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

people are brutal on this game nowadays, and they aren't wrong to be, but it does deserve some grace. remember that it was supposed to be the killer app for the vaunted hardware collab between nintendo and sony. remember that when that fell through, up to 40 percent of its content (by some accounts) got left on the cutting room floor. remember that they had originally planned to implement multiple endings. remember that ted woolsey suddenly had 30 days to rework a sprawling novel's worth of dialogue using a fixed-width font. remember all of that when you fight one of the game's many palette-swapped bosses, or walk into a weirdly lifeless town, or encounter yet another completely empty room in a cave or dungeon. if you can, you might well see that the fact that the final product retained any degree of cohesion at all is nothing short of an absolute miracle.

all the points I've seen about combat and boss fights are fair, so I won't attempt an apologia for them. there's not anything riveting about hitting an enemy, falling back and waiting a couple seconds for your weapon to charge back up, then hitting it again, or about spamming bosses with magic. this came out just before I turned 9 and I've been playing it since then. I have decades of understanding about its inner workings, and I can get through the game in about 20 hours because I know which weapons and magicks aren't worth taking the time to level up. but if you don't have all that knowledge and muscle memory (and if you're just coming to this in 2023, then how on earth would you), then yeah it's really easy to waste your time on things you hope will come in handy later and walk away with a load of feel-bads

the multiplayer really was exciting back then—jrpgs were perceived as somewhat of a loner's pursuit, and being able to play an rpg with two other friends or even just one was bracing and singular

secret of mana is a three-legged dog. it's not fair to put it up against complete specimens like final fantasy III/VI and chrono trigger, but one also shouldn't be so quick to put it down without acquiring a fuller understanding of its particular deficiencies

the most seminal mario game in the years where every new game in the series was seminal (1985–2006), because this is where mario became MARIO. usually my favorite mario game, narrowly edging out world because its levels are punchier and have less time to wear out their welcome. it is as difficult now to fathom that this and smb1 were both nes games as it was then. the leaps in design and imagination were and are staggering. every level is a triumph of architecture and creativity. smb2 (usa) is in some ways more of a free spirit, but this is the complete package. essential.

billionaires may have forgotten that nature is brutal and unforgiving, but as long as you keep this game close to your heart, you never will. this game will not only let you put your hand on an open flame, it will hold it there if you try to take it back. new traumas lie in wait around every corner; ecco's cry of pain is the brown note in the music of the spheres. watch a longplay of it and claim it as your own experience, I can guarantee no one will care enough to speak against you. there is no reason to put yourself through this game, but if you can pick up what it's laying down, you'll discover a haunting beauty that few games have matched before or since. ecco deserves massive respect for being so unapologetically weird, it's just too bad it's chained to the design sensibilities of 1992 (props for infinite lives though at least).

do not listen to anyone who says the sega-cd soundtrack is better than the genesis one

a game you don't play so much as observe with a certain detachment; you don't control a hero, per se, but more a vessel into which NPCs pour their needs, doubts, and anxieties. battle is entirely perfunctory, something only performed to fill negative space between story beats, yet there are mind-bogglingly intricate crafting and farming systems to improve your performance in these battles. literally every aspect of this game is needlessly byzantine. you can miss so much and never have the faintest idea how you missed it, and the game will taunt you with wide gaps in lists. not since king's quest v has a game been both so gorgeous and so infuriatingly inane. feels more bold and refreshing today than it did at release, when it was completely inscrutable. the watercolor-on-parchment aesthetic and strictly supplemental use of 3D aged it better visually than 99 percent of ps1 games. it's easy to see why it reigns as the dominant aesthetic of the world of mana; always has me gazing in awe right up until it starts talking.