Despite owning a PS5 for nearly 2 years now, I have only just got around to playing this game packed in the console. I had always heard how great it was and how it was still the best example of utilising the features of the PS5 controller. I'm glad I finally got around to it as it really was a delight to play. The stuff it does with the controller really is wonderful and definitely the best use of it I've experienced. Even ignoring that, it's a good 3D platformer in its own right. Furthermore there is all the nostalgia you get from unlocking various bits and pieces of random tech from PlayStations history and then saying the other Astrobots performing scenes from classic PlayStation games. The only thing I can criticise about it was that there was some very frustrating motion control bits with a rocket ship and the monkey climbing was also very annoying. But overall it was a great time and I hope Team Asobi get chance to make a fully fledged game in the future.

I recently purchased a "pack" of Oreo X PAC-MAN Limited Edition biscuits, and felt a tinge of impostor syndrome. Am I really a big enough Pac-Fan to eat these? I mean, sure, I can accurately identify Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde no problem, and I know all the words to Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever" off by heart - a song that rips the songwriting traditions of the blues out of the Mississippi Delta and righteously appropriates them to discuss the real hardships (being a gamer) - but I don't really rate Pac-Man as one of my favourite Namco games. It's almost a little too elemental. Too primal. It's a chase game, and that clearly had influence on personal favourites like Dig Dug and Metal Gear, but it doesn't have any of that Dig Dug or Metal Gear stuff that I like in it, either.

I can't decide whether releasing Pac-Man as a standalone Neo Geo Pocket Color game in 1999 was an act of extraordinary hubris, or an earned confidence. I mean, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on the Game Boy Color was one thing, but this is fucking Pac-Man. No new modes or anything. Pac-Man. One step up from fucking Pong. Maybe if you're younger, all these 20th century years seem to blend together in a big "I don't care" grey area, but we were playing Quake III online by then (or at least, we'd heard someone's big brother did it once, but he had to get off the internet after one match because it was costing a fortune on the phone bill). Seeing this on the shelf below the Game Boys and Pokémon instantly lost all credibility SNK may have hoped to have gained with the under-20s crowd. In the 90's, "retro" was incredibly niche. Like, I was aware of the Street Fighter and Bubble Bobble collections on PS1, but when I imagined someone buying them, they were like studious historians, analysing the software like it had just been dug out of a pharaoh's tomb. These things weren't conceivable as "entertainment" for "people". Who the fuck bought this at launch?

Now, I am that decrepit auld bastard. NGPC Pac-Man is cool. A little obnoxiously so, actually. It kind of predicted the retro boom that would start to take hold in the following decade. Pac-Man is a gaming icon. Literally. He's probably the little button you press on your phone screen to get the emulators on. It's difficult to view him objectively as The Packing Man, unencumbered by the decades of cultural impact that followed, but having a little one-and-done cartridge like this helps.

NGPC Pac-Man's big feature is a little rubber ring that comes in the box. You attach it to the NGPC's microswitch stick and it blocks off the diagonal directions. It's actually really effective, and makes the game feel much snappier, as you're locked to 90 degree turns. SNK are an arcade developer, first and foremost, and their approach in designing a two-button handheld is actually really cute. I think if you're happy to go along with that, and not moan about how naive it is to use this strategy to compete with the Game Boy Color, it's super cool that they put Pac-Man on here. And they set aside some of the budget to manufacture a little piece of rubber to make it as satisfying as it ought to be.

Pac-Man is fun. It's immediately speedy. You don't even press a button, and you shoot right out of the gate. All you can do is steer, avoiding the ghosts, attempting to squeeze into a corner of the map that still has power pellets on it, and seeing if you can keep dodging the baddies long enough to clear the board. Each ghost has their own characteristic, and theoretically, you should be able to use this to determine which direction they'll take at a crossing, but I've still to take the lesson of which one's "Speedy" and which one's "Pokey" to heart. Even ignorant of the specific attributes, it adds something to the game, to know that they're each subtly distinct, and it's a fun dynamic to have in the background, as you do your best to survive.

If you've played enough 80s arcade games, you'll know that Pac-Man can be done very wrong. Have you ever played Wizard of Wor? Fuck me, man. What a nightmare. Pac-Man was pioneering. Most games of the time were either about fighting, sport, or attempting to rip-off Star Wars as liberally as Lucasfilm's legal representation would allow. Pac-Man wasn't trying to be something else. It was proud to be a videogame, and it did something that could only really take the form of a videogame. It was praised for its original, non-violent concept (eating ghosts is not in violation of the Geneva Convention, apparently). It didn't assume anything of its audience. It opened up videogames to entirely new players. Anybody could play this. All the Nintendo oldguard see Pac-Man as the gold standard, and Miyamoto's even pulled the strings, buddying up with Namco bigwigs, to get his own four-player fangame bundled in with copies of R: Racing Evolution. Without a strong affinity for videogames, Keita Takahashi signed up with Namco because they made stuff like Pac-Man, and what other business was committing themselves to fun, novel ideas like that? We all benefit from Pac-Man's glow, and we ought to respect him.

Will you play it for more than five minutes? Probably not. But that's okay, too. We need little games like this.

Got this as a random game on my Miyoo Mini and it's ace! A real wee treat!

I reckon I'd have been raging if I'd bought it when I was a kid, as it's quite short, but it is a very satisfying wee game.

Oh and the music! So good.

One last turf war before the plug is pulled on my favourite era of videogames since the PS1.

Well, a few games, and several games which disconnected due to server instability. An all time classic. Memories of hot summer evenings in 2015 playing Squid Jump while waiting in the lobby. The lobby music sending me right back to the time.

My friend actually bought me this. I got home from work to find a parcel with my name changed to an ink related pun. I couldn't believe my luck. Iffy servers be damned, I spent hours upon hours on this game, and for a while it was never bettered. It took a lot of updates for the sequel to rival this one.

It may have been superseded and eventually bettered, but this will always be my favourite.

Stay fresh 🥲

Ah. That’s more like it.

As the one person I know who likes Donkey Kong Country, Drill Dozer, and that one burrowing escape sequence from Ori and the Will of the Wisps, I knew Pepper Grinder was going to be right up my alley. What impressed me though, was just how precisely the game melded its influences into something that felt simultaneously fresh yet familiar. The level design is classic obstacle escalation (introduce a concept, scale it up, throw in a twist, and then run the player through a final exam into their victory lap) with DKC inspired secrets with skull coin collectibles for unlocking secret levels. Many of the usual formula beats are present as well to force execution tests, from the usual moving parts in the forms of cannons, rope swings, and grappling points, to constantly present sources of danger like the freezing ocean or the temporary dirt patches created from cooling lava. What sets Pepper Grinder apart however, is that the terrain itself is the main obstacle. It feels like such a natural pairing to seamlessly mesh environmental navigation with the course’s very foundation, and the best moments of the game lean into funneling the player through various layers of shifting and isolated terrain while tearing through all that may stand in their way.

That said, I think to really understand the nuances of Pepper Grinder, one has to readily commit to its time attack mode. I could have been sold on the game-feel alone as an amalgam of Donkey Kong Country’s momentum physics and Drill Dozer’s force feedback, but playing under circumstances that force you to squeeze every possible second out of the timer gives the player a better appreciation of its movement mechanics. Pepper is not very fast on foot, nor can she naturally jump very far. Therefore, you’d think that most speed comes from tunneling through terrain, but it’s not quite that either. Rather, the player has to maintain momentum through the interplay of drilling and jumping by exiting terrain via the drill run (boosting right as you’re about to leave a patch of dirt), which commits the player to the projected arc leaving the terrain but with the reward of significantly more speed. The result is some of the weightiest and most satisfying movement I have ever experienced in any platformer. I was constantly figuring out new ways to save seconds by timing by boosts both within terrain and right before exiting terrain (since you can’t just spam boost and using it too early can lock you out from getting the necessary boost jump out of terrain), skipping certain obstacles entirely with well-placed drill runs, and figuring out how to manage my health to bypass unfavorable cycles and damage boost past mines and thorns. Some of those gold time attack medals were tight ordeals, but I absolutely savored every moment of the grind.

Bosses as a whole are a significant improvement from the usual quality of those in Donkey Kong Country. You’re not safe just waiting above ground, and burrowing to dodge attacks forces you to at least dash-dance underground since drilling means you can’t stay in one place. As a result, the player is constantly on the move, and you’re incentivized to do so anyways given that most of the bosses require multiple hits to defeat and aren’t the usual “invincible until they’re done attacking” crop from DKC. The biggest complaint I can levy here is that boss hit/hurtboxes can feel imprecise; I’ve heard that many players have had difficulty figuring out how to correctly drill into the beetle boss’s underbelly, and while I had no issues there, I did die a few times from the skeleton king’s heel hitbox where there was no visible attack in its vicinity. Still, I much prefer these boss fights over many of its peers, and figuring out when and how to best aim drill runs from the ground to speedrun bosses was just as much of a pleasure as speedrunning the courses themselves.

There are a few questionable design choices that could be touched upon here. Firstly, there’s a shop system present where you can purchase optional stickers from a gacha machine as well as temporary health boosts. The former is mostly forgivable given that they don’t impact the gameplay otherwise and can be cleared in about three minutes of purchasing and opening capsules. That said, I feel as if the latter could be removed entirely given that I never felt pressured to purchase insurance for courses and bosses, especially because I was often taking hits anyways to skip past obstacles and because you’re not going to regain the extra health capacity in-level once it’s gone. Secondly, bosses in time-attack mode force you to watch their opening unskippable cutscenes before getting to the action, and this gets extremely irritating when you’re constantly restarting fights to get better times. Finally, Pepper Grinder has a few gimmick areas in the forms of a couple of robot platforming segments, two snowmobile sections where you just hold forward on the control stick, and a couple of run-and-gun levels with little drilling involved. I can look past most of these given that they don’t take up much time and that I enjoyed all the minecart levels from DKC as is, though I do wish that they spaced the gimmicks apart a bit more given that levels 4-3 and 4-4 both have significant run and gun segments sending each course off.

If I did have any lasting complaints, it would be that I just want more of this game. Most players will finish adventure mode in under four hours. That said, even despite a lack of polish here and there, I absolutely adore Pepper Grinder. At this time of writing, I’ve 100%ed the game and even gone back to a few time trials after snagging all the gold medals just to further polish my records. It’s often difficult for me to pin down what makes a game feel good to play, but in this case, I just know. Pepper Grinder feels like an adrenaline rush made just for me, and though its execution barriers and short length will likely make this a tough sell for many, it is undoubtably some of the most fun I have had with a game this year. If you’re curious or enjoy anything that I’ve discussed in this write-up, please give the demo a shot. They don’t make 2D platformers like this anymore, and Pepper Grinder’s existence leaves me wondering why when they absolutely killed it on their first try.