a rerelease that absolutely blindsided me when I heard about it; if I drafted a list of games I thought would get remade, crystal caves would probably not have even made the top one thousand. nevertheless, the apogee platformer is a style that deserves to be preserved, even though it's pretty much the epitome of a hack sitcom writer's ideas about video games ("I have to get all the gems and blast the aliens to reach the next level, mom!"). the "jokes" are so bad they would make a borscht belt comedian retch, but the actual gameplay is warm and fuzzy, never too high-stakes but not totally toothless either. will give you an idea of what growing up in the early 90s with a pc as your only gaming platform was like.

sure, maybe flexing on your competition in-game is a little gauche, but really how much more beyond the pale is it than doing it in magazine ads, and anyway, you get a pass when you're, yanno, actually as good or better than the thing you're ripping off. cliff had the right idea; amiga platformers looked amazing and boasted incredible music, but they were boring, doofy, repetitive, and too hard with too little payoff. console wars rhetoric and american attitude may be unpleasant and toxic, but given how fun and playable jazz is, it's hard to argue that they weren't precisely the steroid shot the amiga platformer template needed. I'd rather play this than 90 percent of sonic games; nearly every world is an aesthetic treat, the soundtrack is all killer no filler, it does sonic cd's bonus stages better than sonic cd did, and if you have to deal with some hacky crap like how low eva earlong's dress is cut or a boss that's literally just a mashup of sonic and zool, well, at least those things are easier to explain than figuring out whatever the hell puggsy is.

this is the game that taught me to give yourself some room to be surprised by a piece of entertainment. I got this for christmas in 1994 and was of course polite as one should be when receiving a gift, but in my head I was thinking god, I've beaten donkey kong classics 8 million times, why do I need this on game boy, but fired it up anyway, briefly thought huh, why does this need a save file but didn't think anything of it, beat the first four levels...

...and when the victory music cut off and donkey kong jumped back up and broke the bridge and ran off with pauline, and I realized there was far more to this game than I had expected—reader, let me tell you, my grandparents were not happy with the amount of melted brain I got all over their carpet

best game on the game boy, yes even over link's awakening, every mechanic is drum-tight, every level accommodates both careful consideration and cocksure speedrunning, the locales are wonderful, every lost life is no one's fault but your own, and the soundtrack, my god, the soundtrack is straight fire, it is truly criminal that taisuke araki's entire vgm career comprises just three game boy games, his résumé should be longer than a cvs receipt and he should still be composing for nintendo today, how on earth did he fit a dang METAL SOLO onto this hardware, oh and it looks gorgeous both on super game boy and the monochrome machine, donkey kong '94 is perfect, PERFECT, and I defy anyone to say one unkind word against it