I think I've finally played this game long enough to at least understand how to be good at it. As in, I finally made it past the qualification round. Still have no idea how to make it past more than one racer on the track, but IDK I feel very accomplished with where I am after years of not understanding this game on the Ms. Pac-Man plug-n-play.

Good fanfare too, probably one of my favorites in the classic Namco lineup? It's admirable, I support Pole Position even if I'm convinced I'll never actually be good at it.

I feel bad that my first experience with modern 2D Kirby was Star Allies. While that game has its moments, it totally pales in comparison to this. First of all, running at a consistent 60 does wonders for bosses in these games, and second of all, there's actual level design. Levels aren't just a series of hills and enemies, there's shit to do! I really felt like I finally got a good grip on how to play these games, and I understand why the majority of Kirby fans nowadays are so content with where the series has been going.

Also, the bonus Magolor Epilogue is nothing to sleep on. The way the levels in that mode are based on maintaining a combo may seem odd at first, but as you unlock more of Magolor's moveset it all comes into place. Each development feels fun and substantial, and every level feels extremely well tuned to compliment the combo-based system.

This game in general does a really good job of encouraging mastery by giving you lots of little opportunities to hone skills with moves and copy abilities. Little sections in levels are all about understanding certain abilities and what they can do, and the challenge levels in Magolor's ship are all about understanding the little nuances of abilities you may not have recognized before. It's no wonder this became the Kirby formula back when this came out on the Wii, it's all done just right.

Even the side mode Merry Magoland, a collection of really solid mini-games, has this aspect of encouraging mastery through its achievement list for every mini game, as well as the super-satisfying stamp rally system. This is just an incredibly solid package, and as someone who hadn't played the original I was constantly delighted.

Pulling this randomly out of my giant zip file of snes roms, I had no idea this was an unreleased game. In the countless amount of SNES tie in games, it just feels like this game was released and someone out there bought it, but no, it was cancelled before it could release. Playing it, it certainly feels as finished as you expect any game of its caliber to be. There's no trick going on, nothing out of the ordinary, you can perfectly envision a child tolerating this game after getting it from their uncle. But it only exists in this form, a random SNES rom floating among countless smw rom hacks, demoscenes long forgotten, untranslated dungeon crawlers, and hentai slideshows. Far from any sort of target audience, plopped into an emulator by a dipshit making jokes with his friends over discord at 1 AM. Barbie was never meant to be here, and yet this is where destiny has taken here. A Barbie girl, but no Barbie world, Aqua is left in shambles.

It's easy to overlook this game as just being a GBA port of the All-Stars version of 2, but the addition of 5 red coins for each level honestly does a lot for these levels. It encourages exploring the different routes in each one, and makes the game just slightly more engaging IMO. I feel like every time I play SMB2 I take the exact same route, and these wonderful red coins were able to break me out of this. Also I love the addition of crunchy ass audio clips playing for everything, I love Toad screaming his head off plucking turnips out, I love Birdo speaking full English in a voice she would never have again, I love that most of the bosses are just obviously Charles Martinet doing a slightly different voice. Fun version, check it out if you haven't, it has Mario Bros like every Mario game on GBA, what's not to love.

Outside of the really glaring issues like the requirements for catching jellyfish, the game-breaking glitch the ps2 version shipped with, and the lack of music variety, this wasn't really that bad. In terms of being a light Banjo-Kazooie style collect-a-thon, it does everything just fine, not amazingly, but enough to keep me playing. The thing is, the weirdly floaty jump this game has activates my 3D platformer brain so much more than the generic double jump that Battle for Bikini Bottom has. It's the kind of jump that makes it fun just to see what you can and can't reach with it, it opens up the levels in this game in a way that Battle for Bikini Bottom doesn't. The level design in this game is fucking bizarre, it's a mix of trying to make locations accurate to the show but also randomly sticking in other shit. The cutscenes and animation are also strange to behold, clearly made before Nickelodeon fully went all in on Spongebob and had standards for what could be made for it. "Purgatorial" is a word people have passed around about this game, and I can't explain exactly how it applies but it simply does. That's good to me, though, I had a good time exploring this mess of a game, it's the exact 3D platformer I love turning my brain off to while also constantly serving me something new to gawk at. The way Spongebob fucking spins wildly when you collect all the letters, Larry the Lobster being surrounded by dark clouds and giant foreboding jellyfish just to get away from Spongebob, the Flying Dutchman ramming a boat into a pier, killing hundreds, while unfitting music plays, the CLOWNS, it's all a joy to marvel at.

"Hey, you know the Wario Land games? Those super idiosyncratic, beloved platformers made a passionate team of developers? Well why don't we get essentially an anonymous studio to make a new one of those, but with touch controls in all the places you don't want them!"

This game feels like a seat-filler. Something that exists just to say "Look how many games we have on our platform!" and move on from. Previous Wario games have so much thought and care put into them and their mechanics, and the way Wario affects the world and vice-versa. Here, all the power-ups that come from interacting with the world are just costumes you equip at any time, all controlled by the stylus and equipped by using it as well. This ends up creating brain-dead level design, where everything is solvable by just putting on one of the costumes or moving onto the next room and coming back when you have the right costume for it. It's as obvious as puzzle platformers come, because the devs here clearly don't understand there's a difference between solving a puzzle through the moveset given to you and objects in the environment vs solving a puzzle by using the Puzzle Solving Item.

Drawing on screen to switch to different abilities isn't horrible, but is there any reason this had to come at the cost of having a jump button? Or any buttons?? I guess they expect you to play this with a hand on the d-pad and another on your stylus, because up on the d-pad is jump and you need touch controls for any attack or action. While going through normal levels this set-up is ok, but for situations that require fast action, I always ended up fumbling over my DS trying to draw the right thing several times in a row. Why doesn't this game pause the action when you draw like in Okami? It wouldn't actually be that intrusive, it'd actually make things flow nicely. Instead, boss fights that require fast costume changes are way more annoying because I keep accidentally putting Wario in the boat costume instead of the one that gives him a gun.

One thing I will praise highly is the dialogue here. The premise of Wario ruining an actual master thief's life by stealing his powers and brute forcing his way through every obstacle is actually funny, and there's a lot of good jokes all throughout the story. This is just another way Wario is the anti-Mario, he can actually carry a dialogue heavy story quite well, just because he's so distinct of a character. I won't say it's the best story, as at a certain point a lot of the beats of each "episode" become repetitive, but it was a surprise to see how much work was put into turning in an entertaining script for this game.

I made a point earlier in this review about how this is a 2D Wario game not developed by the Wario Land devs, and I don't think I would've bothered pointing that out if it weren't for the fact that I feel it tries to evoke it a lot. The levels are set up sort of like Wario Land 4 levels but bigger, the enemies are in the same school of "somewhere between cute and weird" design, and whenever you find a chest, you have to do a minigame with a bomb as a countdown clock, which to me reads as trying to invoke the Warioware games as well. But of course, none of these are as good as the real thing, especially the mingames, which feel like the most obvious things to do with a touch screen possible (there's a slide puzzle). The levels are big in a way that makes them very exhausting to explore, since everything is so slow and often requires re-doing puzzles with specific costumes. Also, the music is just pathetic, no one is going to be bumping this shit, these songs are not going to be invited to the "1 hour nintendo music compilation" party.

Obviously pretty bad to look at, but this isn't a horrible attempt at translating Crazy Taxi to the GBA. Simpsons Road Rage outdoes this in terms of framerate and general feel, but has its own problems like its mostly flat world being harder to parse at high speeds. In this game, I honestly felt that even going at high speeds I always had enough time to make a turn and avoid just crashing into every building. Because of this, the fully 3D world definitely doesn't feel like an inherently bad choice, even if it ends up causing a lower framerate and the need to have a loading screen. The map is smartly modified with the GBA in mind while still being a decent replication of the original map. It's also cool that all of the classic Crazy Taxi techniques are in this game, but the low frame rate means it's very easy to accidentally input a button too fast, and so instead of a Crazy Boost you're just losing speed in reverse. This makes the harder Crazy Box challenges needlessly frustrating, since those obviously require you to be able to consistently pull off those moves. A surprisingly decent port, but not really all that recommendable, just something worth checking out if you're a real Crazy Taxi head.

Hold on I'm just now looking at my log dates, what do you mean it took me over a month to beat this?! Christ, I got to get my shit together. Anyway, Wario's pretty fucking cool.

So much passion is clearly evident in this. Despite coming out in the launch year of the GBA, it goes all out with what the system is capable of. Each level has its own central gimmick that make full use of Wario's moveset, while the graphics and music are making the most off-the-wall aesthetic decisions to really make this feel like the culmination of the energy this team has been building up over the years, which would then be poured into the Warioware and Rhythm Heaven series. There are already plenty of great pieces talking about the genius of Wario Land 4's music and gameplay, so I don't really have much else to say, it's just an incredible achievement. Although right now what I'm interested in is the DS game Wario: Master of Disguise, a Wario game literally no one talks about, whatever's in there is probably bad but now I need to know, but that's for another day.

It is just not happening for me. All the stereotypes people have about NES games in terms of aging poorly and being needlessly obtuse in places are ever present in this game. It's constantly playing clown music at you for daring to play the game normally. I cannot be bothered to make it past 1-2, so I won't leave a score just in case it becomes secretly amazing after that, but I seriously want nothing to do with this game after every couple years tricking myself into trying it again. Thank god Uprising exists otherwise the Kid Icarus series would just be unsalvageable.

Yeah, as genuinely fun as You vs Boo is as well as the additions for challenge mode, the screen crunch on this is absolutely miserable. Levels that are only kind of challenging as someone who has played SMB a lot become hell on Earth because I didn't slow down in time to not crash into the goomba offscreen. Probably pretty cool for its time though, I definitely would've played the shit out of it if I had it when I was younger, but outside of running through the You vs Boo levels it's just not worth it.