I think this is the only game I've ever out and out ragequit. The concept of the game is hilarious, you can make some absolute horrors of creatures given the flexibility in the creator and only towards the end of the game do the minigames start being randomly unfair.
Had a GBA download card game that was weirdly addicting.
This game is like my own personal Mandela Effect. For the vast majority of my life I forgot it existed and then one day I just had a vivid memory of creating frankensteinian abominations and making them compete in olympic sports to the death, and a couple google searches later I remembered Amazing Island. I haven't played it since I was a child but I remember really loving it, and it genuinely has one of the most insanely fun character creation implementations I have seen to this day. What a little gamecube gem.
another rent from blockbuster i LOVED this.
not a fan of the aesthetic choices made for the world but the sheer wealth of ways in which you can make your own freaky little beast to play as is unparalleled by any other game I've come across. fun to build awful creatures with your friends
in a word? "amazing"
Stupod stink raptor don't jump
Ignited my love for fully customizable characters. Adorable Gamecube jank and had some pretty decent minigames. I remember playing Drawn to Life on DS and being pretty disappointed that the character creator system there didn’t allow for nearly as much depth as this. Fully drawing your own character from scratch still looks scary, though….
almost forgot my friend had asked me to play this years ago...
was completely awful at the mini games so i never got far but here's to frenchfries my creachure
was completely awful at the mini games so i never got far but here's to frenchfries my creachure
this game was weird and confusing as a kid and i still have my copy
The second minigame is literally unbeatable. Apparently this is normally a Dolphin issue, but I'm playing via Nintendont on a Wii U, so who knows how I'm supposed to fix it.
Objectively this is too many stars but this game was just so delightfully strange. Nothing at the time was doing anything similar.
The gimmick here is that you have to create your own monsters to do minigames to save an amazing island. As you get better scores and unlock more minigames you get more accessories to add to your monsters. The accessories range from body textures to hair to sneakers.
The best part of the gimmick is that you are straight-up drawing the body parts of your monster. It offers an unheard-of amount of customization for creature design as you painstakingly doodle horrible lumpy nightmare creatures and paste tiger stripes and googly eyes onto them. Different accessories and body shapes can change your stats, so you can build monsters that are better at running, flying, etc. Theres a lot of experimentation in building monsters, and all of them will look delightfully jank. No amount of artistic experience can prepare you for drawing with a gamecube controller.
My favorite monster I made was just a head with red sneakers, anime hair, and a beak. Terrible stats (it was literally just a floating head) but I loved my horrible anime rooster friend.
There is a bit of an uneven difficulty curve as you progress, but in a game that encourages grinding for monster accessories I think it actually feeds back into the core conceit: building cooler, weirder, stronger monsters.
It's definitely not a /good/ game, but it is a really interesting one.
The gimmick here is that you have to create your own monsters to do minigames to save an amazing island. As you get better scores and unlock more minigames you get more accessories to add to your monsters. The accessories range from body textures to hair to sneakers.
The best part of the gimmick is that you are straight-up drawing the body parts of your monster. It offers an unheard-of amount of customization for creature design as you painstakingly doodle horrible lumpy nightmare creatures and paste tiger stripes and googly eyes onto them. Different accessories and body shapes can change your stats, so you can build monsters that are better at running, flying, etc. Theres a lot of experimentation in building monsters, and all of them will look delightfully jank. No amount of artistic experience can prepare you for drawing with a gamecube controller.
My favorite monster I made was just a head with red sneakers, anime hair, and a beak. Terrible stats (it was literally just a floating head) but I loved my horrible anime rooster friend.
There is a bit of an uneven difficulty curve as you progress, but in a game that encourages grinding for monster accessories I think it actually feeds back into the core conceit: building cooler, weirder, stronger monsters.
It's definitely not a /good/ game, but it is a really interesting one.
Some mini-games are tedious and boring, but the creation aspect of this game is something I wished for a long time. We rented this game not knowing how fun it would be.