This is a game of baffling choices, a video game adaptation released three years too late - a game delayed by Disney lawsuits and originally had a prototype for the NES - of a movie that was such a box office dud that it lead to the death of a beloved American animation company.

It feels equal parts too easy (the lives system is tied to your health so you can easily end up with 99 lives since heart collectables are all over the place) and too hard (a lot of movement involves traveling on tiny platforms over bottomless pits where it's easy to fall off and the second world is a godawful sky-themed world where you're constantly jumping inbetween tiny platforms), where the difficulty is tied to collecting an arbitary number of coins on a level's map until the exit finally starts working, a bold move away from "mediocre 2D platformer" and into "tedious collectathon on maps not designed for that" territory.

This is a game that feels like a bootleg of the movie its trying to portray, either out of embarrassment or because the game developers were not allowed to have a copy of this movie. There are no familiar song jingles, no other characters besides the three in this game (the Dwarfelles, who were the main gimmick of the movie, don't even appear), and no story to speak of until at the very end where suddenly the final boss battle finally transports you into the movie's setting.

Since this game doesn't care to portray the movie in any meaningful way, it tries to instead fill in the whole "Snow White" part of the title by making your main method of attack, besides the usual "jump on small animals' heads with your gangly human body" method, apple projectiles. You throw apples and get special homing apples or explosive apples that send apples flying all over the screen, and sometimes you can find a special jeweled apple that, when touched, causes a screen wipe of all the enemies by sending a bunch of tiny apple pixels scattering all over the place, thus creating a hilarious amount of lag. Between that and your other main collectible being fruit (which you attempt to string together to get bonuses to raise your score), this is a very healthy snacks-orientated game. Again, not a part of the movie at all, but effort for trying.

This is a bad game and a bad adaptation, but at least it's hilarious rather than just degrading. Mark my words, this game sucks, but it's a fun suck. The kind of suck that you tell your friends in a video call "dude, look at this game" and everyone points and laughs.

Game gets an extra half star for the soundtrack and my ability to play as A Funny Little Guy with a walking cane and funny googly eyes, but boy, I'm glad I didn't spend the 30 dollars actually buying a legit copy like my original plan. Emulation; it saves you from making poor life choices (even if I still ended up playing said game) and keeps you from buyer's remorse.

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.

I loved this game so much as a kid that the three save files on my cartridge were the following - my original save file that sat at 100% and was frequently used for Stop N Swop hunting (which usually involved beakbombing suspicious textures in hopes I'd discover some ancient Rareware secret), the save file dedicated to replaying Grunty's Furnace Fun, and the save file I would routinely delete so that I could play a fresh game of Banjo-Kazooie.

"So you're rating it five stars based on nostalgia alone" you might be saying. Nah. I played this game pretty recently and damn, childhood me had great taste because this game still holds up. Sometimes things from the past aren't as good as you remember, sure, but sometimes you play a thing from your past and you're like "oh fuck yes" and that's Banjo-Kazooie for me.