"Time to get moving! ^-^" ~ Level Select Music

There was a very specific time in my life where I did nothing but draw cars, trucks and other such automobiles with weapons slapped onto them in some form. Think dumb stuff like vans with buzz saws coming out of the sides and probably a big dumb laser cannon on the roof. It was all due to Twisted Metal, and that odd fixation made me gaze at video games with cars in them in a slightly more captivated way. If the car game had explosions on the cover? Oh baby, count me in! Blast Corps was a popular Hollywood Video rental back then, for a pretty good reason and it was because of the cool jet pack robot on the front, and a dump truck that I would come to despise in due time, but more on that later.

Your job in this game is to annihilate everything in the path of the world's most fragile to-the-touch runaway truck carrying active nukes. Some really serious shit for a game approved for kids, but regardless. These are the main carrier missions though, and once the job is complete you can re-enter the stage for a little bit of a break and explore for 100% completion and chill out to Graeme Norgate's OST. (Fun Fact, this piece of music is a remix of the boss theme from Donkey Kong Land. That really knocked me on my ass when I found that out, wish I could stumble upon old Game Boy renditions more often.) It was quite the vibe as they would say for tiny me, when you've got nothing to do you tend to really enjoy just walking around and jet packing with your cool mech friend trying to find that last little blinky light to activate. You think it's a waste of time, but that's just games in general. Checkmate non-believers. You also got challenges in the smaller stages, where you aim to either destroy things or race around a track in an allotted time and other such nonsense. They're a nice little change of pace.

As you would imagine, the Blast Corps have quite the array of battle deconstruction vehicles and mobile suits. Everyone's favorite of course is J-Bomb the jet pack robot, who was popular enough to get a Fangamer shirt that I have in my closet at the moment. Everyone's least favorite is of course, someone who may not need an introduction to fellow demolition experts who have played this. Many a philosopher around the globe in ancient times have pondered questions such as: "why are we here?", "why is the sky blue?", "why did Rare make the dump truck so goddamn awful?"

The dump truck's name is "Backlash", and I assume Vince McMahon named the WWE PPV after it because he's the only asshole I'd imagine who would love using it. To use Backlash, you must take it's dump truck ass and spin it into buildings to destroy them with it's dump truck ass. It's very unwieldy, and Makes one question why a trained demolition crew would bring a dump truck and spin it like an oversized Beyblade at shit instead of just using the bulldozer that's right in front of them. Believe me, I'm making it sound cool, but this thing blows ass, and unfortunately the dickbags at Rare knew it was awful, so they made the player use it A LOT in the final stages. It's dumb, I don't like it, and it's the only reason I can't five star this game despite my mastery at attaching rose-tinted glasses to my face and doing world class mental gymnastics to justify myself in front of a live courthouse full of people who don't give a shit.

It's a shame really, but regardless I stand by the fact that Blast Corps is easily the coolest and most creative game Rare has developed. It's presentation isn't as memorable as Donkey Kong Country 2's pirate adventure theme, nor is it that refined with it's wonky crate pushing physics and trees with hitboxes the size of Wisconsin. It's the way it drops players straight into stages and asks them to solve puzzles like getting a gold medal via a shortcut on a racing course, or how to explode some statue you found hidden behind the train you started in, which had J-Bomb hiding in it for some reason. What was your plan there J-Bomb? Who put you there? Fuck you Rare, why did you make the dump truck so bad?

Another one of those "I just think it's cool" type of games, totally give it a rec if it sounds interesting to you, and really it should, because it was Rare's last gasp before they got tied up in the Mascot platformer coal mines.

Hacker. Pawn. God. Insect.

The defining immersive sim re-tooled, rebuilt, revitalized, and streamlined. I should preface with the fact that I have not played the original game, nor have I played Night Dive's previous remastered enhanced edition of it, and thus went into this remake with only the knowledge of System Shock's prolific influence, I have played plenty of games it influenced. Night Dive's remake is the best looking, sounding, and feeling game I have played this year.

The game opens with a simple but effective drone shot through an unnamed cyberpunk city in the year 2072 that immediately steeps you in the game's atmosphere. It is a game about atmosphere more than anything. You play as an unnamed hacker hired by Edward Diego of the TriOptimum Corporation after you're caught stealing files on the corp's Citadel Station, specifically a military grade implant. In return for your services removing the onboard A.I.'s ethical restraints all charges will be dropped and you'll receive the fancy implant you discovered. You hack into SHODAN, removing her ethical restraints as per Diego's request and you're knocked out. The fancy implant is installed and you go into a deep coma to heal up. You awaken 6 months later and the station has gone to total hell under SHODAN. Here the game really begins and you've got all the handholding you'll receive for the rest of the game.

Moment to moment gameplay is like being a rat in a maze, which you'll later find was one of many experiments TriOptimum conducted on its unknowing employees, a series of hostile hallways that constantly keeps them, and now you, on their toes. You won't receive a map showing a whole level's structure, instead creating the map as you explore. The game hands you nothing. Finding a weapon isn't an event, if you missed one earlier there's sure to be another one ahead, but you could possibly miss every iteration of a weapon. Enemies don't drop them, only broken ones you can shove into a recycler to make some coin from. If you're like me you'll end up filling your relatively small gridded inventory with all manner of trash just so you can haul it to the recycler. You'll only receive two minor upgrades to your inventory, so you'll have to pick and choose what you carry. There's a small stash box, but it can fit two weapons maximum and there are about 8 different weapons on Citadel Station.

Aside from exploration, the two other sections of gameplay are combat and puzzles. Combat is tense, with quick battles either defining you the victor or finding yourself being rebuilt by one of the station's cyborg units. If you haven't found a cyborg unit then you're greeted with a harrowing game over screen where your barely breathing body is picked up by one of SHODAN's Cortex Reavers and your body is repurposed for her army. These encounters always have you thinking on your feet and while mostly serviceable as far as combat goes is still satisfying, the sound design doing wonders. All the weapons have tangible feedback and splitting a cyborg in two with a well-aimed, high powered sparqbeam shot never gets old. You have an energy meter that is constantly pulled between use on your shields, energy weapons, or speed boots. You are constantly managing this system, but luckily each level has at least one electrical pylon to fully restore your power. Using weapons such as the laser rapier or the early game sparqbeam, with 3 power settings, drains power. There are also portable batteries you can use to replenish this. Other weapons are kinetic. Magnum, assault rifle, or even a railgun. These help balance the energy system so that you're never left without weapons to fight with. If you'd like you can keep the opening game pipe and never worry about management at all, although I'd recommend at least finding the hidden wrench.

To fully navigate each level you'll find yourself at terminals that open up doors or force fields throughout the game. These are small logic puzzles that are a lot of fun and never get old. You'll also likely find a few logic probes that can bypass them entirely if you don't want to engage with them. The two main puzzles are an energy bar where you have to set the right paths of power to a precise energy read. Honestly, I was really bad at this one and started logic probing them in the back half. They're interesting and get you thinking, but it was too easy to bypass after the last enemy I killed dropped a probe. The second and one I did every time is an end to end connection where you have a grid of turnable pipes that you'd line up to connect two points. Its incredibly gratifying to see that light travel from point to point and get hit with the green light and closure of the terminal. Lastly is the revamped cyberspace sequences. Not a lot to write about here, but it's a notable upgrade and also visually dazzling. These sections are short and it's just neat to give you some visualization of a digital space within a digital space.

System Shock has my favorite kind of video game narrative which is when it stays out of your way unless you seek it. It mostly circumvents the musings on A.I. and poses SHODAN just as a straight up all-powerful cyber entity fueled solely by human hubris. It is an artistic embellishment of the lengths corporations will go for profit, proving that the issues we face today are the same ones faced upon the original game's release in 1994. Its story is mostly told through its environment and the many audio logs and data sticks. These two items are actually vital to progression. The game does not tell you where to go or what to do, you must seek out your own path given context clues. Someone in an audio log will mention a sector or a room where you can find an item, some give parts of codes, and some more importantly detail the process for preventing annihilation. You will find yourself with a pen and paper at least once during your play, which I think is beautiful. You always have a clear understanding of progression, a literal map of levels as you ascend to each one, but the game expects you to check on your own progression.

Night Dive's System Shock remake is more than a stunning coat of paint on a classic. It's main focus is not to create an entirely different game based on a possibly poorly aged one, but to bring 1990's game design to the present which I can see as a point of contention, but it's something that started as endearment and became profound joy in my time with the game. I feel often that contemporary video games are so afraid the player will become confused for even a moment that they'll practically play themselves. System Shock is a completely hands-off experience that respects player intelligence. As I was minutes from reaching the Bridge and final showdown, I found myself wishing this game would never end. It's my favorite new game I've played in years, and is one I will be playing many times over. Looking forward to Night Dive's remaster of System Shock 2.

Just played the story mode.

Not really sure how to evaluate the game, as I'm not much of a fighting game guy and was really just here to beat up on some AI and see the story. Even then, I struggled with a lot of the fights—this just isn't my genre!

But the presentation here is fantastic. It's a funny and engaging schlocky time travel story with some immediately compelling characters. Johnny Cage is, as always, my favorite, but everyone here gets a moment to shine. I like how every chapter of the story mode follows a different character's perspective; you're always bouncing around seeing different sides of the conflict. It's nice to go from the Johnny Cage chapter where he's a charming bozo to, say, the Sonya Blade chapter where you get to beat him up for being an annoying bozo.

Also, boy, can't really deny those transitions from cutscenes to gameplay. Really smooth every time.

I went into this game wanting to like it, going to the point of not watching any trailers or getting any information beforehand, and I did! At first. out of the 15 hours I played of this game, I only enjoyed the first 2. It is honestly shocking how they managed to make the tutorial the best part of the game. Litterally everything after the tutorial just feels like breath of the wild, a game I really like, but much worse. I genuinely cannot comprehend how this has such a high review score on every site

R-Type might be the series I give the lightest jabs imaginable when I want to critique it through written words. It's not necessarily the childhood trauma speaking from a certain SNES iteration whooping my ass, or having a handheld version to strain my eyes on through a screen that cannot be looked at clearly from any angle regardless of applicable worm lights.

I just like good art direction, a lot. It can carry some of the most mid shit ever if it was left to nothing but the bare gameplay elements. That's not to say R-Type doesn't have good gameplay elements, I love the force option, it's actually one of my favorite mechanics in shmups and can lend itself well to proper strategy. Of course however, strategy is something you need to learn and do on the fly, and in shmups you only have so much time to conduct this when obstacles and bullets are thrown at you willy-nilly-vanilly, and failure means a trip back to a potentially poorly-placed checkpoint. Personally, I feel R-Type has a fantastic first half. The battleship stage in particular I think is an amazing piece to really teach the player on how to utilize the force option.

These good vibes though only last so long, because as always arcade agony rears it's ugly head starting at stage six and onward. I think with some elbow grease I could find some hoops to jump through and commit to mental gymnastics to rationalize these last three stages, but the second loop left me in such a bad state that I just can't find the energy to start the circus act. Full disclosure, I effectively beat this game four times today if you count both loops, and I did break down and use save states. With practice I could 1cc the first loop and gain more adoration for this, but that second loop is an obvious trolljob toward MLG gamers who enjoy looking for safe paths/spots in levels with constant bullet sprays that weren't meant to be there originally. It's a shame, because it's obvious how much this influenced god knows how many of it's kind with it's giant vagina bosses, and iconic first stage boss with thousands of names thanks to terrible localization.

"Hey, what should we call this guy?"
"Gladiator. Looks like a gladiator."
"Yeah, I can see that cheddar cheese Xenomorph fighting Samnites in the Colosseum. Absolutely, good idea sir."

Will still never get where that one came from, lol. At least the Bydo will never scare people again. (Spoilers: they scare people a lot more after this.)

First loop fine, second loop bad. Don't do it, I gained five pounds from it.

I've seen people say this game gets hard like what? this is fairly easy compared to even Crash Bandicoot. I really like the levels on display here, and how clever use of the Frogun can make you feel smart, even if you can effectively climb any wall in the game if you spam the gun hard enough which can lead to some pretty funny skips (like the entire final race can be very easily skipped.) There are a few design flaws like Jake being able to hurt you, and the Spiders and Beat Blocks not having any cues to prepare you for their coming and going, but they can still be surmounted well enough. The camera is entirely manual which can lead to some jank but it never gets too detrimental. Bosses are the old boring kind of "let them do their thing then you can get your hit in" with no opportunity to reward smart play which is kind of a bummer. The music is okay nothing to write home about but not bad while the visuals succeed at being really cute. It also has ample collecting which is Crash inspired, as in the kind you don't want to do all at once but you can do bits at a time for good fun.

All in all it's a cute platformer that I'd love to see get another go with a bigger budget.

Ah, weary traveler, for what reason have you come so far as to visit one such as I? You wish to defeat...Ninja Gaiden on NES? You seek....guidance? That is quite the mountain to climb. It will not be easy...

The journey may seem frightening at first, but believe in me for it is not quite as bad as the tales would tell. To help Ryu Hayabusa on his quest to seek revenge for his father's murder, you must channel all of your ninja know-how and master the hitbox of your blade. Timing is of utmost importance! You must be light on your feet, and be as swift as the wind! Your enemy however is quite formidable, the Jaquio is not one to take lightly! For they do not fight fair with the placement of their army of henchpeople and henchanimals! You will need to maintain a good rhythm and flow to your movement if you wish to keep up progress, as the Jaquio's minions will not hesitate to warp back onto the field as soon as they are decimated by you!

On top of that, you must also maintain proper ninja balance. What is a ninja without their ninja balance? A dead ninja. The Jaquio knows this! That's why they hired the entire NFL to run at Hayabusa and tackle him into the ground! What good will Ryu be at exacting his revenge if he's been sacked on fourth down?! No good at all!

While you indeed do have your mystical dragon sword and your ninja sub-weapons, there is also another unseen magic that you must keep mind of. That which can be barely seen from your view of the screen, the void of the edge of the CRT monitor. The fourth dimension one could say. Utilization of this can be instrumental in making certain sections of your adventure easier. The Jaquio's minions may be able to warp themselves back onto screen, but sometimes the warp tubes backfire and transport them to another stage entirely. A big break for you! Sword throwing Larry will be busy throwing his swords elsewhere!

Step by step, inch by inch, you can ascend this mountain with the help of your endless continues. Ninja Hayabusa is never a quitter, and the journey's checkpoints can be surprisingly forgiving at times. Well....except when you finally confront Jaquio themselves, whom will inevitably bamboozle you with their fiendish side-to-side movement and homing fireballs. They do not fight fair, I've mention this! Jaquio loves trap doors! They can't get enough of them, and will not hesitate to send you back to stage 6-1! Be patient, and be precise with your approach against the scoundrel! Of course, as always you may attempt to fight dirty as well against Jaquio. You may utilize the art of save stating or time rewind, and would you be less of a person to me if I saw you stoop to his level?

Eh, I don't judge. Just remember to never give up, and always think to yourself...

Finish the story.
FINISH THE STORY.
FINISH THE FUCKIN' STORY!

Personally though, I do believe there is something to climbing the mountain from bottom to top constantly, and acquiring mastery of all of it's paths and tricks. Knowing every nook and cranny of where an avian fiend will rear their ugly head, and being prepared for any football player attempting to make you another number to their season statistics. Your rhythm becoming greater and preparing you for your next attempt at the climb. Maybe you don't agree, maybe you do. Regardless, one day maybe you'll see why I adore this adventure as much as I do and meet me at the top of the mountain.

It's quite pretty.

I was once told I was "the Blue Spheres guy," whatever the hell that means. Not that I don't value the recognition of my deep and unwavering love for Get Blue Spheres, the best special stage in the classic Sonic the Hedgehog series. Thankfully, Sega knew little freaks like me would want to play more than the meager 14 levels found across the entirety of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, so some genius at Sonic Team devised a way for Sonic & Knuckles to look at the ROM header of games locked onto it and generate new Blue Spheres levels based on what it finds. You know what that means?

UNLIMITED BLUE SPHERES!

Now, imagine being a kid in 1994, frequently using the level select cheat in Sonic 3 & Knuckles to play the special stages for fun. One day you pop in Sonic the Hedgehog thinking, I don't know, maybe it'll finally put Knuckles in the game this time, because you're 7-years-old and dumber than a brick. Of course it doesn't, but as you mash the buttons on the controller out of frustration, you happen to tap A+B+C simultaneously, unlocking the full Blue Sphere experience. I felt like I had broken out of the Matrix.

The way this all operates is pretty smart. As mentioned, Sonic & Knuckles looks at the ROM header of attached games, and based on the numerical value of the header, different prefab parts of a Blue Sphere stage are assembled. In total, there's 134,217,728 possible combinations, and when playing with Sonic the Hedgehog locked on, the player can freely edit the values of a header located on the bottom of the screen to play through them all (or they can be played sequentially.) So, how do you "beat" Blue Sphere? Conventional wisdom would say you have to clear over a hundred million levels, but that's just not feasible, so instead I locked on every single Genesis cart I own and beat the resulting levels. I feel like this is good enough to mark it as complete, but it should be a federal crime to log this game as "mastered" if you don't play and perfect all 134,217,728 levels. As the resident "blue sphere guy" I should be deputized and given the authority to ban people who fail to comply.

As a mode, Blue Spheres is unsurprisingly my favorite among the classic Sonic special stages. These were always designed as technical set pieces, more concerned with showing off than creating something particularly fun to play, but Sonic Team finished strong with this one. Each level is its own puzzle to figure out, and in the case of the "stand alone" game, the interlocking nature of each stage's prefabricated parts heightens the level of problem-solving involved due to how confounding some of the resulting layouts can be. I find this to be pretty engaging, though some presets seem to be more common than others, and when you have a stack of 26 games to go through, you'll probably start to see some levels with a few too many repeating parts.

Not that this totally kills my enjoyment, of course, as I can always use my increasing familiarity with certain stage elements as an excuse to begin perfecting runs. I think it was a really smart move to put this additional layer of ring collecting on top of grabbing blue spheres, as it challenges the player to consider how to collect every ring before ending the stage early, and getting a "perfect" provides a means of marking the player's skill that prior special stages did not.


None of this would work if the player felt like they lacked control over Sonic, and any dip in performance that resulted in colliding with a dreaded red sphere would make the whole thing come crashing down. Thankfully, Sonic Team was able to push beyond the choppy nature of Sonic 2's halfpipes and awful performance of Sonic CD's UFO hunts, and though it runs at a compromised 30fps, Blue Spheres is at least consistent and predictable. I also love the theme music. Probably one of my favorite tracks in the entire series, and I am endlessly amused by it being reused from SegaSonic Bros, (not that this series is any stranger to recycling music.) Some of my earliest memories are of my parents on the cusp of divorce arguing in the next room, and me cranking the volume up while playing Blue Spheres so the music would drown them out.

Thank you for being part of my childhood, Blue Spheres!

It'll always make me sad that this game gets dumped on so hard. The thing everyone is mad at is that the standard-bearer of the single least enjoyable format of platformer, the collectathon, got replaced by a game that asks people to be creative and think about problem solving, and everyone fuckin revolted.

Like, think about that for a second. The last collectathon game this studio made was Donkey Kong 64, which was panned. The spiritual successor to that format of platformer, Yooka Laylee, didn't do much better. Is it perchance possible that this style of platformer is trapped in its era? There's not been good collectathon platformers in years, and I don't think that's as much about the existence of 3D platformers as it is about how much time people have to put into a game like that and how many ideas can possibly be left for that format.

So yeah, when they decided "man let's switch things up, I don't want to just do this again," and everyone interpreted that as betrayal, it just makes me sad as hell. The actual game here is neat as heck. Fealty to intellectual property can kill hearts. I don't know how many more times we're going to have to learn that lesson.

"By the way, Denton, stay out of the ladies restroom. That kind of activity embarrasses the agency more than it does you."

Going straight from playing a rebellious youth in Jet Set Radio Future to being po-lice. On one end of the spectrum you have counter-culture skater gangs sticking it to the man through weaponized art, and on the other you have JC Denton performing extrajudicial killings with the GEP gun, clicking his tongue and going "What a shame." Cop Weatherby is back!

Deus Ex is a game my friend Larry has been trying to get me to play for the better part of the last two decades. My first real exposure came from the Recut, which he and I still quote to each other regularly, but everything else I've absorbed has been through osmosis and from playing the two prequel games, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. I have no good excuse for taking this long to beat Deus Ex, really. I've tried at least a half dozen times and have always bailed around the second chapter, likely intimidated by how long the game is. However, I've long gotten past my issues with committing to lengthy video games, and I figured it was high time I saw Deus Ex through.

For a game released in the year 2000, Deus Ex gives the player an impressive amount of freedom in how they choose to approach objectives, and how they wish to play protagonist JC Denton as a character. One of the first things you can even do is answer a dialog choice about whether you want to take the stun prod (a non-lethal takedown is always the most silent takedown) or the GEP gun and just blow everything to hell. Do you want to be thoughtful? A master hacker, a philosopher who can talk his way out of most dangerous situations, or avoid them entirely through subterfuge? Or do you want to play the game like I did and steal credits from Maggie Chow's bedroom, alerting her maid who makes a beeline for the emergency alarm switch as soon as Maggie's cutscene is over, causing you to panic and explode both of them with a rocket, thus accidentally allowing you to bypass an entire mission as Maggie's improprieties are exposed to you during your hasty retreat through her private lab? You make your own fun!

No one problem is designed with a single solution in mind, even if one is presented in an obvious way. Much of Deus Ex's fun is borne from how much you can just fuck around with its world. Need to get to a room but a ton of guards are stationed in the adjoining hall? Good thing there's a pin full of dangerous mutant animals nearby. Hack the door open, release them, then turn the turrets on to mop up what's left. Maybe you want to clear the barracks in the heliport out by tossing a bunch of LAMs in through the vents or take pot shots as you scurry through the walls between vantage points, or just flood the whole damn place with poison gas. Fuck it! The world is your oyster, because uh, that's all the world is.

Outside of the moment-to-moment gameplay, this freeform approach to Deus Ex's world is a bit more muted. Dialog choices usually only result in short term impacts both mechanically and narratively, even more weighty decisions might only earn you a handful of different conversations later in the game. Early on you're given the option to follow orders and assassinate a top level NSF operative or kill your partner instead. The choice to kill the NSF agent is presented as being morally questionable and against UNACTO's code of conduct despite the order coming directly from your CO's mouth. This may provide the illusion that you can either play JC as a hardcore company man or rebel and follow your own personal sense of justice, but regardless of what you do, JC will shortly thereafter defect to the NSF. This is of course due to the limitations of the time in which Deus Ex was released. The amount of agency you're given is still remarkable for 2000, and if anything it's to Deus Ex's credit that it was able to lay such a sturdy foundation for other games to build off of.

The plot itself is wonderfully weird and corny, and extremely indulgent in conspiracy theories that would make your average QAnon freak blush. You're telling me there's a government made virus and the cure is being used as a form of population control? Now where have I heard that before... You could take most plot threads, call into Coast to Coast AM, and convince Art Bell to go along with you. Of course, that's because most of these conspiracies have some basis in the real world, at least insofar as them being based on theories that have long been speculated to, like chemtrails, or grey aliens being housed in the bowels of Area 51. This used to be fairly harmless nonsense, once upon a time. At least JC isn't visiting any pizza shops with the GEP gun in tow.

Speaking of, I absolutely adore JC. The way some of his dialog is delivered is just so catty. Hearing him go toe-to-toe with the pure smarm of antagonist Bob Page is a delight, and though some of the line delivery isn't what I would call conventionally good, it is also impossible to imagine Deus Ex sounding any differently. It's peak 2000s video game voice acting, neither bad nor great, yet fun in its own unique way. There's a reason why lines from Recut like "Number one: that's terror. Number two: that's terror," or "Don't think you know the commander. I know the commander because he is my pal. Here's a picture!" are stuck in my head, and it's not just because they've been edited from multiple lines to sound like something funny, it's because the way those lines are spoken are so enjoyably off-kilter to begin with.

But none of this is important anymore. I've merged with the Helios AI. We are as one. Omnipotent, all-powerful, immortal. It is time I stopped talking about Deus Ex and begin governing the world in the only way my Denton knows how... Like a complete god damn idiot.

A childhood classic, revamped and replayed. Revisiting this over 20 years after I first played it was just so pleasant. It's the rare game that stands up to the awe, grit, and challenge I remember. The controls feel better than ever on modern hardware, no longer having to fidget with the N64 controller. Honestly it's a miracle I could figure it out at such a young age. I'm not sure if I ever actually finished it then, the first few levels are so familiar and burned in my mind, but not so much the last half.

It's a singular esoteric experience, just inhabiting it feels dreamlike. The score bumps as you traverse impossible landscapes and architecture as soldiers, dinosaurs, and robots (sometimes combined) rush you from all directions. All of this with an array of satisfying and creative weaponry from your trusty bow all the way to the legendary Chronocepter of which you find a single piece of in each level that is combined just before the end.

All of this to say Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is a pure gem, no ugly blemishes or fluff. Nothing on its mind but collecting keys and killing dinos, and I think that's fucking beautiful.

It's a shame, isn't it?

These days, we have it all. We can easily access an entire console's library with a mere flick of our fingers through means that don't hurt anyone. You could play mods, fixes, hacks and all sorts of things to improve or build upon whatever it is you're interested in. We have everything we could imagine to play anything in gaming history, but despite all this, you can never stop time's continuous march forward. We grow older, we develop more as a society, and technology progresses towards it's next plateau until the next big breakthrough, but could you really know what it's like to play something from it's time period without knowledge of what we have now? To envision yourself as that five year old kid playing it for the very first time? Could you really?

The very first 3D game that I remember playing was Hard Drivin' on the Sega Genesis. It was an impressive looking racer for it's time, but even when I was that young and so full of imagination I only ever saw it as "neat". It wasn't exactly leaving a mark on me anytime soon with it's scenic barnyard aesthetic and lack of music during gameplay. It was funny to crash, that was about it. I laughed, and I went back to playing my 2D games of which many even today still enjoy. Three Dee? What of it? Star Fox you say? Super FX you say? I don't know what those are, but it sure sounds cool!

For me, it was something I couldn't believe. The immediate introduction with that cinematic shot of the giant carrier slowly approaching Corneria with the backing of that powerful and sinister orchestra hooked me immediately. I was amazed. Am I really playing this? Yes, yes I was. Soon as I knew it, I was piloting an Arwing and living that cinematic space-flying adventure with the coolest rock tune to grace my ears at the time. I was navigating through asteroid fields, taking part in chaotic assaults on Andross' space armada and destroying gigantic battleships from the inside in my own little trench run. This wasn't any old game I was used to, it was an experience, and it was amazing. I loved it, and I would never forget it.

...and now, all those... moments are lost on those who come after me, and I find myself alone and lonely on this mountaintop. Star Fox... was no longer considered that amazing, it was just..."neat", like Hard Drivin' on the Genesis. Heartbreaking. Some could be ignorant, some could be respectful, and others could even enjoy it, but I know that deep down they could never be awestruck by it. Their experience will never be the same as mine was, and it will never hit the same again. It's pathetic maybe to lament, but I've come to face the music. I will never meet someone from generations onward who will love this as much as me, and my loneliness will continue as I feel more and more like the last of my kind. Maybe it hit at just the right age as my creativity was just beginning to manifest? I dunno how else to describe my attachment. It rules, and it still has the best sound I have ever experienced off the system. Feel those enemy shots go past you as you boost through space, experience the explosions radiating off the bosses after they're defeated. God.....it's so good.

At the end of it all, Star Fox is still Star Fox and my heart never changed. If I must be alone on this mountain until I die, then so be it. I ain't moving.