MaxyBee
2022
This game appeals to me on some core level by evoking two games I'm ridiculously fond of without actually being much like either title. The first is Ninja Cop (Ninja Five-O to some), the absolute king of grappling hook games, one of the most enjoyable gameplay experiences for the Game Boy Advance. The second is Go Go Beckham! Adventures on Soccer Island, one of the most visually pleasant and fun experiences for the Game Boy Advance. To remind me of both of these lesser known gems from a very specific and formative time in my gaming life is a heck of an achievement, and meant I was willing to give this every chance under the sun.
That it then turned out to be a fantastic game in its own right, with some of the cutest designs and most pleasing game feel I've ever encountered is a nice bonus, really.
The grapple physics feel great, and the range of the hook is generous enough to allow for a lot of saves whenever the momentum isn't enough or you leap out at the wrong time. The slam is a useful secondary tool, that you have a lot more commitment to (more than once I threw myself with some force between two different bounce pads I could have safely ricocheted off), but a rapid jump can still save your bacon now and then, and generous health drops and well-placed checkpoints mean that a foolish platforming mistake is never TOO painful.
Boss fights are so-so, but still maintain enough of the core mechanics to leave some fun to be found, and the briefness of them means you're never far from another level, or one of the exquisite bonus stages that challenge you to either collect, platform, or commit robocide at some speed in increasingly challenging layouts that make you feel like a champion for getting through.
Grapple Dog is a good dog. A good game. I meant a good game. Be a good game, sit. Stay. Installed in my library in case I ever brave the time trials.
(I suspect I will use the fantastic accessibility options to turn them into a rapid fire goofy revisit of the levels if I do, mind)
That it then turned out to be a fantastic game in its own right, with some of the cutest designs and most pleasing game feel I've ever encountered is a nice bonus, really.
The grapple physics feel great, and the range of the hook is generous enough to allow for a lot of saves whenever the momentum isn't enough or you leap out at the wrong time. The slam is a useful secondary tool, that you have a lot more commitment to (more than once I threw myself with some force between two different bounce pads I could have safely ricocheted off), but a rapid jump can still save your bacon now and then, and generous health drops and well-placed checkpoints mean that a foolish platforming mistake is never TOO painful.
Boss fights are so-so, but still maintain enough of the core mechanics to leave some fun to be found, and the briefness of them means you're never far from another level, or one of the exquisite bonus stages that challenge you to either collect, platform, or commit robocide at some speed in increasingly challenging layouts that make you feel like a champion for getting through.
Grapple Dog is a good dog. A good game. I meant a good game. Be a good game, sit. Stay. Installed in my library in case I ever brave the time trials.
(I suspect I will use the fantastic accessibility options to turn them into a rapid fire goofy revisit of the levels if I do, mind)
2021
It always feels weird reviewing a fighting game because it's entirely up to the player what counts as 'finishing', what counts as a complete enough experience to review, and what stones can be left unturned.
I have put in the time, finished the extensive turorials, built up a nice win/loss record, finished arcade mode, and done a bunch of fishing. I have not played story mode, or played as a single character other than I-No outside of the tutorials.
So... not a complete experience. But what I got to enjoy instead was a fantastic guitar witch simulator, with chunky hits and simplified mechanics that make for the best I-No experience I've ever had. An absolute joy, and a wonderful way of getting all up in gender feelings because who doesn't wish they could become a beautiful witch with an angry hat.
Highly recommended if you have femme-oriented dysphoria, enjoy chunky feeling fighters, or hated how it was a half-circle input to stroke in Xrd.
I have put in the time, finished the extensive turorials, built up a nice win/loss record, finished arcade mode, and done a bunch of fishing. I have not played story mode, or played as a single character other than I-No outside of the tutorials.
So... not a complete experience. But what I got to enjoy instead was a fantastic guitar witch simulator, with chunky hits and simplified mechanics that make for the best I-No experience I've ever had. An absolute joy, and a wonderful way of getting all up in gender feelings because who doesn't wish they could become a beautiful witch with an angry hat.
Highly recommended if you have femme-oriented dysphoria, enjoy chunky feeling fighters, or hated how it was a half-circle input to stroke in Xrd.
2019
I’d been excited to get to this as soon as it was announced, so naturally it’s taken me three years to actually sit down and play it (on Steam Deck, over one day, while sick). Detective Grimoire was a rough around the edges and occasionally clumsily handled point & click, but with a fantastic protagonist, a charming sense of humour, and that genius puzzle solving mechanic of constructing sentences using clues and prompts. A bit more polish and it’d be a real five star affair.
And so here we are. The art style is immaculate, nice thick lines, bouncy animations, and a palette that often brings to mind swizzels love hearts (or parma violets for the gothier characters). The puzzles are simple, but still require you to actually turn your brain on and engage just enough to solve them, which combined with gentle prompts on incorrect submissions means you’re never really stuck. The characters are all layered and interesting, and you can learn so much about them by doing additional dialogue through your inventory or profiles. That dialogue, as well! Fully voice-acted, wonderfully performed, every character feels all the more real for the quality performances on display here.
The story itself is a good complicated murder mystery/family affair, and I tried to sell it to a friend as being akin to Knives Out, which is both uncharitable to both and still true enough to count. The only stumbling block is the ending, which is… fine. It’s fine. It’s not clean enough, not nearly definitive enough, without any sign of a sequel on the horizon.
Oh, they have said they’re working on a follow-up? Oh, never mind then. Five stars it is. A most excellent adventure.
And so here we are. The art style is immaculate, nice thick lines, bouncy animations, and a palette that often brings to mind swizzels love hearts (or parma violets for the gothier characters). The puzzles are simple, but still require you to actually turn your brain on and engage just enough to solve them, which combined with gentle prompts on incorrect submissions means you’re never really stuck. The characters are all layered and interesting, and you can learn so much about them by doing additional dialogue through your inventory or profiles. That dialogue, as well! Fully voice-acted, wonderfully performed, every character feels all the more real for the quality performances on display here.
The story itself is a good complicated murder mystery/family affair, and I tried to sell it to a friend as being akin to Knives Out, which is both uncharitable to both and still true enough to count. The only stumbling block is the ending, which is… fine. It’s fine. It’s not clean enough, not nearly definitive enough, without any sign of a sequel on the horizon.
Oh, they have said they’re working on a follow-up? Oh, never mind then. Five stars it is. A most excellent adventure.
1994
Apparently I forgot to rate this, so rest assured this is one of the best games ever made, and certainly the best ‘search action’/‘metroidvania’/whatever you wanna call them.
Really this should lose points for me having to generate three seeds before I got one I was skilled enough to complete, but that was (probably) a skill issue, so I’ll let it pass.
Personal advice is to keep sword and morph ball set to early, just to keep the two most frustrating issues resolved, and to download a copy of the seed info for if you get truly stumped on where one of the two most essential items are (varia suit and lamp). Beyond that, just go wild. Zelda becomes an exciting open adventure where you’re tearing your brain apart trying to remember where every chest is, to the point of going from noble hero to a manic treasure hunter. Super Metroid transforms from sequential exploration of areas unlocked by abilities to the game everyone already treats it as, this perfect set of sequence breaks and clever workarounds so that you can get anywhere at all, and scrabble a reward or two out of some truly wibbly acrobatics.
You will, by the way, become an expert at wall jumping this way. I never had to in the original, so wiring that split second timing between direction and jump button deep into my brain sent me straight back to the high single digits, age-wise, marvelling at strange space creatures trying to teach me something I couldn’t quite understand.
The team who built this randomiser deserve all the love in the world, especially for the aesthetic choices available for your characters. I opted for Mega Man X in both settings because I’m a huge mark for the blue bomber, but knowing you can be Sans Undertale is a nice feeling.
An essential game to play for fans of either game, and I’m delighted I got through it.
Now to play it again and again on different seeds. Maybe I’ll suck it up and let the sword and morph ball be wherever.
Personal advice is to keep sword and morph ball set to early, just to keep the two most frustrating issues resolved, and to download a copy of the seed info for if you get truly stumped on where one of the two most essential items are (varia suit and lamp). Beyond that, just go wild. Zelda becomes an exciting open adventure where you’re tearing your brain apart trying to remember where every chest is, to the point of going from noble hero to a manic treasure hunter. Super Metroid transforms from sequential exploration of areas unlocked by abilities to the game everyone already treats it as, this perfect set of sequence breaks and clever workarounds so that you can get anywhere at all, and scrabble a reward or two out of some truly wibbly acrobatics.
You will, by the way, become an expert at wall jumping this way. I never had to in the original, so wiring that split second timing between direction and jump button deep into my brain sent me straight back to the high single digits, age-wise, marvelling at strange space creatures trying to teach me something I couldn’t quite understand.
The team who built this randomiser deserve all the love in the world, especially for the aesthetic choices available for your characters. I opted for Mega Man X in both settings because I’m a huge mark for the blue bomber, but knowing you can be Sans Undertale is a nice feeling.
An essential game to play for fans of either game, and I’m delighted I got through it.
Now to play it again and again on different seeds. Maybe I’ll suck it up and let the sword and morph ball be wherever.
2013
An audio treat of fun noises, a pleasing stomp, and some of the most frustrating levels ever designed, with no great catharsis to be found when you do actually time every jump just so. Feels like a game tested for difficulty by those who designed it, which warps one's sense of what's actually achievable quite a bit.
I gave it a year, and came away with what I expected: a bad time. A remake of my least liked mainline Pokémon game that (outside of the MySims-esque chibis) looks bland, with as uninspiring a pokedex as it ever had back in the day, only made worse by time and the games that have come since.
Black and White showed this up majorly on their release, and my overriding thought throughout this was how much I’d rather be replaying those games. So I will.
Black and White showed this up majorly on their release, and my overriding thought throughout this was how much I’d rather be replaying those games. So I will.
2014
I'm sure this is great fun to career programmers who enjoy their work, but it is a miserable experience for someone who wants to have fun. Watch Dogs made a hilariously simple hollywoodised impression of what hacking is for a reason. Because programming is incredibly boring, even if a vapid sprite is commentating on what a node is or whatever. A rare abandonment, and rarer still for being acknowledged as such
2015
That this can be such a good time despite being full of the worst first person platforming I've ever experienced is nothing short of a miracle. Guns feel good. Exploring feels great. The bosses are awful, but on the whole a great romp, and a pretty decent update job from nightdive. Excited to play the second soon.
This review contains spoilers
Just about the only way you could have made another Monkey Island. A striking visual style, a simple and straightforward gameplay style that facilitates classic point n click puzzle solving, painful amounts of self-awareness and a combined amount of reverence and light mockery of what came before.
For the most part it reminds me of Curse, until a later act opens up and becomes VERY evocative of Lechuck’s Revenge. If you’re going to be like any two games in the series that’s what you need to hone in on, the best Gilbert game and the only truly excellent post-Gilbert game. But JUST reminding me of the other games would make for nothing but a tired carbon copy, and I feel like what we’re given here has enough fresh ideas and interesting twists on the world that it stands as its own thing. A thing that mostly asks “after all this time, is it worth it”.
There’s an idea running through this, that the irresponsible way Guybrush ruins everything in his path to his ultimate goal is as destructive and obsessive as LeChuck’s, and when this outing has him joining LeChuck’s crew, and teaming with a new trio of dastardly and calculating pirates, all in the name of finding the Secret of Monkey Island™️, it’s hard to argue otherwise.
There’s even a… vibe, a sort of weird unease with him and Elaine, two people clearly in love, but… things are weird. Elaine ‘misplaces’ half of a picture of her and Guybrush (the Guybrush half) to a seagull. Her own aims of an anti-scurvy lime initiative is undermined by Guybrush taking the prototype flyer design workshopped with Stan and immediately giving it away, preventing copies from being made. She calmly explains how Guybrush’s decisions have caused harm on the walk to the final area. They aren’t strained, the two clearly love each other to a disgustingly cute extent, but things aren’t perfect either.
I feel like this could have gone somewhere for the ending, but we get another fun meta ending playing into the framing device of the whole game instead, which just kind of ends the story and we get a nice bit showing that the two are still together and happy with their kid, which is nice. Probably less of a bummer than what we could have got, but with another left-field ending like this from Gilbert and co. you just kind of wish that they cared a little more about giving a sense of closure. But then I like Twin Peaks so closure is for losers, actually.
The only thing keeping this from five stars is how often I got stuck on slightly laborious puzzles, but the hint system is generous enough that it didn’t hold me up, and I’m not so proud as to NOT use the in-inventory hint system, I know my limitations, but sometimes just hearing the answer makes you sigh at how awkward some puzzles are. Nothing as bad as in Broken Age, but definitely ones that weren’t as fun or thought out as they could have been.
But that aside? Amazing game, gonna replay the whole series soon just to relish in it all again.
For the most part it reminds me of Curse, until a later act opens up and becomes VERY evocative of Lechuck’s Revenge. If you’re going to be like any two games in the series that’s what you need to hone in on, the best Gilbert game and the only truly excellent post-Gilbert game. But JUST reminding me of the other games would make for nothing but a tired carbon copy, and I feel like what we’re given here has enough fresh ideas and interesting twists on the world that it stands as its own thing. A thing that mostly asks “after all this time, is it worth it”.
There’s an idea running through this, that the irresponsible way Guybrush ruins everything in his path to his ultimate goal is as destructive and obsessive as LeChuck’s, and when this outing has him joining LeChuck’s crew, and teaming with a new trio of dastardly and calculating pirates, all in the name of finding the Secret of Monkey Island™️, it’s hard to argue otherwise.
There’s even a… vibe, a sort of weird unease with him and Elaine, two people clearly in love, but… things are weird. Elaine ‘misplaces’ half of a picture of her and Guybrush (the Guybrush half) to a seagull. Her own aims of an anti-scurvy lime initiative is undermined by Guybrush taking the prototype flyer design workshopped with Stan and immediately giving it away, preventing copies from being made. She calmly explains how Guybrush’s decisions have caused harm on the walk to the final area. They aren’t strained, the two clearly love each other to a disgustingly cute extent, but things aren’t perfect either.
I feel like this could have gone somewhere for the ending, but we get another fun meta ending playing into the framing device of the whole game instead, which just kind of ends the story and we get a nice bit showing that the two are still together and happy with their kid, which is nice. Probably less of a bummer than what we could have got, but with another left-field ending like this from Gilbert and co. you just kind of wish that they cared a little more about giving a sense of closure. But then I like Twin Peaks so closure is for losers, actually.
The only thing keeping this from five stars is how often I got stuck on slightly laborious puzzles, but the hint system is generous enough that it didn’t hold me up, and I’m not so proud as to NOT use the in-inventory hint system, I know my limitations, but sometimes just hearing the answer makes you sigh at how awkward some puzzles are. Nothing as bad as in Broken Age, but definitely ones that weren’t as fun or thought out as they could have been.
But that aside? Amazing game, gonna replay the whole series soon just to relish in it all again.
2022
What a weird game to review. A complete throwback to a certain sort of linear 3d platformer, updated with modern visuals and a new cool design for our formerly gormless kangaroo. So far that in itself isn’t unique, but when you compare it to other 3d platform revivals that didn’t make the grade (I’m thinking specifically of Yooka-Laylee, but pick your poison), it’s… better? More fun?
The story is guff. The voice acting is charmingly rubbish. But that kind of feels like part of the fun. It’s got jokes that aren’t jokes, and barely even references, they’re huge stretches of the imagination. Like… like Kao’s neck. Which stretches when hanging from vines by his ears or in deep water.
The gameplay though! It’s tight! Not complicated, but everything feels NICE. The jumps have a comfy airtime and movement, punches are crunchy, and the power-ups add nice visual flair (if no actual combat advantages). No fights will challenge the player, ESPECIALLY the boss fights, but for a quick 9-hour completionist run it satisfies. Sometimes you just want to feel like a king.
So uh. Recommended! Loved it. Great time on the Steam Deck, as well.
Oh oh the music is good too. There we go. That’s it. OH AND THE COSTUMES.
The story is guff. The voice acting is charmingly rubbish. But that kind of feels like part of the fun. It’s got jokes that aren’t jokes, and barely even references, they’re huge stretches of the imagination. Like… like Kao’s neck. Which stretches when hanging from vines by his ears or in deep water.
The gameplay though! It’s tight! Not complicated, but everything feels NICE. The jumps have a comfy airtime and movement, punches are crunchy, and the power-ups add nice visual flair (if no actual combat advantages). No fights will challenge the player, ESPECIALLY the boss fights, but for a quick 9-hour completionist run it satisfies. Sometimes you just want to feel like a king.
So uh. Recommended! Loved it. Great time on the Steam Deck, as well.
Oh oh the music is good too. There we go. That’s it. OH AND THE COSTUMES.
2013
Probably one of the better 3D Sonic games, full of neat ideas and with a control scheme that feels more finely-tuned than most 3D Sonics, BUT it's also a horrendous, occasionally unplayable mess, physics and level design opposing any attempt at fun the whole way.
Early segments had me appreciating this, warts and all, lamenting the lack of a sequel to polish this stuff into something genuinely great, but by the last two world I just wanted the game to disappear forever. It outstayed its welcome and then some, simply because of polish that wasn't there.
Also the cutscenes were unwatchable for me. Skipped every one that I could, and felt happier for it.
Still, a fun exercise in what could have been.
Early segments had me appreciating this, warts and all, lamenting the lack of a sequel to polish this stuff into something genuinely great, but by the last two world I just wanted the game to disappear forever. It outstayed its welcome and then some, simply because of polish that wasn't there.
Also the cutscenes were unwatchable for me. Skipped every one that I could, and felt happier for it.
Still, a fun exercise in what could have been.
Finished a replay of this and it’s pretty fun. Too easy, and all the equips feel redundant when you realise you need 10 ton boots and the Gokuu Hat to make the most of your characters, and you barely need the items either, honestly, but a fun jaunt through the Buu Saga and a couple miniaturised movie plots, and a fine sequel to the much more interesting second game. Thumbs up.
It’s funny how well the older material in this has aged, and more so how much the new material maintains the spirit of the thing. Absolutely adored this, glad to have come back to Stanley and The Narrator, and had an amazing time. It’s just good video games, you know?
2000
I was fond of this when it came out, and it is fun to play, but it’s ultimately just a lead-in to the sequel we got in the same calendar year, which is so much better it isn’t funny.