘Em), then earn capital through a couple easy-to-obtain licenses (Jeff Smith’s Bone, CSI). With money in their pockets and Steve Purchell’s blessing, Telltale took their big swing and produced what is probably Sam & Max’s biggest, best-known incarnation.

…and before we go any further, let us stop to admire the significance of all this. Please, indulge me for a couple paragraphs.

Sam & Max are essentially underground comix characters, created by Steve Purchell…’s brother. When they were kids, Purchell’s kid brother Dave drew these comics of a rabbit and dog detective, and Steve drew over-the-top parodies of them to mess with his brother. Dave gave Steve the rights to these dorkuses as a birthday present one year, and Steve developed them into the verbose, satirical, gleefully insane Freelance Police we know and love today.

The characters debuted in a series of comics, which Purchell published as a side hustle to his day job. Eventually, that day job was to be an animator and illustrator for LucasArts (we have Purchell to thank for the fabulous coverart for titles like Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken). LucasArts put out a quarterly periodical, to which Purchell started contributing Sam & Max comics… really because he could. The fine folks at LucasArts loved the Freelance Police so much that they started hiding them into games (this is jumping ahead a little bit, but my go-to example is Max inexplicably showing up as a friendly NPC in Jedi Knight). Eventually, someone at LucasArts realized they technically had full rights to the characters, so with Purchell on-board, the studio put out Sam & Max Hit the Road. Then there was the TV show, and more comics, and…

…well, not to put too fine a point on it - an entire game studio, one that has won countless awards for producing several of the most important games of its era, was founded with the express purpose of producing a new Sam & Max video game. Two studios, if we count the later Skunkape Games. All this from a kid messing with his little brother. You gotta love that.

With all this established, and knowing the house Sam & Max built out of Telltale, I’ve always found it striking how unconfident Telltale’s run of Sam & Max starts. It’s never bad, but it takes until “The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball” - the third episode - before you really feel like Telltale gets what they want to do with these characters and this world. Before then, you have “Culture Shock”, which frankly feels so aimless and inconsequential within the scope of Season One that I can’t think of it as anything but a pilot episode. The main villain of the season doesn’t even show up! “Situation: Comedy” is a good high concept and feels like a better introduction to the characters, but it’s wanting for a big capstone or highlight moment to sell the whole thing (though I can’t hate Mr. Featherly, and there are lots of good throwaway lines during the ‘Cooking Without Looking’ segment).

But “The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball” is where it starts to pick up. ‘Ted E. Bear’s Mafia-Free Playland and Casino’ is the joke that finally sold me on Sam & Max. And then ‘Just You And Me (And Ted E. Bear)’ really sold me on it. I think a decent amount of the first two episodes feel like they’re just extreme examples of adventure game silliness, and it isn’t until you hit that third episode and the change of scenery that you finally get, “oh, no, this just happens to be the heightened reality these characters exist in; adventure game silliness is part of the joke here”.

(as a quick aside - I’ll comment on changes made overall in the remake if I ever get around to playing that version, but I’m a little bummed that they changed the explanation for the ‘skinbodies’, since that was a favorite line as well. Definitely get why they made that change though)

The rest of the season is hit after hit. “Abe Lincoln Must Die!” has a ton of great dadaist political commentary and introduces one of the all-time greatest Sam & Max side characters in Agent Superball (plus, West Dakota). “Reality 2.0” is a fun send-up of internet and video game culture, with a decent amount of the jokes still holding up. “Bright Side of the Moon” is probably a step down from its predecessors, but there are still plenty of classic moments, like the complete lack of an explanation for how Sam & Max can drive to the moon, the payoff for Bosco’s Inconvenience, and the final confrontation.

I honestly think “Save the World” remains my favorite set of Sam & Max’s video game outings? “Hit the Road” is probably stronger overall, but I don’t think the series has given me anything as nakedly funny as a lot of this season’s highlights. Later Telltale seasons have their moments - “The Devil’s Playhouse” comes pretty close at times - but this is my easy pick for the one to play to get you into Sam & Max. Just… stick with it for a couple episodes.

The first of Rare's illustrious N64 career is... not the sort of game I would've expected. Not bad by any means, though. A very high-concept vehicular puzzler where the name of the game is usually to destroy everything. Sometimes, to race, too. But mostly destruction.

Let's get the main criticism out of the way - I hate the Backlash. I never felt confident using it. Like I know it's drifting, the trick to using it effectively is drifting, but the hitbox is so far back on the body that you have to overextend even beyond the amount you normally would for drifting. Even by the end, when I was fairly consistently nailing the timing of moves needed to clear "Diamond Sands", I felt like I knew how to perform, but not the principle behind why my buttons were working this time. Super frustrating.

In any other vehicle, though, the game's a good time. Especially in those mechs, there's something inherently satisfying to leveling buildings, figuring out the way the game wants you to think through its puzzles. I especially like the sheer amount of secrets meant for the player to uncover, especially in the midgame. There are a surprising amount of interlocked systems for the player to navigate, with secrets revealing secrets. So much of the game feels like you're a kid messing around with toys, it's great.

This even extends to the story. You have to love how overwrought the narrative is, trying to figure the safest way to dismantle a nuke truck and somehow that involving plowing through buildings to prevent it from detonating. Like, that's such a little kid sort of narrative, it's great.

It does kinda feel like the game doesn't know when to stop taking curtain calls, though. Sort of a minor complain, especially if you're someone who got super into this game. But, like, you roll credits, then find out you succeeded, THEN have another scenario, then another, then you have to get all the gold, then a few more scenarios, and then you get to the Platinums, then... personally, I called it after the second post-credits mission, since I'm not completely invested in getting all the Golds. Nice that the option exists, though.

Blast Corps is one of those evergreen game premises. It's sort of weird to me that it doesn't have some sort of follow-up. At the same time I don't really know how you would follow it up, since they pretty much exhausted every idea they could with this premise. Sort of a Punch-Out issue, where a franchise would largely consist of updates rather than sequels. This incarnation feels like a fairly natural expression of early 5th generation gaming, finding things to do within early 3D space akin to something like Pilotwings 64. A modern version would probably look a lot better, but it'd have to be a huge resource hog to convey similar ideas on modern tech. Is this a game that could come back? I dunno, but I think there'd be something satisfying for folks if it did.

Lovely, understated game that gets better the more time you spend with it. I love its willingness to tackle complicated, very real subject matter with its silly characters. Everything's softened with humor, but it feels no less real for the ideas that are being communicated. I get why Chibi-Robo has the complicated, unfocused legacy it does as a series - it's hard to sell the game on its action or proper gameplay loop, but it also wouldn't feel complete as a pure visual novel or TV show. So much of this game and its quiet exploration feels like a reflection of the types of things you think about as a kid growing up in a suburban home. What you see, what you don't see, and what you're left thinking about in the quiet moments on your own...

Perhaps one of the games I'm most grateful to see on Nintendo's Switch Online service. Don't get me wrong, I hold no particular love for the source material - the most nostalgia I have for it is seeing marquees for it at, like, Suncoast in the mall, or watching Doug Walker tear into it years after the fact. But I have a soft spot for licensed video game tie-ins, since they were most of what I had access to as a kid. Ever since they announced the Virtual Console for what was then known as the Nintendo Revolution, I've wanted to see licensed games recognized by Nintendo, particularly to satisfy my brother's desire to play the NES port of The Lion King in some official capacity. I dunno if that'll ever happen, but we're one big step closer, bro.

But let's not mince words here, Quest for Camelot GBC is not a very good game. It's easy to see why it's on the service, it trying to be another Link's Awakening-type game (and I guess Ninty owns the rights? Weird). But it fails in a lot of ways that highlight how consistently well-made Zelda tends to be. Case in point, the grid system. 2D Zelda always obeys a loose grid system, where even though Link and other characters can freely move around, all actions they perform are constrained to this grid. If Link makes a jump, he'll always land within the parameters of a tile. If he digs, that will conform to a given tile. So on and so forth. It's a subtle thing that you take for granted, but I found myself thinking about it here trying to jump and dig as Kayley. That jump segment across the scalding lake is particularly dastardly. Kayley jumps just a bit further than two tiles' length, so you're constantly having to orient your sub-position within a tile in order to keep from jumping directly into the boiling water. To say nothing of how inconsistent the game is about where you're able to dig. I wasted a bunch of time in Chapter 2 trying to find the big "turnip" for that ornery horse, enough so that I dug every diggable tile in the village area, and man, did the map not look like I'd dug every tile.

I also have to mention the sword techniques for having one of the weirdest control interactions I've yet run into in a video game. So it's a pretty ambitious idea, having both an RPG leveling system and an expansive moveset with the sword, all on an 8-bit handheld. In most cases, the extra moves aren't worth the trouble, and I found myself leaning into the standard slash and that dash attack (since it's stronger and faster). But that input on the dash attack is deceptively weird! So you have to double tap a direction, then hit the sword button to pull it off - seems straightforward. Only, you don't have to do all that at once. It turns out any time you press the same directional button twice, you "chamber" the input for a dash attack, which gets executed when you hit the sword button. So, for example, if you're trying to chase down a boss and happen to hit right, pause for a moment, then hit right again - it doesn't matter how long it takes for you to hit that sword button, it WILL be a dash attack, even if you hit other directional buttons beforehand! I even tested it out by waiting a good couple seconds between directional inputs, and it still does that! I've never ever run into that! Naturally this means you end up doing the dash attack when you want to do the slash attack, which is an issue because the dash attack doesn't have much knockback. Not a big issue on NSO since you're able to rewind the emulator, but I'm glad I didn't play on original hardware.

Just to touch on bosses really quickly, they all kinda suck. They tend to follow the same pattern of wandering around aimlessly, occasionally throwing out an attack to spice things up. If the arena allows for it, it's pretty easy to cheese their AI. This was particularly funny with the final Ruder fight, where I trapped him in a corner and just eroded two(!) health meters by slapping him with my sword like I was some irritated cat.

So I'm giving this game the same rating I gave Conker's Pocket Tales, but I'll confess I feel way more fondly about this game overall. Quest for Camelot isn't very good, but it's very charming and has a surprising amount of ideas for such a modest release. It experiments a lot with its game design, making each chapter feel very different. Even if these experiments don't always work out (that "Key Dilemma" gauntlet is just mean of the game), that the game's willing to try is honestly pretty cool.

This caught my eye when it was announced, but I only thought to buy it 'cause it was highlighted by the Game Awards. Never say that the system doesn't work.

This is essentially a short visual novel exploring the experiences of a Tamil immigrant couple and their Canadian-born son, largely told vicariously through the context of family recipes. I'd picked it up with the hopes that I could take away a recipe or two, but while a lot of it is laid out, there's a fair amount of "yadda yadda yadda"ing for the sake of narrative flow (but the team is hoping to put out a cookbook, so maybe I'll look into that). So while you can mess up a recipe, the game's quick to let you try again until you succeed; Cooking Mama this ain't. But again, the focus is on the story, with the recipes being used as conversation points and narrative devices to guide the player along.

This game feels very authentic. Being a White American with distant German/Irish heritage, I have no real claim to authority in the overall cultural authenticity of this Tamil narrative, so I must take a lot as given. But there is a lot that resonates with even a know-nothing like me. I of course love the recipes and music; I'm afraid the significance of it changing genres over time is a nuance lost on me, but I very much love that it's paying that much attention to detail. How it represents the Tamil versus English languages is really fascinating - stuff like how Kavin's text boxes get muddier to Venba the more quickly he speaks English is more transparent, but I also like the detail of how Kavin's dialogue in Tamil appears more slowly than Venba's or Paavalan's. Also that bit where Kavin finds himself playing cultural ambassador for a well-meaning but ignorant White showrunner, and writes a whole block of text that he eventually walks back without sending - I think anyone who's been in a position to explain their heritage to people who don't know has felt that.

(also, like, the bit where Kris asks if Chicken Tikka Masala would be a good fit for his show's Tamil character - I'm not at all well-versed in different Indian regions, let alone regional cuisine, but even I could tell that was off. Sometimes all you need is context)

I think the narrative overall is very smartly-paced. I like how the devices used to justify the game's puzzles shift over time. That one chapter in the middle, where Venba doesn't have any commentary to offer the player and simply cooks, is a great understated beat of character development. The game gets away with a lot of its storytelling through subtext like this, like how Paavalan's worker ID has a completely incorrect name, or how Venba and Paavalan never once replace their beat-up bed over the course of 26 years.

And, like, I love the art. Do I even need to say that the art is good? Very fun, simple, expressive character models.

I don't think this game was made for me, in that way that a lot of stories about immigrant experiences and world cultures aren't made for me. Playing through this, I felt like I was listening in on a conversation actively being simplified so someone like me could understand it. I don't mean that as a negative, and I honestly think that sort of narrative treatment is perfectly fair. I don't know that I should necessarily be the target demographic for this type of story, and I think of the act of presenting it in a way I can understand and empathize is a courtesy more than an obligation. That such an effort was made is very much appreciated, and makes it an easy recommendation for me.

I mean, you don't really need me to say anything, do you?

I was lucky enough to play UNDERTALE pretty early on. I hadn't heard about it during the Kickstarter phase or anything, but I remember it very suddenly exploding in popularity, and suddenly seeing sans everywhere. A buddy of mine gifted me the game and urged me to play through it, so I did, with the only real bit of knowledge towards it that you weren't supposed to fight people, and that this hoodie skeleton would be a fight at one point.

I think I had the same general experience a lot of people had out the gate: misunderstood what precisely I was supposed to do and hurt someone I didn't have to hurt, reloaded a save to do better, and got called out on it. The game had me from there.

I don't think there's a lot of new ground for me to cover, but one thing I want to say is that Toby Fox knew precisely what he had. I dunno if it's an artifact of his time with Homestuck and knowing what would trend, or just being a product of the internet, or what, but the sheer amount of shots he successfully called, with the exception of the scope of his fandom and just how impossibly high his career would launch, staggers the mind. You look at things like him leaving a polite request in the directory asking people not to upload stuff right away to Spriters Resource, or that specific scenario requiring so much careful engineering and understanding of player behavior to pull off. This is of course to say nothing of all the minute modular playthrough details that the game has to account for, and the sheer amount of commitment UNDERTALE has to its own themes, even to what would be a detriment in any other game in the case of its myriad endings.

I do bemoan how difficult it is to have a genuine experience of the game these days. Because UNDERTALE so thoroughly changed the world, I can understand how hard it must be to experience the game without doing so as some sort of commentary on some sort of level. I think a lot about Super Eyepatch Wolf's thesis statement in his study of UNDERTALE as a phenomenon, about the accidentally metatextual narrative of the line, "Despite everything, it's still you." I absolutely think that's the case. No matter what everyone makes of UNDERTALE, it is still the same incredible game it was on launch.

And, like... I also think a lot about that inscription in the song book, with Toby Fox commenting that he would play "Hopes and Dreams" every day on the piano, wondering if his game would become something, if anyone would ever get to hear it. I think every creative feels that.

A friend brought it to a group hang-out. We had a bunch of more obvious picks for party games, but I wasn't gonna let this pass us up.

Elmo's Letter Adventure is a simple edutainment game with a very narrow scope: reading comprehension by learning and recognizing letters. Gameplay consists of moving around environments and pressing a button near letters of an opposite case as the one given. After you find all the letters, you move on to the second stage, which does the same thing with the same letter. After that, you find letters to complete words' spelling. Repeat this cycle three times, and the game is over.

I don't object to having a narrow scope for teaching, as there's often a lot you can do within that narrow scope. But Elmo's Letter Adventure isn't doing much within that framework. If we break the game down into three sequences of three stages, a full two thirds of the game isn't even concerned with what you're doing with letters, just rote memorization of what they look like. Now, I don't know Sesame Street very well, but I know that a big part of how it teaches numbers and letters is through scenarios involving character interplay, surrealism, or humor. This has the benefit of (1) presenting the material in a memorable context, (2) teaching application of the material, and (3) being fun. I think that's what they're going for here with each set of levels being based around a different type of adventure (visiting the farm, going to space, an underWATER adventure), but the game doesn't do anything with those; mechanically, there's no difference between hopping on a pogo stick, driving a moon buggy, and piloting a submarine. About the strongest moment of teaching comes when you're looking for letters to start words, where you can accidentally spell the wrong words by picking the wrong letters, but these sequences are over and done with too quickly, they disincentivise this learning through a limited try system (overly-lenient as it is), and they're not even uniquely themed across all three level sets. And you don't have nearly enough gameplay to get through all the letters!

I know this is a game for 3-year-olds, but there's so much more you can do with games for 3-year-olds than this.

Bigger and grander than its predecessor in just about every way. Mumbo's claim at the end of the first game that Tooie would make Banjo-Kazooie "look like joke" Is apparent from the get-go, between its ambitious 20 minute(!) opening cutscene, the jaunt through ruined Spiral Mountain with the first game's moveset nearly intact, and that moment the player steps into the much, much larger Jinjo Village. I can't even begin to imagine the sheer amount of programming tricks required to pull off half of what Tooie's going for with stuff like rendering the ginormous worlds, handling the gameplay shift to its FPS segments, accommodating all the mini-games, the split characters, the cutscenes...

Banjo-Tooie is a very ambitious game. This has both upsides and downsides. The huge worlds lend themselves to a lot of experimentation, but the game sometimes runs into conveyance issues as a result. It's suuuuper easy to get turned around in places like Terrydactyland, and as cool as the inter-level connections are, that a Jiggy in one world can require a puzzle being solved in another (for example, clearing Stomponadon in Terrydactyland to get a Hailfire Peaks Jiggy) means that a player simply searching a given level for solutions can be left high and dry.

Grunty Industries is commonly pointed to as a world with this issue, but I have to side with my friends at Designing For here - Grunty Industries is brilliantly-executed. Having to sneak in, the slow opening of the factory floors, the building sense of scale, pay-off for B-K's WISHYWASHYBANJO, that moment towards the end when you finally unlock flight pads... so much to love there. I know this is the most likely thing to be overhauled in a theoretical remake, but I'd hope they wouldn't change too much.

There's also a sense of incompletion to Tooie that just wasn't present for Kazooie. Part of this was unavoidable - Tooie had to do SOMEthing to fulfill the promise B-K made with Stop 'n' Swop, and with Ninty quashing Rare's initial plan to literally yank out the N64 Game Pak, the team had to make some sort of compromise. But there's no dodging the feeling that a full world's missing, between that suspicious 900 Notes/90 Jiggies count and how nothing Cauldron Keep feels. B-K famously left a lot on the cutting room floor as well, but it had a far more complete illusion; Rare clearly just ran out of time and did their best to put a bow on the game. They did a great job, but there's no arguing with the numbers.

I think, if you only know the first two Banjo-Kazooie games by reputation, it's easy to lump them together as similar ideas. But both end up having very different identities. B-K is a pure expression of 3D platforming and exploration - perhaps less mechanically difficult than something like Super Mario 64, but still derivative of that general formula and its gameplay goals. B-T is less interested in posing mechanical challenges for the player and more interested in encouraging exploration through characters, skillsets, and world integration. Everything in Tooie feels less like "more Kazooie" and more like "commentary on Kazooie" (and other Rare trends, given the FPS segments). They're great complementary titles because they're so dissimilar, really; I'd rather have Tooie be like Sly 2 rather than Super Mario Galaxy 2. I prefer Kazooie all the same, but both are great times.

One last note - Banjo-Tooie would be the last title developed by Gregg Mayles' team during Rare and Nintendo's collaboration. This wouldn't be the team's last effort - Grabbed by the Ghoulies was only a couple years away - but Tooie feels like it carries a ton of weight as the terminus of this team's golden years. This is the same creative effort behind Donkey Kong Country 1 & 2 as well as the first Banjo-Kazooie - all absolutely incredible, ground-breaking releases. I feel like of those four titles, Tooie had the least impact on the industry (modern throwback 3D platformers are more likely to do genre work broadly or Banjo-Kazooie specifically than Banjo-Tooie soecifically). But this shouldn't be confused for Tooie being unimportant. Far from it: Banjo-Tooie is the summation of lessons learned by some of the industry's greatest talents at the tops of their games.

As of this writing, I haven't played Enter the Dragonfly, so this game represents the closest anyone got to recreating Insomniac's whole thing (Reignited notwithstanding). It's an all right attempt, but sadly, it's not great.

This game reminds me a lot of the first Jak & Daxter, a comparison I must confess isn't necessarily a compliment from me (but more on that another time). Part of it is the shift to large, open environments with hidden load screens - perhaps a natural extension of Spyro's usual thing, but striking for the lack of hub worlds. Part of it is the writing, with Spyro being more in-your-face than ever before (though I don't remember Daxter breaking the fourth wall to make a drug PSA?).

And part of it is that there's a swamp level, during which you meet up with a redneck stereotype whose farm is being invaded by overgrown bugs, which you must repel as part of an inexplicable turret segment. If I had a nickel for every time that happened...

This game brings back animal buddies, kinda. Sgt. Byrd and Sparx are the only true returning animal buddies, though Bentley gets a cameo (although booooooo they dumbed him down). Hunter has been upgraded to playable, and while there's probably something flagrantly wrong about his newfound competence, I'm not gonna lie, his archery stuff is a fun diversion. That Frozen Glacier level, where you have to play as Hunter, probably represents the game at its best.

Lastly, there's new character Blink, who's... just kinda dumb. That "fresh-air-a-phobia" line is kind of a perfect tone setter for Blink as a character. Also, I guess the Professor, who is his uncle (nephewism!), was a mole this whole time? Definitely thought he was some small bear or something.

The best part of this game is probably the Drew Struzan boxart. Which, to be fair, is a highlight of a lot of his work, but still. The game's fiiiiiiine, but doesn't have much in the way of staying power.

I always hate it when games of this era, in lieu of a denouement, just awkwardly end immediately after the player defeats the final boss.

You can honestly do far, far worse. E.T.'s biggest issue is its lack of conveyance, something that was a potential issue with every video game of that era if you lost the manual. If you fall in a pit, hit left or right as soon as you switch screens. If you're struggling with the FBI Agents/Scientists, switch to Game 3 to get rid of them. Don't sweat the timer of doom.

E.T. is a bad game, of course, but it's not really the cause of the 1983 Video Game Crash. It's more emblematic of Atari's hubris at the time. Right before Atari went all-in on E.T.'s success, they produced 15 million copies of the 2600 port of Pac-Man when only 5 million Atari 2600s had been sold. To hope any single game would move ten million consoles was foolhardy; to put that hope into one of the all-time worst video game ports was just inviting disaster. E.T. needed to be an overwhelming success; to that end, they got the best possible talent they could in developer Howard Scott Warsaw, gave him five weeks, and set him at it. Warsaw did the best he could, but there was no escaping the hole Atari dug for themselves.

Good ol' Mario Land. Such a weird, idiosyncratic take on the Mario formula that could only exist because developers were trying to sort out what could be done on Game Boy. Far from a great game, but it's such a cute little bite-sized take on Mario that I can't help but respect it. One of the first times we really see Mario experiment with what it can be in a mainline title, too. Mario is a fantasy series, but can it have jogging moai? Jiang-shi? SHMUP segments? Sure, why not? Always fun to revisit now and again for a quick, cozy playthrough.

There's something quite charming to the original Professor Layton, knowing it's an adaptation of a long-running series of Japanese brain teasers first and foremost, and all the stuff that would come to define the series (the characters, the adventure mystery plots full of over-the-top moments, etc) exists here purely as a framing device. At the same time, there was such confidence in the game that not only were sequels already in the works, but code functionality was implemented that would only be paid off when the sequel rolled around, like a mini Stop 'n' Swop. None of this confidence feels misplaced; Atama no Taisou makes for a great template, and the characters and world are immediately charming, the latter's bombast offset by Layton's quiet modesty.

This isn't a fair-play mystery, to be sure, which seems a contrast to the general nature of the puzzles being solvable with careful critical thinking. But maybe that's all right? Luke's there to play the Watson, so the player isn't alone when things start going off the wall in the endgame.

Take any of my ratings of non-Smash fighting games with a grain of salt, as they're usually based off a single run or two through the arcade ladder and general surface impressions.

Absolute masterpiece. Everything is so well put-together here, from the mechanics to the presentation to the fluid animation. It says a lot about the strength of SF3 overall that the subseries could be carried without most of the series regulars.

Having said that, there sure are a lot of weirdos on this roster. Most Street Fighters games have solid casts where I can understand the appeal of each character, but I kinda have to scratch my head at some of the guys here. I'm guessing they're here to showcase the animation more than anything? Ah well, the other half of the roster's still good stuff.