I don't have enough to say here for a proper review or rating, but I think it'd be nice to document a couple of my experiences here in case I forget them one day. Perhaps if you read this you'll be able to synthesize parts of my experience into your own and feel more concretely however you do about this game.

Pokémon Crater was the first Pokémon game of any kind that I played, most likely around 2005 or 2006 or so. I'd watched some of the TV show through thrift store VHS tapes and collected the trading cards as hand-me-downs from cousins and friends but hadn't really gotten to play any of the games. The first real one I played was a copy of Crystal a cousin of mine owned, but that wouldn't be until a little later than this.

I first heard about Crater from Andrew, a kid on the bus who I was friends with through my brother. I wound up playing it for the first time at a Best Buy at one of their sample laptops (a Mac, I presume) while my father was there to browse their wares and buy something (maybe an appliance?). I was there for quite a while so I got to play the game for a fair bit before we left. I picked Cyndaquil to start with, and I remember playing against a number of the Hoenn gym leaders before challenging a couple Johto ones and maybe a Kanto one. It was a nice long session, at least by my young standards.

After that I didn't play it again due to no consistent family computer internet access for a while till I randomly went to a local coffee shop my father frequented. They had a mini internet café there and with his permission I went on and played the game again. I believe I picked the same pokémon on a new account (if I even made one...) and more or less did the same thing again, though I remember going a bit further than the previous time. I want to say I challenged at least one Frontier Brain or Elite Four member.

And then... I can't remember any specific instances of playing it again. I know for a fact I played it at least one more time at that café later on, as well as on the family laptop on one of the few times where I was allowed to use it to browse the web (and wasn't playing RuneScape or AdventureQuest or Club Penguin). Weirdly I didn't ever go on there at school despite my second elementary school giving us plenty of opportunities to play games when we were done with our computer classwork -- I think I just used Club Penguin more there cause most of my classmates were on that so it was more of a fun social thing.

Still, I always loved Crater so it's a bit odd I didn't hop on more. I guess the same could be said about a lot of sites. My internet access was quite limited for a while, though, and by the time I got my own little netbook (a turquoise Toshiba NB505, very cute) I guess I'd forgotten about a lot of that stuff. I think a lot about how I never got to play much of the offerings on Bionicle.com cause a lot of the stuff I'd wanted to play was no longer available like MNOG 1.

Ah, but that's a big digression. Back to Crater...

I think every few years I'd hop on it for a couple hours and then leave, never retaining the same account. Despite keeping accounts for sites like Global Pokédex Plus/GPX+ and Pokémon Showdown and even flash game sites back then, I never seemed to pin one down for Crater. Weird. Anyway, after middle school I pretty much never touched it again until the year I graduated from college. I decided to visit it, and finding that it'd gone through several name and site changes until it was now Pokémon Vortex Battle Arena, I was intrigued. It turned out it pretty much played the same as it always had, though, and in a way it was even cooler that way. I made an account that I keep to this day and every once in a long while I'll hop back in to actually make progress. Maybe I should go back to it sometime.

This game is adorable and if/when it goes down one day I'll be really really sad. Even though I've resolved not to really keep up with Pokémon much in general, this is one of those warmhearted and sincere projects that I can't help but follow quietly when I can as opposed to more high-profile media -- official or otherwise. It's really impressive how long the people behind this have kept it going for. I cherish this game even if I never got to play it too often when I was younger. It's hard to explain but it brings a sense of comfort thinking about it. Not nostalgia per se, but I suppose a sense of relaxation booting up something that you haven't touched in many years. It's almost like a time capsule, and certainly one I appreciate very much for existing.

Certainly not lost on me how shallow my revisit of LBP1 was. This was something of a childhood fave of mine I threw countless hours at; be it in couch co-op with fwiends or alone in my room exploring the avalanche of user-created content people spun together. Neither of which was a factor in me revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade now (jezus farckin christ!!!!), the servers are long gone and I’d need to be the richest man alive to bribe someone to play this with me over a cocktail of Parsec + RPCS3 input lag. Nobody will ever understand the joy of slapping the aztec cock motif on your co-op partners’ faces siiiighghhh…. Still, an illuminating experience that rekindled something in my heart about what LBP1 stood for!

Admittedly, I was always more of an LBP2 kid, these games being modular meant there was very little reason to revisit the first game once the sequel came out. There is a very strong difference in vibes between the two games though, if LBP1 excels at anything, it’s in encouraging the player to go off and create for themselves. It’s kind of wild the extent to which LBP1 offers and explains its tools to the player - its relatively simple levels make no effort to hide the gadgets that make ingame events work. Stages are littered with visible emitters, tags, switches, stuff like only-slightly offscreen circuitry that you can watch move around to inform a boss of its attack patterns and phases. It feels like a child’s art project or something, a simple array of pulleys and string animating rudimentary creatures and swings. It’s all so laid bare, I kind of adore it, and is certainly a handcrafted energy that LBP2 loses in its explosion of visual polish. The constant delivery of decorations, objects, prebuilt things you can make your own edits of, it’s no wonder this game blew up in the way it did - it’s with you every step of the way and always acts as a shockingly good teacher for its own mechanics.

Anyway this was a lot of fun. Unquestionably a hilarious platforming title to insist upon having no-death run rewards when so much of your survivability hinges on Sackboy’s physics-based astrology. You don’t realise how much nostalgia you have for something until the first thirty seconds of a song makes you tear up. This kind of williamsburg scrapbook aesthetic is hard to stomach nowadays but it really works here. Holy shit I can’t believe the racist caricatures this game has in every corner, this truly is a quintessentially British game.

Veredito: O fliperama ideal para quem gosta de dirigir.

Outrun é EXATAMENTE como eu imagino a tara por dirigir. Não sou aficcionado pelo assunto (sei nem diferenciar um Palio de um Clio, falo logo), meu negócio é transporte público e bicicleta/skate, mas gostei bastante de Outrun, mesmo não sendo o público-alvo. Ele passa exatamente a sensação que, imagino, os aficcionados por carros tenham numa rodovia livre, ainda mais nos anos 1980 que é quando ele lançou: velocidade, uma garota bonita do lado, vento batendo no cabelo, passando por várias paisagens diferentes e com aquela sensação de liberdade.

Na verdade, gostei tanto que adoraria que tivesse uma máquina de Outrun perto de casa, porque ele é um EXCELENTE jogo de fliperama. O espírito arcade está em todo canto, e é muito bem feitinho: a vontade de quebrar recordes, de competir com os amigos por um espaço no quadro de pontos, a sensação de "cheguei QUASE lá, na próxima eu consigo!" a cada derrota. É sério, fico tristão desses fliperamas BONS PRA CACETE não existirem mais por aí só porque são velhos. Não é um jogo de corrida como estamos acostumados, você não tem que correr contra ninguém. Só contra o relógio. Consiga chegar a tempo nos 5 checkpoints do jogo, em qualquer caminho que você escolher, e você zera.

Acredite, é mais difícil do que parece. Mas nunca é injusto.

I'm gonna let you know right now, this game is getting a wholeass star for that Hoth level.

If you were born after 1999, then you do not know a time in which Star Wars wasn't an inescapable part of American media. The original trilogy was a big deal, highly influential not just for how it changed the art of filmmaking but for pop culture as a whole, but the early-to-mid 90s were a period of stillness. You could find Star Wars media fairly easily, but you could just as easily avoid it - a far cry from yearly films and big budget television streaming series, and people getting irrationally upset over Sweitt Concorkill on the internet, or whatever. The release of The Phantom Menace changed that, but any conversation about Star Wars' reemergence as a media juggernaut that doesn't bring up Shadows of the Empire is one that doesn't respect history.

Shadows of the Empire was a multimedia event, deliberately treated with the same gravitas as a motion picture release in an effort to revitalize Star Wars' brand power. They even released a soundtrack for the novel. Lucasfilm wanted people to not only think this was a big deal, but to treat it as one. Now I ain't never read the book on account of me not being so good with words and junk, but I did read the comic, because it had pictures of Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett in it. I remember going to pog tournaments (which were held in an empty, unfurnished room on the second floor of a comic shop) then heading downstairs to thumb through issues of Shadows, and going home to play with my Shadows of the Empire toys. I did my tour of duty.

If it wasn't for the success of Shadows of the Empire and the special editions of the original trilogy (which released around the same time), The Phantom Menace might not have been made. Can you imagine how wonderful that would be? Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine a world where kids didn't suck on Jar Jar Binks' candied tongue. Doesn't that just calm you? Unfortunately, you don't live in that reality. You live in the one where Therm Scissorpunch - a character first introduced in a Denny's commercial - has his own carefully crafted backstory. God damn I hate it here. And yet, when people look back on Shadows of the Empire's legacy, they rarely talk about the novel (arguably the centerpiece), or the comics, or the toys and trading cards... It's all about the game. It might as well be the only part of Shadows that exists.

Shadows of the Empire: The Game Based on the Novel Based on a Major Motion Picture is a third person shooter that puts players in control of side character and certifiable space himbo Dash "Shoulder Pads" Rendar. A lot of this game could be summed up as "what if Dark Forces was third person?" Sure, it's not as fast or fluid as that, but the way you approach levels is largely the same: awkwardly platform around various alien worlds while shooting storm troopers and completing a series of objectives necessary for progressing the story and level. You also shoot Boba Fett, so uh, it's basically the same thing??

Of course, being a fully 3D game also allows Shadows of the Empire to feature more dynamic set pieces and varied gameplay types. The train level is a personal favorite, it still provides a satisfying sense of speed and the platforming is really tense, plus it culminates in an absolute bastard of a fight against IG-88. However, Shadows of the Empire is best known for its Hoth level, and while it may not be the first video game rendition of the Battle of Hoth, it's probably the most significant. Having this level of control over the snow speeder, cruising around in a fully 3D space taking out probe droids and chicken walkers, running your tow cable around the legs of an AT-AT... It was incredibly immersive for its time and it was the closest a game came to making you feel like you were in the movies. The other vehicle levels are a bit more hit or miss (the asteroid chase is great, the swoop bike level is offensively bad), but Shadows of the Empire opens strong with Hoth, and broadly speaking, the rest of the game so perfectly captures and sights and sounds of Star Wars that any kid in the 90s would be immensely satisfied with it.

Shadows of the Empire certainly has its flaws though, and it can be especially difficult to come back to today given how refined the third person shooter genre has become. Dash feels stiff and clumsy and blaster impacts just don't have the level of punch you'd want them to. Levels can be a bit confusing to navigate and nearly all of them are too damn long, and the difficulty is all over the place. I mentioned IG-88, Boba Fett, and the swoop bike chase, all of which stick in my memory because of how absurdly difficult they are. The swoop bike sequence is especially frustrating given how lengthy it is, and how punishing it can be to die right near the very end. It was always the point in which the game broke me as a kid. The remaining few levels are like drinking a warm, flat soda. Just a total bummer how weak the climax is, though it's entirely possible I think this only because I cannot perceive them through the lens of nostalgia as I can for the rest of the game. Going to guess I would've never liked Imperial City Sewers, though.

I do like the look of the cutscenes, although the story sometimes lacks gravity due to the fact that Dash is a largely reactive character, and much of his story is informed by events occurring in the novel and comics, which you don't directly see. Luke shows up, but like, Luke is having his own whole adventure in another medium. He may not be the main character of this story, but he's still the main character of the larger story that this one is a part of. It's weird, but also part in parcel for something like this. You can also only do so much cinematically with a Nintendo 64 game, and it's perhaps best that they kept things as brisk as they did.

To say Shadows of the Empire is antiquated feels insulting and rhetorically dull, but it is very much a case of a game having its time and place. It exists entirely because and within the context of Star Wars in the mid 1990's, and I think trying to excise it from the whole of what Shadows of the Empire is risks appreciating it less. In that sense, I find it both fascinating and a little difficult to reapproach. A lot of what I enjoy about it is steeped in my memories of that time, and for anyone removed from that period, it likely holds little value outside of being a time capsule representative of a grossly different media landscape. I certainly think it's worth playing for that reason, the point I'm trying to make here is swoop bikes fucking suck, they fucking suck so much, you don't have to play past that

recently there's been a lot of praise for kane and lynch 2's camera (maybe too much), but i'd argue the way these early rockstar games do the exact opposite thing with the player pov is a lot more succesful - the handheld camera in that game may look superficially filmy, but it almost never helps you look at things a certain way, while bully's actively encourages players to throw objects into the frame in interesting combinations. there seems to have been a lot of consideration to stillness and distance, the way it pans and zooms in relation to the npcs and locations is beautiful (the diegetic camera is a delight), it doesn't encourage you to look at the world because there is no reward in doing so, it simply reminds you that the act itself can be something very nice. i think there's a slightly romantic quality to putting that on a game about a kid completing random objectives to get assimilated into a world that hates him.