You know what. Fuck it. Time Crisis 1 is the best.

The president's daughter has been kidnapped on a remote castle island. It's sunset and you have a leather jacket. Time Crisis fucking rocks.

There's a certain je ne sais quoi to Namco's late 90s output. No other developer carried so much of what defined the "video game" in the prior decade and a half into their early 3D output, and certainly not while feeling so daring, bold and unbound by convention. There's always such a strong sense of style and energy, and there's few better examples of it than Time Crisis 1.

I have a bit of a history with TC (close friends are allowed to call it that, providing it's with dignity). Our family went on a big international holiday when I was about 11, visiting cities, theme parks and national heritage sites, but finding this arcade cabinet on the ferry there, complete with its chunky paddle and sliding recoil action, irritatingly remained the highlight of my trip when my parents asked afterwards. I was delighted to receive the PS1 port on my subsequent birthday. I think that's still my favourite birthday present ever. Finding a CRT on the side of the road earlier this year presented a dilemma. Claiming and carrying a heavy discarded television for half an hour back to my home was challenging and embarrassing, but the longing to bring Time Crisis back into my life made me accept who I was, and push past the looks of disgust and bewilderment from passing pedestrians.

The game is so excited about 3D. Swooping helicopters, a ride on suspended platforms, shoot-outs in active factories, wee moments of cinema. The ducking reload system is so much cooler than anything that preceded it, making you feel just that little bit more involved with your surrounding environment, and making avoiding attacks something more interesting than simply shooting the other guy first. Beyond gunfire, there's moving hazards you have to watch out for. Lunging attacks can be avoided with a quick duck, and effectively countered by popping back up before they retreat.

Enemy designs are simple, and instantly recognisable. You see a red guy, shoot him first, because he's dangerous. Orange? Get him for a time bonus. Blue are fodder, but you need to dispatch them quickly to keep on top of the ticking clock at the bottom of the screen. Standard enemies never take more than a single shot, making your gun feel powerful and keeping high-level play frantic.

What really makes me love Time Crisis 1 is that it's all one self-contained scenario. Having distinct levels in your game is an easy way to add variety, but as is true in games like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil, little can make the objective as meaningful or the threat as tangible as laying all the cards on the table and have the player sweat and scramble through to the end, carrying each new war wound into the next fight. This is a "Time Crisis". You've got to sort this shit out right now. You're not getting a plane ride to an ice level halfway through.

Time Crisis is filled with little 10-second screens that change up the pace and keep it exciting. The bit where you step back from a barricade, or open a door into a 15 foot drop, or have to shoot gunners hiding behind turrets before they fire at you. It's just great. I love it.

The scenario of an old empire's coup against an incumbent presidency is great, too. The old regime's castle has been around for centuries, isolated from the rest of the world, but growing technologically advanced by their active war interests. You get romantic stone walkways, and the iconic clocktowers, hiding rooms full of submarines and blinking control panels. It's such a cool playset for this gun game.

It's the top of tip, it's the championship, it's the most tip-top Time Crisis.



(FURTHER PARAGRAPHS EXPLICITLY COVER THE EXPERIENCE OF PLAYING THIS VIA THE JAPAN-ONLY PS2 "GUNVARI COLLECTION + TIME CRISIS" RELEASE, AND I WOULD DISCOURAGE ANYONE OTHER THAN HARDCORE TC FANS FROM VENTURING FURTHER)

Bringing Time Crisis to the PS2 allowed Namco the opportunity to bring the arcade version to home consoles. Curiously, this isn't what they decided to do. What you get on the disc is essentially the PS1 ISO, but with G-Con 2 support.

Endearingly, in-engine assets used to reflect the G-Con 45 have now been modified to reflect the new controller. Take a closer look, and you'll notice Richard Miller, as well as Point Blank's Dr. Don and Dr. Dan, are now holding G-Con 2s in their respective keyart.

The increased precision of the G-Con 2 is welcome, and I was even able to hit that six pixel guy behind the distant turret at the start of Level 3 in one shot, but the game insists on using A as the reload button, which doesn't make for quite as comfortable a grip, so you may opt for your old 45, regardless. You can still use a second controller as a makeshift pedal, but the game seems fussy about which controllers you can use. I was only able to get a Dualshock 2 to work, but entertainingly, everything works on it. I was able to use L3 and R3 as my duck button. You may find success with contemporary Namco controllers, or maybe even PS2-era steering wheel pedals, but I can't guarantee that.

The game still displays in pixel-heavy 240p, with the biggest performance boost appearing to be in the loading times. It shaves a second or two off between stages, though you're sometimes faced with a disconcerting black screen.

All the familiar PS1 stuff is here, including the Original Mode and the old options menu. I wouldn't recommend getting this unless you're also interested in playing Japanese-language releases of the Point Blank games, but the precision and slightly quicker stage transitions are welcome. I'm sure anyone who's made it to the very end of this review wouldn't be dissuaded if this has piqued their interest.

Ah - This is embarrassing. I guess I hadn't played nearly as much of Half-Life 1 as I thought I had. I didn't know there was so much... Valvey stuff in it. I've always thought of it as a kind of more grown-up Quake II. It's actually much more akin to its sequel or the Portal games than I realised. The vehicle sections, giant production line conveyor belts and cliffside descent. It's full of wee sections with their own ideas. Ambitious and exciting. Well paced and varied. Much longer than I expected too.

I've had access to the PC version for about 20 years, but picking up the relatively dated Gearbox PS2 port on Saturday was what finally got me hooked. I had it in my mind that there was something uniquely interesting about the PS2 version. Given some light research, it seems its primary USP is some local co-op stuff that I can't imagine many would be willing to sit through now, given how much the thing can chug in one-player. The thing that I appreciated the most is that the controls have been somewhat idiotproofed for the console market, simplifying the crouchjump command (something I felt was never really explained to me very well on PC) and including an optional lock-on system. That lured me in, I guess. All of a sudden, this juggernaut of PC gaming started to feel like Ocarina of Time.

I find the kind of time capsule aspect of retro gaming is something that's easier to appreciate on consoles than PC. If I loaded up Half-Life on Steam now, it'd be a rose-tinted vision of 1998, boosted with high resolution options and decades of patches. On PS2, the awkward save system and pre-title screen CGI rendered logo really evoke the era of £25 DVDs in cardboard digipacks and Rex the Runt.

Half-Life 1 is Valvey, but it's the "this was made by 20 guys in a rented office" Valve. It's not terribly slick, and the ideas frequently take precedence over the player experience. Unlike Half-Life 2, moments where you feel pinned down or overpowered frequently seem accidental.

I've long understood that Xen was the result of a team all pointing towards some wild, massive conclusion, and having nothing of substance up their sleeves. Actually playing it, it's miserable. Not a misery that's unique to Half-Life - It's pretty standard 90s FPS drudgery, not unlike many sections of Perfect Dark or Turok - but a massive step down from what had been established. Gonarch is particularly awful, and I'm not confident that the PS2 port is even doing it right. I did an honest playthrough of the fight on Half-Life: Source just to test my suspicions and turned on the cheats to power through on PS2 afterwards.

A lot of Xen is only made palatable on PC due to the game's quicksaves, but you can only make one at a time on PS2. If you're not careful, you can completely fuck a playthrough by using a gun too frequently or assuming there's going to be some health pickups around the next corner. I kind of liked that though. There was a more meaningful weight to decision making, even if I did cop out and Google the Invincibility code for a shit boss.

I'm embarrassed for asking for Half-Life 3 before I'd even finished the original game. It's far more reflective of what I like about the series than I had given it credit for. Playing it in 1998 likely felt just as exciting as Half-Life 2 did for me in 2004. I'm very sorry for chucking it on the "I'm never going to actually play this" pile alongside Unreal.

Criticism of postmodernism is intellectually diverse, reflecting various critical attitudes toward postmodernity as it takes form in philosophy, art, literature and games. Postmodernism itself is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, especially those associated with Enlightenment rationality - though postmodernists in the arts may have their own specific criteria and definitions of postmodernism that depend upon the medium.

Common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, economics and social progress; critics of postmodernism are often reactionary, defending such concepts against the counter-cultural critique of postmodern artwork.

It is frequently alleged that postmodern scholars are hostile to objective truth; they promote obscurantism, and encourage relativism in culture, morality and knowledge to an extent that is epistemically and ethically crippling: criticism of more artistic post-modern movements such as post-modern art, literature or video games may include objections to a departure from beauty, lack of coherence or comprehensibility, deviation from clear structure and the consistent use of dark and negative themes.

Post-postmodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, automodernism, altermodernism, and metamodernism rank among the more popular prospective terms for the movement against against postmodernism, though the lack of a unifying term demonstrates the difficult, uncertain nature of post-postmodern critical analysis.

In my review of Mario Party the other day, I suggested that the game was one of Nintendo's most postmodern works - what does that really mean? First, let's consider some possible features of postmodern gaming, both in terms of video games and board games:

• The game's designer and design become less relevant than the players' interpretation of the signified or signifier. We might see this more or less explicitly within a game like the award-winning card game Dixit: using a deck illustrated with dreamlike images, players select cards that match a title suggested by the "storyteller", and attempt to guess which card the "storyteller" selected. While the game has a scoring system, it's intentionally ambiguous, and open to the interpretation of the players and gamemaster; it's a game that can be played with a diverse group of players with little to no difficulty presented by challenge of skill - like Mario Party, Dixit frequently wrests interpretive authority from the games' designers and publishers and places it in the hands of arbitrary metrics that don't necessarily exist in a rulebook.

• A postmodern game's structure loses its center and gives way to free play. Generally speaking, this has never been a strong-suit of the video game medium - at least on the surface. This application is seen most clearly in the rise of pen-and-paper RPGs, almost all of which make a distinction directly in the beginning of their rule books: "This isn't a game like those other games with winners and losers; it's a game just for playing." In fact, RPGs thrive precisely on the différance present within the interpretive play among the players — and break down when munchkins or rules lawyers try to reinforce the structure. In short - the when the rules are made up and scores don't matter, players are forced to find other ways to enjoy themselves. The same is true of Mario Party.

• The game's structure is deconstructed by examining and reinforcing that which runs counter to the game's purported structure on the back of the box. This can be seen in games like Fluxx and Killer Bunnies. Here, the idea that planning and strategy will pay off, rewarding a player with victory is shown to be false because the idea hinges on the victor's proper management of chance, but chance is by definition that which is beyond management. So let's plan and strategize for an hour and then let chance tell us the winner she picks blindly in the end. Sound familiar?

• The game makes room for subaltern voices and questions the privileged nature of traditional binaries. Once Deep Blue won, there was no longer any substantive difference between a grandmaster and a geek with a GameFAQ. But can you ever truly defeat a machine that's controlling the dice and your opponents? Can you ever truly defeat someone who can win by doing nothing?

• The game breaks down barriers between itself and the things beyond it - for nothing is truly outside the game. This adage brings to mind old-school LARPing of the kind depicted in the movie Gotcha!, but could also include metaludic games like Quelf, where the game becomes about how a person plays the game or even does things away from the game while the game is ongoing.

Though the benchmarks and criteria for postmodernism are (perhaps intentionally) vague, I think it’s fair to say the original Mario Party exceeds in all the categories I’ve chosen to define above. It’s a game that interrogates the concept of the game - both board and video - by removing the mask of objective order, revealing that all accomplishments happen by divine will of the Nintendo 64.

Mario Party 2, however, fails to improve on the ideas of its predecessor in any meaningful way (apart from putting Donkey Kong in a wizard outfit). It’s a reactionary work of digimodernistic post-post modernism that seeks to correct the “mistakes” of Mario Party’s avant-garde by reintroducing the illusion of rules, structure, and “objective truth”: an essential RETVRN to the logic and empiricism that Gamers love so much. A tale as old as the medium itself, where art is the first thing to leave the party when your product needs to fit neatly on the subjective scales at IGN.

Horror Land, Mario Party 2’s “hardest” board, is a perfect case study of how the sequel’s introduction of mathematical “fairness” robs the game of an identity it was previously proud of. The first lap of the board is a 30-square circle with Toad, the star-giver, standing at the precise midsection. Players are given the option of diverging onto a different path, but there is no statistical incentive for doing so - players start with half the coins needed to buy a star, and it’s possible to accrue the remaining funds in a single turn. Apart from a Bank square (oh no! I lost FIVE coins!!) and Single-Player Minigame square, there are no other “inputs” to the system outside of the once-a-turn minigame: the game is all but ordering you to conform to a closed loop in order to take your first step towards an antipyrrhic victory that will be decided solely by the one who can inflate a Bowser Blimp the fastest. There are no alternatives; Wario’s subaltern voice is silenced; Yoshi’s questions about the privileged nature of traditional binaries are unanswered; Luigi’s interrogation of the apparent power structures falls on deaf ears. It’s time for Bumper Balloon Cars, and everyone’s getting some coins.

Contrast this with Mario’s Rainbow Castle, purportedly Mario Party 1’s easiest board - players can steal each others stars and coins at-will; there’s a button that foists Bowser’s roulette wheel upon foes; you can be sent back to the start for having the mere audacity to roll a 3 at the wrong time; Koopa Troopa is running a wealth-redistribution system at each corner of the board. And that’s all before we even get into the minigames, where stepping on a goomba in a party hat can instantly reduce your balance to absolute zero. It’s a revelry in capitalist chaos wearing the flesh of the Mario Brothers and it’s absolutely beautiful. Even Luigi’s “ohhHHHh nnOooOoo!” sounds more chunky and brittle, the bauds compressed under the sheer weight of environmental disorder. He’s saying something. Mario Party 2 isn’t.

The nice thing about Nintendo Switch Online for old people like me is that you get a little involuntary nostalgia hit every couple of months. I wouldn’t download and emulate Mario Party of my own volition, but something about it being readily available on my Switch just makes the access to those old memories so much more enticing - even when said memories now launch with an updated warning about how they can cause permanent damage to the palm of your hand.

Funny story about this game - my younger brother and I had it in our heads that it was possible to be skilled at it. Our misguided belief that the winner of a game of Mario Party was in some way deserving of recognition and admiration eventually came to a head when our neighbour - who didn’t own or play video games of any kind whatsoever at any time - played a round with us one rainy afternoon. He came out comfortably 3 stars ahead at the end of 50 turns, brutally shredding our fragile preteenage egos to tatters. This trauma sent my brother crazy, and he had to be locked in the bathroom for an hour because he was quite simply going completely apeshit-crackers at the notion that someone who didn’t even hold the N64 controller correctly could beat him at a game he’d played for a hundred hours. Very funny to recall his little cheeky face lying on a floor sodden with Chance Time-induced tears. Great game.

You can jape endlessly about the unfairness of the original Mario Partys, but there’s nothing you can really say that’s more amusing than participating in it. Taking huge inspiration from the capitalist chaos of Monopoly, this is definitely one of Nintendo’s most postmodern games, directly stating on many occasions that the rules are made up and the coins don’t matter. It revels in unfairness and mean-spiritedness (literally, with the inclusion of a robber Boo) in a way I imagine Shigeru Miyamoto would frown very hard at, and I presume the meaning of Bowser hollering “That’s often the way things go in life!” while tap-dancing on the spot as Mario wails about being mis-sold a suspicious “super duper star” for the tidy sum of 200 coins just completely passed me by as a kid. Just like the game of Life, the lesson to be learned here is that no matter how carefully plot your course and how hard you twirl your joystick, all the money in your bank can be swept away in an instant because some stupid prick stepped on a big red button with your face on it.

I'm approaching this as someone who started with New Leaf, and instantly became a relentlessly devoted player. I've heard a lot of resentment over the years from OG fans that the new games are too saccharine and pleasant. After finally trying the original game, it's a perspective I can see and respect, but I dunno, man - I like Nice Animal Crossing.

Going back, you can really see Dobutsu no Mori's weird, warty 64DD roots. The N64 may have been shaped by the west, with games like Turok and Banjo-Kazooie, but the 64DD was a playground for Nintendo's internal late 90s weirdos. Projects like Doshin the Giant and the Game Boy Camera. The place that gave birth to Tingle. Kids today, who wanted to play the cute animal game because they saw a popstar play it on a YouTube Live stream, have no idea about its aggressively scribbled heart.

The original Animal Crossing is an uncaring game at its warmest, and otherwise quite hostile. Villagers are often prejudiced, selfish and lazy. All the patter about Tom Nook's callousness? It's actually warranted here. There are kind, sweet villagers too, but they're the town doofus that everybody dunks on.

I think what's crucial is there isn't really much incentive to do anything in this game. You can contribute to the museum, decorate your house, customise your character, but there really isn't much inherent appeal to it. Every object in the game looks like it was pulled out of the reductions basket in Woolworths, and I didn't really care to be the one good Samaritan on Asshole Island.

There's always extra steps to everything to make it just that little bit more of an irritation. Want to swap out the item you're holding? Go to your inventory screen, drag the held item back into an empty spot in your inventory, drag the desired item into your hand, and resume. Don't have an empty space to put the item while you transfer? You're shit outta luck, buddy. Hope those fish like umbrellas.

I realise that there's more to GameCube AC - Folk won't shut up about the unlockable NES games - but it's just so blasé to your presence. There will be days when you just can't do anything because the shop's shut, and you don't have the item you need. Sure, there's time travel, but if you're not going to play the game by its rules, toss off and make your own.

I don't think this game really has the same appeal as modern Animal Crossing. It's more comparable to Tomodachi Life. A weird little toy to poke around and see if something amusing happens. This isn't a "Life Simulator". What you have in Animal Crossing 1 isn't a 'life'. It's a crude doodle of yourself with stinklines coming out.

Again, I kind of like this stuff. It's funny. But after a week of these sociopaths and villains, I was ready to run back into the appreciative arms of New Horizons. I'm somebody who's so into the vibe of the modern games, they enjoyed one-player amiibo Festival. I have been repeatedly assured that my opinion on Animal Crossing is unrelatable and irrelevant. Maybe I just ain't real enough for this shit. Give me a present and tell me I'm fabulous.

A REVIEW OF SUPER Mikey_Mike WORLD (Code: OG9-XN4-FNF)

This has been promoted by its creator (and some unscrupulous news outlets) as "Super Mario Bros. 5". While I find that title hyperbolic, if not blasphemous, I do think it might serve as a better central campaign than the one included in Mario Maker 2.

I think the excitement around Mario Maker 2 petered off far too soon. The format might not work as naturally on the Switch as it did on the Wii U, but it remains a much more powerful tool for Making Mario, if you're willing to put up with a less fun and intuitive interface.

What's been made here is a full 8-world campaign for the game, never going beyond the Super Mario World style. Each level trying something unique, fun and interesting without veering too far into "fanhack" territory. It's easy to forget just how much has been added to the level creation tools past the game's initial launch, but Super Mikey_Mike World puts all the most Marioey stuff to great use. I was cheering as I saw the Super Mario Bros. 2 transformation appear, since I'd pretty much completely forgotten it was ever in here.

It mainly retains the pace and increasing complexity of a familiar Mario release, with simple levels to start with, without becoming too dull, slowly transitioning to intricate puzzles, platforming challenges and some of the best Ghost Houses I've seen in ages. Great care has been taken to make sure players are never trapped into situations they can't get out of, and there's often fun and creative solutions to any predicament you find yourself in.

Really, it's a great celebration of the visual language of Mario. It's great to see a new location with complex geometry and instinctively know how you can use Mario to get through it. Mario hits a little different on your first time through a new game, and Super Mikey_Mike World delivers that feeling.

It's not without flaws, though. I did take issue with how frequently it sends you into a one-screen room for a very simple task, and it just feels like an unnecessary extra step crammed in because the designer thought they were being cute. That stuff gets old pretty quick. The final Ghost House was especially frustrating, as it relies on unpredictable mechanics at the end of a relatively lengthy sequence of puzzles that I found myself having to replay several times before everything worked right.

I think Super Mikey_Mike World's biggest success is in how it reinvigorates excitement for Super Mario Maker 2. It's a big set of clever ideas that showcase what can be done with these tools, besides making auto-runner levels and ones that play a song from Pokémon Red. There's stuff that presents the flexibility and fun of all the familiar SMB3 and SMW stuff, but there's stuff that's entirely unique to Mario Maker 2 as well, like snowballs and upside-down levels. It's great to see that stuff put to work in something that feels like a full Mario game.

I thought it was a little optimistic of Nintendo to add tools to make full 8-world campaigns, but seeing it put to proper use, I'm quite thankful that they did. I hope it inspires other Makers to get cleverer with how they use this great game.

REVIEW REFLECTS SINGLE-PLAYER CAMPAIGN ONLY

NOT REFLECTIVE OF FULL GAME

NO EXPLICIT STORY SPOILERS, BUT SOME FOCUS ON THE GAME'S STRUCTURE, FOCUS AND THEMES THAT I DIDN'T WANT REVEALED TO ME BEFORE I PLAYED IT, SO PLEASE AVOID IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED IT AND YOU'RE SENSITIVE TO THESE THINGS


After Octo Expansion, I was really excited about what the single-player in the next Splatoon would be. There was a bunch of familiar challenge missions, but at the end of it, there was a long sequence that showed how Splatoon's gameplay, music and setting could be applied to a structure more similar to Resident Evil 4 or Portal. It worked so well, I was sure that this was going to be the immediate future of Splatoon - A game that split its focus equally between an established top-tier multiplayer shooter and a fantastic single-player campaign to stand proudly alongside Mario and Zelda.

Splatoon 3's campaign is very much built off the back of Octo Expansion, but not in the way I'd hoped. It's understandable, but this is largely Octo Expansion 2, but with more of a focus towards players who are trying Splatoon for the first time, as opposed to the hardcore fans who bought the DLC.

There are some really good ideas here, though a lot of the time it's playing the old Splatoon balancing act of tutorials/MGS VR Missions. The utility of new weapons and specials are explored in fun levels that really show off their potential, and that Spider-Man one (I'm not familiar enough with the names of new Splatoon 3 stuff yet, sorry) is really good for vertical platforming. I'm not sure they've really given a good reason to ever use the Squid Boost thing in regular Splatooning, but I guess it's not doing anybody any harm.

I'll try to get over what it isn't, and appreciate it for what it is, and there is good here. They really throw a bone to Splatoon 1 fans here, especially at the start. The direct references are so baked into the story that there's a good deal that will go over your head if you've never had the delight of being a Wii U owner (or a GameCube owner, for that matter).

I think they do a good job of introducing new characters, while still establishing that The Squid Sisters are the toppermost of the poppermost. Really well balanced, and I felt overwhelmingly encouraged whenever Callie or Marie complimented how good I was at playing Splatoon. Having the old Agent 3 be their new Captain is a big play to Splatoon 1 fans, who get to point at the screen and say "that's me!"

The tone is pretty light throughout, though the dark backstory is explored in the Alterna Logs, and presented in a way that young players probably won't bother reading them. It's a bit of a let down that a Splatoon game dealing with the threat of an extinction event has fewer fucked up things in it than the new Kirby.

All in all, it's a fun new mode with a lot of things to dig into and enjoy. Not really what I'd hoped for, but there's enough in there to appeal to me, specifically, as an individual, that I worry I'd seem ungrateful if I moaned about it too much. I really hope they just stretch the last hour as the format for the whole of the next one though.

One of the greatest compliments I can pay Rollerdrome is that it feels like a game from twenty years ago. You know, when they made stuff like SSX Tricky and Quake III and Tony Hawk's 2. Infinitely replayable, unique games with no real skill ceiling. You can get really good at this, and every new hurdle you get over feels great.

It's a rollerskating arena shooter. This could have gone badly wrong, but everything's well considered. Your movement is largely based on momentum, while you aim in all directions around you. If you need to take a sharp turn, you can use the same dodge roll you use to evade rockets and sniper fire. All the enemy types are instantly readable, with their own attack patterns and weaknesses. You're constantly balancing distance, quick kills and major threats, looking after your health and combos. Get good enough and the THPS stuff becomes second-nature. It starts to feel like Geometry Wars. Just one where you can throw grenades at fuchikomas while backflipping.

The aesthetic's pretty cool too. Like a very specific branch of early 80s sci-fi. Not like those ironic American parody throwbacks. It feels part of the scene.

Rollerdrome is very difficult, and it plays entirely by its own rules. Familiarity with Tony Hawk's (or better yet, Aggressive Inline) will definitely help you out, but there's a lot to take on board and practice until it's second-nature. The game's structured so you have to get better than you think you can be before it lets you onto the next set of levels. You can kind of flub your way through a lot of the early stuff, but you feel each new level of competence you gain, and it's exhilarating.

Do not pass this one up.

I just wanna shoutout Keizo Ota for a sec because the water in this game remains truly incredible, resoundingly kicking the shit out of any current games that aren't merely leaning on existing Unreal Engine tech. If you've seen any documentaries about the making of the Ultra 64, you probably know how rudimentary the Silicon Graphics sample projects were - imagine being handed an SDK that could barely render a sphere and then getting tasked with modeling the most amorphous natural body on our planet using a computer that's barely more powerful than your average modern calculator. Jesus Christ. I've been a programmer for 15 years I still sometimes break out in cold sweats when my boss asks me to make a floating dialog box with some text on it and this guy was out there in 1995 pulling off some Genesis 1:6-8 shit with the computational equivalent of a Casio watch. Keizo Ota is a man-machine genius-god and it does not surprise me that this is the mastermind who went on to design the masterpiece that is Nintendo Land for the Wii U.

Not just a graphics gimmick, the beauty of the gameplay here is entirely down to the water too - it creates this satisfying inversion of traditional racing game mechanics where your track is constantly moving out from under you, encouraging acceleration to make tighter, riskier turns and deceleration on straights to get control of the chop, a counterintuitive methodology that ultimately brings to life the idea that you're a driving demigod skimming across the firmament of creation to some of the best music Nintendo's ever done. Don't bother with Hard and Expert Mode if you want to preserve your Godhood, though - that shit is just stupid, vulcanized rubberbanding that makes Mario Kart 64 look merciful. Just turn up the wave conditions to "Wild" and revel in our Lord's wrath and fury.

As a casual who only dips into this when they add a funny new skin, Zero Build Mode finally brings the streamlined experience I always wanted from the game: a massive reduction in the number of quiet and confused moments that sat awkwardly among the insanity of an average match’s moment-to-moment survival. Stripping away the construction materials and mechanics (save for the tactile and tactical satisfaction of demolishing walls and floors) improves the pace of play so much, turning a battle for building materials into a more focused super-arena shooter that spans an entire island and at least three hundred multimedia franchises.

As the number of included IPs continues to balloon-bus exponentially, there’s really no reason I should be bored on the plains overlooking Tilted Towers, and Epic are happy to provide me with literally any excuse to avoid playing the game properly - it’s an overwrought joke at this point, but just standing around watching Goku hit the griddy is genuine unpretentious whole-hearted all-American entertainment, and I’m oddly proud of the devs for taking a shitty zombie wave-defense game all the way to this, cultural implications be damned. There’s just something about our programming as a species that makes us predisposed towards finding anime mascots doing club dance moves funny and we have to accept that and move on in enlightenment. Drop the vain expectation of good taste and come as you are to this cocaine-insane royal rumble where you can drive-by kamehameha Indiana Jones while he’s listening to Doja Cat on a jukebox shaped like Darth Vader’s head. It reminds me of Jedi Outcast roleplay servers in the early 2000s, where people would import the Dr. Dre and Doomguy skins from Quake III: Arena and challenge you to lightsaber duels in a map based off that Jim Carrey Grinch movie. If you like Smash Bros. or Multiversus or Gmod or Dante From The Devil May Cry Series, you’ve really got no excuses. It’s all the same thing.

These moments of maximal franchise expression do genuinely seem to lead to something bigger, sometimes, though… Today I did a random Duos with a guy dressed as the stonks meme and instead of gunning for glory we just drove a Major Lazer-themed speedboat along the coast while listening to an Eminem song about drug addiction and wanting to kill yourself (PEGI 12+). When the song was done, the radio faded out to a voice clip of Travis Scott telling us that he really believed we had what it takes to get that Victory Royale. Despite his pride, we died unceremoniously on a trampoline moments later. As our corpses bounced up and down with comic timing, the killcam revealed that Vegeta had been in a water tower with an AWP the whole time, watching the shore from a safe distance. What even is this? I genuinely do not believe there is another game out there that is offering these deeply stupid and satisfying emergent experiences.

I'm unsure if there's a proper term for it... - in German maybe? - that describes a rite of passage through young adulthood that I'm sure everyone on this site has experienced on some level, at some time: finally having the disposable income to obtain something you coveted in childhood and then inevitably finding out that it wasn't everything (or even anything) that the media and advertising you consumed as a child promised you that it would be.

For me, many of these holy capital-cultural artefacts centre on Pokémon. I know it's cliche to refer to yet another Japanese entertainment juggernaut as something analogous to a religion, but it's hard to deny the comparison when your town's priest spent a lot of time between 1997 and the new millennium talking about the Satanic properties of Mr. Mime, Magikarp and Misty. The Catholic Church was afraid of Zubat for a while.

The mysticism of Pokémon was so strong in rural Scotland that my school descended into riots over Pokémon not once, but twice. When someone in our class sent a mail order to China for a copy of Pokémon Silver almost a full year before the game even existed in Europe, people handled it with the same practiced reverence they'd use at the church across the road, carrying it faithfully like it was a relic called the Ark of the Crobat or the Holy Granbull; a really cute snapshot through the crack in time that succeeded the rise of global capitalism and Thatcherite deregulation of children's advertising and preceded the advent of the mainstream internet and all that it entailed. We got our cheat codes from a newspaper back then, and the day the MissingNo glitch was revealed sent our schoolyard into rapture. But like all religions I've been involved in, time eventually revealed this false Pokéfaith for what it was - a moralless money-making vehicle for paedophiles.

While Pokémon Puzzle League wasn't high on the list of Pokérelics I coveted, it still excited me, I think - the idea of a puzzle game (I already adored Tetris) with Pokémon (I already adored Pokémon) that was faithful to the anime (I already adored Pokémon: The Animated Series) was so exciting to me, but I always ended up choosing classic N64 titles like Earthworm Jim 3D and California Speed whenever I finally scrounged together something for the offertory at Electronics Boutique. Perhaps I wasn’t as committed as I remember myself being. Finally playing through it in 2022, decades removed from the incident at my school where a nine-year-old kid was beaten up for selling fake shiny Charizard cards, I could no longer believe in the utter pish that I'd been drinking back then. I couldn't even muster a smile for a MIDI instrumental cover of the PokéRap on the title screen... What's become of me? I guess this is what it means to be an adult.

Austin Powers Pinball features two tables. International Man of Mystery and The Spy Who Shagged Me. I remember watching an interview for Austin Powers 2 in a little Sky Interactive window about a hundred times. I would have been about 12 or 13 and very insecure about puberty. Hearing that Austin had lost his "Mojo" had me looking up the word in the dictionary, which told me it meant something like "sexual prowess". I didn't really understand and assumed the film was about Austin Powers being castrated against his will. I still have not seen Austin Powers 2.

When you first play Austin Powers Pinball, you will attempt to figure out which buttons are used to control the flippers. Pressing anything other than the correct ones will warn you that you have "tilted" the board and will lock you out of playing until your ball falls down the hole.

If you register your copy of Austin Powers Pinball with Take 2 Interactive, you will be entered into their free prize draw to win £100. Imagine what you'd spend that on!

The best games aren't the flawless, slick-as-all-get-out games. They're the ones that have very unique appeal. An itch you can't scratch with anything else. That's why Chibi-Robo fans are such a rare breed.

Chibi-Robo has similarities to a lot of other games, but there's nothing else with its blend. It's a game that revels in repetition and limiting your agency. As soon as Chibi-Robo enters the Sandersons' home, he's a source of resentment. Another expensive gizmo that the childish, impulsive father can't afford. Slowly, by accomplishing little tasks, and helping out with housework, Chibi-Robo becomes welcomed, appreciated and eventually, the subject of intense gratitude as he helps fix the family's problems. The more Chibi-Robo does, the more he has access to.

I'd be deeply suspicious of a game that attempted a similar story arc these days. I know it would be either cloyingly mawkish or shallow and insincere. Chibi-Robo, on the other hand, is dumb, dated and disarmingly weird. Toys come to life at night, and there's something off about all of them. The first you meet is some kind of Buzz Lightyear knock-off, but because of the unique balance of surrounding cultural influences where and when the game was made, he's more Kamen Rider than Buck Rogers, and the localisation team aren't equipped to make sense of that for a western audience. It's just another weird thing in this weird game, and you accept it. There's a load of stuff like that in Chibi-Robo, and it's a big part of its appeal. I don't want to spoil the stupidest plot twists the game has to offer, but there's stuff in here that I couldn't fucking believe.

The appeal of what I refer to as "wee guy" games is very much here, though it's probably easy to overstate in something like Chibi-Robo. You're running around a big house, trying to find hidden pathways and ascend to the highest points. In retrospect, it kind of feels like an N64 platformer with iffy level design. There's typically only one or two routes up through each room's furniture, and the paths aren't always terribly intuitive or readable. There's parts where you'll need to attempt a gap multiple times, finagling the camera into an awkward position and having to retread about three minutes of shelf traversal each time it doesn't work. To players of a certain age though, there's a kind of comfort to this. This is how punishing games are supposed to be. There's an honesty to each fall, and with the domestic settings, the moving platforms and obstacles are thankfully rare. It's like those throwback bags of Opal Fruits you can buy - I don't know if the old approach is better, but it's what you want sometimes.

It goes without saying that Chibi-Robo isn't for everyone. It's a lumpy, stupid game where you can't do anything that you want and you get sent back to the starting point every five to fifteen minutes. Only those of very cultivated tastes will find it charming. It's completely indespensible to me though. I've never played another game does what it does the way it does. I hope I never stop coming back to it.