I'm so glad much of the Banjo-Kazooie team was able to get back together, but I don't think they were able to recreate what they had before. To be fair, the team had an idea they were working towards, and eventually the player is able to "get" what Playtonic was going for, after which point the game experience improves considerably. Even so - the game reads like such a rough first draft at a Banjo-Kazooie spiritual successor so as to be incomparable.

If I were to describe the game in one word, it'd be "sterile". This is due to the game's use of Unity as its engine. Ignoring Unity Technologies' recent string of questionable-at-best business practices, their game engine is perfectly fine; actually, my class used it exclusively for our senior projects in my game design program in college. Out-of-the-box, Unity is a basic but serviceable engine, with a lot of focus on modular physics due to its easy integration with programming scripts. Unity by its nature heavily emphasizes drag-and-drop programming, which makes it a good learning tool and a solid choice for indie devs.

The consequence of this design is that it's very easy for games to feel samey if little is done to differentiate them. Yooka-Laylee leans into a fairly stock suite of physics, texturing, and especially lighting systems that exist within Unity. I'm not saying that I've made a game like Yooka-Laylee, but I am saying that I've played enough student projects thrown together in Unity that Yooka-Laylee doesn't stand out. Naturally, for a game duology as vibrant and creative and unique as Banjo-Kazooie/Banjo-Tooie, it's reeeeeeally disheartening to see that Playtonic either didn't know how to make a stock engine feel unique, or they chose not to do so. I think the most generous read is that they simply lacked confidence in this, their first big statement as an indie company.

If this is all too technical for you, think about it like this. Yooka has the ability to take on different elemental properties by licking things. For example, by licking cannonballs, Yooka becomes metallic and becomes too heavy to be gusted about. This is similar to Metal Mario from Super Mario 64, of course. But in Mario 64, Metal Mario's physical properties are somewhat altered: he can't swim, a loud metallic sound accompanies his walking, and his jump height is impacted. Metal Yooka has no change in physical properties; when Yooka moves around, he moves as lightly and effortlessly as he normally does. The only thing that's different is that his model's texture changes - a purely superficial effect that is easy to program into the game. Many of the design decisions made in Yooka-Laylee are like this.

I think I could qualify a lot of my miscellaneous critiques of the game this way, as products of developers not confident in what they were doing. Capital B is a lowest common denominator version of Gruntilda. Many sound effects, shockingly, are stock and limp. The game reaches for a prolonged fart joke with Buddy Bubble, which I guess is comparable to Kazooie's Ass Egg, but Banjo-Kazooie at least had the good sense not to underline it in dialogue. The Snowplow transformation is presented as being fleshy rather than metallic because that seemingly would've taken effort. Dr. Quack's quiz sequences feel like they're there out of obligation rather than a genuine passion for stuff like Furnace Fun. A lot of the NPCs feel like Playtonic's punching down, particularly the shopping cart homeless stereotypes...

...so let us instead look to what Yooka-Laylee does well. Soundtrack is of course good, with Grant Kirkhope and David Wise at the helm; I do find the melodies unmemorable, but they're good atmospheric compositions. The core stand-in NPCs like Trowser for Bottles and Dr. Puzz for Mumbo are cute enough. Shovel Knight is always fun to see as a cameo character. You can sort-of tell that the team developed each new level in sequence, so by the time we get to Capital Cashino and Galleon Galaxy, the levels start to feel tight and well-realized. I actually quite like the Kartos sequences, and I especially like that they're tied into a boss fight. Even though I don't care for Capital B, his boss fight does the "test all the mechanics" thing I love to see in video games. Icymetric Palace represents a considerable amount of effort and creativity which adds a ton to the experience...

Finally, there's Flappy Flight. You unlock flight in this game late compared to Banjo-Kazooie, but it becomes apparent why: unlike in B-K, Flappy Flight is not gated to context-sensitive pads and is instead useable at any point in time. Suddenly, the game's huuuuuuge levels make sense - it's incredibly low-commitment to travel from one corner of a given world to another, and particularly to do so quickly. Part of what makes Capital Cashino and Galleon Galaxy so effective is that their designs lean into this philosophy, and so the bigass levels become manageable playgrounds operating on hub-and-spoke design. For that matter, backtracking into previous levels becomes much more tolerable, to the point where I'd urge the player to stave off the obligatory revisits as long as they can until they have free flight. This does, in some way, break the intended game design, but it also makes it fun to run around as these characters, which I would argue is far more important to this game.

I do think there's potential with Yooka-Laylee as a series revival. There are ideas at play there, and I think something really interesting is waiting to be teased out. I do suspect that we're not likely to see it at this point. Impossible Lair went in a separate direction (though I understand that game's actually quite excellent), and Yooka & Laylee have mostly just served cameo roles since then. Bit of a shame, but if Playtonic has something up their sleeves, I'm curious to see how they do. As for this game? I think I'm content with my one and only playthrough.

If this was the direction Rare would have taken an extended Sabreman series revival, then I think this game's proof they were on to something. It's a wildly different interpretation from the original Sabre Wulf, and there's little to no throughline with (what I know of) the later games. But for Rare of this era - trying to rediscover themselves after the Microsoft buy-out, basing a lot of their identity around portable games and recapturing their 90s identity on handheld - it's fairly well in-line with their sensibilities, and a great proof of concept.

Sabre Wulf '04 is a speed-based puzzle platformer. Initially, this seems pretty counterintuitive, and it does take a bit to adjust to the challenge. I think I was about a third of the way in before I became at all confident in my ability to quickly send out creatures, and two-thirds before I was confident experimenting with creatures besides Blubbas and Serpents. But there's a good cadence to a lot of it once you finally get there. There's a good core physics system in place, such that naturally complements the functions of the different creatures. I like also that there's rarely only one viable option; since the puzzles are generally physics-based rather than lock-and-key, the player is encouraged to experiment and figure out ways to best navigate enemy and environmental obstacles. So, for example, while *I* found Bigfoot to be an extremely useless creature, I could see other players getting a lot of use out of him, given how much air Sabreman gets after being punted by the big galoot. That sort of emergent design is really cool to see, honestly! And to top that with a wreck-the-set escape sequence just makes EVERY level feel fun and important and easy to master. Great stuff.

The writing's also quite fun! It's clearly nostalgic in places for the original games, what with the Amulet rhymes and the faux-Middle English spelling, but with a bigger focus on the dry, zany tone that characterized Banjo-Tooie (apt, given that's where we last saw Sabreman). I think it's easy to lose track of some of the different subplots going on - I spent the whole game wondering when I was gonna satisfy the conditions behind Orchids #2-5, only to discover I'd satisfied most of them without really realizing it. But I'm not terribly inclined to complain about having less work to do than expected. Besides, there are a ton of fun little moments here and there, like the mixed-up Druidic Monks worshiping at a place called "Imhotep", or the tea-drinking contest.

I do sort of wish that there was a final boss. Maybe it's a bit too much to ask for some pronounced face-off with the Sabre Wulf or Dr. Doolittle-Goode (great name, by the way) when Wulfie factors into almost every level anyway. But for how much of a presence the Sabre Wulf carries throughout the game, I would've loved to see something underline his presence. And maybe thematically tie together the myriad creatures, too, in some way. I don't know how you'd do this without radically changing up the gameplay experience, but if they'd managed that, it'd be the thing to tip this game over from "great" to a personal favorite. Even without that, though - highly recommended.

Hey, this was released as a 20-year anniversary celebration for the original Sabre Wulf, and now this game's 20 years old. Think it's too much to hope for another series revival?

I covered my history with The Lion King video games here, so I'll keep things short this time around.

Obviously not as good as the 16-bit versions, but Dark Technologies certainly made a game effort of it. There's actually some careful consideration for what would and wouldn't work on Game Boy, and the game's been largely reworked with all that in consideration. The animation's... a respectable conversion, honestly, impressive that the animation principles from before are still at play even if the sprites' still poses are janky. Weirdly, this version does the best at retelling the movie's story, since all levels are presented out of context in 16-bit, while this at least has those interstitial title cards (doofy as the characters sometimes look in those). Since this release is less concerned about the player beating it in a rental, there isn't any shameless padding or difficulty spikes, though "Hyena Lairs" manages to be even MORE annoying than "Simba's Return". There are genuinely things to like about this one that aren't there in the original, which is probably the best you could hope for from this release, honestly.

This review applies to both 16-bit versions of this game, since I played them around the same time and there aren't too many major differences between them to my way of thinking. If it matters, I like the Genesis version a little better, since that was the console better able to realize what Virgin Interactive was going for.

Anywho, Virgin's Lion King is a game I think about a lot, as a consequence of what it is. The Lion King (the movie) was HUGE in my house growing up. Easily my favorite Disney movie, to the point where holding any other Disney over it, even masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast, is incomprehensible to me. Almost certainly my brother's favorite, too, and at the very least up there for everyone else. Even before I had access to "video games" and just had "computer games" to play with, The Lion King formed a huge part of my formational gaming experiences: Activity Center, Animated Storybook, Lion King 2's Active Play and Gamebreak, Hippo Hop and everything else in Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games... once my family started getting into console and handheld gaming, it was really only inevitable that the better-remembered Lion King video games would follow suit, with Virgin's efforts being the vanguard to all that.

Virgin's take on Aladdin made for one of the most important licensed titles of its era, if a bit understated these days in historical relevance. But it was enough to prompt Disney to renege on what had been Nintendo console exclusivity deal with Capcom and ask Virgin to produce all versions of the game. A separate studio handled primary development (Westwood, whom I mostly know for Eye of the Beholder) but production generally followed a similar approach as Virgin's Aladdin: Disney animators were tapped for spritework and backgrounds, while the good folks at Westwood handled the actual gameplay side of things.

Of every Disney licensed game, with one exception, this is easily the most important Disney game to who I am, mostly for my relationship with my brother. Dude loooooooves The Lion King, looooooooves that this video game existed, and loooooooooves to engage with it. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but ever since the Wii was first announced as the Nintendo Revolution, and we learned about the Virtual Console, my brother's #1 do-or-die wish was this game. All versions of The Lion King, actually, including the ultra-obscure NES release handled by Dark Studios. We're still waiting in NES Lion King to get its due, but I was pretty stoked to finally see the OTHER versions come out on modern consoles with that Disney Classics Collection (which is how I played it for this review). I dunno if my brother knows this collection exists - for reasons I'm not ready to divulge here, this is a difficult question to answer - but if he does, I know he would be happy that the 16-bit and Game Boy releases finally made a comeback.

Given how important The Lion King in general and this game in particular are to me, it hurts to admit it, but - Westwood wasn't able to recapture what Virgin was able to pull off with Aladdin. At least part of this is circumstantial, though. Lion King was on a tight timeline for its dev cycle, with only 6 months in the kiln, so some rough spots aren't that much of a surprise. This is why you have, for example, the notorious difficulty spike in "Can't Wait To Be King" - the dev team ran out of dev time but needed some way to keep the game from being an easy rental, so they padded. I haven't read any commentary to this effect, but I imagine this is also why "Simba's Return" is as tedious as it is - easy to pad out a maze if you gotta.

The Lion King by its nature also runs into a fairly typical issue that I think of as the "Quadruped Problem". Basically, it's inherently harder to come up with new, varied functions for a player character to do in a video game if they're quadrupedal (that is, walk on four legs and have no functional hands) than if they're bipedal (have two legs and presumably functional hands). This is the main reason why Insomniac stepped away from the Spyro franchise, for example - even by the third game, they ran out of things for Spyro to do and cheated by giving him (bipedal!) animal friends with varied functions. This isn't to say that there aren't games that make great use of quadrupedal protagonists - it's just a harder baseline to work with versus a humanoid avatar.

You can definitely feel this in The Lion King, particularly when comparing with Aladdin. Simba can jump and (eventually) claw-swipe for two moves, and he's working on his ROAR for a third. The game gets something from him climbing up surfaces, which is a fair thing to have a cat do. He tumbles, which... I guess that works. He can also swing off things? You can sort of feel that the team was trying to figure out how to pad out this moveset to satisfy a full-length game, which is how you ended up with stuff like Simba roaring to flip the monkeys, or all the beetle pick-ups to add some sort of variety to play. Compare this to Aladdin, who quite naturally climbs ropes, lobs apples, jumps around, and HE'S GOT A SWORD!

But there are some things I just can't reconcile. I've gone through the game several times, and I still have no clear idea of what I'm doing with the final Scar fight. A lot of the bosses are pretty weird, like that lava "boss" in "Be Prepared" I also DO NOT get the gorilla in "Hakuna Matata". Granted, I dunno what boss encounter you would place there, and you DEFINITELY need to represent that sequence somehow in this game, but still...

It's a cheap asset flip, but I kinda like that the boss to "The Pridelands" is just a normal lategame enemy. Always a sucker for that sort of design.

I don't think The Lion King is a very good game, but it is one I'm quite fond of for largely unrelated circumstances. Nothing has really come close to capturing what The Lion King makes me feel in the language of video games, but this is at least a decent effort. The music and animation conversions are all great, and I love how much of the original is still present here. Timon's "...it starts", placed out-of-context, is a weirdly memetic line for me that I find myself wanting to quote a lot, more for its video game use than its movie use. I love the use of "This Land" as the opening stage's background music - it's such an important track to defining the movie's early tone, but it's easy to lose track of it given it's not one of the vocal songs, so giving it a peppy remix helps bring it tonally to the same level as everything else.

Man, I love this game. I can't justify a high score, but I also can't justify a low score. Down the middle will have to do.

P.S. - Apparently, when Disney gave Virgin the license for The Lion King, one of their suggestions for a video game adaptation was a fighting game, in the style of Street Fighter II. I don't expect this would have been any good, particularly since Westwood had no experience with the genre, but I so wish I could see what that might've looked like.

A tentative step out of the Classic template. I feel like there are a few strong high concepts here for what the team wanted to do separate from Classic Mega Man, but they didn't fully know how best to engage with them, so the end result is a game that wears its heritage close on its sleeve. This isn't a bad thing; I love Classic Mega Man, and I think the concepts advanced here are great steps forward. But, after an abandoned attempt two decades ago and years of hype leading up to this serious playthrough, this game ended up feeling a lot closer to Classic Mega Man than I was expecting.

This isn't to put down Mega Man X any, as it's a great game in its own right. You probably don't need me to reiterate any of the talking points from Sequelitis regarding the first level's smart design and natural way of easing the player into what's different, as well as establishing stakes and themes for the game (light as the latter are). My buddy Tarvould points out that the great opening level is a bit of a drag on repeated runs, which is a fair point, but I think that's more an issue for a series superfan who's played quite a bit - for someone like me who played this relatively fresh, it does precisely what it's supposed to.

This is also one of those rare Mega Man games where every standard stage hits it out of the park. With Classic Mega Man, I'm used to there being one or two stages that are just kinda there, even in some of the best titles; I've never liked Flash Man's Stage in MM2, for example. Not so here - every stage is unique, memorable, and a ton of fun. The system whereby clearing one stage will impact another stage is also suuuuuper cool, though gating Dash behind Chill Penguin certainly limits its impact on Flame Mammoth's Stage. And the soundtrack kicks ass, though you don't need me to tell you that.

Oh, I should mention the Dash specifically. It's cool! Took me quite a bit to "get" it, honestly - I had to learn that you hold Dash into the jump to retain that momentum, and it took me a while to get the cadence right on a dash wall-kick - but it's good stuff! This is sort of what I meant earlier, though. The standard stages are all designed around NOT having the Dash, since outside the latter two-thirds of Chill Penguin, it's entirely possible the player won't have it. As a result, they feel paced like standard Mega Man stages. Like I could see Rock Light running through versions of a lot of these, and while they'd be fairly slow compared to the game that exists, I'd think they'd be roughly on-par with something like Mega Man 7. This isn't bad, but I kept feeling like I was hitting the boss just as the level started getting good. Easy to see why the Dash becomes a default feature starting with the next game.

Quick conga line of nitpicks:
- I've always thought the Mavericks felt like silly choices to include in the more serious Mega Man subseries. Like, if I didn't know Mega Man, and you told me that one series was more serious while the other was generally lighter, and that one series had animal-themed bosses while the other had dudes with elemental affinities, I definitely would've guessed that the animal bosses were from Classic. The fights are good, so I'm not really inclined to complain, but it bears mention.
- Hadouken is a great secret unlock, but it's a little janky having to grind out Armored Armadillo's Stage to get it. At least it's easy to grind 1-Ups there with the Batton.
- Likewise, being able to screw up the jump in Flame Mammoth's to get to the upgraded Buster and having to restart the whole level to try again is a bit annoying. Not a big deal, at least.
- Ride Armor's cool! But it just feels like a quick distraction in this game. Hope they expand upon this later on.
- Sigma's Fortress is okay, but kind of a let down after the rest of the game. Then again, Classic rarely sticks the landing with the Wily Castles, so nothing new here.
- The GameCube port of Mega Man X adds a "Damn!" to X's first line of dialogue. That's a cool way to set tone! This isn't a nitpick, I just didn't have anywhere else to put this note.
- Naming a boss after Balinese demon-queen Rangda is also cool! I should probably stop this list if I'm gonna keep throwing in complements.

By way of comparison: Mega Man X1 feels like what Invictus is to Super Mario World: a cool, sleek, speedy, modification to an existing series; in some ways, only the same game nominally, so much has been updated. But for as much of an incredible leap forward as Invictus was to the Kaizo Mario scene, Invictus is also inextricably tied to Super Mario World and cannot make sense as an entity outside of it. Furthermore, Invictus was only the first jab of a one-two combo between it and Grand Poo World II. Mega Man X1 is excellent, but it needs a follow-up that further remixes and innovates on its template before the X series settles upon its own identity. By reputation, I don't know that X2 or X3 do this, but I'll see for myself with my next annual Mega Man playthrough.

The game in which Kirby became who he was. I've mentioned before that Nightmare in Dream Land was my first Kirby title, so I've indirectly played this game many times over the years, in addition to my two runs of the original years after the fact.

It always feels unreal, whenever I see Kirby's Adventure juxtaposed with other major releases from the NES. Timing's a huge part of that; we haven't had a video game console before or since that lived for 10+ years (though the Switch is having an honest go at it!), so pairing something like Super Mario Bros. with Kirby's Adventure feels like running into both "Love Me Do" and "Let It Be" on the same Beatles album. For something developed as a budget release on aging hardware, the team behind Kirby's Adventure clearly understood everything that was possible on the NES. The vibrant, dream-like backgrounds, the use of color, how expressive each character is, that one bit in Butter Building with simulated parallax scrolling (apparently so sophisticated that the Game Boy Advance couldn't replicate it!), falling through the atmosphere in the fight against Nightmare Orb... seemingly at all times, there's a visual marvel to behold. Kirby's Adventure is almost certainly the best-looking game on the console and a contender for the best-looking game of the 8-bit era, up there with the original Phantasy Star.

I'll admit that I'm much more familiar Nightmare in Dream Land. By way of reference, during my recent series livestream playthrough, it took me two sessions to clear Adventure - two weeks' worth of time. In that time, I beat Nightmare in Dream Land FOUR times. A consequence of this skewed familiarity is that I'm always thrown by the physics and momentum of Adventure compared to Nightmare, since Nightmare takes its queued from Super Star's momentum and ups the speed considerably. This isn't really anything Adventure has done wrong, so it's unfair of me to hold it against it. Still, I am ranking on my overall enjoyment of the game as much as I am what I think of it critically, so I must rate the game accordingly.

I suppose I should acknowledge abilities! It's interesting to see that Adventure took the scattershot approach to abilities in their first appearance, basically implementing any ability function that seemed interesting. Were I in charge, I would've skewed closer to a more conservative set, like we'd see pushed in Dream Land 2, so I really respect how much the team was willing to experiment with big gimmicky abilities like Hi-Jump, Laser, and Light. You run into some oddness; these days, it feels weird seeing Fire and Burning exist separate from one another when they make for such natural complements in Super Star-style movesets. Likewise for Ice and Freeze. Some of the abilities feel redundant as well here, like Needle and Spark, and Stone NOT sliding down slopes feels totally off. But there is a lot of fun to be had with how the game effortlessly encourages experimentation as the game progresses. Plus, you can really tell the team wanted more of a combat focus than this game was ready for, going by abilities like Backdrop and Throw. Not hard to believe that Sakurai would come up with the beat-em up moveset expansions for Super Star immediately after this.

(plz bring back Laser as an ability, though, there's soooo much untapped potential with it for puzzle solving. Also give Cool Spook his due, he's a cool guy)

I don't love Nightmare Wizard. I always always always thought of him as a dumb disposable blahthingie. Maybe if I'd seen more of the anime ahead of time, I might've been impressed by him, but whenever he shows up, I almost always groan a little. Yeah, sure, fine, fangless Dracula over here has his place too, I guess. But I'm fine with him mostly existing as an Adventure throwback rather than a character constantly developed by Modern Kirby's expansion of lore.

Adventure represented the series-making title for Kirby, enough so that almost any other series could afford to ignore its existence as a sequel, akin to Super Mario Bros. or Mega Man 2. It's not the template Modern Kirby would follow - this would be Super Star, of course - but it did prove to be the template employed by Classic Kirby. It's not the series at its best yet, but for its time, it was a great, great title. And it remains a fun, quick little adventure, too.

JET SET RADIOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

I tried getting into this years ago but bounced off pretty quickly due to the controls. At the time, I reasoned that my issue was trying to play it with keyboard/mouse, which might sound like a fair assessment until I admit I logged 40 hours into Sonic Generations with keyboard/mouse. It sounds like the controls can be a bit of a stumbling point for folks, and initially bouncing off isn't that strange.

It's worth figuring it out, though. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jet Set has a GREAT sense of style and flow, leaning into a lot of the characteristic simplicity that made SEGA's mega-hits of this era what they were. Tony Hawk feels like an easy point of comparison, but mostly in the kinetic flow state; I actually find the comparison unfavorable to Jet Set, since tricks are so de-emphasized in this game. Yeah, they're there, but outside of high score modes, that's not really what you're here for. Tony Hawk emphasizes codifying gaps and building combos, while Jet Set emphasizes spine transfers and fluidly moving from tag spot to tag spot, all while managing the opposition.

I think the game sometimes overdoes it, though. Like, I generally got nothing against the ridiculous number of enemies the game showers on the player, since half the fun is figuring out how to manage (for example) racing down rooftops on Kogane-cho while avoiding freaking tactical helicopter missile strikes (to say nothing about Onimisha's eff-off revolver and disproportionate response to a bunch of punk kids being a public nuisance). There are a couple points where it got to be a bit much for me - trying to figure out how to get to that central statue in Grind Square (oh, I get it, "Grind" is a slant-rhyme with "Times", was trying to figure that one) with the electro-shock assassins was a bit sensory overload - but even then most of those were just me struggling to solve the puzzle. But I do think that cutscene you get sometimes after you evade a ground-bound enemy on top of a roof, where you see the militia troopers or whatever stomping their feet in irritation, didn't need to play EVERY time. Hard to keep a maneuver in mind if you have to watch an unrelated cutscene in the middle of it.

The chapter system is a little janky, too. Not a big deal, since it basically serves as an aesthetic buffer around the stuff in NYC versus the stuff in Tokyo. But it does feel like the game suddenly decides it wants to have a narrative and chapter structure about two thirds of the way through.

Also - I'm really not fond of how finicky the spray button can be during rival fights! It's weird to me that you have to be so precise with when you hit the button, since there's an input delay and it's easy to miss your window. I would've much rather been able to hold the button, with Beat or whoever contextually knowing when to start spraying.

I'm mostly criticizing, but I feel like a lot of the game's appeal is pretty self-evident. The cel-shaded graphics are fun to look at, being able to customize your sprays is fun, having the sprays down to a mini-game is a good way to have it not distract too much from flow but also present a commitment with the larger sprays, the music is GREAT, the cast is light-weight but fairly fun...

Actually, I gotta say, the game's weirdly poignant by the end there. Thematic depth isn't generally this game's bag, but I feel like Combo adds a great deal to proceedings, with his introspection on his friend's fate, the machinations of the Golden Rhinos, and the plight of all the street gangs. That bit at the end about how everyone's the same, just trying to make sense of their own lives - adds a bit of gravitas to things, not gonna lie. Good stuff.

Normally I try to have a somewhat recent (within the past 10 years) playthrough to tie these reviews to, but I'm trying to pace out my Crystal replay, and I don't want to let Review #251 pass me up without celebrating Gen 2 Pokémon, so here we go.

In my life so far, I've had two epoch-making games: games whose initial playthroughs were so important and influential to my development of who I am and how I understand the world around me that I can cleanly demarcate my life before and after I played them. The second of these was Persona 4, the game that, to this day, inspires me to love myself and try to find meaning in the people with whom I share a world.

But the first of these was Pokémon: Crystal Version. Bear with me for a bit before the review proper - I have to explain my background a bit before I get there.

I have a LOT of history with early Pokémon, going all the way back to watching the debut broadcast of the first episode of the anime a couple weeks before my fifth birthday. I was actually reluctant at first - I remember my sister hearing about it from a classmate, and I remember thinking her description sounded like the stupidest thing in the world (somehow I thought robots were involved?) - but I gave it a go, and found the whole thing surprisingly captivating. I really could talk at length about my time with Pokémon, but the gist of it was that I was in the thick of Pokémania in just about every way...

...except the video games. My father did not believe in letting his family own video game consoles. I was aware of the video games, between Blockbuster kiosks for Snap and Stadium, TV spots, and visiting my father's friends who let their kids have Game Boys, but for a good 5 years, I could only wonder from afar, occasionally asking my folks for a Game Boy and constantly being shot down. I watched the entirety of Generations 1 and 2 pass me by, and with prerelease and Japanese teasers for Gen 3 cropping up, I upped my game and kept trying to wear my folks down.

I think what finally did it was my changing schools. 2003 marked the year I switched from public elementary school to private middle school - a switch made because public school wasn't challenging me (I don't know if this ever occurred, but I like to imagine a conversation between my parents boiling down to, "Well, clearly, if he's doing THIS well in school, video games couldn't possibly slow him down...")

But they couldn't just give me a Game Boy, so my father cut a deal with me that summer. He told me that he'd buy me a Game Boy Advance, and he'd let me get Pokémon Sapphire for my 10th birthday - but ONLY if I finally learned to ride my bike. I'd held off for almost 10 years, and a kid my age should really know how to do so.

For almost 10 years, I had no real inclination to learn to ride my bike. But with a Game Boy and Pokémon in the balance? That was a complete game changer. I spent hours out there, learning to coordinate my body and balance without training wheels. It took about a week of falling off and getting back on, but by the end of the week, I was riding circles around my neighborhood.

(Let the record show that I haven't much ridden my bike since I learned. But I do indeed still possess the muscle memory, so if ever the need crops up...)

I'm not confident on the exact date, but I think it was Sunday, August 10th, 2003 that my father and I ordered my Game Boy online - a special, limited edition Torchic Orange Game Boy Advance SP, only available at physical Pokémon Center locations or - for a single month - online at Pokemon.com. Calvin and Hobbes had prepared me to expect it to take weeks to arrive, so I was delighted when the Game Boy came in the mail on Wednesday, August 13th. I knew I wasn't getting Sapphire until my birthday at the end of September, but I didn't care - just watching the animation for the GBA boot-up logo could be enough for me. I'd decided that would hold me over for a month.

It didn't need to. My father and I went out to a hobby shop that afternoon. When we came home, there was a copy of Pokémon: Crystal Version sitting on the kitchen table, waiting for me. A surprise from my mother.

A surprise indeed, because somehow - despite being aware of Gold and Silver for years, and frequenting websites like Pojo.com and Serebii.net and Poke-Amph.com and Marrilland.com - I had inexplicably never heard of Pokémon Crystal Version. I could tell from the boxart that it was part of the Gold/Silver series (as I knew it at the time), and I sorta recognized Suicune from my books and the anime, but I was mostly surprised that I had no idea what it was, nor what to expect. Added a whole new level of mystery and excitement to the adventure.

Now, I have no illusions that my fondness for Pokémon Crystal isn't rooted in this specific nostalgia. It's impossible for me to disentangle my feelings on Crystal when it represented, in many respects, the end of one chapter in my life and the start of the next. To be honest, I have no interest in trying to do so, since Crystal is so fundamental to how I understand myself, and so many of my tastes are informed by my experiencing things first through Crystal. But let me instead talk about the things I've noticed and thought about over the years with respect to Crystal, and how that enriched my love for the game.

First, regarding Generation II at large. I mentioned in my Yellow review how that game felt like the first core game developed as a mainstream phenomenon, and how that made for a compelling dichotomy with Pokémon's counterculture roots. By contrast, Gold/Silver (and Crystal by extension) feel like the last possible time Pokémon can be thought of as counterculture. The reason isn't complicated: there was always going to be a Pokémon Gold and Silver. Even before Game Freak knew they'd forever changed the world with Pokémon, they had plans and designs for a sequel duology. These plans changed considerably after Pokémon Red/Green proved to be megaton hits, and they continued to change as the series became an international and multimedia phenomenon, but the heart of these ideas stayed the same. The Gold/Silver series would be a post-script to the ideas advanced in the original series. Characters and concepts from the first game would receive their epilogues, new ideas would exist largely in service of complementing or commenting on original concepts... heck, it even comes down to the broad theming of each generation's regional theming: a contrast between Kanto and Kansai familiar to a lot of Japanese media.

And even with the version of the Gold/Silver series we got, we have the game ending on a fight against the protagonist from the original games, at a disproportionately elevated level. It's easy to look at this largely as a celebration of a success, but I dunno - so much of the understated rhetoric around Red carries so much more than a celebration of the past. Red has isolated himself from society in single-minded pursuit of the original games' selling points, so much so that his own mother has not heard from him in years. At the same time, Red has an Espeon, a Pokémon that (within the lore of the game and the language of the mechanics) cannot exist in the past and could only exist with love and devotion. There's a narrative here that does not serve as an advertisement of the past, but an acknowledgement that there is more than the past. If Pokémon had ended with this fight, and Red wordlessly walking away to find new purpose, the series would have told a complete story - something unimaginable for an eternal franchise, but within the vocabulary of a team looking to underline and conclude their 6-year passion project.

I think it's in this light that I choose to view Gen II: a melodic remix. This informs my response to a lot of the criticisms that exist for Gen II. Why is the level curve so low? Because the player is experienced with the composition of Gen I, and Game Freak decided to encourage further experimentation with rosters by making it easy to train a new Pokémon to the required level. Why is Team Rocket so lame here? Because they were defeated before, and the lack of strong leadership is its own commentary: a counterpoint that's never able to arrive at its own melody. Why is Kanto so abrupt? Kanto is a Coda to the adventure, not a second verse. Why are so many new Pokémon gated behind Kanto? Because the Coda is not a repeat, but a progression of the composition. I'm not claiming to love all of these things, or that the game might not have been more compelling otherwise. But I think there's a lot of artistic purpose to the choices here that are still fun and engaging.

As for Crystal itself, compared to Gold and Silver? Ampharos is my favorite Pokémon, so I definitely miss its presence, plus not having access to Aeroblast/Sacred Fire on Lugia/Ho-Oh is a little jank - but I think every other choice made here is a straight improvement. Because Generation II is such a deliberately casual experience, the world itself and its myriad NPCs feel like they take center stage; things like the Weekday Siblings, the PokéGear contacts, the Monday night Clefairy Dance, and the Friday Lapras sighting make for a lot of the flavor of what Johto is. Changes made in Crystal are largely in service of this: PokéGear contacts are more dynamic; there are secret early chances to catch Phanpy, Teddiursa, and Poliwag; Buena's Password ties the Radio feature to a specific character that encourages frequent interactivity; the Odd Egg makes each playthrough a little more unique and serves as an additional highlight of the Shiny/Baby mechanics; Suicune's subplot exists entirely as a sidequest to the game's light narrative; etc etc etc. And Kris hardly needs an explanation for why she's the best.

And it's weird - there are later Pokémon games that have expansive worlds with details that a person could get endlessly lost in. But I tend not to think as highly of those titles. Is it because I wasn't as impressionable for those as I was for Crystal? Yeah, at least in part. Like I said, I don't claim to be disentangling my own bias from my review. But I do think there's something to how understated and humble everything is in Crystal, in how everything just exists in its own quiet little rustic world, that I don't feel from any other mainstream interpretation of the series.

I'm long past the point of Pokémon being the single most important thing to my life, the way it was when I was a kid. I'm long past expecting to play every new release, or keep up with every new development, or anything like that. Crystal isn't my favorite game anymore, nor even my second- or third-favorite. Even so, Pokémon Crystal will always be in my heart and in my thoughts. It is a game for which I am incapable of holding any feeling but love, and it's a game that I will always speak of fondly.

I always feel like I'm admitting to something when I talk about this game. "Hey, I beat Three Dirty Dwarves the other day! Boy, I love Three Dirty Dwarves. You gotta try Three Dirty Dwarves sometime! You just can't understand what you're missing - not until you experience Three Dirty Dwarves."

That said, I did have a good time with Three Dirty Dwarves. Ed Annunziata projects fascinate me by how strange and experimental they are. Like, until about a year ago I didn't really care for Mort the Chicken, but I always found something compelling about the bone-dry tone of the game's writing contrasted with how inherently doofy its protagonist and the central gameplay loop is. I feel like you could plot his games on a graph, where one axis represents how much dignity a title thinks it has versus how much dignity the game actually has. Ecco the Dolphin thinks and holds its dignity, Mr. Bones doesn't think it has a ton of dignity but it weirdly does, Mort the Chicken thinks it has way more dgnity than it actually has...

...and Three Dirty Dwarves has no dignity, nor is there any illusion about Three Dirty Dwarves having dignity. But that's what makes Three Dirty Dwarves so much fun.

It's a beat-em-up, ostensibly, but I'd actually just as quickly compare it to Battletoads 2020 and its "variety" genre, where the game will sometimes switch up what it's doing within the established parameters of its control scheme for... no real reason, just seemed interesting at the time. You can sort of tell that the world wasn't ready for this type of nonsense game design back in 1996, since a lot of the more experimental levels - "Bouncing Bed", "The Stadium", and "Trolley Ride", for example - are completely exorcized in multiplayer runs. I really think that's to the game's detriment, since the variety is what makes the game so interesting. The proper beat-em-up stages are fine, but there just isn't a ton of variety in what each of the dwarves can do. Weirdly it was "Bronx By Day" - the game's fifth stage, outta fifteen - that was the longest, most challenging wall. Did I just get used to the game's controls (and the idea that I could revive a fallen dwarf by beating him), and everything was smooth sailing after that point? Maybe, but it still felt odd that late game levels like "Riker's Island" and "Laser Research" weren't anywhere near as tough.

I'm deliberately avoiding being too specific in my description because I think a lot of the fun is seeing the next idea that the game wants to pull out, and rolling with the punches. I do think that's the appeal to it - if you're specifically going in looking for a contender to Streets of Rage or even Golden Axe, I don't think you're gonna find it. But if you go into it looking for a doofy party game with a weeeeeird premise, it's a pretty good time. Maybe stick to singleplayer and trade off play if you have buddies, but multiplayer exists, too.

And read the manual! One of those that makes me miss the lost art of making fun instruction manuals.

Also also - hot hell does the title theme/"Streets of Bronx" kick ass. Listen to it in stereo!!!

Kickass! I don't play a lot of DOOM clones, but I always have a good time when I do. Ion Fury is definitely pretty late of a DOOM clone, but it gets a lot of that innate appeal. Dodge and weave, keep peppering the enemy, gore and gib 'em.

Duke Nukem 3D is admittedly a blind spot for me when it comes to DOOM clones (most of my Duke Nukem exposure comes from Manhattan Project and the first third of Forever), so any particular nuance with how the Build engine contrasts with the DOOM engine is lost on me, at least for now. Broadly speaking, levels are HUUUUUUGE compared to what I'm used to - I'm honestly reminded of Sonic Robo Blast 2 first and foremost, at least with respect to how long you spend navigating a particular level. I imagine things get paired down a lot once you memorize certain levels, but even so...

The main thing I find myself impressed by here is weapon variety. When I play DOOM, I tend to fall into almost exclusively using the Shotgun (or Super Shotgun, in DOOM II). Sometimes the Chaingun gets its due if I'm low on Shells, Rockets get their play when I'm fighting a boss, and sometimes fists come up if I'm berzerking - but it's mostly the shotgun's show. In Ion Fury, there's a good amount of forced variety at play. The Disperser tended to be my go-to weapon out of habit, but there's enough of an ammo restriction that I'd have to be comfortable switching to the Penetrator(s). The Loverboy got quite a bit of use, too. Specific enemies would also be easiest to solve with the Electrifier or the Ion Bow, and the Chain Gun and Bowling Bombs made for good switch-up options. The only one I never got comfortable with was the Cluster Puck (heh), largely owing to how little I use Trap Mines in these sorts of games. But it made for a decent alternative grenade.

By contrast, I didn't think enemy variety was great. We're definitely skewing closer to the first over the second DOOM here, where a small suite of enemies carry very specific functions, and you just have to get used to gunning down the same cybernetic cultists rhe whole game. Not a huge deal, the first DOOM did fine, but don't expect a ton of new foes until, like, pretty late into the campaign.

The level pacing is also pretty front-loaded, where the first four zones have 5 levels apiece while the latter three zones... don't. Speeding up towards the finale works fine enough for a game of this length, but I sorta felt like the developers were hurrying along to get to the end, too, after that big climactic fight with the helicopter. Especially since "Countryside Carnage" and "Ordinary Laboratory" are completely missing bosses. I know part of that is that the devs really wanted to use demo level "Heskel's House of Horrors", and it's so much of a non sequitur that it must've been hard to sequence in as anything besides a capstone, but like it's pretty noticeable. Not bad, just kinda funny.

Good, good game all around, though. I definitely think the final fight against Heskel is one of the first times I've been suitably impressed by the final boss in one of these (DOOM and DOOM II are great, but I don't love the Spider Mastermind or the Icon of Sin). Honestly just cool to see that there's a market for this type of game/development in modern day.

P.S. - I get why they had to change it, but I'll forever bemoan the fact that they couldn't call this game "Ion Maiden". Woulda been perfect.

I'm sorry to admit that I ultimately didn't have a good time with this. This was something I was very excited for - I used to read a ton of webcomics back in high school/college, and Dinosaur Comics was one of my favorites. Arguably low-effort, since half the work is already done, but it largely goes to highlight Ryan North's strengths as a comedy writer - unfettered and zany, where T-Rex is pure id and Utahraptor is pure superego (and Dromeciomimus is nice). When the physical book version of the project that would ultimately become this game was announced, I was ecstatic. "Choose Your Own Adventure" Hamlet is a great high concept, the elevator pitch joke of "this is the original story; Shakespeare took a single route and plagarized it for his play" is terrific, and the idea that a bunch of my favorite webcomic artists were tapped to do ending pictures was a coooool collaboration of efforts. I always wanted to pick up the physical book, but it never really ended up happening.

Instead, a couple years later, a visual novel adaptation came out, and a friend bought it for me on Steam. Super cool!

But I'll be honest, I think the project loses something in the shift from physical to digital media. Surprisingly, it's the lack of saves, something that only indirectly exists in physical form. In my experiences with Choose Your Own Adventure stories (well, okay, Give Yourself Goosebumps stories - CYOA proper was before my time), sticking a finger in a page so you can quickly flip back on a bad ending, as well as breezing through the first few choices on a reread, makes for a huge part of the experience. After a while, you're revisiting pages only to hit upon those choices, so your downtime between being engaged by the narrative is shortlived.

I would've thought that this would be a no-brainer for a visual novel treatment, but surprisingly not. You can eventually unlock bookmarks that skip ahead to designated points in characters' storylines, but there is otherwise no way to create checkpoints within this story's flow. I'd been spoiled by Umineko and Ren'Py projects like Katawa Shoujo that let you save wherever, so it was a huge shock that, every time I wanted to try a different split in the branching path, I'd have to sit through a lot of the same rambling comedy writing over and over again. There's a vocal narration as well, and while the narrator does a fine enough job, I had to disable him after a while because I was reading way faster than he was. This was before I'd even started on the rereads; I can't imagine what it would've been like having to re-listen to his delivery on each new round.

I... also don't like this iteration's treatment of Ophelia. So, in a bid to reclaim Ophelia as a feminist icon, Ryan North grafted an entirely new personality onto her, which reveals itself as you go off the beaten path of the original story: she's now a brilliant chemist, looking to invent rocket science three-and-a-half centuries early. Lest you get the wrong idea, I'm not opposed to 'reclaiming' characters like this or adding a more modern feminist perspective to retellings of classic stories - in fact, I think a lot of the fun of retelling stories comes from the change in perspective each new storyteller has. As a throwaway example, I like how "Zorro: The Chronicles" (which I only know from the video game adaptation) gives Diego a twin sister; Ines supporting and occasionally taking on the mantle of the Fox feels like a very natural way of adding a female perspective to the traditional Zorro narrative. I've also seen a version of The Tempest that portrayed Prospero as a woman (and not just the one in Life is Strange: Before the Storm!), which does a lot to recontextualize her relationship with Miranda and Ariel.

In contrast, making Ophelia a proto-rocket scientist is cute, but I'm not a fan of how it's done here since it completely ignores the character's themes from the original play. Ophelia in the play is a tragic character torn between her love for Hamlet and her love for her father Polonius, and her cognitive dissonance in being forced to choose between one or the other drives her mad. There's a natural commentary baked into this character, such that she's inspired countless interpretations and reinterpretations by actors and other artists alike. There is no real attempt to address this aspect of her personality here. Ophelia is given no reason to love her father, and in fact the narration makes no bones about how much of a jerk he is. Hamlet is also put on blast as a boyfriend - it's been a while since I've gone through this version of the story, so I don't remember if any development is given to explore their relationship, such that would redress or reconstruct a relationship for them in light of the criticism this narration poses. What I do remember is, if you try to follow along with the original play's narrative (because remember - the joke is that Shakespeare read a single route of this CYOA novel and based the play around it), inevitably the narrator gets so incensed about the choices you're making that he calls YOU out for being a bad person, then confiscates Ophelia as a point-of-view character. Given that the story goes to the trouble of marking the canonical path with little Yorick skull icons, I can't help but feel like it's trying to do the Spec Ops: The Line thing of calling the player out for their participation in something morally reprehensible. Only Spec Ops is trying to create a conversation around its own medium and genre, while To Be Or Not To Be distrusts the reader's ability to critically examine things from a modern perspective and engages in thought-terminating agrumentum ad hominem in a bid to pwn sexism.

And it'd be fine - not really my thing, but fine - if this sort of critical treatment was universally leveled against the play as a whole, or if the whole cast was presented as OCs with only nominal ties to the source material. But Hamlet's characterization is clearly an attempt to be consistent with the play, as his characteristic indecisiveness (1) is implicit on a metatextual level through the medium of a CYOA novel and (2) plays into the non-canonical scenarios introduced here. I just find Ophelia's treatment to be at odds with the work's own mission statement.

But there are good segments in here. It's always fun to see what's done with the play-in-a-play in any given Hamlet adaptation, and turning it into an MS Paint Adventures-style interlude is a great touch. I must assume the subplot of Hamlet murdering Polonius and trying to dispose of his corpse was a creation for this video game adaptation, given the abrupt switch to a classic Zork-esque text parser. The swashbuckling pirate adventure interlude - and the narration's insistence that all of this definitely happened within the text of the original work, complete with Yorick skulls - is the one bit of literary criticism I think really works here. And getting all the different web comic artists' contributions was of course a nice complement to the rest of the work, and an effective incentive to keep playing.

...still, I must admit that this largely turned me off on Ryan North's projects. The follow-up work, Romeo and/or Juliet, while possessing a truly incredible title, looked to be doing the exact same thing - so I gave it a pass. I ended up falling off Dinosaur Comics after that, and I'm sad to say that I haven't really sought out anything else he's worked on. I hear good things about a lot of his more recent stuff - always been curious about his treatment on Squirrel Girl in particular, since she seems like a character perfectly in line with his writing sensibilities - but I just haven't had the ooph to look into it. Sorry, this one wasn't for me.

Where it all began. Probably the second game I played in the series, too, after Nightmare in Dream Land. I think I got this, Dream Land 2, and Pinball Land all around the same time. But knowing me, I would've played this first, and knowing this game, I would've beaten it pretty quickly, even given how mediocre I was at video games in '03/'04.

Dream Land is a game buoyed by the context of when and how a person engages with it. These days, if you take it in a vacuum or even as someone with a cursory knowledge of what Kirby is as a series, it's hard to see it as anything more than a disposable title, so quickly is the whole experience over and done with. Kirby's abilities wouldn't even be introduced until the next game! But of course, it was always supposed to be an entry-level title, and while the series would get better at producing more compelling entry-level games, it's a perfectly inoffensive title. Actually, it's quite good, for its <1 hour runtime (~15 minute runtime if you don't go for Extra Mode - but why wouldn't you?). And it clearly worked, its sales outpacing everything up until Forgotten Land.

But skill level and its launch in the Game Boy's heyday aren't the only contexts that buoy Dream Land. Kirby is a series that has unparalleled love for its own heritage and legacy, constantly looking forward as much as it looks backward. This game has been remade no fewer than NINE times (Adventure, Super Star, Nightmare in Dream Land, Super Star Ultra twice over, 3D Classics Adventure, Smash Bros. for 3DS, Blowout Blast, Smash Bros. Ultimate), with each reiteration introducing a new twist to the original game's simple template. Even when the experience of the game isn't specifically recreated, the suite of ideas and concepts represented in this game are extremely important to how Modern Kirby understands itself. Most memorable is Star Allies, but it even comes down to little things like places where the series sequences in original sprites, or the melodic evolution of themes like "Green Greens" (later paired with "Kirby's Triumphant Return") and "King Dedede's Theme" (later incorporating "Peanut Plains" and... I think some leitmotif used elsewhere in Star Allies...? But also occasionally mashed up with "My Friend and the Setting Sun" here and again). There's always some sort of statement being made, with how this game manifests in later entries. In most instances, I don't think it's a fair attribution to the first entry in a series when later titles reference it. But there's such a purity to how Modern Kirby and Sakurai regard their origin that it's hard not to feel some of that reverence.

I'll say this. When I was getting into video games and online fandom, Kirby was one of the first ways I wanted to explore that. One of the ways I tried to do so was by writing a walkthrough for Kirby's Dream Land. I never finished said walkthrough, because at a certain point I realized that Dream Land is not a game that really needs a guiding hand. I think, instead, it itself makes for a good guiding force. Not much more than that, and it's almost always more interesting to see what flows from Dream Land than it is to interface with Dream Land itself - but if something's strong enough to exist as that bedrock, who am I to hold anything against it?

The end terminus of a windy road of a video game series, in which six separate franchises somehow participated across three unique titles. I can't, as of this writing, vouch for any of the other properties involved in this series. But I can say that Decap Attack is... okay.

Decap Attack is a game of confused identity. That much is unsurprising from how the game came to be (most immediately: a reskin of a tie-in to anime series Magical Hat), but I don't know that enough was done thematically to give the game its own sense of self. Like, the idea is that it's supposed to be this spooky, grimy world in which a mummy is reuniting a skeleton-shaped world that was split by a demon, and he attacks by lobbing his spare skull or thrusting his torso-head at enemies. Weird, rad, gross. So why are the bosses mostly silly animals? Like I would've thought for sure that the toad and mole bosses were holdovers from the Magical Hat version, but they appear to have been invented wholesale for the spooky game. Kinda odd to go from a skull-and-blood motif to a doofy whiskery mole with coolguy shades.

But I also think the most definitive element of this video game series - those sticks you fling yourself into and launch from - is starting to feel vestigial here. Granted, I understand that they were hell to deal with in Kid Kool, and less than ideal in Psycho Fox. They're not exactly great here, either, being awfully fiddly and hard to get a consistent angle on. They have the strange function of healing you here (you didn't go into the Options and lower your hit points, did you?), which is certainly a way to keep them relevant. Sorta suggests that they threw it in to try and inject some purpose, considering Hat from Magical Hat is a one-hit wonder.

I don't think Decap Attack is bad or anything. It's certainly a weird little title, which is always a plus in my book. But it's over and done with pretty quickly, and just feels like an "also-ran" in every SEGA Genesis collection it crops up in.

...which makes it all the funnier that it's far and away the best part of the Fleetway Sonic the Comic. Like, holy crap, if you haven't read it, you have no idea. I wanna see Chuck & Head show up in SEGA crossover stuff exclusively because of Nigel Kitching's brilliant, brilliant reinterpretation of the property. I know it'd never happen, but a guy can dream...

Now this is more like it! With Ludosity having proven themselves to Nickelodeon, the restrictions were loosened and the budget was expanded quite a bit from the previous title. Making the campaign a roguelike was an inspired move, since it's a pretty budget-friendly way of adding a lot more variety to proceedings than we saw in the original game. There still isn't a ton of content, but what content exists is well-used.

Voice acting and character interactions, for example. In the campaign, character banter is limited to either conversations between characters of the same series or generic statements that could slot in anywhere. I wish there were more crossover moments - SpongeBob talking to Clockwork and the cast reacting to Gary are exceptions rather than the rule - but it's at least nice to have stuff like Raphael worrying about his brothers with Splinter, or Plasmius and Ember sniping at each other, or Plankton and Mrs. Puff being weirdly polite.

I also think the picks for enemy encounters give the game a lot of personality! Unsurprisingly, there's a huge SpongeBob bias, and while I wish SpongeBob didn't get TWO bosses, I'll admit that common enemies like the Bomb Pie pirates are fun pulls. Plus, you have very fun picks from other series like Garfield's food hallucinations, the Girl-Eating Plant, and... those guys from El Tigre (never saw it as a kid).

A common complaint about this game is how much of the last game's roster was cycled out. And yeah, I'm not gonna pretend that I don't miss playable Helga or CatDog, but I sorta think it's a statement on how much of an improvement this game is that the roster gets to be the focus of criticism. I appreciate as well anyway that a lot of the non-returning cast still feature in some way - either as a boss or as friendly NPCs. I would've been devastated if the #HughNation's efforts were a one-and-done matter, but still having Hugh Neutron as a highlighted extra is a worthy consolation prize.

(Speaking of rosters, I'm at a point in my life where I'm more curious to see others' roster picks in these crossover fighters than insist upon my own, but gun-to-head, if I had to pick a character I wanted to see for DLC or a theoretical sequel? Miko from Glitch Techs would be a fun pull. I also saw a fan roster that suggested Cynthia as a second Rugrats rep, which I think is absolutely brilliant)

It must also be said how much of an improvement there is to animation this time around. There's more to it than sheer aesthetics; looking at characters like Danny Phantom or Ren & Stimpy, you can really feel the team getting more comfortable with these guys and figuring out what animation principles existed in the original works, and how best to relay those principles into 3D. Occasionally you run into a weird camera angle that exposes a trick - how much characters' bodies are "cheated" out to the camera, in a way that makes a 3D render look off when viewed from the wrong angle - but I'd rather take that than have characters rigidly adhere to their models or key poses with improper use of tweening.

I've been sitting on doing a review for a bit because I've been going back and forth on achievement hunting in this game, and I wanted to hold back commentary in case I had more to say. I don't think I'm going to go for it, but I don't think that's a comment on the quality of the game itself or anything. With the first Nick All-Stars, I respected the game because, given the bare minimum budget Ludosity and Fair Play Labs had to work with, the team laser-focused on nailing the fundamentals. Those fundamentals are still here in the sequel, only now bundled in a package to properly highlight them. Very happy that the team was able to do so, and very eager to see what the DLC cycle holds for this game.