A fine enough little NES action platformer, but there are a few hitches holding it back. The biggest one is that some of the enemy placements are just plain cheap. The kebabs in the fourth stage move so fast that you absolutely have to memorize where they are. I still haven’t figured out how to beat the wok boss without getting hit. The leaping fish in the last stage move way too fast to dodge as well. Your plucky little chef moves very slowly, which I’m fine with, but the enemies sometimes feel like they were built for a different character.

The extra weapons you can pick up make for a mixed bag. The spoon, which extends your reach a bit, is fine but you never feel relieved to see it. The ranged attack, the dishes, are excellent in the third stage to get rid of the toaster enemies, but otherwise their arc makes them unwieldy. The fork, which operates like a pogo stick, is genuinely useless. No clue what it’s here for. In truth, your base frying pan feels perfectly adequate for most of the game, with the extra weapons not providing much for dynamic play.

Finally, the bonus games you can enter are functionally worthless. They only give you points, and while points can get you more lives, the number you get from these games is paltry. The most I ever got was 1800, and I’m pretty sure you need 50,000 for another life. The one in stage 5 does seem to skip you ahead a few rooms, though, so it’s always worth it.

There is plenty of detail in the stages, each of which presents unique enemies and obstacles. The music and sound were pleasant as well.

All in all, Panic Restaurant just lacks a bit of polish. It’s fun if you’re into retro action platformers, but it isn’t a great way to get into them, and it certainly isn’t worth the price an authentic cartridge will run you nowadays.

A nice, simple breezy game that I finished in a few hours. The only truly challenging parts are the final boss and the levels where you’re on the surface of the water. I appreciated that every type of level had different stages of powerups, though it was a little odd that not every type had the same number. The normal platforming stages have four, but the flying levels only have three, and the space level just has one. The controls were a tad slippery but overall fun. The art was a bit janky in some places (like the space levels) but great in others (like the beach, had a great Wonder Boy vibe). Not a fan of the music.

Slime Rancher is fun, cute, but ultimately kind of shallow. For some people, I think the pure aesthetics and the cuteness of the slimes will be enough to carry them through countless hours, but for me I couldn't even make it to 20.

The fundamental issue, I think, lies with the slimes themselves. They simply aren't deep or complex enough in their behaviors to make them interesting to raise. Most slimes have a single unique behavior that sets them apart from the others. These behaviors make them fun to discover the first time, but you figure out how to work around them extremely quickly. Rock slimes roll up into a spiky ball sometimes, but all this does is prevent you from feeding them for a few seconds. Rad slimes and boom slimes discourage you from getting close, but you literally have a vacuum gun to shoot food at them from a distance. Honey slimes... do nothing. Tangle slimes... do basically nothing. As far as I can tell, the only slime that requires substantial effort to raise is the fire slime, but I discovered it so late in my playthrough that I never even bothered to try raising them. Slimes can't even interact with each other in interesting ways because they will transform into Largos when they eat each others plorts.

Beyond this, I did find the world fun to explore. Once you get the jetpack, it becomes a game of calculating how far or high you can go. I ended up taking harder or possibly unintended paths to various spots just because I found it fun to move around that way. However, most of the things you can find in the wild just aren't that interesting. Gordos are the most interesting things to find, and only because they often have keys to yet more areas. (Finding out where the crystal slimes are was probably my favorite moment of the whole playthrough!)

You can also complete quests from a few NPCs, and doing so unlocks a few different minigames. The game clearly expects you to do the minigames several times to "rank up" within each game but I felt I had seen all they had to offer in a single go. Speaking of ranking up, Slime Rancher has a system where you can pay for higher ranks to unlock customization options. The only remotely useful upgrade is a vending machine where you can buy toys for your slimes to keep them calm. After the early game, the ranks are literally the only major use for money that I could find, quickly costing dramatically more than anything else.

Overall, Slime Rancher nails the aesthetics and worldbuilding but just fails to deliver a gameplay experience that can sustain itself for very long. I do think it's worth a short playthrough, but not much else.

I intended on completing all of the side stages, but man, I just couldn't. This game has a lot of clever ideas, especially in the way enemies are recontextualized as tools in many places, but the controls can't keep up. There's a constant sense of lag every time you start or stop moving, which removes that ever-important sense of satisfaction in movement that the main Mario series nails so well. Also, the final boss (of the main story) was extremely unintuitive. After slamming my head against it for a while, I had to look up how to do it, and I know the only way I would have ever figured it out on my own is dumb luck. I do appreciate the sheer amount of content they packed into this little cartridge, and the presentation is excellent, but the fundamental issue of movement made the whole experience pretty mediocre for me.