I’ve known about this game for a minute and just avoided it because of the cover art. It didn't really look like my kind of game. What reminded me of this game's existence was seeing a tweet around a week ago that Wild Woody was added to an NSFW kart racing game. I had to do a double take, but it was actually real. I shouldn’t be surprised considering the name of the game, but, like, wow. I consider myself to be a fan of the Sega CD, so I did want to give this game a try.

The controls are some of the worst I’ve seen in the medium. When jumping, Woody stutters when rising and falling, so it ends up feeling like you’re rubber banding in an online game. Woody’s main form of attacking is jumping on enemies, which will play out an animation where he sinks into the enemy while erasing them from the level. There’s been times where I would try jumping on enemies upwards of 5 times in a row and it would still not register! He’s also got this sketch ability where you’ll have to press the pause button, flip through the sketch book to find the ability you want to use, and activate it, which plays out an animation. Admittedly, a cool idea, but badly integrated since you can only use 2 of these before having to get a powerup later in the level. For the most part, these are useless in the sense that they obstruct the flow of the game and are never good enough to where you’d even think of using them instead of just damage boosting through whatever enemy is in front of you. Abilities are mostly some awkward projectile or something that transforms you into something for more jump height and movement speed, all controlling as bad if not worse than your standard form. For example, there’s ones that turn you into a kangaroo and hobby horse.

This game is not good in the level design department either. Wild Woody has the design philosophies of Sonic CD with these large, incoherent mazes I’ve gotten lost in for some embarrassingly long times. Also cluttered with enemy placements that, at times, make taking damage feel unavoidable. It’s so bad you’re better off just damage boosting through everything since you’ll probably take more damage trying to avoid them. The enemies also really like throwing unfair projectiles, which you can’t even avoid at times. It’s evident this game was a rush job, and the stage design really makes that show. I get the vibe that they made the levels and didn’t even try playing through the game because a ton of stages have platforming segments that are way too awkward to perform consistently. In the Mount Olympus stage, there is a part where you literally have to take a leap of faith and hope you land on a small platform instead of falling below the area and having to climb back up again. I haven’t mentioned yet that Woody has an ability where he can erase areas of the map to find secrets and progress through the stage. That’s fine; at the start of the game, they highlight these areas to let you know you can erase them, but past level 1, they never mark them again. So, there are areas I’ve gotten trapped in where you just have to waste time guessing where the erasable floor or wall is. Funnily enough, they also increase the time to do so in later stages if it wasn’t already cryptic enough, because then you’ll have to wait longer to erase things with no prior indication.

First impressions of the music from stage 1 sound bad initially, but make more sense since Ron Thal who did the music, said that he made the soundtrack start off silly and progressively get more intense throughout. So even though the first song sounds like a prog rock cover of a nursery rhyme, it does start to pick up the pace with the later stages. My favorite songs are the space stage theme and this song that went unused due to a presumed programming bug. It's a bit goofy, but the high-tempo drums and the piano make for a pretty kickass boss theme, so it’s sad this song didn’t make it in.

How was this released?! Ristar literally came out earlier in the year, and this was supposed to be the swan-song for the Sega CD? How unfortunate… It’s a shame because I think this game had the potential to be pretty cool. I also think it's hilarious that the platforming mascot shit got so out of hand that they made one for a fucking pencil… At least the soundtrack is good.

Front Mission seemed kind of daunting at first to me, as I’ve never really played anything like it with the customizable mechs. What really intrigued me about playing Front Mission was the talent of Amano and Shimomura behind it. There’s digitized portraits of Amano’s character designs in-game, and his timeless art is the kind of stuff I’ll never get sick of looking at. It started to make more sense as I played it, and honestly, it wasn't as confusing as I had thought.

Front Mission is a strategy RPG where you customize mecha for your units to use in battle. When changing the equipment for your mechs though, they didn’t take the easy route with spritework. There are different battle sprites, field sprites, and giant sprites in the setup menu that all change depending on the pieces of equipment you pick. There’s a ton of equipment too, with there being body armor, legs, guns, and even backpacks too, so to see this much work put into something like this is astounding. It really helps sell the game's whole gimmick of building mechs and really makes some builds feel unique. Might I add that you can even paint the mechs different colors for free? This actually helped a ton because I usually have a hard time differentiating troops in these games, so I knew who was who with the allocated colors.

Much of the time will be spent sitting in the menu and customizing your mechs. Admittedly, buying parts is slow, but it’s fun thinking about which builds to go for. There’s a weight limit for mechs, so you kind of need to balance out your builds and not have too much stuff on them as you mix and match a variety of parts from shops, which all raise certain stats. Another aspect of the builds is your character stats. There’s some sort of hidden leveling system for weapon proficiency, so you’ll usually want to stick to one type of weapon for each character. You have the “Fight” stat, which is for gauntlets; the “Short” stat for 1 tile range weaponry; and “Long” for missiles and other long range guns. Certain equipment will work better for short-range or long-range people, so that’s why there’s a lot to think about in the parts shop.

The combat revolves around this body part system, where each mech has separate health bars for their leg parts, both individual hands and the body. Destroying the legs will lower their tile movement; destroying either hand will make whatever weapon the mech is equipped with unusable; and destroying their body will immobilize them completely. You also can’t control what parts you shoot unless someone has a skill that lets them, so it kind of makes a lot of battles very RNG-reliant. I also really like the combat animations. It’s pretty satisfying seeing your mech fire off a multi-hit machine gun as the game lags with the debris flying everywhere…

Front Mission has some awkward balancing as well. The start of the game provides you with some pretty unremarkable equipment, and leveling up units is tricky since they don’t do very much damage. This made the game very hard at the beginning, and I was getting my ass kicked at a certain skill check. At around a third through the game, the characters start to get stronger, unlock their skills, and eventually become some of the most broken units in RPG history (probably). This means you don’t even have to be strategizing anymore. There is benefit at the start of the game from having a balanced team, but in the latter half, the short-range units are so busted that it doesn’t even matter if you have any other differently classed units. Hell, I’m sure you could solo most maps with just one of them!

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Front Mission. The story is very ahead of its time and probably my favorite aspect of the game, which is rare for me since I’m more of a gameplay-oriented person. It’s a pretty easy game and not that hard to get into, despite how complicated it may seem. If all still goes south, there’s an arena you can grind at in case you get stuck too.

We’ve been starving for a new 2D Mario game for a minute now. I’ll save you all from me bitching about NSMB, as I’m pretty sure everyone is aware of those games at this point. I was ecstatic to see this revealed at the Nintendo Direct it was presented in with its profound new artstyle, but I started to get weary of the footage from the trailers as to if it was going to suffer the same design problems as the NSMB games did with its spacious stages to account for multiplayer.

Levels are very spacious, and Mario Wonder is definitely best played with others because of this. They’re not as broad as something like NSMB Wii, but a lot of sections don’t have much going on in them. It’s a good medium, though, as I get that it’s hard to make levels that work well for 4 players and 1 player at the same time. There’s no player collision in this game either, which makes multiplayer pretty hassle-free. I played through the game by myself and tried multiplayer for a bit, and even though multiplayer is more fun, it was still great to focus on getting 100% as a single player experience. You honestly miss out on a lot if you don’t 100% this game; there’s secret exits, flower coins (which are this game's star coins), and stuff like reaching the top of the flagpole even counts for 100%, and a lot of stages will use their gimmick at the end accustomed around reaching it, kind of as a level design progression to see if you’ve mastered the stage. Stuff like this is why I really appreciate Mario Wonder’s game design, and it’s clear there was a lot of work put in to make these stages all feel unique. 

The double-edged sword of why I really like and don’t like Mario Wonder, though, is its badges. Kind of being a bit of a reference to Paper Mario, this game has a bunch of badges that will grant your character a unique ability, some much better than others. The first one you get is a Parachute Cap, which lets you hover and can also be used to float back onto walls as an infinite wall climb, making a later badge basically useless. A lot of these badges, most notably the boosting spin jump badge, can be used to cheese a lot of the game's secrets and ignore a lot of the game's level design. There’s also stages designed around the badges, and a few are honestly some of my favorites in the game. Stages designed around these new mechanics usually have two per badge, the first of which is a tutorial of sorts and the second to see if you’ve mastered it. One of my favorites was the second wall climb jump stage, which is basically Getting Over It if it were a Mario stage. These stages had me thinking, “Why hadn’t they integrated some of these new mechanics into the movesets?”. A perfect one to have added to the moveset would have been the Dolphin Kick, which would have actually made the water levels fun for once, offering a new, faster-paced movement style. 

Other additions to Mario Wonder are its three new power-ups and the Wonder Flowers. The new power-ups are all really fun, my favorite being the elephant, since I kind of like having a strong melee attack in platformers. It kind of goes against Mario’s whole gimmick of stomping on enemies heads, but it is a power-up, and you can lose it, so I was trying to keep it as best as I could. Then there’s the Wonder Flowers, which I can only imagine are a direct response to complaints about NSMB being really boring. Every main stage has one, which will either enable some new visuals or change the way the game plays. These are honestly really hit-or-miss, as a lot of them are really boring. Some of the more fun ones are when they’ll change your character into an enemy, sometimes as a sort of debuff that you’ll have to work around, changing the way you approach the stage. From the top of my head, I think my favorite one was where you have to walk on the wall in the background. Outside of these Wonder Flowers, a lot of the stages already have their own unique gimmick, so it wasn’t like these were entirely necessary, but I enjoyed their addition. 

Mario Wonder was very refreshing nonetheless, and I’m glad I gave it a shot. I loved getting all the secrets and using the new badge abilities. I can only hope we get new 2D Mario games in the near future, as this was a huge step in the right direction. It’s cool to see Nintendo actually listen to fans on this one, and we got one of the more creative Mario experiences out of it.