This definitely was the first LEGO Star Wars game. It lacks a lot of the quality of life of later games, as well as some of the charm, but it's hard to deny that what is here is really nice. It's just a pleasant game that doesn't overstay it's welcome at all. Maybe a lot of my fondness for this game comes from spending countless hours just running around the levels making up my own storylines with my friends when we were kids. Maybe it really is an ok game. Some of the minkits are a little hard to find, which can be a nice change of pace from the stupidly easy Everything Else in this game. Except the Kashyyk minikit where you have to find the carrots. Fuck that one. Insane that someone let that one slip through. If nothing else this game makes me want to go watch the prequels again, even though I did that earlier this month. Thanks, LEGO Star Wars.

Frogger's Journey: The Forgotten Relic starts with a shot of Frogger's giant, detailed feet while he lounges in a chair on his lawn. Then a plane crashes into his house and he has to go find his missing archeologist grandpa. His grandpa's anthropomorphic fox lady assistant kinda helps guide you along the way, but most of the time she just tells you to go talk to the random, unnamed NPCs around town until a new level opens up. This game is kind of like Zelda in that it gives you different items after every level and then you use them in the next level, but some of them are nearly worthless while some are actually fun and useful. After doing a bunch of stuff like fighting the Sphinx, going to Atlantis, and infiltrating the ninja squirrel hideout three times, it turns out your giant dog mechanic was actually working for Eric the evil weasel the whole time and you have to beat up their robots and fight Eric in a volcano or something. The difficult curve of the game looks kind of like this: ___/\\_. It's very long, and moving around as a Frogger is always a treat, but if you wanna play this be warned that the last few levels made me want to tear my hair out and jump into a pool like Frogger (he cannot swim).

This game is a perfect example of how to make discovery enjoyable. Figuring out what every rod does each run is fun and has you praying that it will help you in one way or another only for it to blow up in your face and have you almost die. Then on the next room, you use that explosion to kill 3 ghosts at once and find out it also kills the frogs instantly. Having all text in Portuguese is great because even though I don't speak Portuguese, it shares enough common roots with Spanish/French that as someone who had to take a language in high school/college, there are a few things that I can sort of understand and those clue me in on what things do. The art and sound are like nothing else and really help this game stand out. It's a ruthless strategy rogue-like that is nothing like I've ever played before. Very possibly the most unique game I've encountered, and one I see myself going back to often to try and discover more of its secrets.

After playing Zero Mission and AM2R, I was curious to see how Super Metroid compared to those refined remakes. Super Metroid is weird in that it's somewhat a remake of 1, but has its own story and counts as a separate entry in the Metroid canon. I haven't played the actual Metroids 1 and 2, but from what I know of them, Super is a massive upgrade. I definitely see why every game in the genre has copied in one way or another, but as far as Metroids go I think there are better entries in the series. Still pretty fun, although the map is a little clunky (but I can't be too mad considering it was the first map in Metroid). The music rocks and the game is challenging enough without being too frustrating, and it's ultimately an incredibly fair and enjoyable challenge.

Scaler is an interesting game. If you don't read the back of the box, the intro cutscene makes no sense to you. Even if you do read the back of the box, it still might not make much sense. You play as Bobby "Scaler" Jenkins, a lizards' rights activist who stumbled upon a world domination plot conducted by his neighbor who is actually a lizard. Bobby is turned into a lizard, known as Scaler, and goes through a portal to the dimension that his neighbor came from. He meets his dad here, although his dad doesn't remember being his dad until most of the way through the game. There's isn't a ton of development there, but the ending is what really struck me as odd about this game. Scaler goes through the portal back to his dimension and his dad barely doesn't make it. Scaler, once again Bobby, yells for his dad as the portal closes and the game fades to the credits. I'm honestly not sure if they were trying to set up for a sequel or what the plan was there, but I was laughing pretty hard at the end.

Gameplay-wise, Scaler is a 3D platformer. You jump around areas, grind on rails, and because all video games need it, there are combat sections where you have to beat waves of enemies. The combat is pretty barebones and kinda sucks. Most of the combat was just spamming X to use the tongue to insta-kill weaker enemies or stun larger enemies so I could spam B and kill the larger enemies while they were stunned. The rail sections work absurdly well considering how fucking awfully they work in every Sonic game that came out around this time. I'm still shocked at how Scaler could pull that off without any issues and SEGA completely missed the ball time after time. The big thing that sets Scaler apart from other platformers of it's era (aside from working rail sections) are the transformations. Scaler can turn into specific enemies you've sort of absorbed after beating enough of them. You can only turn into specific enemies on specific levels, but the game does do some interesting things with this. It allows for more interesting boss fights than would have probably been available as base Scaler. There are unique platforming sections focused around these transformations. For example, when you turn into the ball guy (Krok or something?) there are race sections where you have to complete 4 challenges in order to beat the level. Some of them are races, some are time trials, some are breaking obstacles along the track within a time limit. There is a transformation where you can fly and have to go through rings in a time limit. While you sadly can't use every transformation in every level, limiting it this way did allow the devs to make levels more interesting and enjoyable.

The art looks like you'd expect from a studio that primarily made movie licensed games. Which is to say, it doesn't look that good graphically. The design of everything is fairly interesting and does look like what I'd imagine an evil lizard dimension/planet to look like, although I do wish there were more variety in the environment beyond the occasional color change.

Scaler is surprisingly competent considering I went into this expecting something on the level of what you'd expect from a forgotten 3D platformer in the 6th gen called "Scaler." Definitely worth a shot, and it's fairly short to boot.

The absolute worst Shovel Knight has to offer. Obscenely short stages, the worst story so far, an obnoxious main character, and a down-right terrible movement/attack mechanic. At first glance I thought Yacht Club had learned something from the SoT campaign and were going to make another mode with fun movement and combat. I was sorely mistaken. The dash/bash move King Knight uses feels awful. The platforming in this is only sometimes enjoyable because it's reminiscent of Super Mario World's spinjump, but even that doesn't save the fairly boring or frustrating level design. The best most interesting thing this game does is change how the world map system works from the first two Shovel Knight modes (SoT doesn't have a map). That would be a really cool change of pace if the actual game were fun to play. The option card game, Joustus, is ok. I didn't hate it, but I'm not really a fan of deckbuilders so I only played the first couple of Joustus Houses worth. I can see people getting mileage out of that. I am really disappointed that this was the finale to the Shovel Knight saga after how great SoT was, but at least that game still exists. I just wish this one didn't.