A vibrant and unique experience; sprint through 10 stages over the course of 3-5 hours, dodging obstacles, making your way past or through enemies, and experiencing great set piece moments such as train tunnels, rooftops, and various building interiors. It certainly has a lot of 2008-style bloom on the Unreal Engine 3, but it also has a lot of charm with its strong colour palette and remarkably great character animations. The soundtrack is well synchronised to the momentum of the game itself, and a handful of secrets scattered across levels definitely helps the replayability if you're not a time trial kind of person. My worst gripe is there's a handful of momentary bugs with the audio and grabbing certain ledges, but it definitely holds up against many modern big hitters. Definitely recommend the playthrough.

A fairly tame but on point take on the Helicopter style of gameplay; hover Peter Pan around 20 stages as you dodge walls and other moving hazards, spiced up with some key hunting and special abilities you unlock through the game. Backtracking makes the levels feel a bit more deeper as well, as well as hiding secrets in walls and trickier locations. Definitely gets a bit tiring as the game goes on, but there's a decent amount of content, wrapped up in a decent presentation, and I was pleasantly surprised by it all.

No frills but no substance; answer the question and either move on or start from scratch. It's a simple premise for a game show but in video game form it's nothing more than a simple trivia pack, and for this GBA version there's not enough questions for it to last longer than two hours before you start seeing duplicates again. There's also no additional features after hitting start; you're thrown straight into the first question, and you're kicked back to the title screen on anything wrong. Apart from a visual bug if you spam Start after failing a question, there's nothing really wrong with it, but it's also nothing special, and not really worth checking out.

A classic and simple concept that you'll want to replay; roll your Katamari ball around, starting from a meagre 5cm in some levels to up to 300m in the final level, collecting larger and larger objects as you yourself grow. It's addictive and doesn't outstay its welcome. Coupled with a quirky aesthetic and an eclectic soundtrack, the game expands into a sort-of collectathon near the end as you try to discover and roll up every type of object in the game to complete your collection. My only gripe is despite having about 20 levels, there's only three environments in the game, so you'll feel a little bit of repetition, even if different levels in the same area have different goals and object layouts, and eventually will end at a different size level. I highly recommend this game, highly worth playing. The Steam version is incredibly faithful to the PS2 version so you can't go wrong with which platform you play on.

What can only be described as unripe chocolate; bitter and inconsistent. Control Charlie through 14 linear levels; most involving slowly walking up to some Oompa Loompas, attempting to call them to follow you, walking to where they need to interact with something, and then attempting to signal them to act on the right thing. Rinse and repeat multiple times until the game deems you've looked at the scenery long enough to continue. There's a couple of occasions where the game wants you to use Charlies incredible throwing arm to pelt Gobstoppers at robots until it thinks they shouldn't spawn in anymore, but the core of the game is purely the mindless redirection of the Oompa Loompas. It's also woefully communicated so you'll spend half the game scratching your head how the mechanics work and then the other half being painfully bored until the game ends unceremoniously and abruptly. You may also experience animation bugs, camera issues, and in my case, required encounters with squirrels that fall outside the map or get stuck on the player permanently, requiring a whole level to be replayed from the beginning. The only redeeming quality is the soundtrack is pretty good and fits the whimsically chaotic vibe of the movie fairly well. But the rest of this is a slog, and it's not worth even your nostalgia.

The best word to describe this game is aggressive. Immediately off the bat you'll have to trudge through pop-ups, long EULAs, signing in with an account, and then prompted about the paid currency, battle passes, daily challenges, and seasonal rank in the online.

Eventually you'll find the story mode and we reach the second stage of aggression; the writing never takes a breather, and it's about a 50/50 whether any joke lands. Sometimes it's a chuckle, sometimes I wish the game was just quiet for a moment. Sometimes it's self-aware about how annoying it is, but that doesn't excuse it for being annoying.

Finally, the last bit of aggression (and it's not a bad thing) is how much destruction occurs in this game. Nearly every object can be demolished into its raw Lego pieces, dozens of pedestrians can be flung into the air at once, and once the game starts to get going at the faster speeds, it all meshes together into a fairly decent flow.

The game follows a very simple structure; there's four worlds, each with some races which is how you progress through the story, some side missions that should take you a minute or two each, various one off challenge gates that you'll probably ignore until you have a faster car later in the game, and hundreds of collectable pickups, none of which really mean anything unless you enjoy the grind.

And grind it is, because while there's a good variety with each race having its own rival character and AI names and themed vehicles, there's only so many kinds of track layouts that really feel unique and inspiring, and every car controls the same (which is why you can download community made designs for them). The car editor is extensive and probably too involved for me to fully understand but I appreciate its depth, but there's not any tangible meaning or incentive in game to do so.

And it all ends with a bit of a whimper; never getting very difficult (although fortunately there's no unfair randomness happening in the races), and never really reaching any degree of amazingness. The story exists in its own bubble aware from the externalities of the modern Game as a Service, and while serviceable I struggle to really latch on to it and want to replay any of it, or care about collecting every tiny piece of cash floating in the world. Maybe it's worth a curiosity play but I think there's time better spent elsewhere.

A condensed version of Magenta's prior game Muppet Monster Adventure, which it itself is a Spyro-style collect-a-thon, Treasure Planet follows various scenes from the movie in a relatively harmless but not particularly long or interesting experience. Four of the levels are typical Spyro affairs where you play as Jim on foot; swinging a sword and using a blaster beam, collecting money from chests and completing occasional side quests for extra tokens. Four other levels are racing levels where you ride around a circuit for three minutes, collecting money and completing them under a time limit for more tokens. There's a decent bit of variety between each level but unfortunately that's the extent of the game; you'll be bouncing back and forth and neither of them get particularly deep in mechanics or difficulty. Two boss fights checkpoint the half-way and ending of the game, and they're both okay but are also about as straightforward as the rest of the game. Collecting every coin in each level is a bit arduous as some placements are rather tucked away or hard to reach using the rather stiff jump and glide controls (lacking the range Sparx had in Spyro), and there's not really any reward for doing this anyways. The music and visuals are pretty alright though (albeit this was released in late 2002 after much better looking games on contemporary consoles). It's a fun curiosity game though, but it's fairly short at just four hours, and there's better games that it's directly designed after that you should probably play before this.

Better known as Simple 2000 Series Vol. 68: The Tousou Highway: Nagoya - Tokyo, drive a 340km journey across Japan while hijacking and ramming cars, all while avoiding the police. The concept and execution is quite novel, but you'll feel a bit fatigued as the scenery and music never really changes over the journey. It controls a bit too sensitively (the developers previously worked on Choro Q) and the cars are made out of tissue paper as any knocks will reduce their top speed significantly, and a few more knocks causes them to catch fire. None of it is really terrible though, and certainly it's amusingly absurd in the process. It's worth a curiosity play but don't feel bad if you lose interest before its three hour length is over.

More like Barbie Super Short, play across a whole two sports in a 40-minute experience that barely requires any attention to complete. The visuals are fairly passable, and the music's harmless but a bit repetitive (as there's only one song that plays on loop in each of the two sports). You'll be briefly frustrated by the stiff controls for skating as the analogue stick behaves just like a d-pad, but the time limits are so lofty you'll feel no pressure at all. Barbie herself maintains a fairly parasocial relationship with the player by constantly telling you that you make a good team and that every single fashion option you choose is fashionable. I'm still confused by various quips that she'd be faster with more expensive gear, which you earn enough tickets in the game to only really get one of these. There's a couple of unrewarding secrets to discover in the game but otherwise you'll find nothing too memorable about this one.

Visually okay but incredibly shallow and stilted. The game captures nine levels across two movies, but none of them are particularly difficult to reach the end with. Harder difficulty levels require the player to collect enough tokens to continue, and many are encased in these tiny enemies that could be easily confused for the background. Jumping has this strange momentum, rolling deals half damage and generally puts you dangerously close towards ledges, and Simba has a roar that's so short range you can barely get it to function. The worst part is that the game says you've only played 33% of it once reaching the credits, thus asking you to play the exact game again on other difficulty levels (the only difference is that coin requirement and fewer bonus lives, otherwise it's exactly the same). There's a few bonus games but they're rather simplistic. The original music is also very repetitive and reused for almost every level in the game. It's a footnote release, nothing special, and not worth checking out.

A solid racer but a bit repetitive, Need For Speed gracefully jumps into the PS2 generation with fairly detailed cars, large tracks, and a great sense of speed and weight to everything. The career progression gets a bit repetitive before it's over as you're asked to drive on the same dozen tracks again and again, but the faster cars feel different and you can hop between the regular racing and the Hot Pursuit mode (where you evade the police). It gets a bit brutal with the amount of rubber banding the AI employ, as well as how random some of the elements of the police go. The soundtrack is alright but it's shorter than some of the actual races you have to do by the end. It all looks fairly good though, especially for early PS2. It comes together into a fairly neat package and it definitely is worth a playthrough from this era.

A competent little racer but lacks any significant meat. The game presents four career progression tiers beginning with three Gran Turismo style license tests on a single corner, and then eight "races" where you effectively play catchup to several opponents who started a minute before you. As you go, you'll unlock minor upgrades that you can attach onto any of the several dozen real licensed cars. Rinse and repeat over and over across 32 tracks until the game is complete. Upgrades and the car selection doesn't spice up the gameplay at all, and the controls are very loose but also undemanding. Certainly a curiosity title, and I commend the effort on transferring all the car sprites into the game, but it doesn't get any more exciting after it starts, nor does it have the depth of other games it tries to compare against.