This isn't a videogame. It's a thoroughly ethereal experience that can never be replicated by human hands. From the moment the widely sized ape starts extending its arms as it glides through the most beautiful, intricately crafted landscapes, Flying Gorilla immerses you on the most breath-takingly magnificent aerial journey that games like The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and Portal 2 could only dream of accomplishing. This mastercraft makes you feel everything; the satisfaction of collecting every single bunch of bananas that await for your grasp in the skies, the mental exercise as you guide the giant baboon away from the carefully placed obstacles, and the sheer euphoria of finally crossing the finish line after every stage; not to mention the sweeping score, composed of the heavenliest sounds ever bestowed to humanity. A more seminal work of art has never, can never, and will never be gifted to us by anyone other than the very gods.

May the lord and savior Flying Gorilla bless us all, for eternity and beyond 🙏

This is what corporate art looks like. It's so approachable by design that it feels hollow. The theming is bizarre, the cheerful bubblegum pop aesthetics feel uncanny, and stuff like "FriYAY" and "replacing kills with chills" feels like it was workshopped by all the most out of touch colleagues in your office trying to make something safe for the Fortnite generation. There's also a strange confluence of different art styles from the crisp 3D to the flat fiverr-style animated segments, to the literal photographs of wildlife that is incorporated as portraits and album art.

The whole experience feels blatently KPI driven. Any pretense that you're playing something that wasn't cooked up by corporate suits is stripped away when you see the $45 fee for a skin. In a way it's a unique artistic vision, in that, it feels so heavily designed as a set of deliverables by project managers and made for business users.

As a result, it's not quite the next evolution of Splatoon that it wants to be. The single player game modes are where the game hooked me but it's very short and leaves a bit to be desired. Not sure how balanced the PvP is. It's very chaotic, and there are some odd design choices such as a game mode reliant on your team's star player to stay alive and there's a game over condition when they die. Overall, It's a servicable game and the fun is there, but it's not as interesting as it could be. The game feels like it's targeting such a wide audience that it's meaningless.

The following is an excerpt from my list Errant Thoughts on Games I've Never Played Before/Haven't Played Too Much

Angry Birds Trilogy is a strange, strange beast. This is a perfect example of the corrupting power that money has. All three of these games were sold at a price of at least two dollars originally. In this collection that originally cost in the range of thirty dollars, they blend together into this unchanging homunculus of early-touchscreen era artifacts. I can see the Wii port having some value attached, as the potential use of pointer controls might have threatened to mirror the touchscreen controls in an interesting way. Still, that doesn't justify this.

And yet, yet...

This is a perfect piece of game preservation. Unlike many of its contemporaries, all three of the games in this collection are not butchered to run on other platforms. Purely, this is Angry Birds and two of its sequel projects as they were in 2012, and that's what they put on the back of the box. What they likely didn't was "this might be the only way you can play Angry Birds and its sequels, as they were in 2012, twenty years from now." There's a smartphone game that IGN once gave a 10/10 that you can't play anymore, and the original Angry Birds was nearly dealt a similar killing blow early last year. My point is, the iOS is not a safe place for games if you want to view them as more than disposable products. In a way, knowing this devalues collections like Angry Birds Trilogy somewhat. But, if you have the mindset of a preservationist, this has a reason to exist. Finally.

Things I remember about this game;

-They introduce a new villain so you can play as Cortex. He's purple and has a monocle. I think his name was "Viscount" or some shit

-I finished it the day I got it

-It was shit