it is not that often that i see a game that makes me feel dread.

getting to the last few seconds of the video while Badlands unpredictably burps like crazy is so tense knowing you lose all your progress when you die. like, the way this game remixes both I Wanna Be the Guy and a YouTube video in mod format is pretty ingenious... diegetic burp interactivity + basically perfect giant boss fight + a mixture of a cutscene with skill-based play. where else do you see such a story-focused game (Badlands never stops speaking or chugging bottles of coke zero) be so seamlessly merged with high-stakes gameplay??

there's this hypnotic quality to this game. you memorize the whole video in the first hour of attempts and then you turn into a zombie trying to get good burp RNG and then you burst out laughing when Badlands does that wiggly burp. i lost so many runs to that...,

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments

epic games preservation fail: secrets permanently out of stock. there was once a wonder of the ancient gaming world here. but now it is covered in stainless steel and rebar. very few people explore in hyrule anymore. now, its visitors are mostly tourists. if a game like this was released today, people would rightfully call its core design hopelessly naive.

zelda 1 was always meant to be solved with a little bit of help- whether it be homemade maps, schoolyard secret swapping, or good old Nintendo Power™. but that does not mean that the years have been kind to the game. the world map itself remains unchanged 35+ years later. it's us who have changed around it. a whole cottage industry has sprung up on teaching people how to finish video games. sure, guide magazines existed in the 80s. but the rugged, chunky open world is cut through like mist with the guided tours that clutter the first several pages of google search results. the exact amount of help you'll need in this game isn't even clear until you've already spoiled yourself, and the vast, vast majority of people Will need help to get to the end of this game.

miyamoto famously created this game to evoke the feeling from his childhood of trying to piece together surroundings he didn't understand, organically discovering surprises along the way. as a society, no matter how we try and ignore it, we always have a perfect map in our backpack.

nintendo salvaging the american gaming market with the release of the NES was the modern inflection point for our industry, in some ways that are less obvious than others. the console enshrined gaming as a medium with legitimacy beyond the original fad-like relevance of the atari VCS, but the centralization of this success around nintendo gave the company an uncomfortable amount of leverage. this immediately portended poorly with the simultaneous release of the console's killer app: super mario bros., which gestured to a sinister rejection of the console's original intent. look to the japanese launch line-up and you'll see arcade staples such as donkey kong and popeye; games that lauded precise, restricted play with definitive rules and short runtimes. super mario bros. was a refutation of this design philosophy in favor of the loosey-goosey variable jump heights, frequent health restoration items, and long hallways of copy-paste content replacing the tightly paced experiences that defined the era before. the NES still featured arguably the greatest console expressions of the rigorous arcade action experiences that defined the '80s - castlevania, ninja gaiden, and the early mega mans all come to mind - but the seeds super mario bros. planted would presage a shift into more and more experiences that coddled the player rather than testing their fortitude. in some ways, super mario bros. lit the match that would leave our gaming landscape in the smoldering ruins of the AAA design philosophy.

the '90s only deepened nintendo's exploration of trends that would further attempt to curb the arcade philosophy, which still floated on thanks to the valiant efforts of their competitors at sega, capcom, konami, and others. super mario world kicked off nintendo's 16-bit era with an explicitly non-linear world map that favored the illusion of charting unknown lands over the concrete reality of learning play fundamentals, and its pseudo-sequel yoshi's island would further de-emphasize actual platforming chops by giving the player a generous hover and grading them on their ability to pixel hunt for collectables rather than play well, but the most stunning example of nintendo's decadence in this era is undoubtedly donkey kong '94. the original donkey kong had four levels tightly wound around a fixed jump arc and limited ability for mario to deal with obstacles; its ostensible "remake" shat all over its legacy by infusing mario's toolkit with such ridiculous pablum such as exaggerated flip jumps, handstands, and other such acrobatics. by this point nintendo was engaging in blatant historical revisionism, turning this cornerstone of the genre into a bug-eyed circus romp, stuffed with dozens of new puzzle-centric levels that completely jettisoned any semblance of toolkit-oriented level design from the original game. and yet, this was the final fissure before the dam fully burst in 1996.

with the release of the nintendo 64 came the death knell of the industry: the analog stick. nintendo's most cunning engineers and depraved designers had cooked up a new way to hand unprecedented control to the player and tear down all obstacles standing in the way of the paternalistic head-pat of a "job well done" that came with finishing a game. with it also came this demonic interloper's physical vessel, super mario 64; the refined, sneering coalescence of all of nintendo's design tendencies up to this point. see here a game with enormous, previously unfathomable player expression, with virtually every objective solvable in myriad different ways to accommodate those who refuse to engage with the essential challenges the game offers. too lazy to even attempt some challenges at all? feel free to skip over a third of the game's "star" objectives on your way to the final boss; you can almost see the designers snickering as they copy-pasted objectives left and right, knowing that the majority of their player base would never even catch them in the act due to their zombie-like waddle to the atrociously easy finish line. even as arcade games stood proud at the apex of the early 3D era, super mario 64 pulled the ground out underneath them, leaving millions of gamers flocking to similar experiences bereft of the true game design fundamentals that had existed since the origination of the medium.

this context is long but hopefully sobering to you, the reader, likely a gamer so inoculated by the drip-feed of modern AAA slop that you likely have regarded super mario 64 as a milestone in 3D design up to now. yet, it also serves as a stark contrast to super mario 64 ds, a revelation and admission of guilt by nintendo a decade after their donkey kong remake plunged modern platformers into oblivion.

the d-pad alone is cool water against the brow of one in the throes of a desert of permissive design techniques. tightening up the input space from the shallow dazzle of an analog surface to the limitations of eight directions instantly reframes the way one looks at the open environments of the original super mario 64. sure, there's a touch screen option, but the awkward translation of a stick to the literal flat surface of the screen seems to be intentionally hobbled in order to encourage use of the d-pad. while moving in a straight line may still be simple, any sort of other action now begets a pause for reflection over the exact way one should proceed. is the sharp 45 or 90 degree turn to one side "good enough", or will I need to make a camera adjustment in-place? for this bridge, what combination of angles should I concoct in order to work through this section? the removal of analog control also forces the addition of an extra button to differentiate between running and walking, slapping the player on the wrist if they try to gently segue between the two states as in the original. the precision rewards those who aim to learn their way around the rapid shifts in speed while punishing those who hope they can squeak by with the same sloppy handling that the original game allowed.

on its own this change is crucial, but it still doesn't cure the ills of the original's permissive objective structure. however, the remake wisely adds a new character selection system that subtly injects routing fundamentals into the game's core. for starters: each of the characters has a separate moveset, and while some characters such as yoshi and luigi regrettably have the floaty hover and scuttle that I disdained in yoshi's island, it's at least balanced here by removing other key aspects of their kit such as wall jumps and punches. the addition of wario gives the game a proper "hard mode," with wario's lumbering speed and poor jump characteristics putting much-needed limiters on the game's handling. for objectives that now explicitly require wario to complete, the game is effectively barring you from abusing the superior movement of the original game by forcing you into a much more limited toolkit with rigid d-pad controls, the kind of limitations this game absolutely needed in order to shine.

that last point about objectives that specifically require a given character is key: the remake segments its objectives based on which characters are viable to use to complete them. however, while in some cases the game may telegraph which specific characters are required for a particular task, in many cases the "correct" solution is actually to bounce between the characters in real time. this is done by strategically placing hats for each of the characters throughout the map - some attached to enemies and some free-floating - which allow the player to switch on the fly. this adds new detours to the otherwise simple objectives that vastly increases their complexity: which toolkit is best suited for which part of each mission? how should my route be planned around the level to accommodate hats I need to pick up? will I be able to defeat an enemy that's guarding the hat if I had to? this decision-making fleshes out what was previously a mindless experience.

there's one additional element to this system that truly elevates it to something resembling the arcade experiences of yore. while you can enter a level as any character, entering as yoshi allows you to preemptively don the cap of any other character as you spawn in, preventing the player from having to back-track to switch characters. on the surface this seems like another ill-advised QoL feature, but some subtle features reveal something more fascinating. yoshi has no cap associated with him, so to play as him, one must enter the level with him. however, you often need to switch to another character in the middle of a level. how do you switch back? by taking damage. to solve the ridiculously overstuffed eight piece health bar of the original, this remake transforms it into a resource you expend in order to undergo transformation. sure, one could theoretically collect coins in order to replenish this resource, but this adds a new layer onto the routing that simply didn't exist in the original game, where there were so many ways to circumvent obstacles with the permissive controls that getting hit in the first place was often harder than completing the objective. by reframing the way that the player looks at their heath gauge, the game is calling to mind classic beat 'em ups, where the health gauge often doubled as a resource to expend for powerful AoE supers.

the game still suffers from much of the rotten design at the core of its forebear; these above changes are phenomenal additions, but they're grafted onto a framework that's crumbling as you delve into it. regardless, the effort is admirable. for a brief moment, nintendo offered an apology to all of those hurt by their curbstomping of the design philosophies that springboarded them into juggernaut status in the first place, and they revitalized classic design perspectives for many millions more who first entered the world of gaming after it had already been tainted by nintendo's misdeeds. the galaxy duology, released a few years after this game, attempted to rework the series from the ground up with a new appreciation for arcade design by limiting the bloated toolkit of previous games and linearizing levels, but the damage had already been done. the modern switch era has magnified nintendo's worst tendencies, putting proper execution and mechanical comprehension to the wayside as they accelerate the disturbing "the player is always right" principles that have infested their games since that original super mario bros. by looking at super mario 64 ds in this context, we at least get a glimpse of what a better world could have looked like had nintendo listened to their elders all along.

Atari's final product. It feels in bad taste to not leave this game for last on my pointless Jaguar adventure, but considering it was a 3D fighter with an average of 1.78 on GameFAQs I just couldn't resist.

Fight For Life takes place within the Phantom Zone where numerous murder victims fight to get a second chance at their worthless lives and eventually engage in a bout with General Zod.

"Um, actually it was the Specter Zone thank you very much!!" - Massive Jaguar Fan

FFL's main draw is the move stealing gimmick where you can steal two moves from your opponent upon defeating them, and eventually fill out your glorified dummy's set of awkward maneuvers. This means that in a nutshell you're basically playing as blank slates with some textures and voiceclips thrown on them that have a beginning loadout of five moves. This seems kind of neat in theory, but there is in fact a massive problem with this, especially when you consider that the Jaguar only has three buttons on it's usual controller. This means that all the inputs need to be insane nonsense like pressing Left, Up, Left, A to get a shoulder throw to come out. This would be like if Street Fighter tried to do the same concept, and Guile had to hog the usual charge input for Flash Kick while Vega had to hold Up and then press Down to do the Flying Barcelona Attack as Guile preposterously uses the Spinning Bird Kick after having held down Left-Down from beating Chun-Li earlier.

The roster is composed of dorks like some jerk in a crappy bowl cut and a blonde chick whose tits are big enough to take down a jet aircraft like a surface-to-air weapon of sorts. The pacing of this fighter is about as quick as a glacial 50 turn game of Mario Party. You'll be spending your time shuffling around landing basic kicks and throwing your lousy pillow fists for about what seems to be five centuries, until someone finally gets defeated in a two to three round endeavor with no time limits to speak of. The music is apparently good, but I'm afraid to say that the gramophone that my emulator uses enjoys skipping a bunch in most of the games I try to play on it.

The camera is nauseating and probably the smelliest thing about this swan song. You actually get a choice of two bad cameras for your experience. One that rolls and tries to keep the players on their starting sides constantly while making you sick to the stomach whenever someone decides to jump over their opponent, or a static one that suffers a Criticom-esque problem of constantly getting out of line with the fighters. I've had numerous times where my character would wander into the electric barrier on the outside of the stage and get themselves killed due to the camera changing along with my controls. Lousy stuff considering the lead designer of this pile was someone who apparently formerly worked with Sega AM2 to do the camera for the original Virtua Fighter.

"I thought you said you made Virtua Fighter!?"
"Did I say that? Nooooo, I just did the camera. I made the tiger electronics version of Mortal Kombat II!"[citation needed]

It's worth note that this will be a part of the upcoming Atari 50 AV Collection to show the modern day gamer the absolute mediocrity that the company dumped upon the world before it imploded into itself and out of noticeable existence. Look forward to it.

It feels mean to compare this to its predecessor but Virtue's Last Reward just doesn't have the sheer joy and thrill that Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors had. Its lore simultaneously wants to develop and exacerbate the insanity that 999 spent slowly unspooling, but it doesn't want to approach that level of multifaceted storytelling with nearly the same drama or heightened sense of panic. When I learned of a new element within the story, I didn't feel as strong of a sense of bewilderment or clairvoyance-level realization, but rather a sense of mild satisfaction. That's the thing that gets me about this game, I suppose: It works, but it doesn't tug at my emotions as much as 999 did. The chaos is ramped up but it just doesn't feel as urgent or interesting.

The character drama in particular is maybe my biggest gripe with the game overall. Every conversation is considerably longer and more quippy at the cost of information density, there's this sense of irreverence that feels extremely out of place. Of course, you could blame this on the advent of the Danganronpa franchise and its mockery in the face of certain death, but that series has its moments to refrain from indulging in its hypersexuality and humor in service of a bigger idea that climbs towards a hostile thriller screenplay. Additionally, the irreverence is used to help build onto the dread—were it not for Monokuma's complete and utter disregard for his subjects' lives, there'd be less panic among them.

The characters in VLR, on the other hand, are poised to joke and shove corny banter in nearly every conversation given enough time, such that it stands to kill a lot of the intensity that the holistic story builds. I would much rather a short, important conversation than a long one that stands to remove any given amount goodwill I have for the main characters. This lack of brevity is also not helped by the gargantuan amount of time that it takes between various novel segments, showcasing a very annoying dot moving across the map for every single possible migration of the characters. At a certain point in my playthrough, I started scheduling for these intermissions and texting friends over actually trying to remain immersed with a medium that ejected me from immersion to begin with.

That's not to say it's a bad game, far from it—once again in no small part to the thoughtful escape room design employed with a similar (but not exact same) grace as its predecessor. The increase in difficulty is something I rather appreciate, even if it comes at the cost of breaking immersion sometimes. I especially appreciate the safe system, though it has its drawbacks with certain room-end puzzles. The broader story itself, divorced from being attached to the game and the individual writing choices I dislike, is excellent scaffolding around the original lore that 999 set up. It's just a shame that this story had to shake out this way, because as a game it fails to excite me beyond its lore and individual chambers.

EDIT, 23-MARCH-2024:

My neglect to mention the very casual misogyny present in this game is starting to bug me greatly, so allow me to comment on the reality that Sigma and the rest of the characters either are victims or enablers of horrific womanizing. In a shocking departure from 999's relatively minute jokes about sexuality that are unimportant, minor facets of individual characters only appearing once or twice, Virtue's Last Reward takes the bold move to make Sigma a sexual harasser. In every possible route, he is poised to interact with at least one of the female characters with a variety of dehumanizing and, frankly, horrible sex pestery. He even remarks that Clover (who in VLR is small and skinny but an adult) is seemingly jailbait.

Misogynist characters are not inherently detrimental to a story if it is done with the tact and angling that it deserves. I hold the idea that depiction is not necessarily endorsement of the depicted. However, VLR's main character being an incessantly horny poon-hound who can be led to do just about anything with the promise of someone's panties getting stripped off is so irritating after 20 hours of playing the game that it ceases to be worthwhile as a facet of a character worth exploring. There is no benefit to it in this story.

Sega had a rough transition to 3D.

It all started with the 32X. This is unlike most stories, which usually start at the beginning. The 32X was, to put it politely, a fucking disgrace. A lot of historical accounts regarding what a nightmare it was to work for Sega start around this time — Scott Bayless claims that former CEO Hayao Nakayama sent the order down from on-high for a project that was ill-defined and mismanaged from the start, comparing the company to the Hindenburg; Tom Kalinske says that he desperately tried to get Sega to kill the console, to use a Silicon Graphics chip that would later be poached by Nintendo, to partner up with Sony to make the PlayStation long before Sony did it by themselves and made a boatload of money — and was rebuked at every turn. A bit later, Peter Moore told Yuji Naka to fuck off and left for Microsoft after the latter accused the former of faking a video of a focus group who said that Sega was old and boring. Of course, these accounts are all clouded by a combination of bias, the Pacific Ocean, and a language barrier; I admit that I find it a bit difficult to believe Kalinske was such a good businessman that Nakayama was “literally slapping subordinates” (in his words) because of how bad Sega of Japan looked compared to the American branch. Still, though, it paints a picture. Sega is broadly described as being a nightmare company to work for starting right around the time the 32X started being developed, and its reputation never once improves in anyone’s retrospective accounts. The games on the 32X could run in primitive 3D, which was neat, but that was about it. The 32X launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within three years.

The Sega Saturn surprise-launched in the west, to the complete and utter dismay of retailers. So incensed were they by what they perceived to be a fuck-you on two fronts — the miserable launch of the 32X leading into the Saturn just six months later combined with the fact that only some of them were selected to stock it — that many of these retailers outright cut ties with Sega. Hell, the Sega CD wasn’t exactly moving units at the time either, so Sega was cannibalizing itself on three different fronts. As much love as I have for the Sega Saturn and its utterly strange architecture, the console really wasn’t setting the west on fire. Japan liked it, largely because it ran arcade games pretty well. But there was one major, horrifying problem.

The Sega Saturn didn’t have a Sonic game.

It was going to. Sonic Xtreme was planned to be the very first mainline 3D Sonic game, which is probably a sentence that was a lot more exciting to hear in 1994 than it is thirty years later. But there were too many fires that needed to be put out behind the scenes at Sega to continue development on Sonic Xtreme, and the console went without the killer app that most people really wanted a Sega console for. Imagine Nintendo going an entire console generation without a mainline Mario platformer, or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter. That’s just not what these companies do. It’s all wrong. You can’t drop Sonic the Fighters or Sonic Jam’s “Sonic World” and pretend like those are good enough replacements for what was supposed to be the 3D Sonic game. The Saturn launched, bombed outside of Japan, and was unceremoniously killed in western markets within three years.

With every last ounce of power and goodwill they had within them, Sega released the Dreamcast. This time, it would be different. This time, they would have their mainline 3D Sonic game. This time, they were going to beat their competitors to the newest console generation. This time, people would be ready for it. This time, it would be Sega’s turn to reign.

The Dreamcast launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within four years.

Well, it was a good run. It wasn’t, really, but at least they managed to eventually get that 3D Sonic game out. They were late to the party by about two years — missed deadlines and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme meant that Super Mario 64 had been out for three whole years before Americans could even buy a Dreamcast — but they at least managed to finish it. After all that time, the world finally had Sonic Adventure. It was worth it, right? After everything, it had to be.

It wasn’t. The game is bad.

Sonic Adventure is ambitious, like Macbeth. It has a lot of ideas for what it wants to be, but it doesn’t quite have the ability nor the aptitude to make it all come together. Sonic Adventure is a platformer, and a pinball game, and a snowboarding game, and Panzer Dragoon, and a kart racer, and Pro Bass Fishing, and a pet simulator. It’s a clear and obvious case of “fuck it, throw it in”. Rather than one good game, Sonic Adventure is about ten different bad games, summed together in the hopes that having enough content will make people look past the fact that none of it is actually on par with games that were coming out years prior. Quantity over quality is the name of the game here, which means that it’s about four hours too long and it made me wish that I was doing something else, instead.

Sonic himself is most emblematic of this lack of focus, both because he gets the most screen time and because his stages tend to be the most widely varied. Set aside the bad pinball minigame, the fiddly snowboarding, the boring rail shooter sections (you get two, because one wouldn't have been enough!); how does the platforming in this platformer feel? The answer, as it turns out, is also bad. Sonic moves fast, and that's good! It takes him a while to get going, and he benefits a lot from going downhill rather than up. It's nice for a 3D Sonic game to at least gesture towards concepts like momentum rather than relying on the instant capital-B Boost mechanics in later entries that let you go from zero to six thousand in the press of a button. This speed comes at a cost, however, and that's the fact that the game itself can't really keep up with him.

I managed to clip directly through the world several times over the course of about the two hours I spent playing as Sonic, and I was never certain exactly what caused it. An area in the snow level sent me directly through a loop-de-loop after I hit a boost pad, so that one was easy enough to figure out; Sonic went too fast for the collision detection to keep up with. More confusing was when I floated on a wind current that was meant to transition me from Mystic Ruins to a different stage, at which point the camera jerked into the wall and Sonic voided out. I still don't know what happened there. Regardless, Sonic is too cool to follow rules, and that includes the fundamental laws of nature about solids not being able to pass through one another. I've looked it up and people say that this is primarily a problem in the DX GameCube port, but this is the version on the original Dreamcast. This is the third revision of the game. How fundamentally broken must the game logic be for two rounds of bug fixes to not catch this? I wasn't even trying to glitch it out. Clipping out of bounds for going too fast in a Sonic game was a known shippable?

Tails is largely considered to be Sonic's junior, which is funny considering the fact that he completely fucking blows Sonic out of the water at his own game. Sonic's whole thing is supposed to be that he's the fastest thing alive, which is a bald-faced lie in a world where Tails exists. Tails gets not only the benefit of being able to fly over most of the levels that Sonic has to platform through, but he also has unique-to-him boost rings that give him a fast, automatic, optimal path towards the goal. Tails can complete a level with a three-minute par in sixty seconds. He completely trivializes a game where the most difficult challenge is not clipping out of bounds when the collision gets confused. Playing as Tails is fun in the way that spawning a jet pack in San Andreas is: the joy is in cheating.

Big was up next, because I wanted to get him out of the way after everything I'd heard about his section in the intervening years since this released. Funny enough, I had a friend growing up who had the GameCube port of this game, and he used to play the fishing minigame all the time for fun. I watched him do it. It looked like a great time. I never really got a chance to try it out, because he was a controller hog, but I never really believed all of the naysayers. My friend liked it well enough, after all. What's the worst-case scenario for something like that? It's a fishing minigame. How hard could they fuck it up?

Well.

It's bad. It's real bad. It's about as bad as people say it is, but not for the reasons that they usually say it is. Apparently there was some big Game Grumps drama blow-up over the fact that Arin Hanson railed on this section and then got flown out as a mock apology by Sega so that they could all make fun of Big the Cat as part of a marketing campaign. If you don't understand that last sentence, that's okay. It's better that you don't. If you're up on your Game Grumps drama, however, people who go on the attack against Hanson claim that his gripes are only because he didn't know to hold down on the control stick to latch Froggy on the hook; had he known it, it wouldn't have been such a problem for him, and he wouldn't have been so harsh. I agree insofar in that he probably would have had an easier time with it, but I seriously doubt that time spent would be better. Shorter, certainly. I suppose that's a form of better, because it means you get to stop playing the fucking fishing minigame earlier than you would otherwise.

The problem is multi-fold. Froggy doesn't get tired the longer he stays on the hook, but Big gets tired from reeling him in. You can get a series of bad rolls (it seems random, from what I can tell) where Big's stamina drains absurdly quickly and Froggy manages to haul ass three meters in the opposite direction before you have a chance to recover even a quarter of your stamina bar. Froggy can just go and go and go, and you can be put in a position where there's no choice but to let him go without any chance of getting him back. If Froggy stays on the line too long, it automatically breaks without warning, which can be especially frustrating when you've almost got him after a lengthy struggle. The reel likes to fucking jam more often than not, which gives Froggy a free couple seconds to make distance. Froggy will refuse to take the hook if there's three meters or less of line remaining, which is really annoying during the ice stage where the hole is tiny and Froggy clings to the walls. It's probably the worst fishing minigame I've ever played, which is impressive, because I wasn't sure that it was possible to make a fishing minigame that was both this rudimentary and this bad. The nicest thing you could say about it is that this is either the first or among the first 3D fishing games to be brought to home consoles, so it's a bit more understandable for it to be complete shit. It carries a deep and terrible burden, like the sin eaters of old, or our Lord Jesus Christ before them. Big the Cat absolves us of original sin by taking it all upon himself. He ought to be canonized.

I regret not saving Big's section for last, because the following three ended up being something of a blur. As the Joker once said in Christopher Nolan's seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight, you should never start with the Big the Cat levels; the victim gets all fuzzy. What's left probably isn't very good even if you play them first, though: Amy's levels are as forgettable as they are slow; Knuckles flies better than Tails and uses this power solely to float around re-re-re-reused stages collecting emeralds; Gamma just holds forward and the shoot button and all of his levels complete themselves. This Rashomon-ass story also starts getting very old around this point, where you're watching what are broadly the same, unskippable cutscenes over and over again with only minor dialog changes between them. It's cute the first time you play as Tails and Dr. Eggman suddenly sounds like an absolute evil menace, and it's fucking annoying the third time Amy convinces someone not to kill Gamma on the deck of the Egg Carrier.

Super Sonic is a broadly boring fourth or fifth traipse through the jungle maze that culminates in the best sequence of the entire game. You finally get an opportunity to go incredibly fast down some straightaways with no immediate danger of clipping through the world. Crush 40's Open Your Heart is playing. Sonic flies along the surface of the water and bashes Chaos on the underside of his brain. It rules. It fucking rules. The second phase kicks off and is the exact same thing with worse music. Rinse, repeat, roll credits. It's a limp end to a bad game. Big the Cat is there, but he mostly just stands off to the side and doesn't have a single line of dialog, which makes me wonder why he's even here. He doesn't do anything. For the whole game, he doesn't do anything. He exists solely so Sega could shoehorn a bad fishing minigame into an already bloated, half-baked title. Fuck Big the Cat. I hope he dies. Sorry. I know it's not his fault.

What I'm ultimately left with is a small handful of decent Sonic stages, vaguely entertaining Tails stages, and a miserable experience everywhere else. Aside from nostalgia reasons — and nostalgia is a factor whose power I cannot and will not attempt to diminish — I cannot possibly understand what people see now or saw then in Sonic Adventure. It's hardly a wonder why the Dreamcast failed when its biggest flagship titles were games like this and Shenmue. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to give the console any time of day if I was a contemporary buyer and this is what was being marketed to me. The PS2 plays DVDs. What's this have? Bleem? There are some phenomenal Dreamcast games in the back catalog that make it look like a tragedy that the system was killed the way that it was; there are games like Sonic Adventure that make me wonder how Sega even got as far as they did.

Killer soundtrack, though.