You leave the solar system and, before you even regain control of your vessel, the song explodes.

Intense breakbeats and ethereal synthesizers soon accompanied by acid bass, synthetic pizzicato strings and twinkling digital chimes. The entire screen is filled with a deep, blood red; the same red that envelops the Earth, the force field which serves as a prison here serves to protect your ship. The space around your craft is filled with bursts and streaks of light, what are they? Are they stars whizzing past as you speed by? Are they other ships coming in and out of warp? Are they projectiles volleyed back and forth between the combatants in the war against the Ur-Quan? It stimulates the imagination in a way that more literal or realistic representations couldn't.

Nearly a minute in, after a brief lull, the main theme is re-introduced, the lead instrument slightly detuned, the rest of the instruments now accompanying it; it still signifies danger, but with newfound confidence, adventure. The drums leave the mix completely, bells come in, their sustained reverb buried deep in phaser or chorus. The song has taken on a more meditative quality. The sounds beneath the music have transformed from high pitched whirling wisps to deep growls. Nearly two and half minutes into the song the main theme once again repeats, but now transposed (I don't have a good enough ear to tell if its a key change or different mode or what), it now takes on a sense of pure heroism.

But you won't hear that the first time you hear this song. If you attempt to leave the Sol system before completing the introductory quest, you'll find yourself with insufficient fuel to get anywhere, and nowhere near enough firepower or maneuverability to survive a fight; additionally it seems like at this point in the game the encounter rate is cranked up specifically to discourage you from skipping the opening missions. Even once you can fabricate parts and train crew for your ship, you'll inevitably be making short enough trips at first that you'll only hear the more "dangerous" parts of the song. Even once you upgrade your fuel tanks and start making longer voyages, encounters with enemies will interrupt the music and make the song play from the beginning before you have time to hear the later segments. The player's relationship with the song develops as they progress through the game in what I think is genuinely one of the most magical fusions of gameplay, narrative, and audiovisual artwork in any video game, ever.

I'm utterly shocked that this game isn't more widely known. I myself only found it by chance: a podcast I listen to recommended Ars Technica's "War Stories" interview with one of the developers of Crash Bandicoot, and I decided to watch all of the interviews in the series. Most of these interviews are about technical aspects of the game, challenges faced during development, personal histories of the developers, or behind-the-scenes of the business end of game production. The interview with Paul Reiche and Fred Ford, founders of Toys For Bob, is just them gushing for two hours about a game I had never once heard of beforehand. I look the game up to find that despite its seeming obscurity, it was once often considered in "best game of all time" lists, is widely praised by high profile games industry personnel, and has been free and open source for over twenty years.

This game has the sprawling map and incredible dialogue of a game like Fallout, but is so much more intuitive that it could be played with an NES controller without issue. It has some of the best writing, most memorable characters, and most entertaining voice acting I've ever seen in games; I genuinely cannot even imagine how mind blowing this game must have been in 1994 when this version was released on 3DO. It has one of the best intro sequences of any game from this era, I was instantly hooked. I feel like I've barely dipped my toes into it, its scope is so ridiculous; knowing what happens as time passes in the game I'm genuinely not sure if I could ever beat it without following a walkthrough, but even so I'd say it's worth starting out by exploring blindly and learning about the world. Some day I'm going to actually hunker down and try and squeeze this gem for all it's worth, and it's going to absolutely own my life. Even now, with what relatively few hours I've spent with it, Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters has already had an immense impact on how I view games.

I played more of this game this week than I have since I was a kid; I did not beat it, but I do think I've ran out of patience for it, for the time being.

This might be the fastest, tightest handling that Mario has had in a 3D game, but there isn't a single environment that this control feels natural in. It's similar to how the speed increase and expanded moveset of the Switch version of 3D World completely changes the feel of that game, but here it isn't even clear how the pieces were meant to fit. It feels like they moved fast and broke stuff and never got a chance to put it back together. They ripped out half of Mario's moves and replaced them with this crazy new idea, and FLUDD does certainly have moments when it's utilized well, but it really feels stapled on. The level design mostly suffers in the same way that World does compared to the NES games, Mario's greater capacity for midair correction results in spaces without focus.

And yet nearly a quarter of the main shines are secret areas that do try to give more directed, linear platforming challenges, and they take these corrective maneuvers away! Without these Mario's options are far too limited, yet in these moments Sunshine may require more precision than any other 3D Mario game. The lack of a long-jump is a point of contention, some say it should be here, some say it would be overpowered when combined with FLUDD; I say the game isn't remotely put-together enough for these kinds of balance concerns to matter, and that the long-jump's absence is the least of my concerns. Mario no longer has the somersault, he has no safe way to get air, you either need the space to sideflip or take a gamble on whether a spin-jump will send you in the right direction. Mario no longer has the mid-air kick to halt himself in midair. If you overshoot by a hair in these secret areas, you are dead. In SM64, the dive was dependent on Mario's speed, here pressing the B button in midair launches him forward from a complete horizontal standstill (I certainly appreciate now that future games require pressing Z+B, which is a much more deliberate input).

And yet sometimes I prefer the secret levels, because at the very least failing one doesn't boot you out of the level. In SM64 if you run into a wall while riding a koopa shell, you fall off; in Sunshine if you run into a wall while riding a blooper, you die and get booted out. In SM64 if you loose a race with Koopa the Quick, he says "better luck next time!" and you can exit the level yourself or explore and find another star. In Sunshine, if you lose a race with Il Piantissimo, you die and get booted out. When you get booted out in SM64, Mario says "Mama Mia!", stands up, and you jump back in and select the star again. In Sunshine, you get a cutscene reintroducing you to Delfino plaza, you jump back in, you select the shine, you get another cutscene showing off the level. All of these is punctuated by time-consuming (though admittedly stylish) animations and short, but very much extant, loading from disc. I you do get a game over in a secret stage, heaven forbid, you'll often have quite a trek to go through to get back.

The game has a lot of stuff that we just don't see in a lot of other Mario games. It has a unique, consistent setting that we only see again in pretty small doses in the Galaxy games. It has a number of what could be described as "physics puzzles" where games both before and after would focus almost entirely on discrete actions. It has a roster of mostly new enemies, and what enemies do return from other games do so with a unique appearance. It implies continuity with Luigi's Mansion in a way that feels more "real" than some of the easter eggs we see in the RPGs and such. It's not hard to see why people like it, and even I find a lot to enjoy; it's one of very few GameCube games I care enough about to keep in Dolphin, but it's also a game I care about enough to be bothered by how different it feels playing in an emulator with an Xbox controller. Even so I think this is without a doubt one of the weakest entries in the series.

I think my single favorite think about the game is the "text boxes". What other game puts the dialogue on curved lines like this, how many other games put their dialogue in something that isn't just a literal box, period?

I played through Sonic's story and didn't think it was "that bad". To some extent I understand that I was probably a bit lucky in managing to avoid some common glitches (for example, I never got stuck to a wall as Knuckles, which seems to happen to many players). The control isn't perfect but most of the technical problems I had were related to the UI or the loading times, in this regard the Test of Intelligence in particular stands out as a low point. Radical Train was probably the Action Stage that gave me the most trouble, the time limit feels too restrictive in the later sections. Shadow and Silver's stories are unbearable, I will not be finishing them.

Sometimes you play a game and think "they just don't make them like they used to." Sometimes they barely made 'em like that in the first place.

Breath of the Wild is the best-selling game in the Legend of Zelda series, selling about three times as many copies as the game in the number 2 spot; it is also easily the most open-ended game in the series. Four Swords Adventures is linear to the point that it's split into discrete stages that must be completed in a set order, so maybe it's not surprising that it's believed to be the worst selling game in the series. Some even call the game a spin-off, but I don't think there's really a compelling argument to be made there. Oddly enough, if you go to Zelda Dungeon, Age of Calamity, a sequel to Hyrule Warriors that sold ridiculous numbers for a game in its genre for basically no reason other than being a Breath of the Wild spin-off, is right at the top in the main banner, as if was a main entry. Maybe sales, relevance, and potential for engagement is all it takes to be a "real" Zelda. Four Swords Adventures is one of very few Zelda games to have never been re-released in any form, no longer representative of the brand.

After playing Breath of the Wild in 2017 I found myself spending a few months revisiting nearly every Zelda game I could, and with that game's sequel looming only a month and some change away, I figured I'd finally go back to this one. I haven't played through Four Swords Adventures since I was pretty young, at that point I had watched my dad play through Ocarina of Time, and I had rented Wind Waker and the Oracle games but never got further than a couple dungeons in until I owned them many years later. I was kind of surprised how often I reached areas I recognized, remembering them as being particularly frustrating, only for them to be pretty manageable. Infiltrating Hyrule Castle at the end of world 4 was much easier and shorter than I remember, and the Ice Palace had a couple puzzles that I could definitely understand a kid having trouble with but really wasn't that bad. I guess just keeping in mind how little experience I had with the series at the time explains it.

Although, strangely enough I remember World 5 somewhat fondly despite it's setting being one of the more treacherous in the game, a Lost Woods about as hostile as the one in Twilight Princess, and a Kakariko Village that looks a lot more like Thieve's Town. A deku scrub in the last level of the area reveals why; Ganondorf actually has given his minions a direct warning to be on the lookout for "four travelers", but they've all assumed that a group of kids couldn't possibly be the people he's talking about. The more straightforward traversal gauntlets and dungeoneering are broken up by stages that consist mostly of the type of exploration and character-interaction-driven gameplay you would expect from a typical Zelda game's side content, and thanks to the premise of this area, we get two of these back to back, a surprisingly chill chapter of the game.

If there's a common problem I have with both of the two most recent console Zelda games, it's their pacing. Breath of the Wild and Skyward Sword are both a single consistent stream, with the former feeling like an endless sandbox (for better or worse), and the latter just feeling like one big dungeon. The more traditional Zelda structure adopted by A Link to the Past allows the player to split the game into play sessions of more or less equal size and congruent curves of rising and falling tension. Do the necessary steps to get to the next dungeon, beat the dungeon, see what the characters in the world have to say about that, see what your new item can do in the world; it'll take about an hour or two, and you can confidently assume that repeating the process with the next dungeon during your next session will take about the same time. Translating this rhythm to strictly separated levels works quite naturally, and is honestly really refreshing. I think it's a shame more "adventure" themed games don't go for a more focused structure, I think the game that gets closest to scratching the same itch is Half Minute Hero.

The mechanics of this game are kind of crazy. There are ideas in this game that feel like band-aid fixes to make it work in both singleplayer and multiplayer, or individual level gimmicks to keep things from getting stale, and some of those ideas could have carried an entire game on their own. The formation system has a bizarre effect on basic combat. The horizontal line formation will always stretch to the right when activated, and the vertical line formation will always stretch downward; since the square and diamond formations keep the four player characters pretty close together, the player is put at an unusual disadvantage if an enemy is up and to the left of them. The way that the dark world works in most Zelda games is more or less like a completely different screen, here it's actually concurrent with the light world, with objects in one appearing as shadows in the other. 2D platforming did exist in the handheld games in small amounts, but here there are a couple late game areas that mostly consist of side-scrolling. There is like, one time in the game that you can upgrade the Fire Rod and it gets the same utility as the Cane of Somaria. If you shoot a projectile through a doorway on the GBA screen, it will keep flying into the TV; I assumed at first that this only worked in specific areas, but later in the game I found myself shooting sword beams through doors by accident, so it is just a consistent system in the game.

There's a very late puzzle in the game that requires you to go into the dark world, and pick up a Link that's in the light world and carry him around. I have no idea if this is something you could always do, or if this inexplicably only works in that room, but if that's just a consistent thing throughout the game, that's crazy. If it weren't for the fact that literally nothing carries over from one level to the next, meaning there's definitely no meaningful rewards to be gained from replaying a level and finding hidden things you missed, I would have gone through quite a few levels to see what kinds of shenanigans you could get up to with this cursed knowledge.

The core gamefeel is top-notch for 2D Zelda. You can do a "smash"-style input to do a leaping slice, you can do a Zelda 2-style downward stab in midair. If you have the Pegasus boots, you're not locking into a single direction, you have a relatively wide turning radius compared to normal movement, but you can drift around. It's honestly really frustrating that the game limits you to a single item at a time; I really want a game with this exact core movement that would let you use both the Pegasus boots and the Roc's feather, or both the bombs and arrows in the same way that the handheld games do. Hell, the final level of World 7 makes we wish we could get a new game in the style of Zelda 2, I think they could make it really work this time.

And I haven't even touched the multiplayer-only Shadow Battle mode, since nobody has ever actually played the multiplayer of this game because its absurd hardware requirement. With how much game there is here it's shocking that the Japanese version has an entire third mode.

The visuals are generally pretty appealing. The use of shaders in particular could be described as "economical" (both in that a lot of the effects are relatively simple, and that a lot of the particles and things seem to be lifted from Wind Waker), but effective. The assets in the game could be split into a few different categories. A lot of sprites and environment tiles are ripped straight from Link to the Past, a game that I personally think has spritework that is serviceable at worst, and merely neat at best. The stuff that was created specifically for this game typically looks pretty good, though some of the bosses definitely look unusually "gamey", even for Nintendo. I think the Four Swords/Minish Cap design is the best Link has ever looked in 2D. Some of the NPC and boss sprites are seemingly scanned from the 3D games, and these are typically the worst looking things in the game.

Outside of a handful of trickier puzzles, the game is extremely easy. You get as many as four extra lives every time you finish a stage, in addition to the handful you can usually find hidden in jars. I probably died less than 5 times throughout the entire game, and maxed out my lives right at the end of the game. Each stage requires you to collect at least 2000 force gems, though the second level is literally the only time I got even close to not having enough. I don't know if it's just because later levels have higher numbers of more powerful enemies that yield better drops, or what the likelihood is that the game is balanced with multiplayer griefing in mind.

The audiovisual theming is typically derived from prior games. Most of the music is from Link to the Past, though we do also get a few new songs, and some cool remixes of infrequently reused tracks like the final dungeon theme from the original Zelda. The final area is accessed by a rainbow bridge that Zelda herself conjures up, and is punctuated at the end by a escort/escape sequence, just like Ocarina of Time. At times it might seem like the game is lacking much of its own unique identity, but it's a lavish time capsule of everything that The Legend of Zelda was at the time.

It was a good value at the time of its release, but it's far from ideal today. In order to unlock all the games (including S3&K) you have to boot and exit certain games as many as 30 times. The games don't display in the correct aspect ratio, it isn't quite 4:3, it isn't quite 16:9, it's just weird and stretched.

The performance isn't great, sound effects sometimes play out of sync. This is not the only collection from this era to have weird audio problems (likely as a result of trying to constantly load it from the disc), I've had weird problems with Mega Man X Collection and Namco Museum in the past, but they're generally flukes that either fix themselves or go away with a reset; with Mega Collection Plus the issue is rather consistent.

If you want a "pure" experience, get the original cartridges. If you just want to play all these games, there are much better ways, both official and unofficial, to do so.

What does it mean to be the highest rated game of all time on Metacritic, why does it matter, and why has no game overtaken it? Ocarina of Time has many things in common with other games in Metacritic's top 10. Compared to the rest of the list, both Super Mario Galaxy games seem out of place until you consider the consistency, the more sensible nature of its world compared to other Mario titles. Why does Mario collect stars, why can penguins and bees talk? Because they're in space, that simple aesthetic theme is enough to tie everything together. Arcade action focused titles like Soul Calibur and Tony Hawk 2 seem out of place not just because they have today been utterly supplanted by sequels, but because they seem to "gamey" to stand among the rest, but there is something obvious about them; having come out so close to Ocarina of Time they are also among some of the earliest 3D games to feature realistically proportioned 3D human figures, in full 3D environments, with a playstyle and control scheme that was accessible for the time. As for what it means, we all know at this point that salaries and bonuses can be made conditional based on a product's Metacritic score, it's not a stretch then to the say that this score is every bit as representative of what the industry wishes to see in games as it is of the critic or consumer.

I read a post some time ago which read something to the effect of "how can we know whether we have a Citizen Kane of video games when we aren't even sure if we have a Citizen Kane of film?" I hate this perspective. Trying to remove the film from the real space that it occupies requires an assertion that I think anyone truly serious about film or art as a whole wouldn't dare make; it assumes a completely outdated classicist notion that there is simply a singular most true form of a particular medium. Citizen Kane is not a blueprint or a formula, and neither would the equivalent game be. It misses the trees for the forest. The significance of an influential work rarely lies in its whole rather than its parts, its individual effects and techniques. It barely matters if the whole is good, if it has aged well, if it was the first to pioneer these techniques (as both Kane and Ocarina surely were not). What matters is that it is a substantial source of inspiration from which the ongoing, repeated, shared art-ideology and understanding surrounding these techniques has been proliferated. Even logically the quote is obviously self-defeating on its face; Citizen Kane is a real movie that exists, and you have just twice used its name as shorthand for some concept, and that concept is the actual importance of the work.

Ocarina of Time's broad appeal is no surprise. While it largely skews towards a male audience (despite Link's appearance apparently being a deliberate attempt to attract more female players), it is an unmistakably all-ages power fantasy. For a child, the whimsy of the fantasy setting offers the initial draw, and the premise of growing up right away and being able to solve all the world's problems heightens things further. For an adult, the early portions of the game offer a return to a time when most people seemed good-natured, when problems seemed simple and rooted in singular evil-doers. From this perspective the latter half of the game takes on the form of a nostalgic retrofuture. The game goes on, you don't get quite as many new abilities as you once did. Songs stop giving you new powers, they just take you to places you've already been. The child player tries their best to hurtle towards the heroic finale, frustrated when they get stuck, disappointed when Link has to go back to being a kid. The adult relishes every minute of bombchu bowling, target practice, fishing, slowly exhausting each optional moment of retreat before truly running out of things to do and begrudgingly allowing the fantasy to end.

It's interesting how this game and others on the Nintendo 64 simply hang on an end screen after the credits, doing nothing more until the player hits either power or reset. Beating the game is not tracked, you don't get a new game plus, you don't get a little icon on the file select, you don't get to go back into a game-world without threat. On a technical level it's sort of obvious why, how did games end before save files even exist, after all? In Super Mario 64 the reward for doing everything isn't really the extra lives or the sparkly triple jump; as Yoshi says himself, the real reward is simply being able to freely play and explore the levels without worrying about things like progression or failure. When you beat Ocarina of Time you will simply be spat back into the world, and Ganon's tower still forever looms over Hyrule while you race your horse and sell masks. Structurally, seeing the credits is just a formality, a thing that you do more or less on the side for narrative payoff.

But just how strong is that narrative, really? I don't know, maybe my perspective on this is too warped for me to approach it honestly. Some of my very earliest memories are of watching my dad play this game, it is perhaps the single most fundamental piece of media to my early understanding of fantasy settings. I saw Gorons and Zoras before I knew what dwarves and elves were. The menu sounds are drilled into my ears, barely registering as a sound, tasting like water. I remember Volvagia looking like some bizarre writhing cheeto. I remember seeing the at-the-time incomprehensible whirling perspective of Hyrule Castle Town's ruins, a distorted extreme image of pure decay at vacuum pressure. I remember wondering what the materials of this world, its fabrics and glass, could possibly feel like. I remember thinking Ganon's tower having an almost sci-fi appearance, its shape and textures not unlike some of the imperial structures in Star Wars Rogue Squadron. I remember not being allowed to play the game until it came out on Wii virtual console because the great fairy was simply too risqué. Ocarina of Time has always been a simple fact of life.

Today the game's obstacles and encounters feel alarmingly simple, I feel like I'm spending most of my time with the game on autopilot. It's not just how much of the game I go through without really thinking about it, but how much of the game's systems feel as though they exist to aid in that very abandonment of thought. The shift to 3D aside, Ocarina often feels like a watered down version of Zelda, complete with training wheels (this is also not a terrible way to describe the way that Link handles here, but well get to that). As a kid, a game having these skeuomorphic onscreen representations of the buttons seemed almost monolithic; I remember the first time I saw the HUD in Minish Cap it felt sort of "high tech". Today I realize that I've have not even once played Ocarina with a Nintendo 64 controller, the onscreen prompts have never matched the buttons of the controller I actually use, I have always had to put together my own abstract mental index of what buttons are actually going to do what.

For all the pretense of adventure and exploration, the game's core progression is a rather tightly choreographed affair. There is little room for creativity and what little player expression is available through mechanical complexity doesn't actually offer any meaningful benefit or skill curve. You either know what to do, or you don't. It always struck me as odd that Nintendo made a big deal about Skyward Sword finally giving the player the ability control the direction of their sword swings, considering that this has literally always been a feature of 3D Zelda. A lone button press will perform a horizontal swing, either tilting the stick or locking on will result in vertical swings, and both at once will have Link stab (this is particularly interesting as it's basically the exact same concept and input as Devil May Cry's classic Stinger move). But again, none of these options in combat have any real meaning. In fact, the best thing to do in many situations is something completely unintended. In combat you should ideally perform a jumping slash and then follow it up with crouching stabs (the jump attack does the most damage, the crouching stab has no damage value and will just reuse the value from the previous attack). Similarly, the fastest way to get around the world is to lock the camera in place and walk backwards.

Something shocking about this game is just how non-threatening most combat encounters are. Wind Waker has the player fighting armed humanoid combatants pretty much as soon as they can hold a sword; Ocarina waits to offer a similar fight until about halfway through the second dungeon. The first enemy you find is just a stick, many enemies are obstacles that will only affect you if you don't bother to clear your path beforehand. Danger is generally extremely easy to avoid, and the Big Goron sword (a reward for a relatively easy trading quest) does so much damage that it trivializes almost any fight that can be fought with a blade. I do want to be clear that I don't mind this, frankly I wish games were a bit more content to be spaces first and gauntlets second when appropriate.

I was disappointed by just how little flavor text there is in the game, your mileage may vary in the sense that you may appreciate how little structural fat there is. Almost every piece of dialogue is some kind of direct gameplay hint, either tutorializing a mechanic, telling you where to go next, or hinting at a sidequest. The trading quest is a breath of fresh air not only because it has the player doing a lot more simple traversal, but also because it's one of the few points in the game where characters reveal things about themselves (though it's mostly just about family relations) other than what they think Link ought to go do. Just like the original Legend of Zelda, many of these gameplay hints are just barely obfuscated presumably either to try and retain immersion or to avoid admitting that the game just gives you all the quiz answers. The game won't tell you to use the eye of truth, it will just gesture towards the idea of "seeing what is true". It won't tell you to use bombs, it will tell you to use the "special Goron crop".

The titular ocarina, the music mechanic, is weird. After getting half a dozen songs that give the player simple but generally creative and unique abilities, the rest of the songs in the game are just fast travel spells. Playing a musical instrument is an interesting idea but in practice it has some tonal side effects. For example, being able to warp to Kakariko Village is useful for a number of sidequests, whether it's part of the trading sequence or you're just picking up a skulltula reward; these are low-stakes, comfy parts of the play session. The song that you use to fast travel here is associated with the Shadow Temple in the town's graveyard, so each time you travel here you have to play the most dour theme in the game. The opposite happens at the very end of the game, where any time you return to Ganon's tower you'll do so by playing one of the game's most lighthearted preludes to return to the nearby Temple of Time.

Epona is terrible. She gets stuck on every little corner of geometry and decides to just not jump fences half the time. I did the trading quest without her because she just isn't reliable enough to trust when the clock is ticking. People always make a big deal about how the horses in today's games aren't as directly controllable, they have a mind of their own like a real horse; between Epona and Super Mario 64's "fish that actually swim away", I'm starting to think that the entire industry has been playing catch-up with Nintendo's advanced animal AI.

I gave this game probably the best shot it's ever had on this playthrough, having gone through the PC port, finally playin the game with a framerate higher than film. An online friend of mine has said that this game has "perfect" movement. I don't agree in the slightest but what is interesting about the port is that playing the game with decent performance, for the first time ever Ocarina of Time actually has appreciable movement and discernable gamefeel at all. On the original code the frames last so long enough that it's hard to judge what's happening between them, the illusion of motion honestly frequently breaks, and small adjustments are a complete gamble. At a higher framerate you realize that Link is actually only able to smoothly make rather wide turns or completely rotate in an instant, and it's exponentially worse when walking underwater with the iron boots. Because of the apparent issues with literally every official port of the game since the original, this is the first time I've played the game without an over-sensitive analogue stick. All these years later it's still absurd to me that the normal way of using Z-targeting as it appears in all other Zelda games is an option that you have to toggle.

Majora's Mask is better in basically every way besides that fact that there's still not really a good way to play it with good framerate. It's structure is better, the way it handles its story and ending is better, its character dialogue has so much more flavor that I barely even see the Ocarina of Time versions of the NPC's as the "original" or "canon" versions of the characters. By Comparison Ocarina almost feels like some kind of shallow fanmade romhack. And Majora's Mask has monkeys. I like monkey a lot.

Tearaway is visually spectacular but ultimately rather joyless to play.

The game begins with a lame skit making fun of cable, the game's enemies are scraps of newspaper. There are "no stories" left in the "story box" of television. A "real" story can begin with the introduction of the capital "Y" You, the player. You pull the trigger on the controller and shine your light on the world. "The message must become a messenger"; the player input needs representation.

Tearaway nakedly admits virtually every problem I have with video games today. Games are for "stories" now, yet mere interactivity of any kind is supposedly enough to heighten vapid, pulpy, or outright hollow material. The player has nothing interesting to do in this world, nothing interesting for their character to do, but you can do something, and the game will never let your forget it.

You spend the first half hour or so not even being able to jump. Your character does not in any way interact with the enemies; you (the You) interact with the enemies directly, hypnotizing them with your motion controlled light. The most tactile thing in the game is using the touch pad to open a box from time to time. You pick up collectables and the sound effect for it is a nigh imperceptible rustling of paper.

It is appropriate that the main collectable and currency of the game is confetti. That represents very well what this game is: something shiny and colorful that you can periodically throw around for literal seconds of shallow entertainment.

I played this through for the first time in over 2 years. It's fine. I beat it in 34 minutes and got an A rank. It's a nice little rubik's cube of a game, but it's really silly as a standalone product. The story means almost nothing outside of the context of the two games it's bridging the gap between, and the gameplay is nothing revolutionary. The visuals haven't aged very well: it looks like what it is, a 360/PS3 game with an absurd amount of glossy lighting effects covering up relatively simple characters and environments.

Toree is a marshmallow. Squishy, sweet, cheap, and I ate it and it's gone now. Consider this a review of both games, not just because they're so short but because the sequel may as well be a level pack.

Toree's aesthetic elements are unremarkable and usually inoffensive. Cutesy low-poly 3D, blippity bloopity chip-tune and electronic music, and for some reason a pinch of creepy-pasta bullshit.

The core mechanics, the jumping and running, are fine. The game feel, animation, sound effects, this is what makes it worthwhile. The levels in the first game range from boring to frustrating, with the second game being a substantial improvement. I like that the game has a 3D Zelda-style "center the camera behind you" button because trying to fiddle with the camera is kind of a pain.

It's charming, but it's mediocre and has some clear problems. Why can you point the camera down, but not up? Why does the second game's boss fight have such bad audio mixing? It's far from the worst thing I've ever played but I don't get why some people seem to really be talking it up. Just because it's basically free?

Edit: honestly, I went back to the first one after getting more used to the controls and I really think the first game has a rather weak selection of levels compared to the sequel. I would recommend just playing that instead.

The Gunk is a fine way to waste a couple afternoons, I guess.

The Gunk focuses mainly on two characters, Rani and Becks. For a substantial portion of the game, I assumed these were nicknames, or at least first names, and that these two were best friends or possibly even romantic partners. After reading the scan entries in the pause menu I realized that Becks is actually the character's last name, that these two likely had a more formal relationship, likely just coworkers or space-roommates out of financial necessity.

The Gunk revolves around these two following a signal to a potential energy source that they hope to be able to sell. The mid-game "twist", if it is to be called such a thing, can be seen from miles away. Not just because the foreshadowing is so obvious, not just because healthy amount of the protagonists' banter is musing about the nature of the energy, but because so many other games have done it before. At the very least it's not a poorly told or constructed version of the story.

Aside from the overt conflict between nature and industry, so too is there a conflict between the aliens' willingness to have been deceived, and their need to face the truth that industrialization has only made their lives harder to the point of becoming impossible. This is ultimately made most personal and direct in the conflict between Rani and Becks: one seeks the adventure of radical liberation, the other just wants to pay the bills on time. Ultimately the result is a compromise.

The Gunk has Super Mario Sunshine-style goo cleanup, Luigi's Mansion-style vacuum cleaner combat, Metroid Prime-style scanning, and combines basic platforming with the puzzle-focused action/adventure stylings of 3D Zelda. It does none of these as well as the games it's clearly influenced by, but I don't think that was ever the goal. The Gunk is not a game that you play, it's an experience that you sit through.

One of the fears that I have about Xbox Gamepass is the nature of games coming and going from the service encourages games to be one-time flings. Game that aren't focused on delivering interesting gameplay worth mastering, games that are focused on delivering content to the exclusion of any meaningful exploration of form. Games which use ubiquitous or at least well-understood mechanics to focus on simple narratives or pure audiovisual spectacle. Games that don't need to be satisfying on their own, because they aren't really a static piece of art to be appreciated on its own merits, but a single piece of a continuously crawling cultural conveyor belt; games that don't even need to be purchased or for people to be interested in them directly or for their own sake, because they're just part of the same trough where we all gather.

I think that this is a significant part of why there was such a stink about the "walking simulator" a decade ago, though while I think Games as Content (or perhaps Content as Games) tend towards being weaker experiences I do think its important to clarify that nothing here is universal. The probably isn't exclusive to games of any genre, games on any service, games with any budget. It's not even universally a problem at all. I think games can be an effective medium for elevating other types of content through interactivity, and I would even say that many of the more high profile walking simulators are great examples of this.

One of the main reasons I think walking simulators can be effective is their simplicity. While I may wish that The Gunk has deeper platforming with more interesting ways to maneuver, or more combat options to string together in satisfying combinations, I recognize that for a game like this it may do more harm than good. Games like Bugsnax feature such winding messes of systems and mechanics that whatever center they do have is both nebulous and ineffective at holding the experience together. Games like Dear Esther or Gone Home only capture the feelings that they do because their focus is so narrow. The Gunk gets about as deep as it possibly could without going too far out.

The consequence of being a Game as Content is as much as I generally enjoy The Gunk, its drip feeding of incremental upgrades and movie-like focus on dialogue mean that this is probably not an experience I'll revisit until enough time has passed for me to forget it, if I ever go back to it at all.

It's somewhat strange to me that in a game which seems so anti-industrial that the sole reward and progression aside from literal traversal, for any challenge whether combat or puzzle, is an opportunity to strip mine a section of the planet for its resources. Becks even makes it clear that the secondary purpose for this, beyond the game's upgrade system, is selling these valuable materials once they leave the planet. Perhaps its a potent symbol that regardless of her views on the injustices of industrial civilization, Rani is still a person whose very body has had parts of it replaced with an industrial tool she lovingly calls "Pumpkin". Perhaps it's recognition of the irony of the medium being used both to craft and experience this narrative.

In order to progress you often need to completely remove all gunk from an area. On several occasions I found myself unable to progress for several minutes because I missed one tiny piece of gunk. Sometimes this gunk was simply out of view, sometimes it was stuck inside of level geometry, and in one instance even after intentionally dying to reset the area I still could not progress and had to completely restart the game. I also often found my character getting stuck on geometry, or getting caught in a falling animation despite being on solid ground.

The environments are attractive, and the level design is engaging. The character and creature designs are fine. The music is serviceable; it creates the appropriate mood but is rarely if ever memorable. The controls actually feel like a video game. If this had controlled like, for example, a Naughty Dog game, I would have rated it at least 2 stars lower and probably not finished it. I probably would have left a review that was like "The Gunk? More like... The Junk."