It killed off fast arena-style shooters in the singleplayer side and it's influence indirectly spawned two decades of FPS campaigns becoming centered around storytelling with focus on scripted setpieces and linear corridor shootouts, rather than the movement-heavy combat and exploration through the huge levels of Hexen or Quake. A trend which would reach it's logical conclusion with the Call of Duty series and would not end until the relatively recent wave of "boomer shooter" inspired indie FPS like Ultrakill, DUSK, etc.

But hey, still a great game, it felt like playing some sort of classic resident evil game but in first person. It still retains some of the fast movement DNA from older shooters, it's engine kickstarted two of the best multiplayer shooters ever (Team Fortress, Counter Strike) and probably has the best atmosphere of any PC game up to that point.

Such a comfy game. Maybe i'm alone in this but I like the blocky, top-down map perspective far more than the isometric style from 2000 and found it kinda sad it never got used more often both in the series and in city builders in general. Plus I also really kinda just like the simplicity of it, the map builder and all those graphics sets. I remember once making a weird ass scenario based on the Dust Bowl, and trying to recreate Springfield from The Simpsons
That said, the SNES version and mayyybe SimCity Enhanced (has some goofy ahh fmvs) are the versions to go with.

I don't know what it is about Artoon/Arzest making games with artstyles that look pretty cool, but once you start playing them they range from kinda weaksauce to genuinely painful. There's Ghost Vibration, Balan Wonderworld, Swords of Destiny... and, sadly, this one seems to make up the list as well.

I have nothing to criticize about the game art-wise. The music is sick and fits the game like a glove, and the artstyle is really cool, and i aboslutely love Blinx's chesire-cat design made by the designer of Sonic himself, Naoto Oshima. (even though the western cover of the game makes him look like a really dumb 90's 'tude mascot, which probably contributed to poor sales)
The biggest problem with Blinx is the gameplay, and the problem with Blinx's gameplay is the pacing. You play Mario 64, Rayman 2 or honestly pretty much any other 3D platformer for 10 minutes, and even if you've never touched a single platformer before, it all clicks within those 10 mins and you get better at the game from there. Blinx? I've played this shit for hours, and it still feels like i'm playing it wrong. The game seems to place an emphasis on being fast with the grades for levels that pretty much only factor how fast you beat them, yet the game features one of the slowest moving videogame characters i've ever played with, with really basic combat based around picking up trash and throwing it at enemies, which requires careful aiming. So you're trying to go fast with some of the most slow-as-molasses physics for a 3D platformer and with not-so straightforward combat. It's a recipe for tilting.

It wasn't until i looked up high-level playthrough clips of this game online that i figured out that this game actually does have a speedrun skill ceiling, i even realized that through a combination of Fast Forward pieces + Super Bombs you buy at the store, you can jump up to high areas you weren't meant to reach. The thing is, nearly every single pro-level gameplay vid i've seen seems to have mostly to do with spamming fast forward whenever available, and the other time pieces were at best only used to beat a few puzzles on levels. Other than a few sections where you can use Rewinds with falling platforms or breaking pillars to reach higher areas, FF feels like the only power that matters for beating levels fast. And some of the other tricks like the bomb jumping feel really pinpoint. Most intuitive hacks also just don't work. Try stacking barrels on top of eachother? The lower one will just get crushed.
Yeah, sometimes you have to get on some secret areas to get the cat medals, but they rarely ever seem to connect with the fastest routes for beating a stage. It feels like an artificial attempt at replayability by having some of the medals far-apart from the levels themselves so you have to choose between a beating a stage fast and getting a good grade, or getting the cat medals, on top of the fact that you'll have to replay some stages to grind for gold or get time pieces for another level sooner or later.
That's the thing about this game. Blinx isn't actually too hard to beat in and of itself, but it's REALLY hard to play in a satisfying way. Either you're concrete-scraping your way across the game with no style or regard for time or grades whatsoever, or you looked up playthroughs and guides and learned how to beat a level in 20 seconds. The learning curve is almost non-existant. It's no wonder why this game has such a small speedrunning community despite feeling literally built around that.

I had no idea it was possible to make a 3D platformer feel grindy until BLiNX came around. The earlier levels in the game only have about 100-400G to collect, so you have to be scoop up a shitton of gold in order to get Sweepers, Health Upgrades and Time Holders to make your job less annoying and it becomes yet another way for the game to try and make you replay stages for the hell of it. On top of that, you have to rebuy sweepers you've replaced. Swapped out the TS-16000 for the vacuum that sucks up water for a few secret cat medals on Deja Vu Canals? That'll be 4000 Gold plus tip.
For extra insult to injury, the best sweeper in the game is a 100% completion reward and still has to be bought at the Shop for 90000 gold. What's the point? By the time you even unlock this item you will already have done everything worthwhile in this game. It would have been better off as an unlockable for beating the game normally or just really expensive but available at World 7 or so.

Really though, i think the biggest thing holding this game back from being fun is the fact that they wanted you to beat ALL the enemies in order to beat levels. It's bad enough that time monsters become absolute hitsponges on latter levels and some of them like the frogs or the rolling spikes take an annoying amount of care, timing and precision to get rid of quickly, but it also really breaks the flow of levels that may initially seem big, open-ended and incentivizing to carve your shortcuts to the end of the level, by instead forcing you to basically follow a breadcrumb trail of enemies to complete them. You'll just have to accept the fact that stages in this game are a lot more linear than they seem.

Not to be a heretic and try to reform the Holy Blinx, but i feel this game could have been much more fun with two simple changes
1) Every stage having a 'minimum' amount of enemies to beat in order to clear it, this can vary depending on the size and difficulty of the stage, so that you can beat levels much faster with alternative paths.
2) Being allowed to buy the time pieces you need at the item stores. It would eliminate the need to replay levels just for the sake of getting the necessary time pieces for other ones. The game lets you do this with bombs and hearts already, so why not do the same for rewinds, fast forwards and such?

This game is basically an ongoing trainwreck of mechanics with decent potential just smashing into one another without any consistency. It is one of those "i really wanted to like it" kinda games for me. It's really hard for me to say i actually hate this game because... just fucking look at it, my god.
It's the official mascot platformer of the XBOX. The same console brand i always associated with fratbro american football games and Military Industrial Complex manly testosterone shooters, and it looks like a cartoony scrimblo furry fever dream. And with the Original Xbox itself being sometimes seen as a home for challenging games like Ninja Gaiden and all those Fromsoft titles, i do feel it's pretty fitting that the official mascot platformer is one built around speedrunning and tricks. You could probably even consider Blinx to be a pioneer in that territory, but Jesus Christ, if i was a nine year old in 2002, i wouldn't have known what the hell to make out of this game either.
I kinda wanna play the sequel now but i heard with that one they just ran out in the opposite direction and made the game really easy. I just hope it doesn't trivialize time controls too much.

I told myself "oh man if this is just Jumping Flash 1 but better, it's a sure 4.5 star for me!"
Well... it's weird. More than anything, i consider this game to be just Jumping Flash+.

The levels are clearly different, larger and more challenging than the original but the overall structure of the game seems the same. Six worlds, Bonuses on the first levels per world, enclosed levels, conveyor belts and fans, you know, all the gimmicks from the 1st. The stage themes are really interesting too, moving from generic mario level theme stuff like Desert World, Water World, Space World... To a feudal japan themed world, another one set in a factory, another in a theme park, and such. All of which are trapped akin to ships in a bottle by some Kabuki Ballerina guy. Also, you are now rescuing the enemy of the first game and his helper floating pod things called Muu Muus, which is pretty wholesome.
Other than that there are also a few new powerups, bosses that are somewhat harder (although honestly none as good as Shadow Robbit from the 1st game) and a slew of extra levels and the super mode after beating the game, as well as collecting Medals which are basically the game's Achievements for doing certain stuff, although i felt some of these were a bit too easy to get.

Sooo yeah, it's Jumping Flash! 2 for sure. There are no flaws or negative changes worth taking stars away for but also no big improvements or new mechanics worth giving them either. The only thing that really made me consider giving it a slightly lower score was lacking the novelty factor of the 1994 original, but eh, i think this score is more fair. Now i wanna tackle 'Robbit Mon Dieu!'

Probably the most spectacularly pointless videogame sequel ever made.

Croc: Legend of the Gobbos was certainly not some sort of Wabisabi flawed masterpiece hidden gem. It was just an adequate 3D platformer working with the unfortunate limitations of trying to make a 3D platformer for PC, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation. Three platforms for which analog controllers were still pretty much a fetus of a thing. Something which i can't imagine most of the people complaining how the tank controls in the original ever keep in mind and probably just think that every dev team back then mastered 3D movement overnight after the release of Mario 64.

Croc 2, i have my reasons to have a lot less sympathy for. And it's not from a lack of nostalgia because i played it almost in conjunction with the first one as a kid. Launching in 1999, Croc 2 feels outdated than the original Croc was in 1997. In fact, it just feels like an inferior Banjo Kazooie clone at times.
All the "improvements" over the original here are just like a small drip feed of superficial things that were already standard for every other 3d platformer by then. Binoculars, mediocre racing sections and an item store don't make a platformer good on their own. You're still stuck with the same super short-range tail attack as your defense throughout the whole game, enemies still respawn after you kill them, the boss fights are still numb (the final one against Dante being basically a fucking escort mission) and the outside of the wholesome thing about Croc seing his family again, the story elements still doesn't have anything memorable, or interesting, or appealing to people above the age of 8. I might be having expectations way too high for what may or may not have always been meant to be a babby game, but what i'm basically saying is that Croc 1 was a game that was flawed but felt like it was made with soul, while Croc 2 feels like an early example of "more mechanics = gooder" game design thought.

I don't hate Croc 2 because it's worse than Croc: Legend of the Gobbos. It's not and it's honestly why i didn't rate it any lower than 2.5 as i would've liked to. I just hate it because it simply isn't better. I liked Croc 1, but not enough to want a carbon copy repeat of it that improves and adds literally nothing.

I remember watching screenshots and trailers for this game on the internet as a kid, seeing the big 3D Cul-De-Sac and being really hyped thinking it was some sort of open world sandbox game like Simpsons Hit & Run with lots of stuff to interact with. Eh, nah, just a very standard low budget adventure game. It lives up to it's aim to feel like a bunch of playable EEnE episodes with the nice cel-shaded artstyle and lively character models (it even has the vibrating line thing), but with only 8 levels, 6 not counting the extra ones, it's extremely short even compared to other licensed tie in cartoon games and you could beat it or even 100% it in a day.