I blame the podcast "372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" for this playthrough. Mike Nelson and Conor Lastowka had just started reading Ernest Cline's "Bridge to Bat City", and they glommed onto the oddly specific details of (1) main character Opal playing Atari games with Buddy Holly music in the background and (2) Opal's uncle gifting her a copy of MegaMania before taking her to her mother's deathbed. Figured it was worth giving that a go.

Strictly speaking, developer Steve Cartwright got the idea for this game off Astro Blaster, not Space Invaders. But Space Invaders makes for a fairly easy shorthand these days: fixed-screen space shooter dealing with waves of alien enemies, where each of the enemies is modeled after normal Earth things (in Space Invaders' case, sealife; in MegaMania's case, food and household objects). On top of the waves of enemies moving in different patterns (and some decent stuff there - I like seeing the Space Dice roll through), the gimmick for MegaMania is its Guided Missiles in Games 1 & 2, which follow the player's movements.

This ain't bad, but it is strikingly weird. Straightforward enough to program, since it's basically just applying the player's movement to a second sprite, but pretty different from how a lot of games think of their projectiles. I can't tell you how many times I went to line up a shot and retreat from counterfire, only for this to make my missile weave around the enemy. You kind of have to play less defensively than you do in a lot of these space shooters to make the Guided Missiles work. Kinda different than my usual playstyle, but not bad - gives the game its own identity, firing and tracking down an enemy to line up your shot. But if you're not a fan, you can just pick Games 3 & 4 for Straight Missiles, which completely ignore the player's inputs. Nice to have the option.

I kinda wish there was more of a story to this. It's ultimately pretty inconsequential, since a lot of these early games don't really need a narrative, but I love seeing how much effort Atari would put into manuals of this era (the Swordquests and Yar's Revenge come to mind). I haven't played a lot of Activision's efforts in this era; maybe this was pretty typical for them? Nice of them to actually credit Steve Cartwright, though.

Let the record show, my play improved substantially after I muted the game audio and played Buddy Holly's "Everyday" in the background, so maybe Opal's onto something. Ended up with over 62,000 points, so per the manual, I am eligible to become an official MegaManiac. I expect Activision to send me the official emblem in the mail in 8 to 10 business days.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first Gravity Rush is a modest, basic little game carried entirely by two things: the strength of its player character, and the strength of its moveset.

To touch upon the latter first, Gravity Shifting is deceptively one of the most fun abilities a video game has ever offered a player. It doesn't seem like it at first, because it feels quite awkward. Jump into the air and hit the button to go Zero Gravity. Rotate your camera - either with the buttons or the Vita's build-in gyroscope - and hit the button again to shift gravity. You will now fall in the wrong direction. You may readjust if you'd like, but after a certain amount of time, you will start falling in the right direction.

It's weird and clumsy and will absolutely result in Kat zooming in weird directions or falling flat on her face. But eventually you realize, "Oh, wait! This is flight! It's purely physics-based flight!" And then you start to experiment with things like momentum and chaining Gravity Slides into Shifts, and you really start to see Hekseville as the playground it was designed to be. It helps also how forgiving the game is with missed targets and depleted meters, since it's usually pretty easy to loop back around and that meter recharges super quickly (in mid-air!), especially once you have a couple upgrades under your belt. Even if you happen to fall out of bounds, it's no big deal - Dusty will swoop in to bring Kat back into the game, no worse for wear.

I will say, Gravity Shifting definitely felt like it was missing something in this game. It gets a lot of mileage out of Shifting, Sliding, Kicking, and the Stasis Field, but there's a certain je ne sais quoi absent. This would be addressed in Gravity Rush 2, but here Kat's moveset is "only" great. Still one of those games where the mere act of moving around the world as the main character feels right.

Speaking of the main character, holy moly is Kat great. She's such an unabashedly wholesome and sweet (if a little self-centered) protagonist, something you don't expect on first blush with her character design. Her defining moment for me has always been "Home Sweet Home", an early mission where the amnesiac Kat decides her first order of business upon arriving in an unfamiliar city is to find a place to live. She ends up finding a disused sewage run-off pipe and is delighted, then flies around town finding garbage to decorate it. One montage later, the kid's actually set up a pretty sweet pad for herself, and you'll see her relaxing there every time you save or boot the game up.

Every story this game tells is filtered through the lens of this character, who doesn't seem to realize the gravity (heh) of most of the situations she ends up in. So while the plot goes in a lot of directions that, frankly, I can't keep up with, it's always told through the very grounded, simple-minded perspective of its main character. Helps make the whole thing more fun.

Like... she successfully convinces hardened gang members to stop being gang members by asking nicely. What more do you want from your lead?

I had the good fortune to play this game during the year I had free access to PlayStation Plus, and this ended up being one of my runaway favorites from that year. You're generally better off playing the PS4 port these days, but don't overlook this release, either.

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.

Pokémon was counterculture.

It's hard to believe that now, given what Pokémon has become, but the original Pokémon games were made by an indie team of nerds who wanted to make a different Dragon Quest in their own image. So much of that heritage and identity is baked into the first Generation's design. We take it for granted now, since subsequent generations tend to ape Gen 1's template and are almost unto their own as a genre, but if you know what to look for, you can see all the hallmarks of it. Little things like the near-future setting instead of high fantasy, legendary Pokémon as your jRPG superbosses, Voltorb/Electrode being cyberpunk Mimics, the Game Corner as an evolution of Dragon Quest's casinos, deliberate monster design consideration for how boss encounters are paced out (Onix is a scary early boss that becomes a standard encounter in mid-game and essentially a trash mob by the end), etc. I tend not to think of later Pokémon in this way, but that's the main image I have for Gen 1.

Pokémon Yellow, specifically, feels like the first core game for the series made as a mainstream phenomenon rather than a product of counterculture. You could make arguments for the Japanese Blue Version or the International Red/Blue Versions, but the way I see it - Japanese Blue was a surprised thanks from Game Freak for Red/Green's success, and Red/Blue were experiments to see if the success could be replicated outside of Japan. Yellow was made because the series was successful enough to warrant a TV show, and that TV show became a separate phenomenon. Yellow exists in an interesting place, then - it's a trendy response to the success and is thus the first mainline Pokémon game designed to be a Pokémon game rather than an RPG. At the same time, it couldn't change that much of its Gen 1 template, so it still retains those counterculture artifacts. Gen 2 as a whole would experience this as well, given the timing of its dev cycle, but it's perhaps at its most pronounced with Yellow, where the sleek new sprites and expansive Pikachu friendship mechanics exist side-by-side with the grungy counterculture design that made Gen 1 what it was.

I've always had sort of an odd relationship with Gen 1 Pokémon. I was into the anime from day 1 and collected the cards, but I didn't own any (non-PC) video games until the start of Gen 3. I got Crystal first, then Sapphire and Yellow in pretty rapid succession, so a lot of my experiences with the first three generations' core games were formed around the same time. Of those, Yellow held my attention the least, but more because it wasn't the new hotness than anything. A lot of my appreciation for the first generation's games have come after the fact, as people growing up with the titles have gotten old enough to articulate what made them so interesting and so different. I always liked Yellow, I just didn't get it until later on.

Later than this particular playthrough, even; I mostly have modern PokéTubers to thank for my current respect for Gen 1. But I will say this playthrough was a turning point for me. I revisited Yellow for the first time in years for an early Designing For video. I'd long before abandoned my Yellow playthrough and had contented myself with clearing Blue as my first-gen playthrough. But my friends needed B-roll footage, and I was happy to oblige. I had until that point been someone who loaded up on power moves and brute forced my way through every encounter (in Sapphire, I taught my Kyogre Sheer Cold and kept it as a regular part of its moveset), but I decided to give status moves a go this time. Largely because movesets are so limited, and you're starved for options otherwise. Sure enough, I found myself leaning into 'em. I remember being proud of myself for beating the Champion's Jolteon in a close fight because I tried using Thunder Wave rather than just trying to overpower it! Maybe a silly thing in retrospect, but it felt like a grew a bit then.

There's a stereotype for the kind of person who holds onto Gen 1 as the only valid generation. I get annoyed by that - even ignoring that my favorite Pokémon generation was yet to come, I detest such thought-terminating viewpoints - but it's also a pet peeve to see folks who act like any sort of Gen 1 favoritism is someone being/catering to "Gen Wunners". Like I said at the beginning, early Pokémon was counterculture in ways that the phenomenon has never been able to replicate. I can completely understand someone preferring to hold onto that.

Given Chris Seavor's ambitions for Conker as a series in the 00s, this game probably needed to exist to satisfy them. It's a bit much to dump a sequel to a limited release N64 game on the Xbox audience without giving them a way to experience the original. But I do think the world would've largely benefitted from just seeing the original ported, warts and all.

Yes, Live & Reloaded is in a lot of ways a cleaned up experience from Bad Fur Day. Yes, the graphics are quite impressive and show off a lot of what the original Xbox could do. Yes, the full orchestration is great and does a lot for the overall experience. Yes, "Bats Tower" is no longer suffering. Yes, "Spooky" is honestly an all-around improvement, a feat given that it was already a highlight of Bad Fur Day's singleplayer (and I include in that the inexplicable Van Helsing costume change). Yes, "It's War" is far more visually interesting, with the varied environs doing a lot to add to the sense of Conker infiltrating an enemy stronghold. Yes, that one Tediz mini-boss is a fun addition. And yes, the game continues its self-awareness by acknowledging its nature as a remake, at least in the beginning.

But I feel like a lot of the intentionality of the original is gone. On some level, Bad Fur Day's constant abuse of the player was the point, especially given how easy it is to try again. A lot of the original's visual nuance is missing, from how some characters look to how some characters animate. For goodness sakes, Conker's so furry that it's hard to read his expression at times, and you miss out on little visual cues like him flashing the camera an aggressively-nonchalant grimace with "(Hope she's rich 'cos she ain't cute.)" Or using the multiplayer Grunt models for the Grey Squirrels in "It's War", with their cocksure smirks, COMPLETELY undercuts the tone of the Saving Private Ryan opening and parody. Or how the toilet goblin clearly has spare toilet paper, or how the cavemen just kinda do a stupid dance to taunt Conker and Fangy in the arena, or how the blueblood catfish's money uses the SAME model as the other wads of cash instead of a new one...

This is without getting into the usual hot-button issue, the game's extra censorship. I can actually generally accept it this time around - most of the jokes with the cusses are simply that the characters cuss, and a bleep conveys that as well as the swear itself. But of course, censoring "Sloprano" is a huge buzzkill, as was censoring, weirdly, that one joke about confusing the words "fellatio" and "Fidelio". What, couldn't be assed to write another joke? Really, I wouldn't mind so much if the censorship thing was consistent; what, are "shite" and "feck" okay because the dumb Americans at Microsoft are too stupid to realize these are accented ways of saying "shit" and "fuck"? Then why censor "twat" in "Sloprano" when it only rhymes with "scat" in British slang (since Americans would rhyme it with "hot")?

But the most egregious thing of all is the goblins. Like, I get it - you want to increase the emphasis on combat, and you want to get there by adding more enemies throughout the game ramping up to the nighttime chapters. And at first, it's kind of a cute diversion, unexpectedly having to worry about mid-game enemies in an early game area. But then the game just keeps spamming these goblins for no reason! There's never any attempt to explain who the goblins are, or why they're here, or why they're so aggressive, or anything like that. In Bad Fur Day, they were used super sparingly, enough so that you didn't really question it, just accepting these weirdos as part of the tapestry of this misanthropic game world. If they were more pronounced in Bad Fur Day, doubtless the game would have a joke overexplaining their presence - but they show up in like two places, so, no need for that. Here, they're everywhere in the daytime, then completely abandoned at night, replaced very briefly by haunted dolls before the game ultimately decides to dispense with extra enemies all together. It honestly makes the game feel like a low-effort ROMhack, where the hacker couldn't be assed to change up the levels and instead just added more enemies into the standard levels. And tightened up the graphics a little bit, sure.

Xbox Live & Co is okay. Anything replacing Bad Fur Day's excellent, varied multiplayer is a bummer as a matter of course, but Xbox Live & Co is... fine. Probably better back in its heyday, and doing an exhibition run of it in singleplayer is kinda lame, but I can see where potential would come from with this. Sneeker and Sky Jockey felt like the only two particularly fun classes on first blush, but maybe the others feel better with more practice. I don't know that it adds a ton, embellishing the Professor as a threat (and giving him a rude name) as well as bringing back the Panther King, but it is something. I feel like there's the start of it being a decent commentary on the then-burgeoning modern military squad-based shooter, but there just isn't enough there for it to be more than a few decent jokes/references. Or maybe I'm just the wrong audience, with my competitive shooter experience being with Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2?

I think Live & Reloaded would've been acceptable if it had a follow-up, or if it had gone all-in on a more expansive multiplayer. As it is, it's trying to take a weirdly auteur project, filter it down to Microsoft's standards, then build it back up as a competitive shooter. I guess it's still a broadly equivalent experience, and if this was the only way you played it... I mean, it'd be all right. But I don't think it'd be anything special, which is the most damning thing.

I did play all three episodes, but I don't think I have a ton of unique commentary across the trilogy, so I'm grouping 'em together at once.

Years ago, I had the chance to play a pick-up game of the Star Wars tabletop RPG at a convention. At the time, I decided I wanted my character to be a Force-sensitive janitor, because that seemed funny to me - just some random guy who happens to be Force-sensitive, who isn't really part of the Jedi or Sith or whathaveyou but is just kinda doing his own thing. I feel like that campaign was symbolic in a lot of respects of my relationship with Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon. By way of example, I was riding along with people who had been playing the game since the 70s, and they ended up having an in-character conversation for an hour in Jawa (none of us were Jawas), and I just kinda had to sit there for the duration of it.

But it's relevant to mention here because, as much as I can get swept away by the grand, sweeping stories of political factions, and as much as I can get caught up in individual stories about certain characters (ahem), after a certain point I just kinda feel like too many random people can do Force stuff, and having each and every one of these guys interface directly with major factions or main characters like Darth Vader sort of makes the galaxy feel a little smaller to me.

I know it's probably unfair to pick on this game for that sorta thing. Any Star Wars video game is gonna have elements of power fantasy, doubly so for a Virtual Reality game. It'd be a little strange if, in a universe where people possess mystical powers, all you could do in the tie-in VR game was bulls-eye Womp Rats or something. Still, it's the sort of thing that runs through the back of my mind for this experience.

Vader Immortal is not fully confident in letting the player roam 3D space - but that's not a specific indictment, since many VR games are anxious about that sorta thing. Actually, that there is some wandering around here, even if it's just on-rails, is decently interesting. But the large thrust of the game is getting from one shooting gallery or cutscene set piece to another, and it does a decent enough job at that.

I kinda think of this game like a decent theme park ride with a good budget. It's fun and memorable while it lasts, but more something I think of as a decent diversion than something with a gripping narrative. I don't remember a whole lot about the actual experience, aside from some decent messing around with Stormtroopers, Jedi Outcast-style. I'll admit I'd rather be playing Jedi Outcast, but I know myself well enough to recognize that's nostalgia speaking. No reason why this can't be someone else's Jedi Outcast.

I'd played this years ago when I had to as part of Donkey Kong 64, but I definitely had more fun revisiting this as part of Rare Replay. Probably in part because I'm much older now and have more respect for gaming's roots (even if I know very little about the ZX Spectrum), and probably because Jetpac feels like a lot more of a non sequitur in the context of DK64 than Arcade Donkey Kong does, as cute as it is to juxtapose early Nintendo with early Rare.

My main point of comparison for this era of gaming is the Commodore 64 (which I'm also largely unfamiliar with), so I dunno how common a takeaway this is, but man - even early on, you could do some nice things graphically with the ZX Spectrum. Colors are pretty limited (the Stampers made it a space game because the background was guaranteed to be black, I'm sure), but man getting those yellows and purples and reds on the spritework is something to see. I love the entirely superfluous detail of a cloud of exhaust steaming up whenever you jet off the ground. And the effects of the lasers, eventually trailing into dots, is a pretty neat effect.

I like how the game feels, too. There's good variety to the stage loops - 8 enemies with largely different movement patters across 16 stages makes for a good sense of flow as you learn the game. And I like how Jetman controls. Like there's a good sense of momentum in midair, freeing compared to how slow he is on the ground. And sometimes you have to make that decision of if you're gonna run away from an alien on the ground, or if you're gonna risk hopping into the air to get out of the way since, while that brings you closer to the alien, it's a lot faster, and you juuuuust might be able to time it right. A lot of games from this time are very basic in their controls, so it's always neat to see something where the character feels good to control.

It's funny, I know Sabre Wulf is the game from this era that would have more of a legacy for Ultimate Play the Game, but there's something to be said for how strong of an opening act Jetpac was. Still very much worth revisiting today.

Pretty faithful remake of the original, down to its limited and super simple design. Visuals get a nice update, with a lot of the reimagined levels feeling alive. Still retains the weird pacing choices of having five levels for seven MacGuffins. Mizrabel's completely overhauled fight is a neat change of pace.

NONE OF THAT MATTERS. You play this game for the added narrator. Holy moly, does the narrator add so much to this experience. It's so simple yet so inspired, having this guy throw in fun little lines describing what Mickey's doing or thinking at each given moment. You might think that that's redundant or messing with the original's tonality or something, but I don't think so! Talking about Mickey having to be brave or the illusory monsters he has to fight or whatever is exactly the sort of thing that would've pulled me into this game as a kid. This is the sort of thing I want to see added to this endless conga line of remakes we're getting these days.

My very favorite line (paraphrased, since it's been a bit)- "Mickey remembered the advice his friend Donald gave him on adventures: never have them."

I played the remake first, which naturally dampened what I got out of the original. But the original ain't bad either. Simple, but not bad.

This is probably a pretty decent "baby's first platformer". It's pretty straightforward, with the main nuances being Mickey's slow, floaty movement and his projectile game. The game is very forgiving, though not a complete gimme - Continues are limited. I respect that you still have to put some effort in to learn stuff, even if the remake suggests that this is less a deliberate choice on SEGA's part and more a natural consequence of expected game design.

The game sure doesn't feel much like a Mickey Mouse title. If it wasn't for Mickey and Minnie, and Mizrabel kinda looking like Snow White's Evil Queen, you could mistake this as being any sort of generic cutesy fantasy platformer. But I guess it's all right in its own respect. Animation on Mickey's pretty solid, anyway, even if it's a far cry from Virgin's later efforts.

It'd always been weird to me that there are only five levels but seven collectables. Like so you have the Rainbow Gems, implying seven, but you don't have a full set of seven levels to make up for them? Why not come up with some other theming and make the Gems a set of five, then? Odd stuff.

Even on just the Genesis, I'd probably take any other Disney title, but I can respect this being pretty impressive if you were a kid in a pre-Sonic world.