she gonna nick on my bluetooth til i glinch

(Forewarning: Please keep in mind that even though the backloggd listing for this describes the game as a GBA exclusive as well as having the GBA box art, I did not actually play the GBA game as I've played the theoretically-released PC version that does not have a page on IGDB and I can't be assed to make one myself. If one does pop up, please scream at me in the comments and I will change it. The last thing I need to do is anger a glinch mob.)

I can't believe I'm gonna go all patented jtduckman long-review personal-retrospective here with fucking galidor of all things but life comes at you in many unexpected mysterious ways. So as a kid I was quite the big lego fan, buying all the sets I could (shoutouts to power miners), playing through the licensed TT video games, watching stop-motion videos on youtube, stalking lego fan sites, the usual happenings of a young brickoholic. One thing that I was particularly fond of were these like budget 4-game legacy packages of PC lego games that they sold through those weird Scholastic Book Order pamphlets they gave to elementary school mes class, and I would beg my family to get them for me as they had the funny lego people on them and I'd buy anything with those mfers on them. Surprisingly enough it actually did work, and I was able to get 2 of the bundles. One was a yellow one that contained both Lego Island games and both Lego Racers games (sorry island xtreme sports fans, I still have never played that one), and another was a green one that contained Legoland, Drome Racers, Lego Creator, and Galidor: Defenders of the Outer dimension. Through those bundles I was able to deepen my appreciation for Lego as a kid as I was playing that real shit when it came to lego vidya and not solely the licensed copy-paste TT stuff. There was one thing on 7-8 year old me's mind though upon looking at the one game in the bundle that depicted an early 2000s ass 4kids looking action dude in contrast to all my funny yellow plastic people:

What in the absolute fuck is a galidor???

this shit didn't even get its own bespoke disc in the bundle, the game was crammed alongside Lego Creator on the same disc where you'd have to use two different installers to pick which game you'd want to play. Upon installing the game to my computer to see what the hell this shit could have possibly been, my computer would crash 9 times out of 10. You see, being a literal child in the mid 2000s meant that my own personal computer was actually this monolithic beige windows XP hand-me-down from my dad that couldn't run SHIT. Older, lighter games like Lego Racers and Lego Island could conceivably be crunched through, but this game, Lego Racers 2, and Drome Racers just weren't going to happen and to this day I still haven't played very much of the latter two. Perhaps this was conditioning tiny me to grow the current preference for console gaming that I have to this day... Regardless, on the rare occasion that the stars aligned and my old PC somehow didn't manage to trip over itself booting this game did I get to catch a glimpse of what the fuck a galidor could be, and it made zero goddamn sense. There were all these characters talking with each other about random shit that I didn't know about, and when it came to the actual gameplay the thing didn't come with any sort of instruction manual so I had zero idea how to control anything and could never actually get even remotely through the first level. There's probably a readme file on the disc that explains the keyboard controls but I was literally learning multiplication at the time do you really expect my goopy ass brain to know where the fuck to find or read that shit??? Regardless, even if I didn't know what the fuck was happening I did think that the whole cyber aesthetic of everything was kinda cool as growing up with Y2K-era shit made me fuck with those kinds of things. It felt edgy, weird, and 1000% NOT lego in the slightest, which always kept it in the back of my mind.

Eventually I would get enough computers that actually could run the game as I would get older, but at that point I couldn't be assed to actually give the game a go, plus learning keyboard inputs to play a 3D platformer didn't jive well with me so I just left it with my gigantic tub of accumulated random PC games, only really busting out so I could dump my entire collection to a hard drive for easier access should I want to play anything in the future without needing to bust out the ol' external disc drive. I did learn in this time though that this game was supposed to have released on PS2 as well as PC, but was actually fucking cancelled midway through development for both platforms and was never actually released in its time, instead having what I would assume to have been the remains of what HAD to have been finished put on a disc and released years after the fact in 2006 in Europe or something, which was what I played? I think that the bundle that I got my copy of the game in deadass is the only way to have gotten the game in America in any fashion whatsoever, so I mean like if their job was to confuse the very specifically small audience of lego kids by throwing this alongside the games they would care about then like mission fucking accomplished guys! You at least got me!!! the gba game which is completely different actually did release when it was supposed to in all regions tho.

ANYWAYS ONCE AGAIN fuck the past flash forward to the present year of our lord twenty and twenty four. I use my funny gamestop benefits to score a steam deck for comparatively cheap after being motivated to get one from getting bedriddenly sick and thinking "man, a steam deck in bed would be nice". I then go down the very foolish and time-consuming rabbithole of using proton to get whatever old PC games on my old game hard drive working on the thing as a way to hopefully make a consolized PC of sorts to play my old PC library on one device with minimal futzing required (HAH). To make a long story short, that shit takes years and out of the dozens of games I threw at it only like 20% of them would actually fucking run to the point where I just deadass wishlisted every old PC game that I already own physically on steam because paying extra to double dip on random bullshit outweighs the hundreds of manhours troubleshooting why X particular installer fucked up or why Y DRM needs to be cracked out or whatever. Linux and proton struggles aside, you know what game worked right out the box? No DRM, boots up alright, and even natively supported the buttons n shit? FUCKIN GALIDOR BABYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!! and I knew, right then and there, that it was time to put like 15 years of mysterious curiosity to rest and finally answer the question of "what the fuck is a galidor".

After playing through the game, fuck if I know!!! So the game consists of a dude named fucking Nick Bluetooth and his motley crew of cyberspace travellers named shit like "Euripides" trying to beat up some robot looking mf named gorm from idfk being a dictator or some shit??? I shit you not the game just cold opens with the gang just shooting the shit and throwing characters and what I presume to be plot points around without introducing them whatsoever and I'm just supposed to fucking know about this shit already. All I know is that Gorm steals all your friends and you need to rescue them while picking up the pieces of an egg like thing that will be the "key to galidor" on the illusionary hostile planet named fucking KEK. Nick has the power to "Glinch" people, wherein doing so allows him to inherit the characteristics and traits of enemies as his own limbs like some sort of kirby gone horribly wrong. Maybe I would understand more about the characters and world if I watched the tie-in Canadian live-action TV show of which I am unsurprised of its existence, but fuck it yanno!

On a gameplay level this game is some pretty standard 3D platforming affair. Nick can only attack enemies through this close-range homing-attack esque jump dive, and defeating certain enemies gives you their glinch power. There's a Glinch bar that drains while you are glinching (what the fuck am i talking about), and through it you can get abilities like frog legs to jump higher, big fists to knock things down or deal damage, special wings that you can hangglide across wide levels with (protip if you mash up and down you can keep your vertical height constant while also continuously building up speed, take notes galidor speedrunners), theres a laser cannon that doesn't actually damage anything but instead activates switches, and lastly a grappling hook with the most janky drunken spider-man ass swinging you ever will see. The camera is very unpolished and due to that and the flat lighting on everything it's INCREDIBLY easy to lose your depth perception, especially on the stupid grappling sections. Every time the game asked me to land on a precise platform with that stupid thing I had to say every prayer I knew in hoping that it would actually land where I need. I did learn near the end that you can actually cancel your glinch in mid-air which stops all of your horizontal momentum, but by the time I learned that trick I was pretty much done with the game. The level design is pretty phoned in and levels overstay their welcome constantly, though the aforementioned lack of good depth perception does make any time the game wants you to climb a tall tower a massive ordeal as you can and will fall to the floor and have to start over constantly. And there are multiple levels like that, so have fun! There's not even that much of a point to limiting your glinches with a glinch meter because it's not even like these are linked to combat or anything anyways, they are just basic ass tools that you need to clear the levels with!!! It already takes forever to switch your glinches so like that's already enough of a limitation imo. The gameplay is a bit standard and unpolished, but given the fact that this game technically wasn't even supposed to come out can I really blame it too much for that? If anything I'm surprised it's not a lot buggier than it actually is. I did like how the default keybinding on steam deck was all sorts of fucked up, and while I could have used the steam UI doohickey to fix it, I felt like having shit like switching glinch powers mapped to start and select, R3 to pause, L1 to cancel glinching, etc was part of the janky charm so I didn't. The game supports analogue movement though, and the analog triggers did control the camera speed, so that's something! the final boss is a fucking space harrier fight too so like shoutouts, I guess?

Aesthetically though ngl I kinda dig it but that's probably just me being weird. It has those like ratchet and clanky or metroid primey vibes to it both visually and musically, with some serviceable techno music alongside generic orchestral beats powering the OST while the games visuals have a lot of sharp jagged browns and greys. It really does hit a perfect mood of being like gritty and edgy looking in the eyes of a child but pretty harmless in the grander scheme of things, and I think that's why it stuck with me for so long. For better or for worse, it is 2000's PC game as fuck, but I vibe with that highkey. And even the fact that things are just thrust upon you with little rhyme, reason, or explanation can be its own vibe in its own right especially given how these days I always feel like I have to arm myself with as much context before going into anything to get the highest enjoyment. Sometimes it can be refreshing to just play some random fuckshit without any clue as to what's going on and being there for the vibes.

I think that if I was able to consistently run and control this game back when I first got it that I likely wouldn't have ever been able to beat it and probably would have called it quits from falling down a tall ass chamber for the hundreth time in an already 20-minute long level. I would have liked the overall aesthetics though, as they were clearly striking enough to keep this stupid shit at the forefront of my mind for the past god knows how long. The game just doesn't feel like it's a real video game honestly. I play a lot of stuff out there that I think some people could hear me talk about and say to me "that doesn't sound like a video game that actually exists" but this absolutely takes the crown. This is like the shit you'd see being played in the background of a C-rate sitcom or something. This some of that shit you'd see on the game store posters in the most recent diary of a wimpy kid. Even after having played through this game I still have plausible doubts that yes, this actually is a game, and yes, I did play it. I didn't even mention how this game and the GBA counterpart were supposed to support a fucking peripheral/mini console? called the fucking GALIDOR KEK POWERIZER to get better glinching or something. I give this a low score not because I think the end product is horrible or anything, but rather that I don't ever wish this years-long madness I have wrought onto myself on anyone else. If you've somehow read this far in the review and are curious yourself about this shit then like
1. im sorry
2. go off and give the game a try it's like only a few hours and you really don't have to finish it no please, like don't
3. this youtube video goes into way more detail about the overall galidor brand than anything else I could say


WHY THE FUCK WAS THIS ASSOCIATED WITH LEGO?!?!?!?!?

It's a single screen shmup with like 4 twists to it:
1. It uses the paddle controller instead of a joystick for control
2. There's a gauge on the sides that grows whenever any enemy falls all the way through the screen without being shot, and if it grows high enough it's an instant game over
3. Both you and your enemies shots are one-pixel wide lasers that instantaneously zap anything directly in front of them regardless of distance
4. Every so often there's a bonus stage that shows up where you can farm additional points for extra lives

It sounds pretty snappy and fun in concept, especially given how precise and quick the paddle controllers are for control, but soon enough the game quickly ramps up in speed to the point where you'd need ascended reflexes to keep up with what the game throws at you. It's pretty easy to be minding your own business and having an enemy spawn right above you where it uses its one frame death laser immediately, basically killing you before you have a chance to react. It also makes it so the enemies that shoot back at you are significantly more deadly than practically anything else, as getting in their line of sight pretty much could spell immediate doom. Maybe if you were the only one that had the zappy laser gun whereas other enemies could have traditional slow-moving space invaders bullets to dodge would there have been more balance, but it be how it do. It's not like you can just avoid the laser shooting guys since if you let them go it builds up the meter so you're just fucked either way. There are also these really fast moving bouncy bombs that work as screen nukes if shot but they move so damn fast and erratically that it's hard to get a good shot without slamming right into them and if they pass you they fill up the meter by like a whole ass third so yeah good luck. There's no real limit to how frequently you can shoot though so I guess you could just mash that fire button like a lunatic and just hope everyone runs into your shots in an accuracy be damned sort of manner but then the game will just keep going BZZZZZZZZZZZT so mute your speakers if that's gonna be your strat. I was barely able to scrape up 2000 points, though the manual says if you can reach 5000 you can earn a free T-shirt. There's no way in hell I have reflexes good enough to win that T-shirt, and considering the fact that I'm seeing the shirt listed on ebay and etsy for upwards of like 200 dollars there clearly can't have been many others that could do it as well. I don't need your likely itchy 40-year-old T-shirt anyways, imagic. Not the worst 2600 game as there's definitely enough of a skill grind to be worth a go but it's a bit too unbalanced for me to consider it a personal favorite or rec.

This game improved a ton from the last entry. Much more concise, flows great, feels like the morning cartoons it's trying to emulate. It fixed most of its issues in terms of traversal and power creep with shorter, more dense levels, and the exp mechanic for guns. Although, the series' fascination for bullet sponges still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Especially for common enemies in the late game. I also finally got a hang of the control scheme with this game (which still sucks). Overall though I'm glad I got to go on another adventure with Ratchet and Clank :)

I mean this game has a pretty legendary status among atari games, and that's with good reason. So like, the hardware of the 2600 has made it so it's library is known primarily for either overly simple games or games that are overly obtuse due to the atari graphics making things hard to parse at first glance. Either way, given the channel-like nature of selecting your gamemode and understanding what each gamemode even is, reading through the manual is practically mandatory if you want to play your atari today. Adventure is a really cool game in that it's basically a solid balance between being simple enough where you don't need to study the manual much to understand what to do while still having some meat on its bones.

Things are in threes here. There are three castles on the map (though one is really just a safe space/start/goal point), each that needs one of three keys to open the doors to, there are three mazes to wander through to find whatever it is you might need, and there are three dragons that will fuck your day up if they touch you. There's a sword that can be used to kill any dragon for the remainder of your life, a magnet to collect items that might be stuck in walls, and a bridge that can be used to pass through walls either to progress through certain mazes or just to have a shortcut to where you need to go. If you die from a dragon or get stuck, you basically have to hit the reset switch, which keeps the item placement/unlocked castles in tact from your current session but resets your characters position while resurrecting all the dragons. If you can find the chalice in the black castle and bring it back to the yellow castle, you win!!!!!

The biggest enemy isn't really the dragons as killing all three with the sword basically makes your run entirely harmless. The real villain is the stupidass bat that wanders around randomly and just shuffles items around to whatever place it happens to bumblefuck off to. The thing can even pick up dragons or their corpses, which actually can fuck up your day if you are just trying to get somewhere when the mfin bat just decides to drop that shit right on you. The bats existence emphasizes remembering the world layout, where items that the bat dropped could be, what rooms are safe that can be used as item stashes, etc.

It's impressive how borderline unorthodox and forward-thinking this game is compared to other games released in 1979. Usually atari and arcade games are numerically score-based, where the point is primarily to play an endless assortment of looping challenges to see how long you can last, and get ranked by how high of a score you were able to accomplish, or competitions to see who can earn the highest set amount of points over the other to win that way. Having a game where the point isn't any form of score but rather a singular linear(ish) quest that just ends as its own established goal rather than having something in the manual be like "if you can get X points or reach the goal in X time, you are a real turbo atari master super power gamer player!!!" is certainly subvertive for the times. Adventure marks one of the first instances of a game where the fun in the play isn't necessarily building a skill, but rather it's just the fun of getting familiar with a coherent interactive world through exploring and interacting with it, which is crazy when over time even within one decade of this games release games would pretty much ditch the latter skill-based arcade approach to focus on the former world-buildy approach, and that's nuts. The fact that this game also happens to have the first instance of a secret "easter egg" hidden within its code that's accessible to players is just icing on the cake, as I'm sure whoever might have taken the time to learn or find out about it back in its time must have had their entire perception of video games altered as they wondered what other secrets or tricks could be hidden in their other games (whether said secrets actually existed or not). I guess I can't really say for sure how impactful this game was to the playerbase at the time as I wasn't around for it, but given its legacy in the atari playing circle it had to have been a literal game-changer for people to some degree. Video games are fucking cool, dude