In high school, when I got all four of my wisdom teeth removed, my dad decided to get me Jak 3 to make me feel better.

I 100%d this whole game in a week while completely coked up on the strong pain medication that the dental surgeons gave me so, because of that, I have completed Jak 3 but I do not remember Jak 3. I had to have a friend tell me that there was driving in this video game. I only remember the ending cutscenes because the pain meds were starting to wear off.

Part of me wants to revisit this game but I also don't want to ruin the magic that is me suffering a Men In Black memory wipe over Jak 3. I remember liking it more than Jak 2 at least. I think the difficulty was smoother? Maybe? I remember fighting a giant robot with a smaller robot inside that I think was the bad guy but I can't be too sure.

You know those last two Harry Potter books where it's supposed to be all dark and edgy because they "grew up with the audience" so Harry Potter and his wizard friends are teenagers with romantic subplots fighting a war and there's death but in the end, you're just experiencing something that's worse than the previous adventures because the writing sucks now and the story is still about wizards named Hornswoddle Prissipants? This is the dragon version of that.

What a deeply embarrassing nightmare of a game with a deeply embarrassing story that hits every single tired beat. After being trapped in a magic time statis rock with his goth gf Cynder for several years so that they can sneakily change the art style, Spyro is A TEENAGER now which means this game has to have Spyro flirt with Cynder, who now has dragon boobs and a wasp thin waist since she also hit puberty, while the game takes an agonizingly long time to finally get to Malefor and get this thing over with. Spyro's ability to transform into "Dark Spyro" when he's feeling strong emotions makes a return in pivotal cutscenes and it's still a stupid idea. At one point Spyro weepily says that he can't fight Cynder because "he'll have nothing left to fight for" while they run Mark Hamil through about 50 different voice filters until he's undecipherable without the subtitles. There's also a level where Spyro and Cynder walk into a village full of cheetahs and literally every single cheetah is the same character model just with palette swaps. They do the Dumbledore funeral scene with Ignitus the Red Fire Dragon and all the dragon ghosts are also all just the same character model. All of the budget went towards Elijah Wood as Spyro, Mark Hamil as Malefor, and Gary Oldman as Ignitus and it shows.

The only reason you'd own this game is either because of childhood nostalgia or because you own an HD version of the game and therefore own a collector's item. There's free flying and it was impressive at the time, but since this game's art style is so weird, Spyro and Cynder's bones just break every time these poor bastards fly around in their environment with their paper thin wings until they hit an invisible wall. The combat is back, and it's just as bad as it was in the previous two games. The one saving grace is that they gave just enough of a shit that Cynder has a completely different move set with different breath abilities, but that's really it. I'm glad I get different color breath attacks depending on which dragon I choose. I'm glad Cynder has "Fear" as a breath.

So glad we only got three games of this nonsense before they rebooted Spyro a second time and, instead of having a cult classic where the games don't sell but at least the kids on Deviantart love it, they got a minor cultural phenomenon that would immediately sell millions of copies and toys. The Legend of Spyro walked (and fell face first) so that Skylanders could run and Toys For Bob would grow enough as a studio that we'd get Spyro Reignited. The Legend of Spyro is a weird time capsule and I'm glad the series has moved on.

I played this game while I was at home suffering from a mental cocktail of anxiety and depression because I was furloughed from my job and forced to quarantine because of the 2020 global pandemic, and co-oping with a friendly stranger who helped me no matter how many times I fell down that tower with the lights moved me so much that it made me ugly cry during the credits.

Part of me wants to be cynical and say that the game wouldn't have been as impactful to me if I played it at a different time when I wasn't so emotionally vulnerable, but that part of me also realizes that bringing cynicism to the table when talking about Journey feels like missing the overall message of the game. A big thanks to the developers of this game for giving me just a tiniest drop of hope in an otherwise bleak time. I'd apologize for not playing this game sooner but I realize now that I played it at the perfect time.

This is what happens when the entire Internet makes one too many "Crash Bandicoot has become Dark Souls" jokes. Some developers will take that as a challenge.

However, despite the balls to the wall level of difficulty here, this might be my new favorite Crash game. Everything just feels so finely crafted and purposeful - from the environment and creature designs to the way the characters respond to your inputs - that I'll forgive a little feature bloat in the form of the N. Verted levels. The way I see it, 100% completion is optional and something to be chipped away at gradually over time, because, yes, I can see how this game would quickly drive someone insane.

"Welcome to the Salty Spitoon. How tough are you?"
"How tough am I!? I beat Rayman 1!"
"Yeah, so?"
"Four times. On four different consoles including the weird Game Boy Advance port with the small screen and that one Game Boy Color version no one remembers that actually has a Mr. Dark boss battle."
"R-Right this way!"

You damn kids and your Undertale and your TikTok. Back in my day, when a video game became an Internet meme, it's because there was an awkward English localization in a completely obscure, unremarkable game I was never going to play. And as I walked uphill five miles in the snow to get to school, I thought saying "all your cards are belong to me" to my friends as we traded Digimon cards was hi-LAR-ious!

Alright alright, moving on, finally playing this game after knowing about it for about 20 years was quite a deflating "is that it?" experience. Turns out there's a reason the All Your Base meme is its only lasting legacy. If you've played anything in the side-scrolling shooter genre, then you've probably played a better game than Zero Wing is now. Most of the gameplay is weaving your fragile little ship through narrow corridors like the thread of a needle while you wait for the screen to scroll all the way to the right.

At least the soundtrack is a banger.

I feel like me and my fellow 90's gamers all owe The Lion King an apology because we all let this game completely squeak under the radar when it feels way more actively spiteful towards its target audience than The Lion King ever did. This game's first level with its spike traps, time limits, and relentless enemy placement definitely made small children cry. At one point they place a spider directly above some collectibles purely to fuck with you.

Disney's Beauty and the Beast is a wonderful testament to just how bad a level's design can get while still being something that you can look at and go "Yeah, I GUESS this is a finished product that can be beaten". Every level is a labyrinthine trial of slow platforming and even slower combat with terrible hit detection. The second level - the second level of the game! - is an autoscrolling "race the spikes to the top" level where there's these timed fire traps in his own castle and the spikes rubberband worse than a Mario Kart AI. The Beast can roar and freeze enemies in place, which seems like a harmless addition to his moveset until it's also worked into the platforming somehow. Sometimes you have to roar to make floating platforms move (because magic...?) and there is a very terrible section in this game where The Beast has to roar at these tiny "barely-can-see-the-pixels-on-a-CRT-TV" sized bats that are flying around in his castle so that they freeze in place, just so he can platform on the tiny bats to get to the next area. The tiny bats also fall the moment you step on them. This game hates you.

The Beast can also wall climb, which is cool until you take damage from tiny enemies because you can't dodge very well while wall climbing. Read the last sentence of the previous paragraph again for emphasis.

Also, seriously, why did every game developer in the 90's look at this movie and decide that The Beast was a slow-moving block of wet tissue paper who throws slow punches and gets his shit rocked by rats, spiders, and frogs? The Beast feels like a character that would've been a slam dunk for a fun 2D platformer like Aladdin was, but instead I have to watch this giant dog/boar monster laboriously plod around his environments until a small animal ruins his day. It's hard to even say which Beauty and the Beast game is worse - the SNES game or the two Sunsoft Genesis games - because they're all uniquely terrible in their own magical ways.

Game at least gets an extra half star for the level where Belle and The Beast have a snowball fight and The Beast just dies if he misses three snowballs. Perfect.