You have chosen to read my Princess Peach: Showtime! review. This is on you, now.

I think it's worth reflecting on how Peach wasn't really even a character in the original Super Mario Bros. She was a destination. The MacGuffin you needed to reach in order to rightfully claim you'd won the game. The idea to expand beyond that in any way was largely an act of convience, as Fuji TV's Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic was rebranded as the second Super Mario game. They needed a roster of four heroes, and there had only been four sentient things in the Mushroom Kingdom that weren't enemies. They took the spritesheet for Lina and drew "The Princess" on top.

I don't point this out to demean or belittle Princess Peach. Far from it. The act of repurposing and rebranding is at the very core of what videogames are. Mario, himself, was the result of seeing what could be done with an unwanted Radar Scope arcade board, and missing out on the opportunity to use Paramount's Popeye characters. OXO, Tennis for Two and Spacewar! were all experiments to see if large-scale supercomputers designed for complex business calculations and global warfare could be used for the purpose of fun. Peach has quite rightly earned the title of Princess of Videogames. A direct descendant of the cathode-ray tube amusement device.

From her first playable appearance in Super Mario Bros. 2, she was treasured by little sisters, cartoon studios, and boys who valued the float-jump more than the societal pressures of homophobia and gender stereotypes. By Mario 64, her significance to the Mushroom Kingdom was fully fleshed-out, positioning the entire game within her castle, and illustrating her unwavering benevolence, ethereal presence, and also, her sense of fun with the introduction of her personally-commissioned Secret Slide. She was a true representative of videogames, and a welcoming presence for audiences who may have felt uninvited to the games gang.

In 2024, I feel Nintendo are more aware of the weight of their history. Back when they last tried this, with 2005's Super Princess Peach, there was an air of carelessness. It was a throwaway game, fobbed off to Chubby Cherub/Shrek: Reekin' Havoc devs, Tose, and launched to a market whose respect for Nintendo had already taken a beaten from the likes of DK: King of Swing, Super Mario Ball and Classic NES Series: Ice Climber. Now, Nintendo treat Peach with due reverence, having her host Universal Studios meet-and-greets in her own personal bandstand, as the highlight of millions of holidays. People are thrilled to meet her, regardless of how much spaghetti she's made for them.

Right now, we're in a very odd period for the Mario brand, overall. Nintendo have embraced the idea that there's no unified vision of what Mario is. In the last year, we've had a mainline 2D entry closely modelled on the art direction of Masanobu Sato, a major Hollywood movie that denied post-1994 backstories and reinstated the NES-era US canon, a remake of a very of-its-time mid-nineties Mario RPG, and the announcement of the remake of a very distinctly eccentric fan-favourite GameCube RPG. Mario has become Mr. Video again, appearing in all sorts of different projects, merely as a comforting presence. He's a doctor and an artist and a kart racer and an umpire and we're not supposed to take any of it very seriously.

The dynamic sits awkwardly in relationship to why New Super Mario Bros. took its iconography so seriously in the first place. Back then, it was a relief to see the series discard all the bullshit and get back on target, reinstating what was Real Mario Shit. Goombas were Goombas again, and if there were any weird offshot baddies, fans would need to adopt such convoluted nomenclature as "Mega Para-Biddybuddies". It felt like the programmers had taken more control, with the world defined by hard parameter references. There's a stiffness to that approach that I have a lot of affection for, and it was the lifeblood of the Wii U era (particularly in Europe and Japan). It brought us closer to the logic of the software, subconsciously making us better equipped to appreciate and understand it. It was fiercely objective. It's easy to see why this approach wouldn't resonate with the wider public, though. If Nintendo wanted to catch on to mainstream appeal, they'd need to foresake the concrete utility of their playing pieces and expand their surface-level appeal. During the promotion of the New Super Mario Bros. sequels, developers explained that Peach hadn't been made playable in the game because of how her float-jump would affect the balance of the level design. In Showtime, she doesn't even have the float-jump.

Ah - Here we are.

I don't really like Princess Peach: Showtime very much.

I could come out with excuses, justifications, characterisation discrepancies... I just think it's boring to play. Levels are formulaic and repetitive, there's little dexterity to its gameplay, the rewards system feels like you're playing the game wrong if you're not constantly digging at the scenery to find every hidden item, performance and presentation is way below where it ought to be for a game with this focus, yada yada yada... I don't think it really matters. I just didn't want to play the game very much. The first couple of days I had it, I was telling myself I was too busy to calm down and enjoy it. I spent multiple days away from it before completion, and only went back to it out of obligation. I really wanted to care less, and not bother coming back.

As much fondness as I may have for the character, I'm clearly not the target audience for this. And I don't mean to imply that it's a game strictly for young girls, either. But it probably is for fans of recent Yoshi games. I'm certainly not one of them. As I dodder around, looking at the nice artwork, but wondering what I'm supposed to be getting out of it. It's a bit of a shock to see Mystical Ninja's Etsunobu Ebisu come back to a directing role to make something so devoid of spark or humour. Though the different costumes grant Peach a range of diverse abilities, the structure of each introductory level is largely the same, and the bulk of her more intricate actions are automated. In a move that recalls Metroid: Other M, all core actions have been distributed between two face buttons, and if there's anything particularly acrobatic or impressive, it doesn't often feel like you were very involved in performing them.

Showtime is fun in theory. The level themes are bold and exciting, Peach's costumes and in-character voice clips are cute, there's a lot of great art and punny design. I saw one review compare it to Kirby and the Forgotten Land and became incensed. That's a game that loves being a game. It celebrates the medium, embraces all the tropes that come with being a platformer, and sets up young audiences to embark on a future, exploring many wonderful videogames. Showtime is like Paper Mario with all the jokes, strategy and compelling gameplay stripped out. It's an RPG without story or combat. If you wanted to dedicate a budget to having a team design a bunch of charming adventures for Princess Peach to go on, I can totally get behind that, but why make this game when your passions and energy were better suited to a series of YouTube shorts, or a pop-up book?

There's definitely things I wanted to like. I felt like I should have liked. There's several parts of the concept that feel like they're paying off on things they established with Peach's character years ago. The fact that Odyssey ended with her setting off to explore the world in a bunch of cute outfits feels like it was leading up to an idea like this. They're making a game with Cowgirl Princess Peach, for god's sake. How haven't I come away raving about it? It's just all so tame. Mermaid Peach sings underwater to guide helpful fish, and that sounds like something I should have adored, but they never take the next logical step with one of those trademark Nintendo Switch vocal themes. Why didn't they want this game to be brilliant?

Something that surprised me is how bothered I was by the stageplay concept. The notion that to some level, this was all pretend. That Peach is taking on the role of a character for each level. Her voice sounds different for a bunch of them. I don't really feel like this is a game about Peach. It's about her playing the part of generic characters. I didn't feel any sense of drama until the very end, when she emerges outside of the Sparkle Theatre, as herself. It was the first thing since the intro that the game was trying to convey as authentic. Maybe if I just believed in the game - like there was a real throughline that meant each level was an important new part of a story - I wouldn't have been so bored with it. You really don't have to do a lot to get me with this stuff. I honestly found myself crying when I first heard Odyssey attempt to finally convey Peach's perspective on her relationship with Mario. Is this what a good story has to offer a game? As it is, it felt like I'd bought a colouring-in book, and for some bizarre reason, it was important that I finish every page.

This is very much a 'me problem'. I hope I've established my criticisms as fiercely subjective. I can see some folk getting a lot out of this. I've heard some say that they loved Yoshi's Woolly World. I certainly don't want to convince Nintendo that people don't like Princess Peach games. It's just that I had to play through Sexy Parodius and Third Strike before I'd gotten through this, just to remind myself that I do enjoy playing videogames.

They will never make a better rhythm game than Gitaroo Man

INFINITY==================
Not in a hundred-million years!
===============IMPOSSIBLE

When I've been away from Gitaroo Man, I always have a tentative worry. Does it still hold its power? Have I lost it? By the end of Flyin' To Your Heart, I'm back in. I am the True Gitaroo Man. "We've forgotten this sound for so long!"

Gitaroo Man seems self-aware in a way that its contemporaries don't. I don't just mean in its fun, jokey tone. It knows how to be an hour-long game. Each level presents a new storybeat, and a distinctive musical genre in this shonen anime fairytale musical, introducing enough to keep each idea fun and peppy without ever detailing anything too deeply. It's bright, exciting and fantastical, and that brief running time is the key to so much of that.

The thing that draws you in is how good the music is. It's proper game music. So often, I'll play a music game, and feel let down over how little thought was put into the music. They're often either not very musical, or negligent of how they'll feel to play. Gitaroo Man's music is brilliantly structured for gameplay, with distinct phrases for the moments they're complementing, and the whole thing's so inherently videogamey. Levels are split up into CHARGE, ATTACK, DEFEND and ENDING phases, with the music working so well to convey the drama of each section. Charge sequences have you building your life bar, calmly gaining strength through long, sustained notes. Defend stages have you dodging vicious staccato attacks, that come in the form of rapid button prompts that zoom in from each side of the screen. Attack and Ending phases are the catharsis, with you taking revenge, sustaining long notes to do maximum damage, but if you miss any entirely, that's a knock against you. You've got big Street Fighter life bars at the top of the screen. I don't think there's any piece of imagery you could conjure that could so effectively illustrate the nature of a battle to videogame players. The gameplay mainly takes the form of following "trace lines", which are big bendy lines that converge onto the centre of the screen. You have to react to each one, right on the beat, and follow their bends with the direction of the analogue stick. Bending guitar notes swoop and curve around the screen, in synchronisation with the music, and when you're playing well, you feel like you're nailing a solo, trying your best to resist making Steve Vai faces. It's a similar system to Keiichi Yano's later Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents games, but it feels so much more aggressive with all of the prompts zooming into the middle of the screen. It's combat, it's war!

There's a crucial hook to the game, and something that's deeply undervalued in it. Gitaroo Man adapts to how well you play. It has about a million alternate music bars up its sleeve, determining which would be the best to throw at a player of your skill level. In most levels, you'll very rarely hear the same song twice. I've been returning to Gitaroo Man over and over again for around 20 years, and I still don't think I've heard every bit of Bee Jam Blues hidden on the disc. It's exciting every time, and really encourages multiple playthroughs. This stuff rarely gets talked about, but it's a real feat of both game design and musical composition. You never feel like a phrase is being pulled out from a list of suitable candidates and loaded in. It's all seamless, and given its response to your skill level, it feels both rewarding and emotional. It's the feeling of getting lost in a solo. I have little doubt that the lukewarm response to Project Rap Rabbit's failed Kickstarter pitch was on the fault of the public's ignorance towards this aspect of Gitaroo Man.

It's clear that the game never would have been made without the precedent set by PaRappa the Rapper, and back when PS2 games were all at the same RRP, I can see why so few would have been willing to take a chance on something they'd already dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan novelty, but Gitaroo Man is so much more thoughtfully designed and satisfying to play. 326's artwork doesn't have the broad appeal of Rodney Greenblat's funny animal people. Ignoring the wild rendering techniques of PaRappa and just focusing on what the artists drew, Gitaroo Man's designs are weirder, and pulls more from eccentric 70s robot toys and gag manga. Everything's covered in colourful dials and buttons, and all the faces are bizarre. The visual style is both geekier and cooler than PaRappa, and I've really grown affection for it over the years, but who doesn't love Puma?

The game is so aware of its length. It knows how to use ten levels to tell a Hero's Journey. It never gets too full of itself, or takes itself too seriously, but that doesn't prevent it from doing something beautiful. The story is broad, silly and simplistic, but that's great for a short, E for Everyone game that you'll come back to again and again. The adventure takes the form of one of those Wizard of Oz-style dream scenarios, only a little more ambiguous, where we're returned to the status quo at the end, but one where the hero has learned their lesson. For me, the real ambiguity is in whether or not we're supposed to think U-1 punched Kazuya in the face.

The downsides? Uh... the compression in the FMV cutscenes is a little much. The game makes a great argument for concave analogue sticks, as you might find your thumb sliding a lot on an official Dualshock 2. I don't like that you have to navigate to the Options menu each time you want to load a save... Look - not only is this a 2001 PS2 game, it's a fucking KOEI game. It's amazing that the game came out nearly as slick as it did, drowning out developer talk from the Kessen offices next door.

Gitaroo Man was lightning in a bottle. I don't think we'll ever get a better collaboration of game designers, concept artists and musicians again, and if we do, it won't be with this budget or freedom. I mean, unless the Splatoon team decided it was time to do a narrative-focused Squid Sisters rhythm action spin-off. I don't know. Maybe Nintendo don't have the guts to become the hero.

After a dull opening act spent cleaning tables, the playpen made of WarioWare busywork gives way to la terreur when suddenly you're left to your own devices, combining the comte's mega-microgames into tangible thoughtlines that video games don't often afford us; now we're suddenly playing with the cards adults use!

Later sections often take a psychic toll upon the gamer's undeveloped brain, and it's only right that a game about the pyrrhic toll of cheating eventually becomes so mind-destroying that you end up looking at videos showing you how to cheat at cheating - any% WR for this game is just a guy turning on cheats and then letting the dialogue roll for 50 mins.

Don't want to spoil the potential endings for anyone (because this game is hinging quite a lot on its so-so-story), but I'm glad the developers were following my train of thought as it pulled into Epilogue Station. Bravo gentlemen! The first person to combine this gameplay with an existing card game is gonna clean out the gambling hall. I wanna slip-cut a Pot of Greed into a Yu-Gi-Oh draw deck while sipping a glass of Gamer Fuel.

Hideo Kojima's career is fascinating, and it's not something you can hope to find out about from "The Official Version". You kind of have to dig into old interviews, and have first-hand memories of long-delisted websites and discarded promotional material. GW has erased the ugly details, but I can't say goodbye to yesterday, my friend. Kojima thrived on the sidelines. He was originally hired as a project planner on Konami's MSX team, in the offices that the management didn't pay much attention to. The high-stakes positions were all working on Famicom and arcade games, and Kojima spent the first decade of his career in the shadows, catering to a small, enthusiast market with Japanese home computer releases and text-heavy adventure games. It's easy to over-romanticise this era. It wasn't easy. There was a lot of mismanagement and the expectation for relentless crunch, with many members of staff spending days on end in the office without leaving, but the games that came from those teams were pretty special. They were purposefully constructed, delivering a clear worldview and commenting on the ethical dangers of scientific developments in a politically unstable world. Then MGS1 was a huge international success, and all eyes were on Kojima.

From the early days, it was clear that Kojima had a unique confidence and self-belief. Some may call it ego or even narcissism, but it's what gave him the drive and ambition to attempt blending dense, socially relevant stories with traditional videogame action. When the bulk of the Japanese games industry was still hiding behind publisher-insisted pen names, Kojima opened Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake with an introductory credits sequence, naming each member of staff, saving himself for the biggest credit. It made sense. MSX2 owners who'd played Metal Gear and Snatcher knew that there was a rare quality to Hideo Kojima's games, and Metal Gear 2 was the promise of the Kojimiest game yet. Policenauts would similarly promote itself on the name of its director, delving into the production process with behind the scenes books and bonus discs that were fairly uncommon forms of game merchandise in the mid-90s. Before MGS1 had made the west aware of him, Kojima was putting his face on soundtrack CDs. He wanted the spotlight, but he didn't know how demanding it would be of him.

Metal Gear Solid 2 was announced, and was propped up as the game for the new millennium. The one thing that would chrysalise the medium into a new form. In tandem with the growing interest in the internet, the significance of home computer ownership was really taking hold. DVD players and digital TV services were selling themselves on "Interactive" features, reportedly blurring the line between audience and participant (we didn't know at the time that the peak of this technology would be Beehive Bedlam). Sony were convinced that Windows PCs were too technical and business-focused for mainstream adoption. There would be no overlap between the computer and the living room. The word at the time was that the PlayStation 2 was going to be the thing to take people into this new, interconnected era, and traditional forms of entertainment would become a memory of the 20th Century. The promise of the "interactive movie" that had been dangled towards early adopters of CD-ROM, finally coming to fruition. From Final Fantasy X to Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, and perhaps most ridiculously of all, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, many new titles were selling themselves on the promise to bridge the gap between these mediums, but for many, MGS2 seemed like the best bet to accomplish it. That's a lot of pressure for a game where you navigate boxy rooms, avoiding blue vision cones.

Metal Gear Solid 2 trailers were bold. Not only were they promising a game with unforeseen levels of interactivity, but wild narrative swings. We were told Solid Snake was dead. We were told he was the leader of the terrorist organisation putting the world at ransom. We'd anticipated a game that would radically shift our perception of the prior one. When we eventually bought the game, we swallowed the bitter truth when a mysterious Navy SEAL popped up with David Hayter's voice, taking fire at a horny vampire.

Reading pre-release interviews with Kojima, it's clear that he was as convinced by the potential as anyone else. He talks about character movement being impacted by changing wind direction, the integration of voice-recognition and online support. The end results are so compromised that you might not even notice them in the game. The network support got nipped and tucked at so much that in the end, it became an online competition for the opportunity to have your name appear on an in-game dog tag, and a browser-only leaderboard system where you could post your completion stats after you finished. The voice support, adding user-expression to the long, dense CODEC calls? That's the ability to press R2 to have your character audibly think a weird retort. "WHATEVER!" These are the limitations of not only the PlayStation 2 in 2001, but the ability of a Japanese development studio to deliver an action game on new hardware in a three-year project.

MGS2 couldn't live up to those initial ambitions. It didn't fully satisfy those dreaming of something new and transcendent. It was MGS1 again with extra buttons. But oh, what buttons!

MGS2 has so many cool little stealth moves to play around with. You get a real sense of your own ingenuity as you figure your way through each section. VR Missions was everything that MGS1 gameplay could offer. The developers knocked their heads against the walls, spinning its systems off down every conceivable avenue. The frustration of these limitations directly inspired the techniques players could make use of in Sons of Liberty. Players would be able to interact with guards much more intricately, threatening them at gunpoint, disabling walkie-talkies, injuring specific limbs, and shaking them down for extra supplies. Snake and Raiden could roll (or cartwheel), hang from railings, and pop out of cover, ready to fire. Most crucially, you could now aim from a first-person perspective, allowing for much more deliberate action in shoot-outs, or just fuck about with the set dressing to see how many clips KCEJ recorded for the sound of shooting a frying pan with different guns. Shenmue had set a new precedent for how interactive a 3D world could be in a game, and MGS2 picked up the baton to explore how that degree of tangibility could benefit Metal Gear. Hardcore fans who had bought Zone of the Enders solely for the opportunity to play a small section of this game would become intimately familiar with all the quirks and potential of its gameplay, hungry to see how they would be explored in the full campaign. I'm not convinced the Big Shell was the best possible pay-off for these hopes.

It isn't just the fact that players got to spend more time with their favourite muscle man that makes the Tanker section so beloved. It's very purposefully designed to explore MGS2's mechanics, and refreshingly, it borrows little from the structure of the MSX games. Metal Gear had already spent multiple generations reworking and refining the same, familiar setup, and it was exciting to see the series do something different. There's no hostages, no NIKITA puzzle, no underwater facility entrance. It was doing new things, taking out security cameras, shaking down guards for supplies, and sneaking past an audience of a hundred soldiers during a speech. It was exciting. But those old tropes were waiting for us, just around the corner. Justifying themselves via a metatextual reflection upon the previous game.

MGS2 is discussed in hushed, reverential tones these days. If something seemed weird or stupid, you obviously didn't get it. It had been relatively easy to understand a story about genetic inheritance, but memetic inheritance seemed far more abstract. Snake was a son of genetic inheritance, being a clone of the world's most prized soldier, and Raiden, the son of ideological inheritance, with Solidus killing his parents and fostering him as his own brainwashed soldier. Every action he takes is accompanied by a question of how he's being manipulated, and by whom. There's an awkward balance in the game being both radically incisive and incredibly schlocky videogame trash. Whenever it did something too absurd or outright crap, we took faith in the notion that nothing was quite what it seemed. Like there was a hidden truth that would make it all cohesive and brilliant. It was up to us to find it, and if we couldn't figure it out, we could always just pester Kojima and Konami to produce a much more pandering sequel. Full of retcons, underwhelming reveals, and relentless goalpost shifting. Was there ever value in MGS2's outlandish paranormal activity? Did Kojima ever have an answer before his arm was twisted enough to yell "nanomachines" in response to every question? Are we ashamed of our words and deeds for ever thinking the whole of Shell 2 was agonisingly tedious?

Discussing MGS2's story is a sticking your hand in a can of worms and finding a worm-filled rabbit hole at the bottom. A dense, purposefully confusing, and often prescient script. It also has roots in Kojima's 80s action game design, where storybeats are mainly included to intrigue its audience enough to continue playing. Kojima's handwritten script is filled with footnotes, explicitly referencing the Hollywood blockbusters he ripped each idea from. MGS2 was the point where much of Kojima's games became dictated by the promises he'd made in press interviews and pre-release trailers. MGS4 staff have talked about spending months solely working on moments to include in trailers, and then retroactively having to build the game around those moments. That approach started here. Shallow instances of mindblowing spectacle, engineered to shift product with little concern for the long-term impact. Ocelot's arm, Vamp's superhuman abilities, basically everything to do with Dead Cell - they're weird twists, and typically just for the sake of having a weird twist. Vamp's gay relationship with US Marine Corp commander, Scott Dolph, appears to be entirely a sophomoric in-joke targetted at Kojima's then-personal interpreter. MGS2 is simultaneously an earnest musing on the nature of propaganda in the digital age, and a very stupid videogame with absurd arcade game bosses. I don't want to make out like all the silliness is purely problematic or mishandled. There's moments of fun and whimsy I enjoy. Slipping on birdshit and the guard taking a leak off the side of the Strut L. Fatman. It's not the focus, but the old frivolous MSX personality is still here. Just muffled by all the pretension surrounding it. On your first playthrough, you don't know whether you can just enjoy something as a daft joke, or if it's hiding some deeper layer of significance. MGS1 had one foot in gaming's history and another in its future, and MGS2 attempts the same, with messier results in either respect.

The game's English writer, Agness Kaku, has discussed the thankless job of attempting to make MGS2's weird, convoluted script sound engaging through its translation. A lack of reference material, character limits, and heavy rewrites from Konami resulted in the game we have today. It's also clear that she doesn't have much regard for Kojima's script, and attempted to inject it with a richer sense of character and more entertaining dialogue. Many gamers would feel take strong objection to someone, particularly a woman, tinkering with the script from a visionary of Kojima's status, but the bulk of MGS2's most beloved English lines are embellishments on Kaku's part, and her political and literary knowledge lined her up well for the subject matter. However, Konami's insistence on literal translations of certain lines, paired with her personal distaste for Kojima's writing, made the final script fairly patchy and inconsistent. As talented a voice director as Kris Zimmerman is, there are lines of dialogue that are delivered in very odd ways, suggesting the cast didn't really understand the intention behind them. By contrast, Kaku's work on Katamari Damacy presents quite an interesting dynamic. That was a similarly text-rich game, but one with a much more playful tone, and a less demanding writer. She was allowed to completely rewrite the game with very little direction, and the final result was a delight. Katamari writer/director, Keita Takahashi has gone on to learn English at a high level and now lives in San Francisco, where he's expected to speak it as his main language. I wonder if he's ever gone back to look at the English version of his PS2 game.

Metatextually, MGS2 benefits from a constant feeling of distrust. To know whether or not you're seeing the real version. There's an additional distrust of censorship thanks to the game's Q4 2001 release date, the story of terrorists causing destruction and political instability off the coast of New York City, and public sensitivity to the subject matter at the time. Following September 2001, there had been late-stage edits to the game, and as an audience, we can't be sure how compromised the final release is, but even without the real-world parallels, the game is filled with themes of how lies spread and ideas take hold. From the once-tortured child soldier, Raiden, to Peter Stillman's faked disability, to Otacon's disturbing family history, every character in the game has an uneasy relationship with the truth, denying their personal trauma to the world. By the Big Shell portion of the game, there's a question over whether they're real at all, or merely a projection of an elaborate AI construct. Sections of the game that are teased - boss fights with Fortune and Ocelot, as well as the bulk of Shell 2 - go unfulfilled. Raiden breaks through enemy security by lying about his identity, pretending to be one of them, adopting their uniform, and manipulating their body to trick a retinal scanner. Raiden's first quest in the game - disabling a series of explosives - turns out to be an elaborate decoy, while Snake discovers the real bomb off-screen. Snake is playing the real game, and Raiden is still in the VR replica. The Solid Snake game that had been heavily promoted at trade shows and plastered on magazine covers for years beforehand didn't exist. It was all just part of the simulation. This is the dynamic of MGS1 and 2.

The truth of the situation only comes through in the ending.
"It doesn't matter if they were real or not, that's never the point."
"Don't obsess over words so much."
"Everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice..."
Kojima couldn't make something that transcended the medium of videogames. The Emotion Engine was merely a new CPU, comprised of silicon soldered to a circuit board, and shipped to millions of homes within SCE's new electronic toy. When the PS2 became something people could touch and own, the best it could do was play rushed versions of TimeSplitters and SSX that would soon be rendered obsolete by their immediate sequels. The dream was over. The boundaries were brought into stark focus. Metal Gear Solid 2 would be little more than The New Metal Gear Solid, despite the discussion, obsession, interpretation and reinterpretation it would provoke. With the constant focus from fans, it became more than it was. Value was seen in it, and thus, it was there.

Metal Gear Solid 2 changed my relationship with videogames, and not in ways that either its developers, or I, may have hoped. It made me aware of the inherent limitations. Before it, the future of videogames seemed like a boundless, infinite expanse. They could be anything. They could transcend physical limits. They were another dimension. A world of pure imagination. Afterwards, I became aware of just how tethered they were to reality. They were the result of project plans, processing speeds, staff sizes, managerial oversight, limited talent and budgets. They became infinitely smaller. Less significant. Cute. They didn't reflect the limitations of their creators' imaginations, but their ability to deliver a project with realistic expectations. It levelled the playing field. Now, MMOs, which promised entirely new worlds for players to live in, were dragged back to the same context as Pong. It made me realise what a game was. I came to the other side of that, and still loved it. To call it a disappointment is denying the growth that we needed to take. As fans, creators, and an industry. We're currently living through the investor class catching up with PS2 gamers, getting hyped for Final Fantasy XI, kidding on like we're going to spend all our free time in the fucking Metaverse. We all need to accept reality, and learn how to live in it. To appraise videogames with maturity. Let's all calm down and see how big a score we can get on Dig Dug today.

I've got to come clean, here. I'm not really into most horse racing games. I mean, I like the idea, but pretty much everything I've tried has been really stat-heavy and management focused. They generally seem tailored towards those who are heavily invested in gambling, and following the fine details of what makes a reliable bet, rather than those who just want to play a nice horsey game. There are exceptions. Obviously, I'm really into the horse stuff in the Zelda and Red Dead Redemption games, if I'm ever lucky enough to come across a Final Furlong cabinet, that's a great day, and for all the convoluted design elements that comprise Bomberman Fantasy Race, there's a really fun arcade horse racing game at the heart of it (even if the horses are cartoon kangaroos and bipedal rhinoceroses). For a straight-up good horse racing game, though, I've never found anything that could compete with Pocket Card Jockey.

Its premise is actually quite relatable for me. Your protagonist wants to be able to win horse races, but has no aptitude for it. They're better at card games. Through a deal with god, you're allowed to compete in horse races via the medium of quick-fire games of solitaire.

This isn't just a fun facade to put on the front of a card game, though. It's not like a licenced pachinko or pinball machine with funny animations. This is a horse racing game first, and a solitaire game second. You choose a good horse based on their natural statistics, develop their skills as much as you can in each race, and attempt to carry them through a career before they grow too old and get sent to the farm to produce offspring. Between each game of solitaire, you'll need to decide where best to line them up with the rest of the pack to maintain speed and stamina, while sticking close to the inside lane for oncoming corners. You're making decisions as a jockey, and relying on your abilities as a card shark to stay competitive.

The solitaire stuff is dead simple, but deliberately so. Cards are arranged randomly in the tableau in front of you, with you drawing cards at random from your deck. If your drawn card is one number higher or lower than the one on top of a stack, you can remove it from the game. Clear the board quickly, and your stamina loss will be negligible. Don't clear it in time, or run out of cards before all the cards are removed, and you'll really feel the impact. One bad hand can ruin an entire career, and you'll be struggling to make anything of your horse before it's time to move to a new one.

It's how frequently your focus is shifted that makes Pocket Card Jockey so addictive. In the heat of each solitaire game, your whole attention is on drawing the right numbers, and looking out for good sequences of cards to leave on the table for a big combo down the line. Then you zoom out, and you're back to the race, watching stats and trying to find the best place to set yourself. Then you zoom out further, and you're looking at your horse's career, trying to pick the best races to put them in, and buying items to boost their abilities. And you can zoom out further still, trying to make sure you've got a good horse waiting for you afterwards, and picking out good breeding pairs. There's constant distractions, but that sense of momentum never goes away. It's all headed in the trajectory of becoming a champion.

This is all well and good, but what really holds Pocket Card Jockey together is its charm. If you hadn't known already, this is a Game Freak joint. While they're, understandably, most known for Pokémon, I feel their true character comes through most in their independent games, like Jerry Boy, HarmoKnight and Pulseman. They're relentlessly creative, and have a history of consistently lovable titles with great art, music and writing behind them. Pocket Card Jockey is a surprisingly funny game, and can blindside you with its dialogue and characters, while maintaining a friendly, unassuming appearance. It isn't afraid to go full shonen anime for the more intense races, transporting your steed into a neon-filled techno dimension as you rapidly draw cards looking for a 7 to place on a board full of 6s and 8s. Something like this could easily become dry and predictable, but Game Freak have enough tricks up their sleeve to make sure you're always having a good time.

Pocket Card Jockey was initially a 3DS eShop game, and was later revived as the Apple Arcade mobile title, 'Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On'. That's the game that's been ported to Switch. There isn't too much to distinguish between the two games, with the bulk of content, including the script, horses and races, being pulled from that original 3DS entry, though the fully modelled 3D races are a flashy new tweak. There are some low-level changes to the ruleset beyond that, but after a race or two, you'll forget all about them. The real change is how the game has been reconfigured for a single-screen format, and subsequently, a home console. The sacrifices are comparable to Splatoon or Mario Maker's Switch sequels, without a second screen to provide useful information. It also plays a lot slower with a pad than a stylus, with a lot of the design clearly tailored towards a touchscreen, though you don't have to give that up if you're playing in handheld mode. The controls have been mapped quite carefully for those who do opt for the big screen experience, though, and there's a real satisfaction in flicking the right analogue stick to draw a new card. It's not a game that works as well here as it did on the 3DS, but they're trying their best.

Be honest with yourself, though. Are you really going back to play your 3DS on the reg again? If you are, good for you. I'm sure you'll enjoy the original. For the rest of us, we're much more inclined to turn to the Switch when it's time to play a game, and it's great to have Pocket Card Jockey as one of our selectable games. It's welcoming, cheap, compelling, and sessions can run from five minutes to all day, depending on what you're willing to put in to it. Look at my top five favourite games, and you'll see that four of them are available to play on the Switch. In a robust library of all-time classics, it's really great to see Pocket Card Jockey come into the fold.

First time finishing the original TR and I fucking loved it!

Honestly, the game is transformed just by having a save anywhere feature (I know this is in the PC version). The new visuals and 60fps help too.

New art is great and being able to switch back to the original visuals with the press of a button is very helpful when you need its brighter lighting.

No handholding, minimal HUD, great puzzles, a suitably creepy and lonely atmosphere, and a classic soundtrack. What a game.

(Yes, it can be tough at times but it’s far easier - and fairer - than its sequels. Speaking of which, TR2 next.)

Man, it's something else to vanquish a white whale. Tomb Raider was one of the first 3D games I ever played, and I've always had a real respect for it, but christ was it fussy. On PS1, where you're dealing with save crystals, load times, fairly limited draw distance and 1MB memory card read/write speeds, it takes a special kind of patience to make it past St Francis' Folly, and once the marvel of playing a game in 3D started to wear off, fewer and fewer people were willing to pass the threshold.

This kind of thing is what the Nintendo Switch has been all about, for me. How miraculously it can reframe impenetrable, pisstaking old games and make them fun again. I'm so glad that someone decided they ought to put the old Tomb Raiders on this thing.

For all the frustration and tedium that the original game has come to represent, it's difficult to see the Official UK PlayStation Magazine 10/10 that lies beyond all of that. Not only is the game a real technical achievement, there's a great sense of character to Tomb Raider 1 that drifted away as the wider media got overexcited about big boobs. An air of elegance to the consistent control system, the ambient, synthesised choral soundtrack and these huge, labyrinthian caverns hiding elaborate ancient relics. That isn't everything, though. There's a balance between this side of the game, and the game's absurd Hot Wheels playset from Hell stupidity. Aqueducts swarming with crocodiles, and elaborate ancient traps protected by starving lions and furious gorillas. Despite how deeply the series' lore has been mined, I didn't see any credit for the inexplicable cowboy boss beyond "the cowboy". The game's filled with big, mad, daft stuff, and I love it.

Tomb Raider was a massively influential game. It's easily forgotten, given how much the industry propped up Mario 64 as "The 3D Game" a year later, but I don't think you get an Ocarina of Time without Core Design's influence. When developers were still figuring out what verticality could offer a game, here's Lara Croft backflipping into elevated passageways and swandiving from slides. Compare that to mid-nineties 3D adventures like Descent or Jumping Flash, and you really have to marvel at how confidently Core were able to take on this design challenge. It's all owed to how strict its controls are, borrowing from cinematic platformers like Another World and Flashback. When jumping lands you in the same spot each time, you know the most interesting spots to place each successive platform. Level layouts are consistently clever and imaginative, but it never forgets that human beings are playing the game. There's a balance between strict, Sokoban-style logic puzzles, and wild spectacle. Sometimes they just let you chill out in a big room to look at a neat sphinx.

There's a solid sense of progression through each of the game's levels, and it gets freakin' bananas by the end. Starting out running through cold, undecorated caverns, and ending up in a giant gold pyramid, with fleshy, pulsing organic walls. Tomb Raider speculates that beyond the Aztec blowpipe traps and rusted old switches, there are 20th century living dinosaurs, roaming under our feet, cordoned off in a special jungle room, behind an elaborate clockwork water puzzle. They've been there all along, but no explorer in human history was clever enough to get past Level 2 until Lara came along. I love this stuff.

The Quality of Life stuff in this 2024 release is fairly conservative, but beautifully exploitable. You can save anywhere now, and don't have to worry about memory card management to do so, but I'd argue the more meaningfully transformative addition is the Photo Mode. Click in both analogue sticks, and you'll have full control over the floating camera. Not only can you take rockin' shots of the game's low-poly crocs, you can use it to scout out passageways and dangerous trap sequences whenever you like. Not having a map screen is kind of crucial to the Tomb Raider experience, but being able to quickly check underwater to see if you missed a switch or item, instead of clambering down from the tricky precipice you're standing on, is such a relief. Use it judiciously, and it doesn't make the game feel any less perilous or thrilling, but it takes out so much of the busywork.

I love Tomb Raider. In no way would I ever recommend it to anyone who doesn't already have a strong taste for this era of game design, though. Everything takes so fucking long. If you have to push a block multiple times, it's going to be a long night, my friend. For as strong a design principle as the restrictive grid-based structure is, it also turns a lot of the experience into an overwrought sequence of wobbling into the correct position. Every mandatory switch you need to pull needs to be successfully wobbled towards before you can activate them, and in puzzles with multiple switches, this can be agonisingly tedious. There are the optional "modern controls", but I'd suggest using them would be akin to driving a car with your face. Don't look at Tomb Raider as if it's a big blockbuster action game for fans of thrills. You have to be a very boring old prick to stick with this shit.

I'm really glad I did, though. Tomb Raider is a very different idea of how to design a 3D game, and it makes a great argument for doing it this way. Sure, these principles lead to the all-time studio crushing embarrassment that was Angel of Darkness, but they also gave us everything Fumito Ueda's ever made. There's such a rich sense of satisfaction to successfully navigating the game in a way that Crystal Dynamics have never managed to replicate. In a world filled with Yellow Paint and Unlock Everything DLC packs, you need a little Tomb Raider 1 to remind you what a game can be. We were heroes, once.

Subnautica is one of those games.

A game that you think about even when you're not playing it. A game that takes over your brain and lives there for a bit. A game that makes you feel you're actually accomplishing something. A game with a purpose. A game that actually lets you discover things, wonderful things, terrifying things, all by yourself instead of forcing them on you like most other titles.

Subnautica is a game worthy of your time. It's a game that will last the ages. It's beautiful.

Play Subnautica.

This was given to me by my uncle for Christmas in 2001, the same day I got my PSone (yeah i was late to the party).

I never made it past the second level and it was quickly traded into GAME when I realised that was a thing you could do.

Now it's 2024 and the game has been added to Sony's (so far) dismal emulated "classics" line up as part of PS Plus Premium. Although you can buy it as a standalone title like I did for pocket change.

Is it good? No -- but I had unfinished business.

The game itself is actually quite ambitious for the hardware with lots of interactive NPCs and dialogue trees. It also includes an odd level where it essentially turns into an old school adventure game as you try and find the right thing to say to the right market traders in the right order to get some daft fucking pod parts for Anakin. Took me hours.

It's scuffed, but it more accurately reflects the experiences that most causual players likely had with the original PlayStation than those who played FF7/MGS/Silent Hill/Resi Evil and then wouldn’t shut up about them for the next 25 years.