Banana, on the surface, is just an incremental meme game that you play for 20 seconds, get the one and only achievement, and then uninstall. There's some basic text and a png of a banana. Every time you click the banana, the text counts up. No upgrades, aesthetics, or anything of note gameplay-wise beyond that.

In reality, the "game" is the Steam marketplace. Every 3 hours you keep the game open, you get a banana in your Steam inventory. Every 18 hours, you get a rare banana. You then trade and sell these on the Steam Marketplace for Steam cash from people who feel tempted to have every banana. It is basically an NFT buying and trading simulator.

All the different bananas are actually created on the game's discord by fans and are given an arbitrary rarity. After 24 hours of having the game open, I have gotten 8 bananas, 3 of them being duplicates, and can sell them off for about 30 cents total. Some people are straight up buying rarer bananas for as much as 200.00+ USD. I will probably keep the game open for a few days on the off chance I get anything people are willing to buy but ultimately, there is nothing beyond that. While I probably should give it 0.5 stars, I can't deny that getting an 8-cent banana for doing literally nothing did bring me more joy than some full games I've played.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha i've been playing this without the fucking light spell because i apparently missed it in the warp maze and also there's a million things along the way and i also missed the bayohihihihi spell and also im meant to use up 3 spaces of my very limited inventory for it but also im meant to grind way more because apparently concussing arle for 5 levels straight to go fight schizo wasn't enough and i have to grind even more and more and more this game will ask for your soul your devotion your spirit and all your worldly possessions but it's not enough it's greed is astounding its avarice is bottomless you ask "how much until you are satisfied?" and you are only met with the cries of "more, you pitiful human" so you slave away and slam poor 16-year old arle nadja's head against the wall like a human piñata as she cries out in pain. you are dulled to the cruelty you are committing because the game doesn't care, the game just wants more and more violence it wants you to run arle through the mud it wants you to make her suffer the worst possible fates this game HATES you but it knows that it succeeds the enjoyable madou monogatari i so it believes it can get away with tearing at your sanity and savoring the chunks of lost time you will NEVER get back i feel nothing but emptiness as i stare at this god forsaken chain link fence that can only be bypassed by the bayohihihihihi spell that i missed somewhere around the way because this game fucking hates telling you shit and wants you to figure it out but also it hates that you try exploring so it goes out of it's way to make it GOD AWFUL to traverse. magic-draining tiles, slippery floors in dark rooms, fog rooms with FUCKING MINES ON THEM, incredibly convoluted warp tile mazes, the people who made this game hate you and think you must be the biggest sucker in the known universe that would willingly subject themselves to madou monogatari ii: 16-year old arle nadja. i feel so fucking bad for arle she can never catch a fucking break and i'm so glad she has a new home in puyo puyo because she can rest easy there and have a nice comfortable life with carbuncle and her friends where her biggest worry is trying to find a way to have fun because its so much better than here where she has to suffer and bash her head against a wall in order to summons scyllas that poison her and then you have to drag your ass through the stair prompt say no then go buy an antidote herb from that snail motherfucker who is ripping you off just to cure the poison only for you to have to go back through the stair prompt because if arle gets a concussion on the same tile as yoyoyo she summons the bastard again and you have to wait for his humdeedoo ass to slither his way into frame before you say "no i don't want your shit" but then he tries to sleaze you into buying something by saying "cmooon i got good deals" but clearly he doesn't realize that no means no so you have to remind him and show him the shape of italy through a practical exercise and then you have to repeat the process OVER AND OVER AGAIN JUST SO YOU CAN GET PAST THE BS FIGHT THAT IS SCHIZO THAT JUST SHOWS UP AGAIN AND AGAIN WHY THE HELL DOES HE SHOW UP SO MUCH AND WITHOUT WARNING if i was playing without rewind or save states i think i would've preferred a bullet to the mouth because what the fuck were the devs thinking trying to make such a convoluted system where you just stack diacute spells over and over but tough shit if you miss! but you're gonna get fucked because the monsters can just fucking steal your shit and leave because why not and you can't do shit about it get fucked this game hates you your entire bloodline and it even hates you, the reader. i cannot explain why such a hateful game even came into being it's nature is paracausal in nature no sane human being could have possibly created this necronomicon in the form of a game gear rom cartridge there is no scientific explanation as to how one game has managed to illicit such a painful response yet it kept dragging me in despite all the bullshit despite it all but the fucking backtracking broke me because i cannot DO this anymore i cannot stand any more abuse from this game i've had enough i will stand my ground and say no. i have had enough madou monogatari ii. your threats mean nothing to me and you will sit in my openemu library in shame of your actions.

So, yeah. It's better than Overwatch 2 at the very least.

Colorblindness Rating: A?
By the time I dropped the game, there were some colored gems. Presumably the same ones in the Carbuncle diagram which aren't really complicated but this is a tentative rating since I don't know if there is a legitimate problem or not with these gemstones but at the same time I am not willing to stick around any longer to find out because I am able to recognize toxic relationships with games and I only have room for one of those in my life and that's Destiny 2 thank you very much.

Good night.

♫ Whyyyyy are there so many/gaaaaames about cavemen/living in dinosaur tiiiiiimes? ♫

Ahem. Joe & Mac is a game I've known about for years and years through one of the retro gaming sites I used to follow, but never really had the ability nor inclination to play. Well, the upshot of Nintendo Switch Online is that I now have access to stuff like this and can take the plunge whenever. Seriously, I know it's cool and sexy to get all the major first-party stuff on Virtual Console-esque services, and Ninty's habit of rereleasing titles on a drip-feed can be annoying, but this is precisely the advantage of this weird slow subscription model - you have access to odds and ends you'd never really seek out otherwise, and the limitation makes you more likely to go for the weirdies. In 10 years, when Ninty's almost assuredly discontinued support for this model, we're gonna miss this part of it for sure.

Coming into this was interesting since I'm largely familiar with the arcade release, not the Super Nintendo release. Turns out they changed a decent amount of it with the simple addition of that map screen. Naturally, the arcade flows directly from level to level, though the game has the cool feature where certain levels boast branching paths. The SNES port generally splits all of these into their own levels (which explains, for example, why there are two consecutive stages with pterosaur bosses - you'd only take one of those on an arcade run). A couple of the more gimmicky ones are missing, which I'd attribute to difficulty converting arcade features onto home console. But overall, it's a decent way to handle it, and adding a largely-superfluous system of unlocking bonus levels with a finite amount of keys adds a bit of arcadey intrigue to proceedings that could really only work on a home console title like this.

Joe & Mac is mainly defined as a platformer by its subweapons. The titular cavedudes get four options on SNES - bones, boomerangs, wheels, and fireballs - on top of their melee clubs. During my first few attempts, I made the mistake of thinking that the system worked like Castlevania and began arranging tiers in my head - Wheels and Boomerangs are best, Bones are piddly but reliable, Fireballs are strong but more tricky than their worth. But don't be bamboozled! Hitting SELECT lets you swap between all subweapons you've collected (on this Continue). No need to avoid pickups if you don't wanna, or struggle through boss fights with unoptimal attacks. Once you get this, the rest of the game's cadence comes pretty quickly.

I have to comment on the final boss. I have to. In arcade, it was some weird caveman monster dinosaur blahthingie that lived in a T. rex. It's weird. Who even knows who that guy is. But this was changed on SNES... to a devil guy. Does this make more sense? Honestly, I couldn't say. Maybe? Was the devil pissing off the T. rex by stabbing its heart with its pitchfork, or something? Nobody can be sure. But what's weird is that it's a Satan, on Nintendo hardware, during a time when Nintendo of America was still not cool with Satans showing up on western shores. At a time when ActRaiser - a game clearly about the God of Abraham going about creating civilizations and smiting other gods and Lucifer, the Satan - had to pretend that you were playing as a neutral, nondescript divinity pwning some goat-horned guy named Tanzra. And right here, you had a little dude with the red tail and horns and everything. He was added to the Nintendo version. To say nothing about the inherent weirdness of mixing a devil with caveman stuff. Like... what even is the cosmology of Joe & Mac? Are these doofy neolithic hunks God's Anointed on Earth? Weird stuff.

Joe & Mac's a'ight. I suppose I'll want to play the arcade release someday so I can compare and contrast (also, some of Data East's other offerings; I'm given to understand Bad Dudes and Adventure Island have their similarities). But as its own thing, it's a cute li'l platformer. Not a ton of staying power, but a perfectly fine time with some fun animation and a decent mechanical core

A good but flawed return to form

+great soundtrack
+good level design for the most part
+despite switching from Rare to Retro, this still /feels/ like donkey kong if that makes sense

But

-wiggle controls in the og version, no way to turn them off completly
-diddy kong is just a powerup and dosent really have his own identity in this game. And I love Diddy Kong.
-massive difficulty spike for no reason towards the end
-an annoying amount of levels are mine/rocket levels where you die in one hit. World 4 is basically entirely this.

Overall good game, but without having even played it yet, i dont doubt its sequel is a lot better.