wanting to play this introduced me to emulation in the mid-2000s and even though it's scaldingly hot garbage it'll always have a place in my heart as a result

Really really impressive how they fully ported (yes there's a complete version) the entirety of the SNES's biggest launchiest title to the console that Nintendo was trying to get you to put in the closet so you could buy the new console, just so you could play this game
But that's about all it is, a pristine conversation piece that shouldn't exist but was birthed out of the ingenuity of emerging markets, much like Somari
You're not an underprivileged child in the eastern bloc or nations adjacent to China 25 years ago. so there's no reason to play this when you can play the real game, unless you're a shithog for bootlegs like me of course

The platonic ideal of what people wanted Sonic Xtreme to be, as well as "fangames" in general
A precious adamantine gemstone of transformative love, primordially compressed in the beating heart of a volcano over the last quarter-century
Abolish copyright for a world full of these

The closest any singular video game has ever come to being designated as an SCP
It's like Street Fighter/King of Fighters/Super Smash Bros, if its character roster was built out of the Akashic records and took the form of an impossible shape optical illusion

I don't know how the community is now, but back in the 2000s/early 2010s it was a bureaucratic nightmare hellscape ruled by Napoleons, the worst possible community for a game reliant on user-generated content, with so many rules, moral prohibitions, and warring factions (warehousers vs. creators) that it'd make Kafka shit his pants and die
This game is basically the video game equivalent of the King in Yellow, an impossible forbidden game that drives its players to madness, when I was a 12-year-old autistic child with strong convictions about preservation, my actions in the community made people threaten to kill me and dox me and send fake reports to the FBI over me (which is a felony btw! epic win) which definitely has NOT fucked me up for life with anxiety issues

There used to be a list of "unrequestable characters" that were prohibited from distribution due to stolen code, or stolen art, or because they just didn't like who made them, and that instantly turned every character on that list into a hot commodity all of us WAREHOUSERS just had to find

We were all assholes and deserved each other, like we had all sinned during a previous life and this community was our punishment

P.S.: a "warehouser" is defined as somebody who engages in unauthorized distribution of MUGEN content, you would become a social pariah if you shared characters without permission, even if those characters had been offline for years and would be lost permanently without reuploading, you are still catching a ban

if this game and Binary Domain did the DBZ fusion dance, combining Vanquish's incredible gameplay with Binary Domain's actually interesting story, it'd be the perfect video game

this is like a [redacted] at Tweaker's house

Shut the fuck up. You say "I'm baby" but you're not. You are not baby. You are not capable of being baby. You possess neither the limitless potential of baby nor the driving curiosity of baby. You have some similarities. You cannot function on your own, you depend on others for your most basic needs. But where baby eventually outgrows these flaws, you are already hardened by your failures. You will not grow. You are not baby.

if the idea of GTA for the Game Boy Advance appeals to you, go play Payback instead

The first game I ever played, and there's probably no better foundation to build a house on
I was so young I would put the cartridge in my mouth and teethe on it until it stopped working
by the way, the bricks are Toads, King Koopa transformed the Mushroom Retainers into bricks through black magic, fucked up

half a star bonus for the pun in the title being funny

K: "Hello, Potion Seller, I am going into battle and I want your strongest potions."

PS: "My potions are too strong for you, traveler."

K: "Potion Seller, I tell you I am going into battle, and I want only your strongest potions."

PS: "You can't handle my potions. They're too strong for you."

K: "Potion Seller, listen to me; I want only your strongest potions."

PS: "My potions would kill you, traveler. You cannot handle my potions."

K: "Potion Seller, enough of these games. I'm going into battle and I need your strongest potions."

PS: "My strongest potions would kill you, traveler. You can't handle my strongest potions. You'd better go to a seller that sells weaker potions."

K: "Potion Seller, I'm telling you right now; I'm going into battle and I need only your strongest potions."

PS: "You don't know what you ask, traveler. My strongest potions will kill a dragon, let alone a man. You need a seller that sells weaker potions, because my potions are too strong."

K: "Potion Seller, I'm telling you I need your strongest potions. I'm going into battle! I'm going to battle and I need your strongest potions!"

PS: "You can't handle my strongest potions! No one can! My strongest potions aren't fit for a beast let alone a man."

K: "Potion Seller, what do I have to tell you to get your potions? Why won't you trust me with your strongest potions, Potion Seller? I need them if I'm to be successful in the battle!"

PS: "I can't give you my strongest potions because my strongest potions are only for the strongest beings and you are of the weakest."

K: "Well then that's it, Potion Seller. I'll go elsewhere. I'll go elsewhere for my potions."

PS: "That's what you'd better do."

K: "I'll go elsewhere for my potions and I'll never come back!"

PS: "Good. You're not welcome here! My potions are only for the strongest and you're clearly are not of the strongest you're clearly the weakest."

K: "You've had your say, Potion Seller but I'll have mine. You're a rascal, you're a rascal with no respect for knights. No respect for anything... except your potions!"

PS: "Why respect knights... when my potions can do anything that you can."

You can play against Steve-O AND Carmen Electra

Better than Super Monkey Ball tbqh

Probably the best conversation piece in my collection, which is saying a lot, Terrifying 9/11 is a strange work of heated anti-imperialist schadenfreude gestating a surprisingly competent Metal Slug port for Game Boy Color that outdoes its Neo-Geo Pocket Color siblings in terms of faithfulness to the original game
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao