Reminder: 3 means "I don't regret playing this."

Saw the cabinet for it at a local barber shop one visit, and after my haircut I got a chance to play it, to discover that it was in fact exactly as terrible as most of these reviews have said. I, even as a child (albeit one lucky enough to have Street FIghter Experience by the time I played this), was delighted by how clearly Not Good it was. It might be the first time I ever enjoyed a game for being irredeemable, a trend that would continue on with me into the future. I love arrogant failure in art, and boy, did they think this was gonna take over the world or what? Fuck, the box art just says "Arcade Classic" on it. That is a lie! They are lying.

This game is from a weird time in everyone's life. I remember when this game came out, it was at the dawn of streaming services. We gathered around a Ustream account because they'd just made it to the cave, and several of us thought "well we should see this thing for ourselves before we yell about it." The person who was most outraged about what they had seen (who miiiiight have been the person playing it? That detail escapes me) in two month's time would go on to demand that a CSA survivor Prove It. We've all come a long way since then.

I was just about 18 when this came out. I remember how people talked about it, about it being this landmark moment for expressiveness in video games. The passage of time since this game makes a lot of that discussion look like a slowly dressing clown, bereft of enthusiasm. The despair arises from how little it took to make people in 2007 Question Everything They Thought They Knew About Video Games. The Joke, that all that thought and energy was invested into the dude what made The Castle Doctrine about a decade later.

I wrote a Tribes 1 review that mainly featured shitting on Tribes 2 and how it must have a chorus of positive reviews, only to discover this ghost town. I guess for Tribes as a whole (especially in the face of the Weekend At Bernie's act it had after this game) you just had to be there to understand. This is not a great sign for the future of games preservation or critical analysis of multiplayer-focused games even on websites explicitly meant to catalog opinions for games all through the history and spectrum of the medium.

that said, tribes 1 still better

Disney, like so many companies that harvest children's hearts for money, are awash in opportunities to generate that buy-in to make sure they have a chance to pull someone's identity into their market profile forever. For me, the two that almost worked were Aladdin and The Lion King. The Lion King was so enormous in my childhood that in our music class, one year's production was The Lion King. I'm pretty sure it was the only production I really made it to? That's a bunch of other sad stories there. Anyways, the point is, I genuinely believe my ownership of the cartridge of this game is the thing that inoculated me against Disney Adult Disorder, as I don't know that any child could have touched this goddamn thing and held any affection for anything related to it after the fact.

I shrieked when I learned the ZeroRanger team had a new game, and it's been out for three days, and I managed to learn nothing about it. It's so rare to be surprised like that, to just hear "hey the people behind that shit you loved did it again." Hey! They did it again!

The appeal of ZeroRanger wasn't rawly as a shootemup, though it was a good one of those. Rather, the appeal was in the edges of it, in how it expressed ideas and concepts, how it subverted those concepts, and what it expected of you in return. They have done it again, and in a completely different way than last time. Must play.

So, friends of mine have pointed out that my taste in games leans a lot towards Japanese pixel art games. That's largely because it's what I grew up with, where I was looking at what, like, EA was putting out versus what Treasure was doing and just being like "yeah uh there's no contest here." It didn't occur to me until much later that that art style was attempting to invoke anime art, and I've never been able to reconcile how much I can't stand anime with how much I love old Japanese action games. Except you look at this fucking thing, and play this fucking thing, and it's like a perfect little test case of how tipping too far into deliberate anime invocation can make a promising idea ("oh shit they're making a sequel to Contra Hard Corps!") into just the most mid horsehit imaginable. Look at those people in the box art! In Contra Hard Corps you could play as like a werewolf with a chaingun arm and sunglasses! How did you fuck that up?! Being too anime is how you fucked that up.