Cute, snappy, fun, easy to get into, and extremely inoffensive monetization model. A bit barebones on launch but has huge potential for new content along its lifespan (praying we get Sonic crossovers like the mobile game did). Hopefully I can get my friends into this!

I'm always biased towards racing games, but definitely one of the better Battle Pass-centered games to come out in recent, unlike a particular paid kart racer that came out last year modeled as a grand return of a long ago-released fan favorite spinoff to a JRPG that may or may not be called Chocobo GP.

This is the full log of my journey with Daytona USA and my chronicles and attempts to play each version.

-Mid 2022-
1. Saturn port. Bad.

2. Original with MAME. Fine, but isn't fully compatible.

3. Xbox 360 port via Xenia. Full dump doesn't exist online.

4. PS3 port via RPCS3. Found it in the dark recesses of a personal Russian game dumper's blog. Fantastic version, the definitive, best way to play Daytona.. on controller. Gear shifting is botched through button presses, and while incremental gear shifting is allowed through shoulder buttons, the game was designed to be going from gears 4 to 2 and back, mostly. Going from gears 4 to 3 to 2 and back results in unreliable and unpredictable drifts most of the time. I craved more but was running out of options.

-Q4 2022-
5. Daytona Championship Circuit on Saturn. Worst. Do not.

-Early 2023. Got myself a steering wheel for arcade racers. I do not yet have a shifter.-
6. Reattempted MAME with wheel. Buggy but ultimately playable, but did not satiate my hunger. I missed the cleanness and definitiveness of the 7th gen ports, but neither Xenia nor RPCS3 have proper wheel support, and I was not looking to map controller input to a wheel axis. I wanted real wheel interaction.

7. Discovered SEGA Racing Classic. 2009 arcade re-release without any Daytona branding because of the license expire. The excellent 7th gen ports used this version as the base. Runs as an .exe via SEGA RingWide and took me hours of scouring and old forum surfing to find the full dump and loader. Works with my wheel, feels incredible to play. This is the one. Unfortunately, graphics are fucked due to NVIDIA GPU incompatibility (looks perfect on AMD, however). A shoddy patch exists. I get a "Cannot find Folder app.dll" error. I found one person in a YouTube comments on a gameplay showcase video with 42 views who mentioned they got this same error. There is a long thread, mostly all of it is broken non-understandable English and a general lack of tech jargon knowledge between both people to amicably find the fix. After hours of searching elsewhere, I cannot find any mention of the error elsewhere. The trail is once again cold, but for now, somehow, this lame re-release, with all of its iconic branding stripped (even the soundtrack is altered so you don't hear Mitsuyoshi's iconic "DAYTONAAAAAA" shout), is somehow the best playing version for someone in my extremely, extremely specific situation. My heart goes out to that guy who had that same error message, shouted in the void, and somehow got a response but with no resolution. I feel much like him.

Been replaying this with my partner after we both got Steam Decks and I wanted her to try it for herself since I got her into MH with GenU and Rise. My feelings stay pretty much the same as this is one of my most played in the series; I've gotten my thoughts together on this back during its peak but there's so many unique aspects to this game, it's a lot to unpack.

I think it goes without saying that the MH dev team's attempt at making the world of Monster Hunter feel like a living breathing World with this title was an absolute success at first glance. Even as someone who's played MH since 3U, I think World succeeds as the most interesting and captivating title in the series in spite of its obvious growing pains. The focus on ecology and every creature's relationship with their biomes was such a beautiful way for the player to connect with the world. Following monster tracks to their hideouts, filling out investigations and growing research levels per monster, watching monsters defend their ground by attacking other monsters in turf wars, utilizing endemic life and using terrain gimmicks to shift favors in battle all tied into this game's focus to the awareness of its ecosystem and it honestly pained me to see so many veteran players vilify those new mechanics. To see these inventive new perspectives met with such playerbase ridicule to the point where most of them were scrapped completely in Rise instead of any attempt to revise them was heartbreaking for me and I'll forever hold a judging side-eye to these "hardcore" fans because of it.

And that's not to say this game is barred from criticism, because this game did indeed have its fair share of issues. Maybe a little more than a fair share. The Slinger was a very confusing mechanic and still one that never feels truly right to use at times. Picking up Dragon Pods that are apparently oh-so effective against Dragon type monsters that only deal a fixed number of 20 hit points on impact just flat out makes no sense to me, and that goes for all the other types. To see the Slinger also replace the usage of Pods by having to load them first also always feels overly cumbersome. On one side of that coin, it's always fun to sling a Pod at a piece of destructible environments to entangle monsters into avalanches of debris. On the other side, however, having to switch to Dung Pods, Screamer Pods, or whatever might be crucial in the heat of battle almost never feels worth it for the amount of time it takes to finagle them onto your slinger. The usage of Torch Pods in Rotten Vale is one of my favorite implementations of this idea as they have to be used to interact with the environment, but having to scramble through your items and radial menus to load up Dung Pods because some asshole Odogaron decided to join the fight is such a pain in the ass that it almost feels more correct to just wait the guy out before he decides to leave.

The always online multiplayer was definitely a more good-intentioned approach to the concept here than other titles at the time but this is where the bulk of my problems lie, and where Rise made the most effective improvements. Merging Village and Hub quests into a unified list created a hunt directory of completely arbitrary difficulty from beginning to end. Scaling methods in this game make no sense, as just one player joining will buff the boss' HP to ludicrous amounts, and in the event of a player leaving or disconnecting, the boss' Max HP is not scaled back down to match. Not to mention the horrendous state of the online around launch for PC, where disconnects abound often left you or your party robbed of a member and left to deal with a monster buffed beyond your strength in numbers. In my second playthrough of this, I have had quests take as short as 3 and a half minutes and as long as 25 in the same rank level, all in multiplayer with just me and my partner.

That is, to say, if you and your friends were even around the same areas of MSQ progress to even progress, because holy shit, what was the deal here? Why, for every single MSQ, did every player have to comb the entire biome for the monster to trigger its reveal cutscene, and have the choice of either

A) popping an SOS Flare to open their gates to other players or
B) Return to the Gathering Hub, wait for all your buddies to do the same thing, and restart the same quest with everyone together?

Oh man, and that's not even mentioning the random expeditions the game forces you to go on to find tracks. More than three times from the first mission to Xeno'jiva you'll have to break away from your party to find stupid "???" tracks that may or may not be all enough there for you to find on your first visit. If you can't find the rest, come back, start another expedition (by yourself) and look for those tracks again.

So too often was party progress barred by one of your party members who may or may not have already seen these cutscenes or done these expeditions. To gate progress by making sure everyone has at least started the same quest is an absolutely redundant design decision, and it's even more baffling that this wasn't fixed in the expansion and took a whole sequel and the removal of the unified quest list to be fixed.

For every genius idea that breathed immersion, there was a suffering game mechanic to dull its impact. I believe that ultimately things levelled out towards the positive side, and while I could have predicted from the start that series purists wouldn't see it the same way, my soul was crushed to see these systems dulled down in Iceborne, and then completely eradicated in Rise.

Monster Hunter: World has more glaring issues than maybe any other game in the series, and despite all of them, it's the title I enjoy coming back to the most. While I love Rise and especially Sunbreak for their cleanest refinement cuts yet to the combat formula, I will never not miss the ambition this game set out with. The subtitle here is the most important thing, because this the closest Monster Hunter has ever gotten to feeling like a truly cohesive ecosystem. To see it come so earnestly with its ecology focus and to then see it ridiculed and beaten down back to old tradition for the next mainline installment absolutely broke my heart. I can hope for the rest of my life that they'll try this again, because I want Monster Hunter to feel like a World again.

(Taken from my Steam account.)

Was interested in this since launch because of its unique style and arcadey top-down perspective, and thoroughly surprised that it controls exactly unlike how I intended. The "Automobile Sim" tag on here threw me for a loop and I understand it now. Very, very far from the Super Off Road successor I mistakenly assumed it to be, Circuit Superstars took me by surprise by how it incorporates actual GT/Rally techniques and mechanics into a top-down arcade experience; oversteer, understeer, weight transfer, tire snapping and so many additional elements that contribute to its unique handling system. There's a real learning curve, one that I haven't mastered yet as I'm still fumbling on the Pro-AM difficulty, but one that I've been coming back to for how rewarding and satisfying it is to use your car's weight to catapult it around corners.

Other than its deep, robust method of car control, Circuit Superstars is simple. There's not much in the way of additional content aside from its cups and time trial methods, and I haven't dared jump into online play just yet. Game modes are customizable enough to experiment and practice with, so as long as you're aware of what's inside the game beforehand, decide for yourself if you're up for it. It's not for everyone, and I see a lot of comments that it's repetitive or controls poorly, and I feel as though those are similar cases of people's expectations not being met. For me, even though Circuit Superstars isn't the return-to-classic isometric rally racer it can look like at first glance, I find it fun to play once you accept what it truly is.

Bonus mention to the UI and sound design. Not just counting the dynamic engine sounds, but for the aesthetic design of its menus; it strikes a fine line between minimal and sleek, and the selection blips and starting jingles remind me of Wii Sports. Very uniform.

this review score does not reflect the awe-inspiring creative universe of user-created WADs. doom II is a timeless game, rendered infinite by its community and ongoing, unkillable legacy of custom content. there is no score to reflect the sheer infinitum of creative, original, legacy-pushing user created game modes, campaigns, experiments, whatever catches your eye.

this score is reflective of the actual base game of doom II, doom ii viewed in a vacuum and forced to stand on its own two legs. and to that, i say, doom ii is some fucking dog ass

This review was edited by user Detchibe, thank you!

The “Mascot Wars” of the ‘90s and early 2000s were a terrifying, lawless, bloody era in our history. In which the average consumer couldn’t peruse the usual video game department without bearing witness to Aero the Acrobat, Punky Skunky, Cool Spot, Blinx the Time Sweeper… I think it goes without saying that no attempt at a brand or console mascot ever reached the heights of the two obvious Red and Blue ones, but it’s commendable that some got as far as they did.

Spyro the Dragon is an interesting one, because if I’m being honest, I don’t like his design much, and I haven’t been particularly fond of any iteration of it. There was something about the mascots of this era that scared me away as a kid. Characters such as Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper (most things not Nintendo, if you can spot the pattern), always looked too loud, edgy, and frankly, scary. They looked like they would bully me if I didn’t buy their game. I was, and still am, always drawn to the cutesy, rounded mascots: Sonic the Hedgehog, Ristar, Sackboy, Toro Inoue, you get the idea. These guys looked like friends, and I wanted to be their friends. So naturally I had no interest in really playing games of this caliber from this era unless it was for any sort of historical reason that I wanted to study. I love 3D platformers, but I was never too confident that a character like Spyro could carry a game for me, so forgive me for my hesitance when long-time friend and user Detchibe threatened my family at gunpoint to at least 100% the first game.

Spyro the Dragon wastes no time getting started. There's no concern to loredump nor give Spyro an origin story or an extended rise to the occasion. Gnasty Gnorc turned all the dragons into crystal statues, you rescue them by touching them, now go!

Right from the beginning, Spyro the Dragon presents itself differently, not only with its uniquely whimsical universe and dreamlike art style, but in a shift from orthodox structure. From the word go you are dropped into the first of five hub stages. Deviating from the standard that Super Mario 64 had created with its singular sandbox hubworld, Spyro not only gates progress through multiple hubs, but chooses not to grant reprieve from its gameplay loop in these locations. Alas, while you spend Spyro's stages defeating enemies and collecting gems, you too must also do the same in these hubs. In turn, these hubs also serve as stages where scouring every nook and cranny for enemies, vases, chests and gems also count towards 100% completion.

Spyro himself plays unlike any other platformer hero before him. He's a quadrupedal dragon without his full ability to fly, and his physics and abilities only take a full run of a single stage or two to truly understand. In addition to quickly becoming accustomed to his slippery four feet, just as quickly will you be familiarized with his abilities. He can charge forward, glide and huff out a short range blast of flames. It's simple and refreshingly easy to rail into instinct. There's no speed physics to exploit, there's no intricate web of differentiating jumps needed to chain in sequence, and there's no strict arcs of movement. The bar for entry here is low, but controlling Spyro from beginning to end somehow feels just as freeform, expressive, and satisfying as the plumber and hedgehog before him, and that's due in part to its level design.

There's no part in Spyro's quest that feels oppressive or impossible. The canyons and chasms he traverses are more inviting than intimidating, as jumps are easily made, enemies are unresistantly smashed through and burned away, and collectables and smashables of all kinds are in every corner wherever you rotate the camera. Spyro the Dragon isn't a challenge of skill and reflex, instead what you're given are more akin to sandboxes of discovery, begging to be searched high and low.

The philosophy of how to design a collectathon can create a rift in difficulty. Sometimes the bare minimum to reach the end boss is considered the "true" main content, while the hunt for 100% completion can be mindless and dull. Other times, as I've seen with Pac-Man World 2, beelining to the end is barely a game, an experience that almost subconsciously wants you to try to collect the meaningless macguffins, always an uncomfortable ways-off the main path and ludicrously difficult to earn. It's a difficult balance, but it's one that I think is Spyro the Dragon's greatest strength. Spyro the Dragon is consistently and intentionally low in difficulty, and stages are wide open and sprawling. Reaching the "Return to Home" portals tucked away on the far sides of each stage is never really the end of your time there, and I've never once jumped into one upon finding them for the first time. It was upon realizing this where I understood why Detchibe insisted I 100% the game; it's because Spyro fully embraces collecting, and extends a gentle hand to pull you in. The true end gate to the final boss is a prerequisite number of dragons to save from a stony eternity, essentially a form of collectible in and of themselves, and their placements in each stage are sporadic, far-inbetween, and nonlinear. It's not just a game of collecting a single Star at a fixed point in a map, or reaching the end ring at the end of a stage, and it's not about returning to a start point to change Kongs to collect different colored bananas. It's a game designed to be lax, to not adhere to restriction, and to promote differentiating routes. Even by gating progression between hub worlds, Spyro promotes a sense of nonlinear exploration that just feels fun to experience…

...Most of the time. Spyro is never a mean-spirited platformer and is deliberately light on puzzle solving. It's that design decision that makes some of the more difficult and out-of-reach collectables a real bitch to find. There were only three or four times where I was stuck, usually missing the last batch of collectables in a stage that I just could not find for the life of me. I did unfortunately spend a few unnecessary hours running around fully excavated, empty stages looking for one last chest or breakable vase (and, most unfortunately, this was before Spyro's dragonfly companion would happily point towards the nearest remaining gem) until I would go through the repeated process of just giving up, looking it up online, and being absolutely stupefied. I think all but one of the times these last collectables involved using the powercharge glide to reach absolutely bafflingly-placed areas, locations barred from view from any camera angle, or too far apart to ever make a sort of connection like "Oh, if I do this I can make it over there." There is no way any kid figured some of these out with no internet or no guide. Some of those powercharge glides are bitches themselves too, where the combination of holding Square and letting go to press Cross felt arbitrary and unreliable. I had to save-state on most of these and any of the ones I had trouble with took 10+ attempts.

And again, that's not to say Spyro is a deliberately mean game that wants to stress out kids and adults alike by hiding one last gem in a shaded corner; it never feels intentionally malicious, and feels more so like an oversight that an average player might not reach in a normal playthrough. None of it ruins the experience, and it is all forgivable.

When viewed in a vacuum, before the knowledge that any sequel or franchise should be spawned from it, Spyro the Dragon is a knockout of a mascot enter, even if it's not one that would have reached child or adult me's attention on its own. At times, it feels plainly obvious that some of its shortcomings could be rectified by sequels. A lack of permanent ability power-ups and upgrades is a double-edged sword of its own; returning to levels with new traversal abilities can ensure replayability, but the game would lose the validation of being able to 100% a stage on your first go, comforted to know you've done everything and can press on. Bosses aren't really anything to write about because they're essentially not even fights, moreso just linear hallways with enemies to charge through until you bonk the big baddie and they die pathetically. Even without playing a Spyro title before, I had a hunch that both of these aspects would be re-worked in future installments and I was right on the nose, but any further comments would have to be reserved for a Spyro 2 review. If I ever do one. But for then, and now, I say that Spyro does deserve to be recognized as a successful mascot, a former Sony icon, and a refreshing, peaceful change of pace on a genre that was gorily beating itself to death.

There's a weird stigma around mobile games, or games designed for phones to begin with. I can't think of many games made for touchscreen smartphones that were ported over to modern consoles being received relatively well, actual quality be damned. Angry Birds did fine I guess, it was Angry Birds. Square Enix's miniature GO series seemed to adapt to button presses fairly well. The Nintendo Switch in particular has been the go-to for most of these ports since taking away the Joycons makes it a big fat iPad anyway.

Then came Easy Come Easy Golf, a Definitive Edition-styled migration of a mobile golf game with a bit of speculative history, one I am particularly intrigued with. The original game, Clap Hanz Golf, released in 2021 onto Apple Arcade, 2 days into the same month their developer's collaborators Japan Studio was dissolved and subsidized into other dev teams, followed not long after by the termination of all online services for their previous title, Everybody's Golf (which is also the twelfth game in their long-running series). I admittedly don't have much to say or speculate. The dissolution of Japan Studio amidst a half-decade silence in what seemed to be steady release flow of solid golf titles, only to be broken by a rapid announcement of subsidization, cancellation of online play crucial to their latest game's functionality, effectively killing it, and then this series leaving its home series of consoles for the first time in 20 years all seems to occur a bit too close together to not warrant the slightest bit of speculation. I also want to disclaim that Japan Studio did not fully develop Everybody's Golf 2017, nor did they have any previous involvement in series installments prior, but it seemed to me that the joint operation in Everybody's Golf 2017 seemed to be crucial to the series' remaining heartbeat.

But what about Everybody’s Golf’s real father, not their life support nurse? While Camelot Software were admittedly the original creators, developing the very first title in 1999 that would spawn the franchise, the cards fall onto Clap Hanz studio’s lap, who have been the sole developer of the Everybody’s Golf series from its second title all the way to 2017. Somehow they seemed to have made it out of the fire, or Apple’s graciously-timed development funds were there to save their skins, because Clap Hanz Golf released on Apple Arcade like a cool action movie guy walking away from an explosion. And I did not play it because I don’t have an iPhone.

What I DID play, though, was its Nintendo Switch port that came a year later, something I have been eyeballing hard from its announcement up to its release. This was to come after its initial year-long exclusivity run, with all the content and updates made in one package, mobile game progression systems removed and unlockables streamlined into a full experience.

Aside from its large finger-button UI that remains intact for optional touchscreen use, I think the casual uninformed golf gamer probably wouldn’t even assume this was made for phones. Content in ECEG unlocks naturally. You start with two 18-hole courses, split into four 9-hole cups. Play those, unlock a boss match. Win the boss match, unlock the character, unlock two more courses. Repeat ad-infinitum, with optional random events popping up day by day presenting opportunities to unlock alternate costumes for every character, some of which are actually kind of cool and had me willingly play through every one that popped up. I have no clue how many characters are unlockable and how many costumes are in the game; not much of the game is documented but considering that I have unlocked 10 characters still in the “Novice” category and plenty of costumes for each after 20 hours of play, I’m going to assume there’s a lot more. I wouldn’t call it grindy, either, as things unlock at a steady, incredibly constant pace. Customization in general is nowhere near the outfit piece selecting Everybody’s Golf has become synonymous with, but being a full version of a phone game with a year’s worth of consistent content updates truly, genuinely justifies the asking price. The initial feeling of missing true character customization is swept away by the sheer amount of character and costume options you’re given. It’s a good compromise.

But the golf! What about the golf? The actual golfing, the golf that you play and golf in Clap Hanz Golf? It’s very good. Your number of control options coming off of Everybody’s Golf is admittedly a downgrade, as your only options this time around are a 3-button press swing meter and a touch screen variant of the same thing, the latter I never bothered with. It’s as responsive as you’d expect, and I never had any problem with it. It’s functional, good ol’ golf.

The real flourish in Easy Come Easy Golf, however, is its presentation. Good God, what a fun game this is to look at. The most shocking thing about this game to me is how, even as a budget title, none of Everybody’s Golf’s synonymous style is compromised in the least. Multiple characters with designs and bios so varied and individualistic I can still remember their names and likes and dislikes from their character sheets off the top of my head, even after not having played in a few months. Not only are the characters themselves diverse and still easily recognizable, but they’re animated with such peerless finesse it puts other AAA golf (and otherwise) games to shame. Characters squatch and stretch with all unique, random exaggerated movements in reaction to pars, bogeys, eagles, hole-in-ones, and somehow there’s multiple animations for each. Particular character models are crafted with such detail that immerses themselves in the world, it’s simply astounding. It’s not just character hair that flows in the same direction and velocity with the wind, it’s the hoods on the back of their clothes, wads of cash stuffed inside expensive polo shirt pockets, and even the dangling charms on their phones in the back of their jean pockets. Other iconic imagery from Everybody’s Golf persists here as well, whether it’s the cutscenes of your caddy helping you line up shots, the spectators running away from incoming balls, or the rapid pitter-patter of your character scooting across the field at 20x speed to their next shot. I’m always a sucker for details and ECEG comes in spades, with all the animation and detail quality going far beyond what could be expected from a 20 dollar game. Nothing has been compromised from its predecessor’s addictive style.

The only real quirks that keep ECEG from freeing itself from the shackles of mobile game jank would be its optimization. Onfield is usually stable, and I’ve never noticed any performance drop in the middle of play. Running through the menus is a different story, as every option select is accompanied with a delay and a stutter, and rapidly flipping through selections and screens is out of the question. I’ve had one instance where it completely crashed to the Switch menu mid-game as I tried to brute force some gameplay settings too fast by button mashing. Thankfully progress is saved in between every hole, which is probably what the game is doing during its relentless cavalcade of loading screens sandwiched between every menu and hole transition. Double thankfully, none of them are that long and last more than 5-10 seconds. None of this ever detracts from the experience in my opinion, because I think it’s very obvious any Switch owner has put up with much worse, but I still felt to mention it because I assume mileage may vary.

Not even counting the additional modes I haven’t even touched like randomized holes and weather tournaments, local and online play, I played a lot of ECEG in such a short time because there was so much to enjoy at every waking moment. I’m not even halfway through unlocking everything and I feel like I’ve already experienced more than what other AAA sports games offer at this time. My praise for ECEG might partially have been due to my low expectations, because, well, this WAS a mobile game. I’m starting to feel as though I should rethink my outlook on mobile games and console ports of such, seeing as when done right, the results can be rewarding, and nothing about ECEG’s quality would ever come close to its final result if Clap Hanz hadn’t been so passionate about golf. Whether developing a fully-priced console entry or, now proven, even just a mobile spiritual successor of sorts, it’s clear that Clap Hanz’ love of the sport weathers through any conditions; rain, shine, windy, fair, rough, or bunker.

Also note: I get why there's two entries for this game because one is for mobile and one is for Switch, except both have "Nintendo Switch" as their platform and have the same title, despite the mobile game being named Clap Hanz Golf. And assuming this is the correct entry for the game, this one has the lamer box art. I don't know how IGDB works but someone plz fix

we didn't have a lot of money growing up so it was always a treat to get a new video game so age 10 me was really excited to get this for my birthday. unfortunately my childhood gaming station consisted of a busted, lights-faded CRT strategically placed so that every single ounce of potential sunlight from a nearby window would assault the rounded glass. playing stuff with bright colors like Sonic and Mario wasn't much of an issue since I was always able to make out the bright colors but I completely fumbled through this game trying to make out anything through the dark palettes of Gotham City. my poor visibility was so tied to my experience that every memory I try to conjure of this game, continuously to this day, only comes out as a fuzzy, sunbleached, CRT-warped image in my mind.

can I remember this game well enough to even talk about it? nope. was it even a good game? I don't know, probably. 3 stars baby

Maybe it's because I never played this growing up and always seeing this particular game everywhere, but I always thought that Pac-Man World 2 was some sort of hidden masterpiece that always eluded my hands. I always saw it on store shelves, I had family and friends alike that always had it on either Gamecube or PS2; it was just sort of everywhere. And yet I never played it much yet seen a glimpse of any sort of gameplay. I loved the box art and this iteration of Pac-Man, he always looked so nice and friendly.

Fast forward to today! I got my hands on a Steam Deck, immediately turned it into a portable emulation station ("Sayonara, Retroid the Pocket...2"), and started plowing through my retro backlog.

Starting with the original Pac-Man World, I immediately appreciated its warm, heartfelt attempt at translating Pac-Man into a 3D platformer a-la Crash Bandicoot, alas it was a rush job of a game made under copious amounts of pressure that caused the gameplay itself to suffer in ways unintended. Not only was I immediately more drawn to its polish-priority remake, but also its sequel, the one that I carried some sort of lifelong curiosity over, and it started with such polish and finesse that I might have almost fallen victim to its true nature.

World 2 starts off with layers upon layers of extra polish, as Pac-Man runs around, turns, jumps, and spins with such bounce and precision to it all. The first world is consistently linear and yet invites you at every corner to take a minute to play around. It's a playful breeze of a game starting out, and I honestly had fun collecting all the fruits and Pac-Dots in every stage, but it isn't until the second in-game area that World 2's polished coat of paint starts to peel.

From here on out, things slightly nosedive before turning into a full-on crash. The second area in World 2 leans the player into some of the backtracking that World had in spades, and not that I ever had a problem with it, but in World 2 things feel a bit more inorganic. Original Pac-Man World required backtracking to find keys and fruits to open doors that required them, which is a bit inorganic in and of itself, but World 2 omits the door-and-key system entirely in preference of this new system of pressing buttons to cause another button way back in the level to appear. In simpler words, the backtracking consists of pressing a button so you can press another button so the way forward can appear back at the first button. OG World at least had some sense of discovery by having these doors containing these buttons or moreso optional collectable goodies marred by the requirement of something to be found off the main path, which can sometimes even be bypassed by scouring stages as you go and collecting everything up to said point. Actively collecting everything off the intended way is often rewarded in OG World. World 2 is unintuitively blunt about its requests to backtrack, and fails to provide any true meaning or satisfaction in 100%ing it. OG World still had a game with a fine difficulty curve if you weren't a collector, but World 2 so firmly insists on collecting every Pac-Dot and fruit that there's almost no game for you otherwise.

The third area, the icy mountain, is the final honeymoon phase killer. Gone is any notion of all the fun, bouncy movement you've been playing with up to this point, and gone is the denial of the game's poor design as World 2 shamelessly pulls the dreaded "shitty ice level" card. There's nothing to even be said about the stages supplementing this portion, as every "3D platformer ice level" trope you can imagine is found here; slippery, untrustworthy platforming that always feels as though it was designed to be anti-fun in favor of passing time by stealing lives.

I had accumulated over 40 extra lives by the time I had reached the fourth volcanic area and I was fumbling on just 8 left, but World 2 continued to provide no ounce of any meaningful gameplay unless I wanted to collect every knicknack and macguffin, and the contrast in difficulty becomes night and day. Had you wanted to simply trot from stage entrance to stage exit, you could do so at the expense of the game withholding all of the meat of its gameplay. The difficulty curve becomes a single flatline with no heartbeat, and the game simply does let you trot to your heart's extent, practically rolling out the red carpet for your featureless, hurdleless jog from beginning to end. Go for the collectables so you can have your fill of any gameplay to experience and be met with the worst 3D platforming that can be offered, with cavalcades of slippery small platforms, uncoordinated, arbitrarily-launched projectiles, and a camera that won't cooperate under any amount of sweet talking and playing nice. I had lost 40 lives that I had spent 2+ hours accumulating up to that point in a matter of minutes between the third and fourth areas, and that's when World 2's true essence struck me: it's a collectathon that shouldn't be a collectathon. It's a plain misunderstanding of OG World's successful balance of optional collectables in tandem with some (conceptually) solid gameplay, something that I would have not realized had World 2 been so sour.

So I quit after completing the second stage of the fourth area, and thus ended my curiosity in the classic Pac-Man World series. I had never seen World 3 to the extent that I had seen World 2 growing up, so my burning desire to explore its history as what I once thought was some underrated masterpiece has diminished.. but not entirely burnt out. I was able to maintain some level of hope for OG World's remake as I felt its biggest issues were technical and balance related, but I see nothing in World 2. It's basically the ying to World 1's yang, successfully fixing the former's technical problems and main course difficulty at the cost of creating a much more disjointed, unfocused experience altogether. OG World certainly has had the potential to be cleaned up from buffs and scratches outside of its intentions, but World 2 is, unfortunately, deliberately designed the way it is; inherently flawed from conception alone and execution.

Normally this would have the opposite effect, but after playing this and thoroughly not enjoying it (I've made it halfway through before throwing in the towel here) I'm genuinely more interested in playing Re-Pac now.

It should go without mentioning this game's hellish start of development plus all its documentation regarding its lack of playtesting but every single moment of Pac-Man World reminds you of it. Too much does this game struggle to play smoothly, whether it's Pac-Man randomly choosing not to grab ledges, a ramp misfiring you into a pit, literally falling through moving platforms, or picking and choosing any of it's six main bosses that don't play fairly. The physics are not only awkward but inconsistent, as Pac-Man rolls and slides (or doesn't) on all kinds of slopes and angles that don't necessarily make sense. Every butt bounce is unpredictable, every dash roll is a Hail Mary. I've even gotten softlocked twice, both by butt bouncing at certain angles where Pac-Man gets stuck in the terrain on landing.

The difficulty, whether intentional or not, is all over the place. I had genuine trouble in the second stage (in the first world), game over'd twice there before I got it, and then breezed through until I reached Manic Mines, halfway into the second world. Most of my struggles actually were due to the camera movement/placement during sections that shifted perspective, as crucial platforms required to progress are obscured, made completely out of view unless you grab a glimpse of the way forward before the camera makes some weird angle shift that omits it from your viewpoint. Weird, unnatural leaps of faith become common unless you keep a keen eye on what's ahead. Bosses are just plain absurd as well, with the second boss being notorious for being unfinished and receiving the least amount of playtesting, but if I'm being honest each one that I got up to was on some similar level of bullshit. The bosses are the lowest points of an already meandering experience, as you're thrown into arenas and are ravaged with uncoordinated amounts of different projectiles with different behaviors. You know sometimes in Cuphead you could just get really unlucky and find yourself in a shitty split-second situation where the enemy projectiles just line up in a way where you just have to take the hit? Imagine that but that's how the game's bosses work. And no, I didn't get filtered by Anubis Rex. I got filtered by fucking King Galaxian, the spamming shit bastard.

Pac-Man World wants to play fair but unfortunately hasn't been made to. Which is a shame, because conceptually it is not a miss; while the setpieces are bland and boring and the soundtrack sounds like a phoned-in score for a Saturday morning cartoon, the platforming and gameplay as a whole can be, at times, thoughtful. You can see a glimpse of the polished Pac-Man World it was meant to be when you can successfully chain bounces, rolls, and make quick maneuvers through stage hazards in succession. It can almost feel like a Sonic game after some slight mastery, but I just kept calling this game "Ass Bandicoot" in my head as I fumbled along. Unfortunately, things just don't happen they way they're supposed to, and the duct tape and stapled-together Pac-Man World becomes a game that's only really fun to imagine rather than play.

Now that Re-Pac exists, however, I feel like I can look forward with some optimism, knowing it's not just a straight remaster but a full ground-up remake with better balancing and polish in mind.

my U.S. Military LARPing cousins got this for christmas in like 2009 and they played this for like a whole year straight and thoroughly obsessed over it, and talked about nothing except this game for weeks on end. i could do nothing but watch them play this for hours to the point where i have every single mission, setpiece, and line of dialogue hot-iron branded onto my frontal lobe. they grew up to be tinfoil hat q-anon maga chuds. one of them is now a marine and posts snapchats making jokes about drone striking arabs. fuck this game