only took two and a half years, but through my innovative technique of playing a handful of missions every four months I have finally taken down this beast. absurd how structurally lazy this game is: 89 single-player missions, all back-to-back with no side quests or key quest system or any sort of progression/organization beyond "play a mission and then unlock the next one." it should be obvious that most of these missions bear more than a small resemblance to one another due to the comparative dearth of maps and enemy types, so throwing the player into this many mandatory missions just exacerbates the repetition. sure, this is a game oriented around an endless grind for weapon and armor drops, but evidently the game's bounty of missions vastly exceed the bounds of the game's weapon pools given that identical pools appear in many of the missions on a given difficulty and rarely give new items. the weapon level drop curve is such that even running the first couple of missions on inferno, the highest difficulty, primarily gave me weapons I already had from midgame on normal, three difficulties below it. this would be more bearable if at least the weapon pools between all four classes were shared... but they aren't, so good luck if you played through the campaign with one class and would like to switch on the next difficulty up, because you won't have shit to work with. the developers recognized these unforced errors because edf5 rectified a fair number of them (primarily shared weapon pools and an upgrade system when you pick up a dupe), but it stings a bit that this entry completely fumbles these elements here.

I'm dedicated to fencer (the armored suit class) through and through, and in this particular entry fencer gets an essential (if perhaps not intended) dash cancel that lifts the weight of the rest of the game on its back. by firing the otherwise mediocre javelin catapult directly after executing a side dash, the ending lag of the dash will get overwritten with extremely fast javelin recovery frames, enabling quick dash spam across the battlefield. a couple weapon types possess the side dash as an auxillary ability, with perhaps no one more busted than the blasthole spear lineage, which provide rapid-fire, high-DPS shots at close range. the synergy is quickly clear: hit-and-run tactics with the spears and the dash cancel can easily depose even spongier enemies as long as one manages their cooldowns. of course, if this was the whole gameplan, the game would stale over such a long campaign, but luckily the fencer uniquely possesses switchable item sets. I kept a mid-range cannon and long-range mortars on deck in the other set for most of the ride as heavy artillery to deal the majority of my long-range damage, and since these remove the incredible mobility of the javelin/spear combo, you have a comfortable role trade-off to deal with in each fight. switching sets can't be done willy-nilly, and outside of wakeup animations most recovery lag will keep you from swapping, preserving the commitment of the most truly heinous fencer weaponry. the sluggish movement of the fencer normally would not necessarily be fun to use, as it would submerge the game into wading through enemies and tanking shot after shot, but this particular dash-cancel wrinkle helps sell a hot-and-cold playstyle that one rarely finds in a third-person shooter.

scenario-wise, probably one of the best examples I can think of where simply mass-spawning identical enemies makes for very solid encounters. although my brain would like to call it a TPS musou, it really hews closer to a wave shooter or arena shooter due to the centralization of the battle around the player character. you may enter with allies to assist you, but they rarely last past the first wave, and thus the game devolves into controlling the mass of enemies following you and you alone around the map. at its worst, it's a lot of kiting, either soothed by the need to stop to unleash your best weapons or agitated by the need to build up a healthy distance from the enemies before you unleash your best weapons, depending on how you look at it. only the cheap fodder succumb to pure tracking tactics, however, and with enough alternate opponents that lockdown certain parts of the map, roam, or patrol, you can find yourself properly flanked in a way the fodder can't do alone. of these the most fundamental are the hectors: large bipedal robots with an assortment of heavy weaponry and shields. getting in one's sights can subject the player to anything from full-map range plasma shots to short-range sheets of sparks, the latter of which portends poorly for any fencer player clamped to the ground by it. the variety of these and the use of different AI routines for each make hectors an essential flavor for any environment, especially maps with lots of enemy spawn points. other large enemies are equally fascinating (the segmented quadruped deroys and their long-range leg melee are rather fierce), yet the bosses tend to make clear how much of the game relies on hundreds of adds running around the screen at once due to their gigantic hurtboxes and rudimentary behavior. perhaps this is why the final boss opts for a much smarter strategy of smothering the earth with artificial ceiling of weaponry, with the top hurtbox only accessible when openings in the ceiling plates have been cracked open.

podcast fodder. it occurred to me over the course of playing that for four-player couch co-op like this, the mindlessness is a boon. you're supposed to be catching up with your friends and fucking around, not actually invested in the game.

it pulls surprisingly heavily from the original gauntlet with little variation: destroy generators that endlessly spawn, open chests and gates with keys, use potions as AoEs, destroy walls, open other walls. the only other mechanical changes is some light meter management, where you can activate one of three different special abilities depending on the level of the gauge or siphon some off to use a dash-twirl kinda action. other than weaving those in, you'll just be mashing the shoot/attack button, and with the advent of a 3D world and shifting perspective for the game, they've slathered auto-aim all over your toolkit, so there's almost no engagement other than being there to press the button... and if you're close enough to an enemy you'll auto-attack anyway, so who cares.

the main intrigue instead is the variety of environments and stages, each with their own hazards and puzzles to solve. you might rend an arena asunder by pressing a switch, skewing the two halves apart and exposing new corridors in the process. there's moments where you'll rearrange a set of catwalks by pressing a series of switches (although you never have access to more than one at once) to raise and lower them to match your character's height. in some (many) instances, you must painstakingly root out a breakable wall and enter it to press a switch and open a different wall somewhere else. indeed, most of the game consists of finding switches to press to access a new area; it is not uncommon for there to be chains of three to seven switches that lead to each other in the span of a single room. is what the switches activate occasionally cool, giving you a new path through the often intricate area designs? sure. but expect the whole game to follow virtually the exact same loop throughout: mash attack, press switch.

there's occasional gesturing to more of diablo-like system, the style which would quickly eat this series' lunch by the sixth gen, though it often doesn't land given the game's arcade-focused nature. other than adding a leveling and stats system to the original gauntlet experience, there's also this odd loot/power-up component, some of which is random but others of which are actually specific, often obscure unlockables within particular levels. of course, seeing as there's no permanence regarding items beyond keys/potions, these end up being temporary powerups; the thrill of grinding out skorne 1 so that you can get a piece of his armor set feels quaint when faced with the reality that said item will disappear 90 seconds into the next stage you play. as an aside: per the original game you're intended to replenish your health or revive yourself with extra credits, but seeing as this console version does not have that system, dying will kick you back out to the hub with whatever health you had going in. that might seem fine, but if you actually want to replenish to full health, expect to spend a lot of time grinding the first level for the 400-500 in health pickups that are guaranteed. for my final boss run, where I needed my level 60 max of 7000 health after spending most of the game maintaining about 2000, this was quite a chore.

this sega dreamcast version seems like a hodge-podge of each of the other versions of this game. compared to the playstation and n64 versions, which have a different set of levels and a proper inventory system, the dreamcast version serves as a more direct port of the original's levels and item system. oddly enough, it does have the additional endgame levels and skorne refight from the original home ports. it also carries in certain mechanical changes from the game's incremental sequel dark legacy, such as all of the new character classes and a functionally useless block ability; what the fuck is the point of a block in a mostly ranged game where having attack advantage is always a priority to avoid getting flanked and overwhelmed? probably the most bizarre aspect of the dreamcast version is that it runs like dogshit even with only a single player, and it retains the somewhat hideous look of the original game. not sure why the dc wasn't able to handle a relatively low-poly game built for a 3DFX banshee gpu, but I'm going to assume fault on the part of the developers.

still, a podcast game with some cool level visuals has its own appeal. was unfortunately left curious about dark legacy and the later gameplay revisions in seven sorrows. an arcade-style dungeon crawler does appeal to me in a base way, and I appreciate that this was an early attempt at creating an arcade game with a proper progression system (including rudimentary usernames and passwords!). should probably bring some friends along for the ride if I ever get a wild hair to try again.

nintendo salvaging the american gaming market with the release of the NES was the modern inflection point for our industry, in some ways that are less obvious than others. the console enshrined gaming as a medium with legitimacy beyond the original fad-like relevance of the atari VCS, but the centralization of this success around nintendo gave the company an uncomfortable amount of leverage. this immediately portended poorly with the simultaneous release of the console's killer app: super mario bros., which gestured to a sinister rejection of the console's original intent. look to the japanese launch line-up and you'll see arcade staples such as donkey kong and popeye; games that lauded precise, restricted play with definitive rules and short runtimes. super mario bros. was a refutation of this design philosophy in favor of the loosey-goosey variable jump heights, frequent health restoration items, and long hallways of copy-paste content replacing the tightly paced experiences that defined the era before. the NES still featured arguably the greatest console expressions of the rigorous arcade action experiences that defined the '80s - castlevania, ninja gaiden, and the early mega mans all come to mind - but the seeds super mario bros. planted would presage a shift into more and more experiences that coddled the player rather than testing their fortitude. in some ways, super mario bros. lit the match that would leave our gaming landscape in the smoldering ruins of the AAA design philosophy.

the '90s only deepened nintendo's exploration of trends that would further attempt to curb the arcade philosophy, which still floated on thanks to the valiant efforts of their competitors at sega, capcom, konami, and others. super mario world kicked off nintendo's 16-bit era with an explicitly non-linear world map that favored the illusion of charting unknown lands over the concrete reality of learning play fundamentals, and its pseudo-sequel yoshi's island would further de-emphasize actual platforming chops by giving the player a generous hover and grading them on their ability to pixel hunt for collectables rather than play well, but the most stunning example of nintendo's decadence in this era is undoubtedly donkey kong '94. the original donkey kong had four levels tightly wound around a fixed jump arc and limited ability for mario to deal with obstacles; its ostensible "remake" shat all over its legacy by infusing mario's toolkit with such ridiculous pablum such as exaggerated flip jumps, handstands, and other such acrobatics. by this point nintendo was engaging in blatant historical revisionism, turning this cornerstone of the genre into a bug-eyed circus romp, stuffed with dozens of new puzzle-centric levels that completely jettisoned any semblance of toolkit-oriented level design from the original game. and yet, this was the final fissure before the dam fully burst in 1996.

with the release of the nintendo 64 came the death knell of the industry: the analog stick. nintendo's most cunning engineers and depraved designers had cooked up a new way to hand unprecedented control to the player and tear down all obstacles standing in the way of the paternalistic head-pat of a "job well done" that came with finishing a game. with it also came this demonic interloper's physical vessel, super mario 64; the refined, sneering coalescence of all of nintendo's design tendencies up to this point. see here a game with enormous, previously unfathomable player expression, with virtually every objective solvable in myriad different ways to accommodate those who refuse to engage with the essential challenges the game offers. too lazy to even attempt some challenges at all? feel free to skip over a third of the game's "star" objectives on your way to the final boss; you can almost see the designers snickering as they copy-pasted objectives left and right, knowing that the majority of their player base would never even catch them in the act due to their zombie-like waddle to the atrociously easy finish line. even as arcade games stood proud at the apex of the early 3D era, super mario 64 pulled the ground out underneath them, leaving millions of gamers flocking to similar experiences bereft of the true game design fundamentals that had existed since the origination of the medium.

this context is long but hopefully sobering to you, the reader, likely a gamer so inoculated by the drip-feed of modern AAA slop that you likely have regarded super mario 64 as a milestone in 3D design up to now. yet, it also serves as a stark contrast to super mario 64 ds, a revelation and admission of guilt by nintendo a decade after their donkey kong remake plunged modern platformers into oblivion.

the d-pad alone is cool water against the brow of one in the throes of a desert of permissive design techniques. tightening up the input space from the shallow dazzle of an analog surface to the limitations of eight directions instantly reframes the way one looks at the open environments of the original super mario 64. sure, there's a touch screen option, but the awkward translation of a stick to the literal flat surface of the screen seems to be intentionally hobbled in order to encourage use of the d-pad. while moving in a straight line may still be simple, any sort of other action now begets a pause for reflection over the exact way one should proceed. is the sharp 45 or 90 degree turn to one side "good enough", or will I need to make a camera adjustment in-place? for this bridge, what combination of angles should I concoct in order to work through this section? the removal of analog control also forces the addition of an extra button to differentiate between running and walking, slapping the player on the wrist if they try to gently segue between the two states as in the original. the precision rewards those who aim to learn their way around the rapid shifts in speed while punishing those who hope they can squeak by with the same sloppy handling that the original game allowed.

on its own this change is crucial, but it still doesn't cure the ills of the original's permissive objective structure. however, the remake wisely adds a new character selection system that subtly injects routing fundamentals into the game's core. for starters: each of the characters has a separate moveset, and while some characters such as yoshi and luigi regrettably have the floaty hover and scuttle that I disdained in yoshi's island, it's at least balanced here by removing other key aspects of their kit such as wall jumps and punches. the addition of wario gives the game a proper "hard mode," with wario's lumbering speed and poor jump characteristics putting much-needed limiters on the game's handling. for objectives that now explicitly require wario to complete, the game is effectively barring you from abusing the superior movement of the original game by forcing you into a much more limited toolkit with rigid d-pad controls, the kind of limitations this game absolutely needed in order to shine.

that last point about objectives that specifically require a given character is key: the remake segments its objectives based on which characters are viable to use to complete them. however, while in some cases the game may telegraph which specific characters are required for a particular task, in many cases the "correct" solution is actually to bounce between the characters in real time. this is done by strategically placing hats for each of the characters throughout the map - some attached to enemies and some free-floating - which allow the player to switch on the fly. this adds new detours to the otherwise simple objectives that vastly increases their complexity: which toolkit is best suited for which part of each mission? how should my route be planned around the level to accommodate hats I need to pick up? will I be able to defeat an enemy that's guarding the hat if I had to? this decision-making fleshes out what was previously a mindless experience.

there's one additional element to this system that truly elevates it to something resembling the arcade experiences of yore. while you can enter a level as any character, entering as yoshi allows you to preemptively don the cap of any other character as you spawn in, preventing the player from having to back-track to switch characters. on the surface this seems like another ill-advised QoL feature, but some subtle features reveal something more fascinating. yoshi has no cap associated with him, so to play as him, one must enter the level with him. however, you often need to switch to another character in the middle of a level. how do you switch back? by taking damage. to solve the ridiculously overstuffed eight piece health bar of the original, this remake transforms it into a resource you expend in order to undergo transformation. sure, one could theoretically collect coins in order to replenish this resource, but this adds a new layer onto the routing that simply didn't exist in the original game, where there were so many ways to circumvent obstacles with the permissive controls that getting hit in the first place was often harder than completing the objective. by reframing the way that the player looks at their heath gauge, the game is calling to mind classic beat 'em ups, where the health gauge often doubled as a resource to expend for powerful AoE supers.

the game still suffers from much of the rotten design at the core of its forebear; these above changes are phenomenal additions, but they're grafted onto a framework that's crumbling as you delve into it. regardless, the effort is admirable. for a brief moment, nintendo offered an apology to all of those hurt by their curbstomping of the design philosophies that springboarded them into juggernaut status in the first place, and they revitalized classic design perspectives for many millions more who first entered the world of gaming after it had already been tainted by nintendo's misdeeds. the galaxy duology, released a few years after this game, attempted to rework the series from the ground up with a new appreciation for arcade design by limiting the bloated toolkit of previous games and linearizing levels, but the damage had already been done. the modern switch era has magnified nintendo's worst tendencies, putting proper execution and mechanical comprehension to the wayside as they accelerate the disturbing "the player is always right" principles that have infested their games since that original super mario bros. by looking at super mario 64 ds in this context, we at least get a glimpse of what a better world could have looked like had nintendo listened to their elders all along.

started to see the vision once I realized the grab (your only verb outside of jumping) gives you i-frames when you bounce off of whatever you're grabbing... pretty cool wrinkle on an otherwise plain set of mechanics. a lot of the game is carried by the dense mix of geometric terrain and organic outgrowths a la sonic; it's no surprise that much of this team got rolled into sonic team for NiGHTS into dreams the year after. said team really demonstrates their technical aptitude as well, with some stunning overlapping parallax on stages such as planet automaton and swirling line scrolling in the background of the itamor lunch fight. ristar emotes fluidly, with his walking scowl morphing into a grin and twirl upon defeating hard enemies. occasionally he'll even show a penchant for childlike play, such as in this snowball fight setpiece.

a first impression yields something a little dry on the gameplay front, with single-hit enemies and slow movement compounding into something more leisurely than interesting. thankfully around the halfway point the design veers into level-unique puzzles and setpieces. the one that stuck out to me the most was a series of areas in planet 4 involving babysitting this radio(?) item across various hazards in order to give to various birds who want them blocking your way. presages a klonoa style of puzzles built from manipulating objects in the environment rather than working with pre-defined aspects of the player's toolkit. near the end the game veers into some execution challenges as well, with mixed results. ristar's grab actually has a lot more going on to meets the eye: not only does he have the aforementioned i-frames, but he also gains a bit of height off his bounce, and he can hold onto some interactables indefinitely, swinging back and forth using his arms as a tether. the former gets used for a couple climbing challenges jumping between walls and swinging poles, which makes for some pleasant execution trials in the midst of the level-specific stuff. the latter never gets expanded on quite as much, probably because ristar maintains no momentum from his swinging when he releases due to bouncing back off of the fulcrum he's attached to, so actually manipulating the technique to achieve certain bounce angles is a bit unintuitive.

bosses are neat across the board; while somewhat cycle-based, the designers trickle a couple small points for attacking them before they're obviously wide-open. some of these (I'm thinking of specifically the bird boss on planet 4 and its array of non-linear projectiles) encourage the i-frame abuse in interesting ways. by the end of the game, however, it seems like they expect you to exploit it pretty openly to get anywhere, and by that point the bosses end up becoming grab spam. definitely makes the fights fly by quicker, but I find myself preferring the more cautious approach I took during the earlier bosses, although I would imagine upon a replay some of the same techniques apply.

I've got real admiration for the theatrical trappings, with panels falling off the back wall and gyrating stagehands gussying up the set as you stroll through, but I think coming back to this style of gameplay doesn't hit the same for me anymore. the treasure hyperfocus on impressive boss fights is here without the richer mechanics of gunstar heroes or alien soldier, leaving much stricter scenarios where the player has less leverage over the proceedings. it's heavily setpiece-driven and thus built upon cracking open whatever essential strategy solves each individual encounter rather than learning particular mechanics over the course of the game. a good example would be izayoi, who has a rapid arm extension attack that aims for your head, so if you throw your head above you right when she starts tracking, you can repeatedly have her whiff and then bop her in the face when she briefly exposes it afterwards. that's a cool little extension of the game's primary mechanic (you can throw your head in any direction), but once you lock it in the repetition of her behavior pattern and her cyclically available weak point make the fight rather static.

not sure what to think of the different abilities you can get with various heads throughout either. theoretically I could've enjoyed having them woven in through enemies or something else organic a la kirby, but having the abilities just sitting out in the open right where you need them feels a bit raw. it's especially apparent given how few there are that alter mobility or do anything other than make combat easier; perhaps a bit of tunnel vision on the developer's part, even though you can tell they attempted some actual level design here. you may get a sequence with some wall-climbing thanks to the spiky head ability, but these segments boil down just to "scale the wall with the powerup" without many complicating factors thrown in aside from a late-game segment where you use it to stall on the ceiling and avoid rocket trains zooming by. the way that abilities are applied in the boss fights also fall into a narrow paradigm, with more than a few bosses having abilities sitting around that effectively shut them off: time stop in multiple fights, both a bomb with crazy damage and invincibility in the aforementioned izayoi fight, and the hammer in both rever face and the final boss fight. really something where some sort of trade-off regarding grabbing the ability would've made more sense; the developers settled instead of interleaving junk abilities in the rotating ability selection that will inevitably cause you to eat a lot of damage until they wear off.

obviously with mikami at the top of the masthead on this one it's very tempting to extract the seeds of resident evil and his later titles out of this one. hmmm... limited inventory, you say? narrow corridors with dangerous enemies that you have to expend limited ammo against or lure away through subtle AI manipulation?? all these environments that loop back on themselves... you can really see the sketches of the spencer mansion here...

but really, it's heavily streamlined zelda in the same way quackshot is heavily streamlined metroid. the structure is effectively five dungeons in the classic single-screen room format strung along with some cute cutscenes of goofy and max trying to rescue pete and pj from a group of pirates. there's no resource management; exiting and reentering a room resets the majority of its state, which includes various throwable objects used to attack enemies. occasionally a puzzle will affect something in the next room over, but by and large every room here is a self-contained puzzle, ranging from "clear all the enemies" to push-block puzzles to a couple things in between. they're pretty solid too: the push-block puzzles often require using certain blocks to line up others, keeping the mapping of routes from becoming rote, and since clearing a room requires paying attention to where throwables are located and how to access them, some cool ideas arise from determining an order of attack and manipulating enemies to assist you with killing others. AI manipulation puzzles are a thing as well, ensconced into the game's toolkit with a bell item that draws aggro and thus controls enemy movement. the concepts stay remarkably fresh throughout, although given that the game is only a couple hours long, it would be tedious if this wasn't the case. a couple favorites of mine would be ones where you trick enemies into walking into oncoming fire from cannons and a particular one where you line up four enemies in a corridor to kill them with a single sliding block.

beyond throwing items and kicking blocks, goofy can hold two items at any given time to assist in particular puzzles. other than the bell one mentioned earlier, the hookshot serves the most "interesting" purpose of the bunch, as it can both stun enemies and create tightropes. not exactly exhilarating, but its latter purpose consumes the item, making searching for new hookshots an additional intrigue that drives exploration. beyond these the applications lack substance; the candle widens the sight radius in infrequent dark rooms, keys are just keys, and shovels can be used to farm life-up items in some rare locales with movable dirt. in this way the restriction of holding only two items at once becomes less demanding, since the latter set are so situational that holding onto them longer than a room or two will always be a waste. by the late game item-reliant puzzles give way to ones that leverage the game's inherent mechanics, so it seems like the designers figured this out as well.

crash-like with a twist: you can emanate a magnetic field around yourself for either polarity, north or south. magnetized items (with color-coded polarity for your convenience) will respond appropriately; if you use the opposite polarity, you'll be pulled towards the object, and if you use the same polarity, you'll be pushed away. in practice the implementation is rather ticky-tacky, with the actual interactable set being limited to jump pads you trigger with the same polarity and swings/ziplines you trigger with the opposite polarity. not necessarily a compelling hook on its own, and indeed, the game is a bit of a hard sell. it uses crash's one-hit kill system without a corresponding amount of shield items, its life system is somewhat stingy, and the game outwardly tends towards trial and error, with many magnetic interactable sections coming down to memorizing polarity sequences.

overcome these punitive aspects, however, and you'll find a rare platformer that virtually never repeats an idea. across sixteen levels the game flips the script at virtually every checkpoint, putting fresh spins on ideas from earlier in the level or introducing completely bespoke setpieces and puzzles. in the last level alone, the game introduces stomping hydraulic presses with temporary platforms in between, a curved rainbow slope leading down to a bottomless pit, piston platforms raising and lowering from an electric pit on a cycle (first on an alternating cycle, secondly all synchronized, with parallel bounce pads to suspend yourself between when the platforms lower), alternating lasers on either side of a gap with bounce pads that fling you to the other side, a series of different cycling platforms over lava with enemies you can throw to destroy doors, and a race to exit a safe before platforms crumble in sequence, with spotlights swirling around that trigger lasers on each line of blocks. that's one five minute level! it's erratic and creative in the best ways, switching tempo on the fly between fast-paced, timed platforming and slower throwable-enemy puzzle sections. there's a klonoa-esque flair to its puzzles, but where klonoa would iterate upon individual mechanics and structures to create conceptually driven levels, magnetic neo just tosses ideas off and moves on. a frantic way to approach design.

that alone makes it fascinating, but in a trial-and-error environment, the actual responses to these challenges would be rigid. however, the magnetism component has the subtle addition of proper inertia regarding when one activates and deactivates their magnetic field. this applies both to timing interaction with swings and ziplines to fly off at certain directions and speeds as well as adjusting the angle off of launch pads. sections involving these interactables become more fluid in how they're approached, with minor skips cropping up in various sections when using the physics to one's advantage. the levels are specifically designed around these mechanics, with many sections having multiple different ways to traverse them explicitly laid out by the developers. the simplest configuration of this is having one path dedicated to magnetic elements and the other as a straight platforming sequence; it seems in some instances they punish players who refuse to learn the speedier yet more opaque magnetism sections with long-winded cycle platforming. however, some sections go even beyond this, having the two paths intertwine in such a way that one could seamlessly transition between them depending on how they conduct their movement. considering its corridor-based level design, the open-ended nature of these setpieces bolsters the explorability of their mechanics and reduces the tedium of repetition.

the environments match the design techniques in their commitment to never staying the same, as demonstrated in level 2-3. the level starts at the base of a pyramid, scaling it and soaring through it as the level progresses. when finally it reaches the stratosphere, the background transforms into an oasis above a bed of clouds, capping off the scene with the stark blue sky above. the game keeps this fervor for change throughout. while simple, it matches the strengths of the dreamcast nicely: flat lighting, clean and seamless characters, and bright colors.

a katamari-like from the actual katamari devs; more specifically the Now Production jobbers who toiled to get keita takahashi's vision off the ground back on the original titles, although many of the devs on this particular title were johnny-come-latelies who started on beautiful katamari. munchables twists the "roll up stuff, get bigger, roll up bigger stuff" loop from katamari into a game all about eating, where your mute spherical protagonists chomp through waves of pirate/alien/frankenfood creations, getting progressively larger after each set of meals. your character's size is unambiguously labeled with a level number, with enemies larger than yourself having a similar label to illustrate who exactly you can eat at any given point. these larger enemies can be bumped with a dash attack that splits them into smaller enemies, although if the difference between you and the enemy is vast enough, each of their component sub-enemies may still be larger than you. interesting systemic element here, where due to the split being an equal amount every time, you can decompose an enemy multiple times, eat a select number of sub-enemies, wait for them to recombine into a slightly smaller enemy than before, and then break them once again to get a set of sub-enemies you can scoop up all at once.

this plays into the other mechanic: chaining. eating an enemy starts an implicit chain timer that replenishes with each additional enemy eaten; when the timer expires, the number of meals counted from enemies eaten during the chain will more or less double. a cute idea in theory, although you may be able to see how that breaks any thought involved with above decomposition mechanic: more at once is always better, so split big enemies into as many sub-enemies as possible every time you see them. however, in the first real levels (in the second world) you can see how this still ends up having that katamari flair to it. a large arena of different zones, each locked behind edible barriers with level requirements, where you can freely navigate across zones and backtrack to your heart's content. similar to how katamari lets the player reason about the optimal size to grab a set of items at once, here you can plan inter-zone chains by carefully planning your feeding route to give you just enough food to bypass barriers while leaving plenty of enemies on the field to grab in a single swoop.

if that was the game it would probably be pretty good; there's a buffer-able, charge-able dash chomp you can use to link enemies in a chain, so there's a comfortable rhythm to the experience that negates the otherwise ho-hum movement. unfortunately, the level designers got antsy and started actually designing some levels. the progression quickly devolves into linear gauntlets, jettisoning the potential for inter-zone chains and replacing it with quick bursts of enemies with ample downtime in between. these in-between sections get muddled with switch "puzzles" and other tired gimmicks that continually throw the katamari loop out the window. the aforementioned issue with chaining gets exacerbated here, because there's never a reason to not decompose big enemies as soon as you see them, so the linearity of the levels becomes even more apparent. when the game veers into actual platforming it's even more appalling: there's virtually no mechanics here to support that outside of some mild air stalling whenever you chomp. much more tedious than it has any right to be.

major props to hal lab for avoiding cashing in on yearly picross 3d releases like in the 2d series; round 2 is a complete overhaul of the original concept. the original picross 3d struggled with integrating its 3d nature into the actual puzzle solving, as the game's loop involved slicing its three-dimensional voxel sculptures into two-dimensional slices, where row hints pointing towards the player had next-to-no bearing on the solution of any given slice. round 2 instantly solves that by transforming the game's mechanics into an adaptation of color picross from the main series, where instead of chiseling out a monochrome image, you instead have to deal with multiple colors on each line. hints perpendicular to a slice now show the possible colors for that particular block, and thus the loop now involves checking hints on all three axes instead of just the slice's primary two. switching to colors also vastly increases the potential number of hint arrangements. as in the first game, each hint may indicate an unbroken string of blocks, two separate strings of blocks, or three+ strings of blocks, but now each of the two colors can have its own variable number of strings per row. the amount of different idioms that arise from this far surpass the original game.

what makes this particular interesting is that the coloration of the blocks is not random or chosen purely mechanically: it actually reflects the construction of each puzzle. the voxels of the original game are now marked blue, and new, variably shaped, curved blocks are marked orange. this addition adds substantial context to the chiseling process: compared to the rectangular jumble of the original, you can now clearly make out the structure of what you're building over time. while aesthetically pleasing in its own right, this also assists with the mental leg work, as educated guesses can be made much more easily with a rough idea of the puzzle's shape and edges. this creates some pseudo-idioms in its own right as well: for example, edges with a taper at either end generally appear as a single blue string and then two one-block orange strings. the game can get quite inscrutable at times without some real brute forcing of all the different possibilities, so the organic natures of the game's mechanical structures eases some of the tedium and allows for some guesswork.

I played a couple more rounds of the original just to feel it out, and honestly playing this has dampened my enthusiasm for that entry. so many QoL additions here, from the ability to swipe across the screen to break/paint a bunch of blocks in one go to finally being able to isolate the edge-most slice from any direction. the structure here has been changed from tiered assortments of puzzles from easy to hard to thematically driven "books" of puzzles, with the easy/normal/hard selection individualized for each puzzle. goes a long way in making the on-ramp smooth coming out of the original; no need to slog through the piss-easy stuff if you already have some experience with the concept. the ranking system is also much more granular, with your amount of misses (now including incorrect painting, unlike the first title) and time taken now converted to a numeric score, which gets multiplied against the chosen difficulty of the puzzle to get your final score and rank. also a testament to how difficult this game can get: later puzzles can have top "rainbow" ranks allow for 25-30 minutes on a single puzzle with up to three or four misses. the very final puzzle in the game took me over 45 min!

it has super mario 64 loosely draped over it, but in reality this is meat-and-potatoes platforming platforming: linear levels, hazards galore, and not a single NPC in sight. would be fair to say it has quite a lot of crash in its DNA, although gex completely jettisons the on-rails setup of crash in favor of more spacious locales. to try to wed its two influences, gex tends to set up its areas as narrow gauntlets at the start with forks in the road around the middle of the level so you can access each objective (red remotes that serve as this game's equivalents of mario's stars). for the majority of objectives, which slap a series of platforming challenges in front of a red remote, this is more than serviceable. it becomes more tedious when occasional objectives require you to find X number of thingamabobs strewn throughout a level; in these you get the unenviable chore of playing the same level forwards and backwards, swinging the camera around in the hope that you'll see a thingamabob tucked behind a wall. this is not to say that gex doesn't have some tricks up its sleeve: the early level Out of Toon starts off with a wide open area for its collectable jaunts (and a hidden silver remote too!) before tightening into a line for the rest of its duration, and the more experimental level Poltergex from late in the game provides a haunted mansion locale with doubly-layered rooms, giving two stacked paths that combine and loop back with a couple of branches off at key points (including a secret third and fourth layer of rooms on top). perhaps this game would be more interesting if it leaned more into these styles of level-building that took more advantage of the full 3D space.

gex's toolkit is brief and functional: he gets a tail bounce after any starting jump, and he gets a flying kick that gives a quick burst of speed while tying him to a particular direction momentarily. these are small additions to an otherwise standard run/jump/tailspin verb set, although the smooth implementation allows for seamless transitions and minor momentum conservation to those looking to speed up their gameplay. the obstacles in each level follow suit, providing a nice overview of traditional 3D platformer obstacles at this nascent point in their history. there are seven primary locales with a handful of levels each that reappear over the course of the game, and thus the gimmicks from earlier ones tend to be iterated upon for later entries. the best of these is probably the Circuit Central stages, which have a variety of manipulable platforms for the player to move across its vertically focused areas, such as a platform that rotates around a center pillar until it is struck, sending the platform off in its tangential direction. these levels also center an time-based energy power-up that allows gex to turn on other platforms and walkways when in contact with them. most other level gimmicks are cycle-based: flying table/drawer-platforms in the haunted mansion areas, rotating flat platforms suspended in air in the space areas, dripping lava in the prehistoric areas. very traditional platformer design, but at the same time it becomes hard to tell which of these were really new ideas in '98 when thinking through the slurry of platformers I've played from this period. it becomes even harder when said challenges are seemingly dropped at random throughout a level without real mechanical through-lines to grasp onto.

I went in thinking the voice lines would be trite, but they verge on nonsensical; it sort of presages a family guy-esque "look at the reference!" formula without the nicety of setting up some punchline in the process. gex rarely emotes anything relevant to the situation (outside of an eyebrow-raising chinese accent in the Kung-Fu Theater areas), instead preferring to sing bars from schoolhouse rock songs or drop random schwarznegger lines. or he just says "it's tail time!" over and over and over again. wanted to dunk on the simpsons writer who apparently penned much of this, Robert Cohen, but looked into his history and found out that his one primary simpsons episode credit was.... Flaming Moe's. very unfortunate, because that episode is a series-defining classic.

better sense of scale than the first regarding both its central mystery and its locales. for one, you're given much more room to stretch your legs, with the second half of the game taking place in an area roughly the size of the entire first game and the first half having a few beefy areas of its own. the multiple mysteries in this one indeed also expand beyond the big endgame twist, and more care has been taken to drop breadcrumbs of intrigue throughout the adventure rather than the meandering approach of curious village. at the same time, the larger cast of characters and tragic lover's bond at the heart of the narrative makes the lack of attention paid to their actual characterization more noticeable. an examination of the folly of a rich family mining the earth and bringing ruin on their workers becomes didactic quickly when it's conveyed entirely through history lessons and layton's personal observations, and the writers' preoccupation with preserving the shock of the primary mystery keeps the actual humans at the core of the conflict from expressing themselves until the final ten minutes. I've cooled off on curious village's twist in the couple of years since I played it, and even though this one is probably more interesting, it still feels like a sudden burst of passion at the end of another meandering 15 hour adventure. then again, more pretty backgrounds than last time, so it all comes out in the wash.

puzzles in general are now better integrated into the story; layton still lives in an alternate reality where everyone is obsessed with puzzles, but at least he's actually using his skill at solving them in practical ways to navigate the world and solve mysteries. I'll hesitatingly say that conceptual puzzles seem to be fewer in number compared to curious village, with more focus on various physical layout puzzles and some math ones here and there. conceptual puzzles have the strength of obfuscating a solution space and thus making the exercise feel more like a product of reasoning and less trial and error, but I do also appreciate the variety of layout puzzles here, especially when it comes to ones like chopping wood in the right place to make a square or placing lanterns to cover every path of a forest. tired of maze puzzles tho; really no mental leaps required for them beyond just following each path to the right place. those are really the other extreme compared to conceptual puzzles, where the whole solution space is there for you to look at and you just check off whatever path leads to the finish. the best conceptual puzzles come on the critical path at least, so you won't miss any of them.

there's also better scaffolding around the ADV parts of the experience to keep exploration fresh thanks to some new integrated minigames. there's a persistent puzzle with an exercising hamster you must lead around a grid in order to have him reach a step count, and by solving puzzles around the world you can win items with new properties for him to chase. the puzzle itself is cool, and having a variety of ways to reach the maximum step count goes a long way to making the puzzle feel less prescriptive. when that's reached, he'll pop up in the world to tell you where you can find hint coins, removing the pixel hunting component of the game completely. there's camera components you can find as well that, once assembled, can be used to take pictures of specific rooms in the game. this opens up a "find the differences" type game that will open up a bonus puzzle; another neat addition that complements the main draw nicely. the third is less interesting: you can win different tea ingredients to make people tea? in-game there's no benefit to doing this, although I have a feeling some of the post-game puzzles will unlock if you can serve all the different kinds of tea. problem is figuring out all of the different brews is complete trial-and-error, and although some NPCs will give you recipes, others are much more vague. would help if some NPCs who want tea didn't suddenly stop wanting tea if you fuck up their initial order, though considering that they randomly re-enable later I have a feeling this is just some scripting issue.

real left-field win here for atlus, adapting the grisly world of surgery to an arcade-like game designed by the digital devil saga staff and helmed by one of the designers of the hamtaro gba games. it's primarily a game of juggling various timers, specifically the main time limit, the drain on your patient's vitals, and the time until a new hazard spawns in that will increase the drain rate. kyriaki, the first of a set of viruses called GUILT that make up the second half of the game, best exemplifies this. it appears by creating an incision in the patient's tissue, which will bleed and thus increase the drain on the patient. locating one permanently requires using the ultrasound to locate it (preferably after creating the incision) and then cutting it out of the tissue with the scalpel, after it will which it will make another incision, leaving you with two extra cuts to deal with. to kill it, you target it with a laser for some amount of seconds, but leaving the laser in one place for too long will puncture the tissue, requiring you to drain the resulting hemorrhage and close the wound with healing gel. when multiple of these appear at once, you'll be put in uncomfortable circumstance of having to juggle your focus on each one as well as the various injuries you incur along the way, down to decisions such as "should I try to cut them out now or suture wounds while I wait for them to line up so I can cut them both out at once." choosing wrong can often mean a quick death for your patient, especially in particular scenarios where killing one on its own might lead to two more coming out from underneath and causing many extra incisions at once. reminds me of something like diner dash in an odd way.

draining vitals isn't a one-way street however, as you have two separate tools for increasing vitals in exchange for time. the primary one is your stabilization serum, which gives a quick burst of vitals in exchange for the time you take raising the plunger of the syringe to fill it; the amount you raise the vitals scales with the amount you fill into the syringe. alternatively, you can use the aforementioned healing gel, which lightly raises vitals as applied by rubbing the screen. both are limited resources that refill slowly when not being used and will refill completely after a short lockout when they deplete, and alternating between the two becomes a natural tendency in the later operations when simply fighting the virus on its own can't outpace the natural vitals drain. later levels extend these limitations to other tools as well: final boss savato repeatedly locks out your scalpel when severing the spider-virus's webs, and in its second phase managing your time remaining on the laser to both proactively deal damage to the virus itself as well as reactively dealing with mini-spiders it floods the tissue with imposes further considerations on when and where to strike. the best levels impose malleable rotations on the player, where multiple tools must be swapped between in series. these are rarely static, as the often twitchy viruses and the wounds they inflict will keep the player weaving in defensive maneuvers dynamically. learning this balance between offense and defense evokes the tension and precision of the real operating room.

the level of creativity on display with the operations is also worth applauding. the latter half of the game (especially the "boss rush" chapter six) begins to repeat itself a fair bit, but earlier on the game is more than happy to give one-off operations their own bespoke mechanics, from clots staggered in sequence traveling through winding veins to draining fluid from a man's lungs on an airplane undergoing heavy turbulence. the game even weaves in non-surgery elements just to keep things fresh, such as some hexagonal block puzzles and a mid-story bomb disposal. as with any game like this, duds rear their head as well. two of the GUILT strains become annoying for opposite reasons: triti and its rules for cell expansion (it's similar to conway's game of life) are poorly explained and tend to mandate a specific solution that will jeopardize the operation with any single mistake. conversely, deftera depends on two viruses colliding in order to vacuum out of the tissue, and while its random movement can be manipulated by using the gel as a fence of sorts, ultimately a good performance on these levels comes down to rolling lucky on getting good collisions back to back. falling back on more of a puzzle approach as in the former example or mechanics out of the player's hands as in the latter example can work when it's a singular operation or a break from the action, but given that both of these get repeated a few times apiece, it's hard to be quite as forgiving.

a triumph for scenario design aficionados. hour after hour of slices of the real world perfectly aligned into a playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet deus ex routinely weaves both together. for every point A to point B underground lair with traps laid out in sequence there is a completely open venue, such as the suffocating catacombs and their dimly lit hallways giving way to the Champs-Élysées avenue of paris, with a bakery to pilfer contraband drugs from, a hostel with full bar access, and an arms dealer's loaded apartment, all off the beaten path from your main objective. military bases and science labs retain the layout you'd expect had you ever toured one, and you'll find that locker rooms, rows of cubicles, and break rooms feature just as prominently in the dungeon crawling as warehouses with guards patrolling or tightly wound mazes of laser tripwires and turrets. the authenticity and legibility of these areas comes first, and yet more often than not the designers still manage to weave in appropriate challenges without violating each location's fidelity in the process.

and really, dungeon crawling is the name of the game here, more or less. at least half of the game takes place in some sort of complex with a destination and a set of non-linear gates along the way, all of which serve as hinge points for the player to choose which resources to expend. the "immsim" label comes from just how many resources have all gotten slammed together in your control: lockpicks and "multitools" for bypassing security, ammo for many different varieties of firearms, bio-energy for utilizing your augmented abilities, and a slew of consumable items meant for tanking bullets, running past enemies undetected, or breathing under water for long periods of time. at its most taut, the game generally puts some sort of barrier up in your way and then a way around it, with the direct option being something like combat or picking a lock and the indirect option being finding a vent or waterway to circumvent the barrier. with enough of these situations back to back, the game hopes that you'll avoid sticking to one gameplay style in order to preserve your resources in that area for later when they seem more necessary; you can't crack every door with lockpicks, so you'll probably have to get your hands dirty or crawl on your belly here and there if you want to keep your picks for when the alternative is, say, running through a irradiated area. the nice part of this is that it truly does work: I explored, snuck around, and fought off enemies all in equal measure throughout the game through entirely organic response to each of the situations. the downside is by endgame the resource economy has completely turned in your favor assuming you've been rotating all of your options, making decisions on resource expenditure past a certain point much more about cleaning out your inventory rather than rationing.

when the game is firing on all cylinders, you'll get something like bunker III from the aforementioned catacombs. the area is two large rooms with a camera and turret tracking you at the back of the first room right in front of a cell full of hostages, multiple floors connected by stairs with archways for cover in the second room, and a back hallway swarming with rocket-strapped operatives where the camera/turret controls and a key to the next reside; a waterway additionally connects the front of the first room with the back of the second room. here you have actual tradeoffs to deal with: just grabbing the key and skipping the whole area by going through the waterway works, but the coverage in the back hallway can be intense depending on the AI's behavior, and your direct path to the key is blocked by strategically placed crates as soon as you leave the waterway. gunning for the security controls instead is feasible, and you can leverage the fact that hacking computers (sometimes?) pauses enemies for a bit to quickly run out, disable everything, and hop back in the waterway. you could also sneak in from the front and use an augmentation that hides you from cameras to avoid triggering the turret, and if you rescue the hostages with lockpicks instead of locating the cell key and leave the area early, you'll get the next area's key from their camp leader anyway. when the game constructs situations like these, they not only make the discrete tradeoffs impactful on the flow of a given level, they also weave it into the actual second-to-second movement, stealth, and combat as well.

at its worst it's the opposite: individual rooms with a guard or two and maybe a computer system or locked door stitched together by long hallways that inoculate each scenario from one another. in these sections the main appeal is exploration, either through finding nooks and crannies hidden from view or by reading the many "data cubes" with flavor text strewn around. it can still be exciting, especially earlier on when you don't have tools to detect enemies through walls and the suspense of moving around still persists. later in the game when one has more abilities at their disposal, breaking apart puzzles or barriers by jumping over them with enhanced height, moving large crates to use as stairs with enhanced strength, or shooting down doors with a mastered rifle ability can potentially make the monotony less apparent. some of the barriers don't fare quite as well due to a lackluster implementation: the hacking, for instance, is more or less free even with minimal upgrades, and for every camera you have to actually maneuver around there's at least four you'll disable without thinking just because the security terminals are easy to access. if the mission locations didn't adhere to the small details of real environments or didn't have cute little secrets in vents and lock-boxes, these issues would likely overcome the holistic experience and result in tedium.

the tiny details extend further than objects in the world as well. from early on when one of your augmented colleagues begins spontaneously complaining about getting the wrong can of soda from a vending machine, I had hoped that the scripting for the NPCs would stay high quality, and it absolutely persisted to the final moments of the game, when a civilian mechanic distraught by my actions pulled a gun on me behind my back. the tight pacing of the levels compared to a full open world experience allows for many of the individual NPCs to have unique dialogue, behavior, and even inventory when subdued. of these the most fascinating to me may have been a conversation with a chinese bartender in hong kong, who extolled the CCP's commitment to capitalist enterprise outside the purview of the new world order by emphasizing authoritarian nationalism against main character denton's idealized western democratic order. it's something you wouldn't see now in the xi jinping era and weirdly reflective of the game's almost non-ideological view of politics: people-facing organizations controlled by layers upon layers of shadowy organizations, each manipulating social behavior in a top-down way compared to the bottom-up class struggle and ideological superstructure of reality. not really a thought-provoking work unless you're particularly animated by vague gesturing towards "control" and "liberty," but at least you can tell the developers didn't take it too seriously either. there's roswell-style gray aliens running around for christ's sake.

the appeal of a convention stems from the yawning tide of people who embody it; a mass of the like-minded enveloping a space, to the extent that one could never meet or know every one at once. the homogeneity would not be pleasant if it permeated our entire lives, but to momentarily enter a crowd knowing that each person among it could understand your drive and passion is invigorating. when I come to these I tend to roam solo, poking my head into every room I find and silently people-watching from the sidelines. I greet friends of course, and I may strike up a conversation in line waiting for a cabinet, but I find my immersion into the atmosphere alone provides a mental balm before even socializing comes into play.

every year going to magfest I plan new ways to make the experience more comfortable: a well-rounded diet, planned breaks, and more consistent sleeping arrangements. this time my new innovation was a fanny pack, replacing the cumbersome backpack of previous trips with something less intrusive and throwing my misplaced sense of embarrassment at wearing one out the window. with this came a swap from my switch to the smaller form factor of my 3ds. I've come to really lean into my 3ds as of late, bringing it to long waits at the barber or when lazing around at a friend's house. at some point I realized that all my downtime wasted on scrolling twitter could be funneled into a marginally more meaningful hobby by using my 3ds instead. besides, the console is becoming a bit retro! recently a young child saw me with one and asked their mother about the strange two-screened phone I was holding, begging to peer over my shoulder while I played dragon quest.

bringing the 3ds to magfest also gave me the opportunity to try to shore up my puzzles on streetpass, which I had neglected for quite some time. the entire idea behind streetpass - every person's 3ds signalling out in an attempt for two to pass each other and exchange information - was an outgrowth of nintendo's attempts to turn the handhelds into tools for positive social reinforcement, originating at least as far back as the nascent pokemon exchanges on the original game boy. it turned the 3ds into something that continually engaged with the world while you did, giving you brief glimpses into the lives of those around you while you traveled. the most basic of these was puzzle swap, less of a game and more of a mass exercise in collecting pieces of various puzzles distributed by nintendo through occasional content updates. some pieces you could roll for using "play coins" collected while walking with the 3ds in your pocket, but some were exclusively gained through trading with others, and in general the most consistent way to locate certain pieces was by trading with as wide of a group of people as possible. of course, this collaborative effort operated best in a world of mass public transit and high population density, traits missing from the suburban american experience. my regular streetpass contacts were ones at my high school, and the minimal outside interaction led to an eventual disinterest in churning through the same puzzle collections day after day. the eventual death of the 3ds only cemented the end of my streetpassing days.

even just from waiting in the eye-watering badge pickup line at the con, snaked switchback style across an expo room before leaking out from one side of the building to the other, I had already matched with at least 10 people, showering me with new pieces and puzzles I had never gotten a chance to download. a feature past my time called "bonus chance" had kicked in, giving me many pieces from each individual I streetpassed instead of just one like the old days and letting me mop up my collection way quicker than I had anticipated. every break I took during the con seemed to have at least a couple more people trickle into my waiting queue, and by the end of the con I had collected every trade-only piece with less than 100 to go overall. there were people walking around with all of the pieces, people walking around with just a few, some who had scarcely updated their streetpass since the mid '10s, and others who seemed to have gotten in on the tail-end of the whole phenomenon, with lots of pieces for the last few puzzles and barely any for the early ones. for a weekend, this social game that had withered away over five years prior got the chance to bloom again.

these people who I previously just saw from afar, stood next to at adjacent cabinets, or sat behind at a panel now became little figments inside my 3ds. I had always perceived the con as a regional experience, but their data now told me there were those as far as the west coast or even alaska participating, perhaps expats who had moved close by, or former residents flying back to stay with friends. little tidbits such as their most recently played game gave me insight into their tastes, and many of them had included celebratory messages of excitement for the return of the con. their collections, their smiling avatars, their flairs, their messages; it humanized these many con attendees who I often had passed by and further strengthened that bond we shared of mutual attendance. after years of using an ugly caricature of mips from sm64 as my avatar, I finally changed it to one that reflected my face. it only seemed natural to give them the same clarity they gave me.

adding another feather to my cap by winning this year's monkey ball tournament at magfest after last year's typing of the dead win. a friend of mine has run lights and lasers at magfest on and off for the last decade or so, and when he told me there was a monkey ball cabinet in the arcade during a walk-through the night before it opened I was overjoyed. memories of old cons with filthy, unmaintained cabinets that one could barely roll through beginner courses on drifted away as I hoped this would finally give me the monkey ball arcade experience I had waited for. the last-minute announcement of a tournament was even more appealing; this would finally put my endless pandemic training to good use.

they had two cabinets in fact: an original stand-up cab, near flawless except for an uncomfortably dim screen, and a naomi kit and 3d-printed banana shoved into an astro city cab for those who preferred to sit down. both cabs were swarmed at open time, but I snuck in some time on the astro city cab late the first night. the setup was appreciated but god was it sensitive; imagine a joystick with the same deadzones and behavior of the gamecube analog stick, but with a porn-quality cock-sized banana attached to it, nauseating yellow from the printer filament. I resorted to two-handing the monster, using one hand to brace it while gently pressing it with the other. the original cabinet was completely stiff by comparison. even minimal motions required cranking it to either side, and certain full-length presses felt like they lacked the tilting distance of the gamecube version. definitely a learning curve, but it was to be expected. it was my first time, after all.

unlike typing of the dead, which at least had some head-to-head scoring support, monkey ball's tournament was structured as consecutive single credit runs between two players in bracket matches. begs the question of why they didn't just do a pool structure since it was all single elim anyway; a friend of mine who runs my hometown arcade organized the proceedings, so I wasn't about to crawl up his ass about it. score attack also left the crowd puzzled, as most of us ignore score in comparison to floor count. a quick google search as the competition started rolling led me to this particular guide (specifically section 2.6), which outlined the scoring system in some detail. effectively the number of seconds (including centiseconds) multiplied by 100 gives the bulk of the score, with the score doubled if it was done in less than half of the allotted time. bananas contribute another 100 points for each one obtained. however, warps contribute significantly more points, as a green warp goal will give 10000 additional points on the base value (reds give 20000) along with an additional multiplier for each stage skipped. the latter multiplier makes up for score lost on skipped levels, but the base bonus is pretty intense overall; there aren't levels that can give you anything close to 10000 points as a base, much less several in a row! when it comes to a score attack competition, warps are overly centralizing, to the extent that a player could perform worse and still secure a win by locking a warp.

so to the player I unfairly trampled first round, I'm real sorry. you breezed through beginner without dropping a single life, showing off little skips and flair in the process. I popped in after and warped through most of it and demolished your score, even tho I dropped a life and missed the extra stages. it was honestly a screwjob, and I don't blame you for running off afterwards. in the final round a similar issue happened, where two people in a match on expert each got the warp on floor 2, with one person failing at the infamous floor 7 (also known as Exam-C), and the other getting a couple floors beyond that. the former person flew through the warp and got the time bonus, doubling a 70k reward to 140k points and completely blowing the other person out of the water, floors be damned. hell, the same round I took a single credit all the way to floor 16 and I still did not get as many points as she did thanks to an overly cautious run through floor 2. it really was a bit ridiculous. however, these tournaments are about understanding the rules, not necessarily agreeing on whether they're fair. so, emboldened by my rather strong previous showing (only one other person got a run past floor 10), I threw caution to the wind on my floor 2 attempt, snagged the time bonus, and that was it, even with a total choke on floor 7.

of course, in console play I can comfortably take a 1cc all the way through expert extra, so this shouldn't have felt that impressive, but on the chunky banana the gamefeel transformed the game a fair bit. the whole tournament was on the original cabinet with the weightier controls, so nailing the precision of floors like 14 where nudges around pegs that will bounce you off ledges was as easy as just pressing the stick in the right direction; no attention to minuscule movement required. it's when it got to floors demanding quick build-ups of speed or wild tilts such as floor 18 that it began to dawn on me that perhaps the cabinet was not as in perfect of a condition as I had hoped; could have also been some early control mistuning by the developers, but I'd like to think they understood their own game well enough to design levels around the original stick. still, we got lucky that plenty of extremely challenging stages are front-loaded in expert, as we all still got a good show of some very solid east coast players taking a crack at a sega classic. maybe we would've all preferred to play on gamecube instead tho lol