Incredible Crisis seems like one of those PS1 games I'd buy. Short and stupid. You'd probably expect me to own this. There just wasn't enough of a hook for me, back at launch. It's effectively a mini-game collection. And bottom-rung European publisher, Titus, seemingly picked up this middling Tokuma Shoten release for its superficial similarities to Channel 4's Banzai, which I already felt a little too sophisticated for at 12. It wasn't until I saw Kenichi Nishi crediting his work on the game in the press release for the koROBO Kickstarter that I decided to check the eBay prices. Maybe there will be some charm here?

Incredible Crisis delights in stressing you out. Sequences of multiple minigames need to be completed in chunks, and they relish in telling you that you can't pause. You need to exploit tutorials and save screens just to catch a breath. Levels are filled with time limits, rapid button presses and last-second surprises, and you'll almost certainly suffer a few flubs on your first attempt. That's part of the system, though. There's a stress meter on the screen in every level, building each time you make a mistake, and if it errupts, that's a life gone. You're going to make mistakes, but it's just about keeping the ball in the air long enough to finish the level. Oh, and of course this game has a limited lives system.

It's not that cruel, though. You're ranked at the end of each chapter, distributing extra lives for playing well, and it's fairly forgiving to sloppy players. You also get to save at these parts, and there's not much of a penalty for failing the first level of a chapter repeatedly and reloading a save. Difficulty is quite varied, with levels requiring a fairly broad skillset, and if your thumbs aren't fast enough, or you're crap at rhythm games, you're probably not making it through this. There's one that demands fast mathematical abilities, and it almost served as the roadblock for me, but I got there with a little persistence. Most of them are fairly basic, and once you've figured out what you need to do, there isn't much of a game there anymore. After you've finished a level, you can access it at any time via a minigames menu, but there's a bunch that I don't see anyone bothering to come back to.

There's some appeal to the graphics. Chunky environments and character models with a rare level of dextertity and expression for the PS1. Falls way short of Mega Man Legends and Robbit Mon Dieu, but it's going for a more limited version of the same thing. The game's also running in low-resolution mode, and a lot of it looks disappointingly blurry, though the simplistic designs and texture details complement it. Nishi really seems to enjoy putting rustic, working-class families in outlandish situations, and some of that charm is carried here. It's a more juvenile, less sentimental exploration of the subject than what he'd present in Chibi-Robo, and you shouldn't come to this for the story.

Why should you, then? I don't know. Should you? Some folk thought it was funny, back in the day. Or at least they claimed to. The Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET parodies seem pretty tame now. There is a good deal of charm in the animation and voice clips, and the converging storylines, each depicting the daily activities and interests of ordinary salarymen, housewives, teenage girls and young boys in late-90s Japan, each hold some appeal. Incredible Crisis was never going to be the kind of game anyone got too passionate about. It's probably a better attempt at something like this than Project Rub/Feel the Magic/Kimi no Tame nara Shineru, but it's also marginally less funny and eccentric. And they removed a couple of Yakuza-style karaoke levels from the English release of the game, so that's probably going to put a bunch of folk off from buying a copy.

Yeah, don't bother. It's not a bad game. I kind of like it. But I can't give you a good reason to spend your time here. If you've already burned through Mr Domino and Bishi Bashi, and you're still looking for PS1 games that scratch that itch, I can see how you'd end up here, but we're not staying for long. Another title off the checklist. Another day off the calendar. Time rolls on.

It's kind of odd to see Nintendo commit to such a US-themed version of NES nostalgia, globally, but I think I get the logic in it. Japan had their own version when they got Famicom Remix. This is focused on competition, and as the most significant event Nintendo celebrated that with, the Nintendo World Championships were an ideal part of the console's history to theme this around.

So it's kind of NES Remix 3. Not as playful or silly, but it's going for a different thing. And you feel like a right goober for sweating over Ice Climber anyway.

Here, you have to approach challenges with real scrutiny and self-examination. Previous best times are recorded, and displayed against your current attempt, with every button press highlighted at the bottom of the screen. It's a cultural mishmash, theming around the 1990 kids party and focusing it on the current day grind of speedrunners and fighting game streamers. Maybe a celebration of those who refused to grow up? I don't know. We're here to have fun. Don't let the dark thoughts in.

I kind of came to this for how much I love, and actively enjoy, the NES Marios. It's fun to play them with a different mindset. I'd never seriously consider researching speedrunning techniques for Mario 1, but as an end-of-game challenge that rewinds every flub? That sounded kind of appealing to me. That World 8 warp is usually more hassle than it's worth, but being forced to get it is something else. I also take it with an amused anguish each time Nintendo insists I play more Zelda 2. Removed of the tedium of attempting to make progress in these adventures, it's a little funny to test how efficiently you can make 8-bit Link and Samus navigate corridors.

The appeal of something like this really hinges on your preconceptions, and what you approach it for. Challenges are often 3-5 seconds long. It doesn't really feel like you're playing around with the games, but chipping away at them to find the 'correct' strategy. I really hope this doesn't serve as anyone's introduction to Kirby's Adventure, with its floaty, imprecise controls. Replaying instances over and over also highlights how much of early AI was handed off to random value generation, with Donkey Kong fireballs spawning and approaching in different ways each time you replay the challenge. Getting high scores on the oldest games sometimes comes down to chance.

I came into this thinking I was shithot at Mario 3, because I knew to jump on Koopalings the instant they emerged from their shells, and I always caught the wands before they landed. NES Championships highlights my naivety. Each time you run a little too far, or correct a jump, that's extra hundredths of a second, and Nintendo expect more from you. You've been turned out at the FOR MASTER PLAYERS door. Oh? You got through the Darker Side Kingdom by the skin of your teeth? Here, take a seat at the children's table.

I don't really like to play games with this approach. Speedrunning has always seemed hostile to me. But the hyperanalysis of NES garbage? Yeah, I'm here for that.

There's a great deal of warmth and nostalgia to the whole package. Personalising your player profile has you selecting titles from a list of childhood anecdotes, relating to fond memories we share of growing up with videogames. And you're allowed to say if you're too young to have experienced these games when they were released, and your first console was a Wii. Everyone's allowed to be a NES fan. Most impressively, you're also allowed to highlight your favourite NES game, and they have a full list of licensed software to choose from, including all the movie tie-ins and titles from defunct publishers. Everyone's NES history is valid, here. Even if you've only played Low-G Man.

As a European, I'm somewhat guarded when it comes to the prevalence of American NES history. Nobody's making games about getting your collection from car boot sales and your parents chastising you because they couldn't see £100 more value in the Mega Drive. 50Hz software actively being delisted from digital storefronts, and the IGDB refusing to fully acknowledge Kirby's Ghost Trap. I'm not so afraid of it these days, though. European voices are being heard now. There's some awareness of how significant Psygnosis, DMA Design and Argonaut were in shaping the industry. The United States helped too, I guess. It's okay to have Mario appear as a frontloading NES owner in the new Hollywood blockbuster. Let the baby have his bottle.

My main criticism of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is how confused it feels. Like maybe it was proposed as a Tetris 99-style NSO freebie, but the latency of online play nixxed any potential of networked Balloon Fight play-offs. There's support for 8-player local games, but how easily do they expect us to engineer meet-ups of stringent NES devotees? The system almost seems built for Trials HD-style ghost data to spread across your friends lists, egging them on to do a little better each time you submit a new time, but they haven't implemented it. The online stuff comes in the form of weekly challenges against random opponents' best times, seemingly pulled from the single player mode where they had as many reattempts as they liked, whereas you have to do a bunch of different games in a row. I don't really care how these strangers did. If I knew the guy, and we could exchange barbs at each other afterwards, well, we'd be talking about a different, and better, game. For now, that only seems possible if I can persuade him to play on the same console as me.

The game selection, too. There's a bunch of weird selections and omissions. I can only expect Punch-Out challenges are coming in a future update, but the game's so niche, I'm not confident Nintendo will see the point of allocating more resources to it while they're making Mario Kart 9 in the next room. It's too early to make a definite statement on this game, but for now, it's an awkward release.

There could have been better ways to release this. In Nintendo's more desperate days, I could see this coming to the 3DS for a third of the price, and everyone raving about it. Even the loss of easy Twitter clips feels like a massive knock against its potential. Right now, when players have been more diversified and less platform-focused than they have in decades, it feels like a weak effort. Nobody's ideal scenario.

I don't know. Maybe you're part of an active retro gamer group with regular meet-ups. Maybe speedrunning is an active interest of yours, but you don't know where to start. Maybe you wear Playing With Power t-shirts, and your YouTube channel is filled with reuploads of Stuttering Craig top 10s. This could be totally your thing. I just don't imagine you know a lot of people who are just like you.

Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic had Mario Bros POW blocks in it. We ought to be questioning whether SMB1 counts as a "real Mario game".

I think all that patter's died off now, anyway. Only really got loud when the first generation of NES nostalgia emerged in the mid-2000s, alongside the GBA NES Classics rereleases and screwattack.com. I don't think there's any controversy about the game among those under 25 years old. This is Mario 2, and Japan got a shitposty expansion pack in the form of a cheap Famicom Disk instead (initially).

Forget about other Mario games for a second. Mario 2 is a monster of a cartridge to put in your NES. Look at other puzzle-action games from the period. I don't think any of them measure up to this. I'm not talking Zelda 2. I'm talking Zelda 1. Unlike anything of this vintage, this doesn't feel like a handful of sprites and level concepts reassembled a half dozen times. In many ways, this is the first game that feels like what we've come to expect from Mario. Clever, funny ideas, slowly rolling out over a series of gradually more complex stages. You think you've got this shit figured out, but then there's shyguys on ostriches, rocketships that you pluck out the ground, and giant whales shooting ridable water out their blowholes. Yeah, you fight Birdo a bunch of times, but they're always playing around with the arenas and her abilities in a much more interesting way than stepping up to Bowser eight times. And you're not just solving puzzles, but making creative use of the levels. You're searching for secret areas and determining the best places to throw each magic potion. There's optional routes and shortcuts that you're not going to see unless you do everything perfectly. This feels like 90s game stuff, and when it came out, it was sharing shelf space with Ghostbusters and Mickey Mousecapade.

Following the precedent set by Donkey Kong, Mario Bros and Wrecking Crew, Mario and friends don't defeat enemies by jumping on them. That's Mushroom Kingdom rules. In Subcon, you pick them up and throw them at each other. It feels exciting, brandishing a physical weapon. This is Mario with a gun. It's kept satisfyingly tricky down to the diagonal arc of your throw and the effects of momentum that lead into it. It's also one of the (many) aspects of the game that had a direct influence on following Mario games, with you having the ability to grab Koopa shells and fly off with them in Mario 3. Having the ability to grab parts of the world and use them makes Mario feel much more tangible and filled with play potential, whereas the previous games presented everything as either a threat or a benign platform. You can use enemies as platforms, and discover alternate routes and shortcuts. Removing that time limit incentivises you to play around and try things. See what you can get away with. This was the Mario 64 playground appeal in 1988.

Oh, and when Miyamoto eventually got out of the logistical nightmare of managing N64 teams and made his big statement game with Pikmin? The one where you pluck sprouts out of the ground and add them to your party? He was thinking about Mario 2. Never let me see you undermine the significance of this game.

No previous Nintendo game had Mario 2's sense of character. Obviously, this is the game that provides players with four characters to choose from, each with their own statistics that play on their personalities, but it's filled with things that feel much more vibrant and individual than anything we'd seen in action games before. It doesn't feel bland or abstract in that way so many mid-80s games tend to. There's whimsy and warmth in the design. There's no need for the bomb-throwing boss to be a huge mouse with shades, but it just feels right, you know? For as outlandish as they may have seemed, there was a practicality to the design of SMB1's flat-headed Goombas and leaping, winged Cheep Cheeps. They let themselves loose on Mario 2, and it feels much more fun for it. This is the Kuribo's Shoe stepping through the door. Mario 2 is so fundamental in our affection for Nintendo.

With Doki Doki Panic, NES SMB2, Famicom Super Mario USA release, All-Stars, BS Super Mario USA, and eventually landing on the definitive release with Super Mario Advance, there's perhaps no game Nintendo reworked so frequently in such a small span of time as Mario 2. Imagine if they could have distributed software patches back then. I don't think it's over regrets for the game's technical shortcomings (though like most highly-ambitious NES cartridges, there are a fair few here). I theorise that Nintendo just think this game is really funny, and they wanted to use new technology to better showcase that. There's still a good sense of Mario 2's energy and humour in this release, though. Riding a flying Birdo egg to a distant off-screen island is one of the funniest bits of game design I can recall. SMB1 was fun, but did it ever make you laugh? "OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!", maybe - at a push - but the material's fairly worn-out by WORLD 7-4. Mario 1 feels like the NES Soccer developers really making a last-ditch effort to make something really worthwhile with their cheap little family computer, but Mario 2 feels like they were enjoying themselves and making each other laugh. Mario 1 is the Miyamoto we respect, but Mario 2 is the Miyamoto we love.

There's definitely aspects of this NES version that make it tough to recommend over Advance. Most glaring of all is how extra lives work. You collect coins in Subspace for a shot at a slotmachine after each level, and that's where you get about 90% of your lives. It's a total crapshoot, and if there's any skill to winning BONUS CHANCE, it's lost on me. There's no rolling dials like SMB3. Just flashing images. Given how stingy the rest of the game is at dolling out 1-ups, your chance of success leans quite hard on fate. Besides all the goofy cosmetic stuff, it's the generosity to players that really has me pushing the GBA cart over the old NES version. Anyone determined enough will be able to see the end of that game. I can't guarantee that here.

It's easy to accept on original hardware, though. Like you've just found a vintage amusement attraction at the end of a pier. Not everything completely works, but it remains very charming. In some ways, it feels older than it is, with the red velvet curtains that adorn the character select screen and the fairytale nature of the yume kojo. Again, there's no practical justification for these decisions, but they contribute massively to Mario 2's sense of fun and warmth. I have a real soft spot for it. It's just very hard for me to talk about how much I love Mario 2 without my brain going "CHOOSE A CHARACTER!" and "I AM THE GREAT WART! HAHAHA!". Man. Fuck this in the bin and get Advance on.