Sorry Brian Kibler, I love ya but this wasn't it. People tried to argue this game had a better monetization model than Hearthstone, but anyone who played the game for more than 20 minutes can see this game had serious issues with its model, you got slightly more free stuff but with no good dust system there wasn't a strong way to convert that into what you want at will.

Another serious issue this game had that tied into it was power creep and power level issues, strong cards could absolutely crush weaker decks with no recourse and budget decks very rarely existed, no "face hunter" or (to use a Yu-Gi-Oh term) "Perfect Gadget" here. The card evolution thought was neat but more of a strategy game than a card game.

All of the servers for the game have been shut down, so it is basically impossible to try out even if you want to. But you didn't miss much.

Until I happened upon a review of this, I totally forgot that I had played it on Fightcade with a friend of mine because a bunch of random fighting games had been put on it and we wanted to see how bad some of them could be.

This one was pretty bad. Balance is all over the place in a bad way, graphics are pretty mid, I recall combos not being particularly effective. The weak point system is honestly a cool idea but it is set to be way too easy to do, resulting in some pretty cheap kills. The character roster is fine, but that doesn't say much when I find the gameplay disappointing.

Maybe if I spent a lot of time with it it'd be decent, but from the time I spent messing around I really would rather dedicate that time to something else.

I don't have a ton to say about this game, but given it was a bit of an enjoyable surprise I feel sad it has no reviews at all right now, so...yeah. SKYPEACE is a pretty charming and fun, short game! It's pretty simple, arcade-y fun: Get to the end of each stage, collect as many coins and as much treasure as possible and avoid enemies, with a few secrets here and there. It ends up playing a lot like a horizontal shmup but without the shooting, which is interesting in a way. The art style is a cute little "indie anime" style, kinda nice, and the music is honestly kind of a happy-chill banger that got me into the zone to play this game.

The game itself is pretty short, it has 10 stages + a tutorial and will be completed in about 35-40 minutes if you're just trying to beat each stage, but I was rather surprised at the number of achievements on display! There's plenty of standard ones like just beating the level, getting X amount of coins in the level or not getting hit, but there were also some little inventive ones like beating the game only using vertical movement. While the game is quite easy to beat normally, I am going to guess that getting the best ranks is harder as I didn't particularly come close to any S Ranks (I got two A Ranks and eight B Ranks), so there's plenty of room for replayability. And while it is short, the game is also only a dollar, so it's really impossible to complain about the size. I certainly felt like I got my money's worth.

Ultimately, if a simple little arcade-y high score game sounds your speed, I definitely recommend this if you got a spare dollar! I picked it up with eShop coins and felt happy with my purchase. It was apparently a little 20th anniversary project for the company, so maybe that's why it feels like it has a little extra heart put into it.

Existing in that brief two year period where Acclaim tried to turn NBA Jam into a more traditional "simulation" Basketball Game compared to a purely arcade-y title, NBA Jam 99 is one of the Acclaim greats alongside Re-Volt...at least, in so much as any Acclaim game hit greatness, although I do have some fondness for them in that "6-7/10 game churning studio" kinda way. The point is that despite the wide perception of this era as a bit of a low point for NBA Jam, I would actually say Jam 99 succeeds fairly well and manages to stand out among some contemporaries of the time by still being worth a look today.

The simulation aspects go for a very different style than most sim basketball games by being an almost "arcade simulation" style, focusing less on the minutae and instead going for a "Point" system that is used for free agent signings, a create-a-player system or even in trading with other players. While the system is overall basic it still fits well enough on an old console like the Nintendo 64, many games at the time simply lacked even this level of depth and so it is quite welcome. The fact it is stripped down also allows one to get into it very quickly, giving it high replay value compared to a more in-depth NBA game where you might spend many hours tinkering with roster moves and planning out franchises. This is not without its downsides: Player progression is far too simple to be truly effective, making longer term franchises much less interesting, and keeping together a great team is too easy. But considering games it was competing against didn't have free agents, that's quite a feat!

The gameplay is quite solid even if it is somewhat outdated, the shooing mechanics are incredibly simple for better or worse, the AI is surprisingly good and I found it honestly far better than far later games like NBA Live 09 (though not NBA Live's heyday). It isn't a game where exploits are everywhere even if some are too easy, alley-oops are particularly powerful, it generally plays looser than a hardcore simulation title which lets you pull off some crazy stuff.

Where this game truly shines is in the presentation and feel. Hot take: This game looks better graphically than NBA Live 99, it doesn't get to go for the more "realistic" faces but if anything that's a good thing because even when I was a kid I thought some of them looked pretty off. The more polygonal look of NBA Jam 99 ends up making it more stylized and memorable, which is aided by a variety of over the top and epic dunk animations that make you feel every slam. Said animations are smooth for the era and flow well. Pre-game introductions aren't super animated, but each player gets an announcer fully voiced intro with each team getting a little intro as well. There's just something great about the combination of those late 90s photos for players with the models, intro, feel, it's great. You'll even get people calling out "cotton caaaaandy!" for sale to go with crowd noise among other things, for the time period quite immersive and even today pretty solid.

But it is Kevin Harlan and Bill Walton that REALLY make this game shine, excitable and blood-pumping with flat-out classic and iconic lines. "With NO REGARD for human life!", "He rocked the rim and I'm ROCKIN' IN MY CHAIR!", "Pandemonium inside the building!", "This is NOT the kinda place you wanna take your date after the prom!", honestly I think this is the aspect that really pushes the game over because over the years I have found very few sports games with this level of energy in the announcing duo. It's up there with Pokemon Stadium 2 of classics.

The menu music is also a banger, but the soundtrack overall is pretty limited, and sports games have soooooo many games with good soundtracks that it's hard to put this too highly given the low amount.

Overall, NBA Jam 99 is a game that was somewhat ahead of its time when it came out and still has reasons to go back to even as later 2k and Live entries blew past it in terms of franchise depth and gameplay quality. The free and arcade feel holds up as a niche on its own, all the bells and whistles give it a unique identity that's still top notch to this day, and given 2K games hadn't come out nor had NBA Live hit its pure stride I am honestly surprised this game didn't make it bigger. I joked about Acclaim greatness, but this does feel like a game that could have been a genuine hit for them in another timeline. Go dust off the N64 and give it a look sometime: You won't be disappointed!

Probably the biggest issue with this game is absolutely pathetic AI, the game has no idea what to do if you just go up the middle, turbo in and go for a lay-up/dunk. Defense is similarly pretty difficult, AI teammates can struggle to keep on the ball at times. The franchise mode is fine, but when you compare it to other games that you could buy it was nothing impressive. It simply lacks the gameplay to be a particularly fun basketball game, you'd be better off buying an older NBA Live game or an NBA 2K game.

NASCAR 2000 is a reasonably fun game that there is absolutely no reason to go back to past the date it was released. The biggest reason for this is simple: Lack of features. NASCAR 2000 has single race and season mode aaaand that's it. There's no Career or Franchise-style mode, which is the lifeblood of basically every sports game in my opinion, nor anything like race specific challenges, big time race recreations to play or what have you. All you can do is the bare minimum of racing around. Fun to waste some time with, but there is no depth or replayability which means there isn't a ton of a reason to come back to it. This is furthered by the fact that the game doesn't have a full selection of NASCAR tracks,

The gameplay feels very "arcade-y", looser than games like NASCAR Thunder 2003 or to use a contemporary racer F-1 World Grand Prix and more easily exploitable. Really, that's another major issue that NASCAR 2000 ends up having: The AI isn't very strong and therefor resorts a bit more to rubber banding than great racers, but with the arcade-y fun can still be nice to beat, with the end result being that popping it in for like two races can be fun but it isn't a long term experience and it isn't as fun as more modern games. The graphics are good for the time, making the cars fairly crisp and distinct and the courses feel fairly realistic for a Nintendo 64 experience, although I wouldn't say they look as good as F-1 World Grand Prix. Better draw distances on the cars, but that game had superior course detail and so on.

Overall, NASCAR 2000 was okay at the time and I have some fondness for it from my childhood, but even back then there were a ton of racers both simulation (F-1 World Grand Prix, Indy Racing 2000) and more "party" (LEGO Racers, Mario Kart 64) that stood out as superior to me. And as soon as NASCAR games evolved at all, this game became pretty outdated and meaningless. Not the worst experience but simply not worth checking out again.

This game starts off as a pretty solid, easy kid's platformer type of game. And that's what you'll get early on. It is decent, not especially engaging but I am going to bet if I was the age of the target audience (young kids who'd want a McDonalds liscensed game) it wouldn't be so bad, nonetheless I would say after a while this game gets really grating? The thing is the game never gets hard, pits can be defeated with balloons which can even be strategically used to skip large parts of the stages even, but at times it just kind of adds in some obtuse stage design or gimmicks. For example, the brief ship level with the penguins actually confused me for a bit, and had me trying other stuff until I realized you were supposed to platform to the right (which looks the same as the left, which is death if you go that way). The end result is spending some minutes dwadling around while not in any realistic danger. especially since health pickups are impossibly common in this game.

In general this game feels very reliant on "gimmicks", in the sense that the platforming very rarely evolves beyond the simple and so instead it is spiced up with some gimmick that the game feels like it adds more to it, like having sumo wrestlers that stomp down and cause the track platforms it is on to be angled differently. This doesn't actually change up gameplay, it's the same simple jumps to do them, so it didn't do much for me. Boss fights in this game are also weird? You need to deliberately get hit by one of their attacks so they can suck up your life, then attack them while they chew the life gem after attacking, and frankly this mostly leads to fights becoming dragged out. It's nearly impossible to actually die to any of them except for the final boss since their patterns are simple and they spawn enemies that drop health (otherwise they could become unbeatable easily), so you just wait for the attack and sometimes only get a few hits. The final boss is frustrating because they set it up so if you mess up his easy pattern, you nearly unavoidably lose half your health, necessitating either grinding health to win or dying if you make more than a single mistake. It's still fairly easy, but it is annoying to die in this way and since the fight isn't super clear at first it will be a "gotcha!" at first.

Graphically the game is solid, but for some reason this music just absolutely slaps? Must be that Treasure power. The final boss theme is way too intense for the puzzle boss fight, the stage music all bop with some of the moon stages bein' reeeeal funky, this was by far the best part of the game, maybe this should have just been a McDonalds album. Also, for some reason this game just. Has racist caricatures?? What?

I know some people got nostalgic memories for this but gotta say I wouldn't recommend this one.

A short review for a short game. Toree 3D is a basic throwback platformer to the days of the PS1 in terms of aesthetic and style, something which I would say it executes reasonably well, particularly given the extremely cheap 99 cent price tag.

The best thing about this game is the tight controls, this game feels GREAT to control and reminds me that I wish more games would map dash buttons to the shoulder buttons or allow you to remap them. It's soooo nice to hold down the shoulder button for running, thumb ready at a moment's notice to jump at will (or in games with more than just jumps, like Mega Man Zero, attacking or special abilities). If anything the game is a bit TOO good controlling! Because of how much precision you're able to have it can be a bit too easy to save yourself from mistakes you make, especially thanks to the game having a double jump, and because the level design is pretty simple this means the game is pretty easy for better or worse. I think it could have gone a bit harder on not letting you "get out" of mistakes so easily, basically. Still, this game's physics and feel is a real keeper for any future projects!

The entire aesthetic and presentation of the game feels on point for the PS1 retro mood, the harbor levels feel right out of Sonic Adventure 2 in feel (though obviously not as expansive) and Toree's design absolutely would appear like this back in the day. It feels kinda like if someone turned Flicky into a 3D platformer. There's also some fairly memorable tunes included in the package, although I'll take this moment to note that some of the sound effects could be a bit loud, and that one thing I wish this game did better was have a bit more expansive Options for stuff like sound, Options menus aren't really something that need to "throw back'.

This game was made for a "haunted PS1 demo disc" game am and so it has some light horror elements, but they're veeery minor which I would say was absolutely to this game's strengths. In fact, I'd say 95% of this game's spooky elements would feel exactly at home from a PS1 platformer even without them, like some enemy designs being fairly cartoonishly scary. I also love how it actually mixed this into the game's story: Toree's ice cream is stolen by a "creepy mean guy" and Toree rushes to get it back. The first stage then shows this glitched out grim reaper ass guy holding an ice cream. It is very amusing!

While I wouldn't say the game is THAT ridiculously short for 99 cents, you can't expect a dollar game to be as expansive as Breath of the Wild, I do think that the game was still somewhat too short even for that. Given the late 90s platformer feel I am really surprised there weren't any simple boss fights in the game, which could have helped break up the stages, in particularly the end of the 9th stage could have tied the spooky elements of the game into a surprise boss fight or something for some flair. It feels like the game ends right when the level design is opening up, as many of the first four levels are VERY simple, even something like two more levels (one for top and bottom row) could have added a lot. This game's shorter than Super Mario Bros. 1 on a casual playthrough, I beat it in 38 minutes while trying to 100% all stars on each stage, so I don't think that much is unreasonable to request.

Overall, Toree 3D's a short game that nails what it is going for but admittedly never goes beyond that, held together by well put together aesthetics and very tight controls to make up for some quite simple game design and the feeling there could be "more". At 99 cents? Yeah, I'd absolutely recommend it if you want a quick fun time, and there IS a good deal of replayability thanks to two unlockable characters and the option to go for A Ranks. I even got it for free with gold eShop coins! Just don't expect tooooooo much.

There is, put simply, no good reason to play this game if it wasn't 2000 and you were desperate to play Yu-Gi-Oh but had literally no other way to. Effect monsters are essentially non-existent, the graphics are terrible, it plays very slow, and it isn't even that hard.

The reason I got this when I was younger was because it had a custom card creator, a hella cool idea that the series didn't use again. Problem is the card creator sucks! The fact everything is a normal monster means you basically just make something with big attack and the custom options are extremely limited in flavor and ability.

This game really isn't even worth trying to play.

I absolutely did not play this game in arcades, but instead on my computer when I was like 12-13, and it was extremely cool back then. The wireframe graphics give this game a really cool simulator feel that I believe could make for a great aesthetic with a modern take on it, the game is very simple and short (my biggest complaint) but has super addictive and arcade-y gameplay. It's very possible this game doesn't deserve this score but I played this game for plenty of hours, so I'm gonna give it the 7/10.

The game is fine and the Special Flag is fittingly iconic, but I feel like it ages somewhat poorly compared to many of its contemporaries. When taken as a maze game, the AI is a bit annoying and bad compared to Pac-Man which released the same year and is simply a more complex and interesting maze game.

Then you look only two years later and see Ms. Pac-Man and Dig Dug release and Rally-X just ends up not looking all that special. Not awful, but I would be hard-pressed to return to it any time soon, while Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man have enduring quality.