Played while sick as something easily digestible and non-intimidating to engage with. The older I get the more intrigued I am by the artistic call for a non-insignificant portion of this games musical DNA to be staked on the stylistic signifyers of acoustic American Blues. When you think racing game, specifically racing game from Japan, you think Jazz Fusion. This is just the nature of the beast. You play a racing game, it has jazz fusion playing in it. Or jazzy breakbeats, or hard rock with fusiony solos. Same difference. There's an interesting history to that in it of itself, what with Japanese racing broadcasts being soundtracked by the fusion band T-Square for decades, essentially codifying the aesthetic association of racing = jazz fusion. But the music in Double Dash? It's a lot of like, synthesized emulations of acoustic folk and R&B styles. There's some funk, a weirdly recurring amount of Ska, some Caribbean folk, but you'd look at the music in Mario Kart Double Dash and assume it was created in an alternate timeline where Rock & Roll never existed. And it's basically just this game that this stylistic oddity occurs, Mario Kart 64 had jazz fusion, Mario Kart DS might as well be the genre of jazz fusion cursed into the form of a handheld video game, it's just this game that shifts into this alternate reality. And like, i guess I get it, this whole game is the opposite smooth and slick, it's a brash and uncontrolled chaotic mess to play. The karts feel like they are barely holding onto the road, controlling them isn't immediately obvious or intuitive and kinda requires you to adjust your brain to the games specific feeling and mode of interaction. The item balance is mostly unhinged cause every character gets access to a unique overpowered nonsense item, the character switching mechanic leading to a lot more strategy required of the player beyond "know what item is most useful to have at any given time". As maybe the third video game i'd ever played, it's weird quirks all feel natural to me, but looking at it, it's a whole mess of weird systems both low level and upper level. It's definitely not as impressive or grandiose as what Mario Kart 8 achieves, it seems to have it's priorities basically set to the complete opposite of that game, but it feels so distinct and engaging to control and interact with, and the genuinely chaotic hard to predict nature of the game makes it feel really wholly new to come back to every time. It's such a weird little one off game both mechanically and aesthetically that it ends up being so much more interesting as a singular artistic statements than the successive titles, which feel like they picked an artistic direction and have just been successively refining to the point of crystaline lab grown perfection. This game is not that, it's a trash fire racing along at max speed. So it's probably the best mario kart maybe.

listened to while playing: Nickelback The Offspring, Breaking Benjamin, Smashing Pumpkins, Hum, Silverchair, Linkin Park (you cannot convince me Kara wouldn't listen to literally all of these bands)

One of those concepts so obviously good it's kinda shocking there aren't already a few exponents more of this kind of game. Frenetic trick skating movement shooting set in a battle arena that's also a massive skate park, genius. Roller Drome is a game that lives and dies by its momentum. By design, both the shooting and skating feel really good to in an unbroken combo, continually building up speed and picking off one enemy after another genuinely reaches transcendental levels of Cool at times. That coolness is all the more enhanced by the pseudo-comic book artstyle, which in combination with the increasingly frantic and overwhelming fights can make for some really nice visual moments. But as a direct result of this focus on momentum, any major failure in the moment is made all the more punishing by it's shutting down of that momentum. This makes this a Very fun game to be doing good at, and a pretty annoying game to be having any difficulty with. This is mostly okay cause as a natural curve you are going to mostly get better faster than the game gets harder, in my experience at least.

Another distinct aspect of the game I noticed was how, fucking complicated it can be. If you play this game with a standard controller, literally every single button on that controller is mapped to a thing you have to Regularly use and intuitively have at the ready for the right situation. This can be kinda dizzying at first, it's a very easy game to stumble around with the controls in its learning process. It is extremely satisfying to have all figured out though. I do wonder how much of that could have been simplified? The complexities of the trick system rarely if ever served to enhance Any of the core gameplay for me. I kinda just, ignored it for anything other than "hold down the flip and grab buttons when I need to reload" and instead focused on refining my abilities with the combat systems in the game. The core of combat and movement feel good enough on their own that I'm actually not really sure what end the implementation of a semi-complex trick system actually serves? Regardless.

The core gameplay loop and aesthetic elements here are so plainly strong it would be hard for me Not to love this game, but, I have a couple key hang-ups. One being, for a game this much about movement, these fights are like, kinda static. Almost none of the enemies in the game move at all. Which like, sure, aiming is a little awkward in the context of a fast pace skating game you're supposed to play with a controller, adding a slew of moving targets on top of that is just gonna make that even weirder. But this leads to me ask, is the arena format really the best suited structure for this combat system? I can't help but imagine this same synthesis of movement/combat systems in the structure of like, a series of linear Sonic the Hedgehog style stages, that feels all the more natural with frenetic momentum based movement gameplay this game seeks to prioritize. The combination of the closed in arena environments and static enemy types can make the game feel a tad, restrictive and empty, at times at least. When you are shredding ass during some of the more chaotic stages, you don't really notice it. My other big issue is a lot more direct: The progression system is kinda stupid and counter to any of the games Actual strengths. Each stage has a set of 10 achievements for specific actions you can take during the stage, and at the end of each leg of the tournament you have to complete a certain number of these in order to progress. Let me tell you, in a game that lives and dies by its momentum: this is a terrible idea. Forcing me to stop in my tracks and complete a bunch random specific nonsense tasks in order to move forward in the game is the most efficient way to kill any built up player momentum from match to match. And to be completely clear, I'm not even entirely opposed to the premise of making me go back to the previously completed stages to do better on them in order to progress. I actually had a lot of fun specifically doing any achievement that was just, "get this certain high score", "get a combo this high", those were awesome, Those work because they reinforce and encourage the player to build momentum and become more efficient and effective at the core systems in the game, the things that are fun to do anyway. What I don't enjoy are the tasks that are like, "do this specific trick at this part of the map!" or "kill this tough enemy using just your pistols" cause all those serve to do is completely and entirely halt you in order to do some overly pedantic nonsense in some part of the map. These eventually just become chores. Since you aren't required to complete a match in order for them to count (i'd be even more annoyed if they did), you just end up loading into the match, ignoring everything else in order to do this One specific thing in order to get enough Good Boy points to move on to the next part of the game you actually want to play. I get this was done to pad out the games length some, but I woulda just chucked this shit wholesale tbh. Just make it so I have to beat specific highscores to progress if you really want to have a system like this in place, force me to do the fun stuff in the game plz.

Hiccups aside, this is game where doing the most Basic shit is fun enough it'd be ridiculous of me not to have had a good time while playing it. Good Shit.

The quiet comfort and faint familiar warmth of endless oblivion. A game about a long dead almost entirely empty world dragging on long past it's own time. There are only 2 inhabitants of this world who aren't the player character, they both have problems you need to solve, one of them seems kinda impossible and the other wants some special colored fish. You start helping one assuming it will eventually lead to you being able to help the other.

A game of half formed systems and places that creates a simultaneous sense of unknowable dread and a hazy yet familiar feeling of comfort. Like half-remembering a strange uneasy dream you had as an extremely young child. Probably a little odd as a comparison, but I'm reminded of the original Quake in it's atmosphere. A world of abandoned concepts, none of which are fully formed enough to feel like a dominantly voiced aesthetic, and instead form together to create a uniquely moody and muted sense of gloom and emptiness I don't think is achievable otherwise.

Also like the original Quake, this games strongest asset in that aesthetic is it's sound. The sound design in this game absolutely wrecks me, it ties together the whole of this world as something that once brimmed with life, as something worth holding dear, that was left lifeless and barren long long ago. It's the sound of a million save files for a dozens dozen 90s adventure and RPG games, all left untouched for years to come. Worlds left static and dead. You do platforming and collecting, but it feels like empty husks of worlds designed for these systems that no longer serve their intended purpose. You can fall off, but cannot die, you simply reappear where you started. The few systems at play here are so slow and archaic they don't really allow for their seemingly intended gamification of the world to ever amount to anything other than a hushed suggestion of a game that used to be, but no longer is.

As the game goes on you come to realize the only two inhabitants of this world represent equally opposing and incompatible perspectives on it's own existence. It came off to be a game about two different conceptualizations of hopelessness. One voices a want to find beauty, comfort, and familiar joys in a world long devoid of any such things. Content to float out into infinity as an empty husk so long as there are things to remind you of the way things once were, and taking solace that the world itself, despite being an empty facsimile of what it used to be, will always be familiar enough to be beautiful in it's own way. The other voices a more direct want, to cut hopelessness at the source, even if it costs everything. If there is nothing left for this world, letting it drift on sparsely alive for an eternity is a far crueler existence than letting it die with finality.

Despite being a game of emptiness, of half formed systems, a game of quiet dread, I grew a strange fondness and comfort existing in it. It convinces you this really was a world of beauty and meaning a long long time ago. But all that's left of it is a shell. Quietly drifting off into oblivion.