gotta be honest, i don't get the hype for this thing. it's enjoyable enough and i think it has some fun movement options, but it feels very undercooked in both presentation and polish. also, it's really easy to get lost in a "everything looks the same" type of way considering how indistinct a lot of the environments are. and it's not necessarily the game's fault, because it does go out of its way to make varied room layouts, but something about it makes the whole map blend together in my head. it's a jam game so i'm sympathetic, i just feel sorta lost on how people are giving this outlandishly high scores. there's just genuinely not a lot to say about this game, and i felt like the game basically ended when movement finally started to get more interesting. on the bright side, i'm on the low end of the spectrum when it comes to enjoyment with this game (relatively speaking), so if a short 3D metroidvania with some well-received mechanics sounds appealing to you, then you should give this a shot.

crash team racing (CTR) is a game for the longest time i've wondered if undervalue. as far as kart racers go, MK64 was obviously the big trendsetter, but i do think CTR succeeds in a lot of ways MK64 falls short. the movement feels so much better and less stiff, and it feels like you're given a lot more room to do interesting things, whether it be short cuts or miniturbos in short turns. i think if we were just judging the kart racers of the 90s on how they feel, CTR would easily take the gold medal.

where i get lost with CTR is in the surrounding crust of it. adventure mode is fine for what it is, but relic races are agonizingly tedious if you're trying to go for platinums (what, you play crash bandicoot games and don't go for the platinum relics?). and boss races largely feel useless; anyone who has a basic competency with CTR's systems will be able to pass a boss character by the first lap and leave them in the dust until the end. lastly, i just don't really feel very passionate about a lot of CTR's tracks. they're extremely hit or miss for me, and while the good ones (hot air skyway, polar pass, oxide station) are usually ones i look forward to racing on, the bad ones (n. gin labs, tiger temple, coco park) are either dull or genuinely unfun to race on.

hell, even some of the tracks i like, such as papu's pyramid, sewer speedway, or polar pass, become nightmares to try and optimize for either relic races or time trials. the tracks in CTR have a love for cycle-based obstacles that make optimizing them have this annoying element of RNG that ruins the experience for me. i also have broader nitpicks with the game, like how the whole "you have to do a minimum of three time trials per stage if you want to complete everything" aspect is really tedious and annoying, especially when your first time trial beats either of the ghosts (which it often will). and i expect that this point will be contentious with fans, but i've never really given a shit about the soundtrack and found it to be fairly unmemorable, especially when you compare it to contemporaries like diddy kong racing. that's pretty bad for a crash bandicoot game, but it's also the kiss of death for a kart racer, regardless of when it comes out.

i'm dogging on this game a lot in this review because it feels like the positives are obvious to state. the game looks great for PS1 (and still holds up in most respects, imo), it controls well, the items are fairly balanced and it never feels like you lose a race because your opponent got lucky, etc. i have never outright disliked CTR, let's be clear on that. when i was younger, i was obsessed with it, if anything. i just also see that it has a lot of things that hold it back from being that special type of game to me. i appreciate what it did for the genre, though, because i suspect it was what really sold the idea of the kart racer as a viable spinoff for later series to try. and how can i dislike anything that might've helped lead us to the eventual apex of kart racers known as sonic & all stars racing transformed?

a game that i will always adore. it's impossible to divorce this game from how it made me feel playing it as a 5 year old, and any time i replay this game, that precious joy is evoked. level design peaked here with levels that end up being the perfect length so they don't overstay their welcome, and the variety of levels aids this game, despite what popular modern consensus says. i do share the sentiment that they could've likely cut off a jet ski and motorcycle level or two to make room for another platforming level, but my playthroughs of this game never leave me feeling unsatisfied. i especially love how time trials are handled here, as the changes in boxes and added element of time stopping radically change how you'd view a level compared to the initial run.

i dunno man! i just love this game. i love the level themes, i love the bosses, i love the music, i love the graphics. . . it's just one of my favorite games i've ever played. i have very little negative things to say about this game, and i can only say that there will always be a deep reservoir of love in my heart for this thing.

i hate discussing this game with fans because they always move the goal posts. no, this isn't the first time i've played an older 3d game, and no, i don't dislike this game because i can't appreciate them. i greatly enjoy and love games like resident evil, tomb raider, crash bandicoot, and sonic adventure; those were all early 3D offerings that were rough around the edges. they had very thought-out mechanics with intentionality behind their level design and were consistently engaging to play. i cannot say the same about this game. super mario 64 is not fun for me play because i do not find the mechanics or level design engaging. additionally, the camera is atrocious and has aged poorly. there's also this weird pseudo-tank controls aspect that changes how mario moves without warning and killed me several times in the later levels like TTC and RR. movement is actively one of the worst parts of this game, which is the kiss of death for a platformer. i don't dislike this game for being old, i dislike this game for being bad.

i respect what it tries to do, and i think there is some level of admiration game devs of the time express for it that i understand. i get why this was such a groundbreaking game in some ways. but, i grew up in this era, and even as a kid, this game didn't connect with me. finally sitting down and playing it as a fully grown adult, i can understand and verbalize what it is that fucks me off from this. am i impressed with the attempt to focus so much on momentum as a platforming principle? yes. do i think this game hits the mark with that lofty goal? absolutely not. again, it's not that this game is old; i had this same exact feeling when it was still a new game. i do not enjoy super mario 64 not because it is dated, because dated things can still be enjoyed. i do not enjoy super mario 64 because i do not enjoy super mario 64.

1.5/5.0 feels harsh, but it's a combination of not enjoying my time with this game as well as resenting this game's legacy. i don't understand how this is still regularly discussed in contention for greatest game of all time. i hate how it's still seen as hipster and contrarian to say this game isn't the second coming of christ. and, most importantly, i am very tired of this idea that the games that we love cannot have flaws and cannot be criticized.

it's hard to overstate how powerful nostalgia is. ever since i started understanding how memory can be easily manipulated and self-fabricated (all unintentionally), i've been very wary of how i view the art and stories i grew up with as a kid. some days i think i'm overcorrecting, some days i think i'm not going hard enough against my biases. after replaying snowboard kids 1 (sbk1), i felt primed to go into this and be let down in some capacity. it's only natural. and, let's be clear, i think snowboard kids 2 (sbk2) has obviously aged in a lot of ways. but, ultimately, i fully replayed this game and got a swell trip down memory lane while also being able to re-appreciate just how quaint and charming this game is.

sbk2 takes the base formula sbk1 established and basically refines everything about it. there's more characters, a small "slice of life"-esque story, more varied stages, and even a little hub world where the characters can run into each other and say "hi!". it's all very quaint, and these small things go a long way to making the game endear itself to you. there were even these adorable yonkoma strips in the instruction manual (https://imgur.com/gallery/h1erE) that i absolutely adored reading as a child, and they helped make this game feel more unique and memorable than a contemporary like 1080 boarding, which i played as a kid but i could not tell you a single thing about to this day. these things add up and matter, and they give sbk2 an identity that endured.

as far as the actual racing goes, it is relieving to say that the racing AI isn't horribly mangled in this game and avoids the rubberbanding problems that sbk1 was plagued by. it's genuinely surprising to see that the game actually has the kids now adapt to the rules of their board + build, so you're not gonna run into nancy being faster than christ and when someone uses a slow board like the ninja board, they're usually gonna be at the back of the pack. again, small but compared to both its predecessor and something like mariokart 64, which, to the best of my memory, completely doesn't give a shit about this sort of thing, it's nice to see. if anything, this game is on the fairly forgiving and easy side, but maybe going from sbk1 to sbk2 can be likened to when goku's fighting piccolo in dragon ball and takes off the leg weights and is suddenly zip zooming around. ice land is a difficulty jump, which is fitting for the final level of the game, but it's not as absurd as any of the final three levels in sbk1. i normally like harder games, but sbk1 was challenging for the wrong reasons, so i'm completely fine with this game doing a lower gear shift to let me soak in the stellar OST and level design.

speaking of levels, i love the variety we get here. i think sbk1 already had a pretty great selection of levels, so to see sbk2 hit it out of the park and improve upon that is impressive. standouts include the aforementioned ice land, starlight highway, and wendy's house. there are some true platform highlights in this game, and it's no coincidence that each of those levels has a killer music track to accompany it. so much of this game is just the simple fun of racing in unique locations and taking in the sights. even the relatively tame locations jingle town get a section with aurora borealis that shockingly translated pretty decently on N64 hardware.

the biggest problem with this game happens to be items, and, in a weird way, when i played some of these tracks without them, i had more fun. there's just a huge lack of oversight when it comes to item distribution. tell me: why the fuck am i able to get boosts in first place? hell, why the fuck am i able to get the pan in first place? speaking of the pan, i think it has to be the single worst item in a racing game, and i'm trying not to be hyperbolic when i say that. it's far too common, for starters, and it's the lightning bolt from mario kart but instead of capping speed, it stops racers dead in their tracks if they don't have an invisibility item to protect them. i wouldn't mind this item's existence if it was, to counterbalance those problems, either much rarer or less overpowered. its existence can turn races into very big stop-and-go affairs that ruin the feeling a racing game should have. i'm also not entirely crazy about the ghost items due to how swingy and game-changing they are in a game where momentum management is king, but compared to the pan, they are eclipsed in severity. i don't have a segue for this nor do i want to type up an entire paragraph about them, so let me also just state here that the boss fights are all extremely bad and unnecessary, and god help you if you do them on expert mode.

i get that this game isn't for everyone, and there's always going to be an aspect of this game that i forever associate with how it felt to play this when i was 5. i maintain that it hasn't aged nearly as badly as other racing games of the time, and the art style utilized N64 graphics better than most games on the platform. still, it is a fairly basic racing game with a fundamental item issue, so i get it. i also get the feeling that, in spite of my replay and critical eye, i still manage to overrate this a tad. oh well! i've wanted to replay this game for literally a decade now and only just gotten around to it, and i enjoyed my time with it. this was a special game to me as a kid, and it was a joy to discover that its star hasn't dimmed for me in adulthood.

i'm going to be incredibly harsh here and say that this is a remaster that does not need to exist. the graphics look more washed out and lose that sharp style that original had. more damningly, the game somehow runs worse on the PS4 than it does on PS2 and will regularly get very bad slowdown around the baseball field near shopping street. it adds no qol features that the original could've used (i.e. the ability to restart a level either from pausing mid-level or retrying at the results screen), no extra content that the original didn't already have, and it only offers the japanese voice acting with no option for the iconic english voice acting (ik this part is contentious but there really is no reason it couldn't have at least been something you could toggle). i hate to be the fun police because a lot of people got introduced to this game from this remaster, but there really is no actual reason to play this over the original, especially considering how most microwaves can emulate PS2 games nowadays. i don't recommend this remaster for anyone uninitiated to the game and i don't recommend this remaster for any fans of the original looking for either new content or to revisit a classic, so it's a game for an audience of no one in my mind.

i want to be clear that this rating isn't necessarily reflective of the whole package; even with hiccups, this is katamari damacy. it takes more than slowdown to negate the joy of saying "C'MERE BITCH" and rolling up a terrified person into your katamari to then be rewarded with their screams of fear and agony. this rating is more an assessment of what reroll does (or does not do, in this case) to differentiate itself meaningfully from just playing the original. why pay money for this game when you can emulate the original and get the better and (imo) more essential experience? there's nothing inherently wrong with playing this over the original, but i would be completely unable to make a pitch for it. that's what makes it such a failure to me.

nostalgia definitely influences me to overrate this one. charming visuals and outstanding OST, but it's an extremely flawed experience. this game should be used in game dev seminars when discussing enemy AI, because this is emblematic of what not to do. the rubberbanding is legitimately broken such that any lead the player gets will be minimized nonsensically (nancy and jam, despite being the slowest characters in the roster, will still zoom past you without any boosts). meanwhile, if the AI is in first place for too long, they'll amass a lead that is just impossible to overcome, made doubly worse when racing against shinobin, who seems to literally always have an invisibility item ready. playing quicksand valley through ninja land is fucking harrowing and i had several (i mean several) races end with me within pissing distance of the finish line only to get pan'd, frozen, etc. and lose the race. this game's AI is demonic and torpedoes a lot of the good will and fun that was built up in the process.

it's a testament to both nostalgia and aesthetics that i can still say i enjoy this game. i definitely overrated it a bit coming into this and had to knock off a star, but it's an endearing game in spite of its flaws. i remember SBK2 fixing a lot of the issues this game had as well as just generally being a much sharper presented game. i'm looking forward to replaying it in the near future.

very charming game that captures a lot of the magic that ace attorney 1 had. it was refreshing to enter this new world with endearing main characters that felt fleshed out and distinct from other ace attorney offerings. far and away one of the game's strongest features is its animations being a lot crisper and detailed, due to being mo-cap'd. even minor characters had little animations that i found a joy to watch.

biggest flaw with the game, for me, is the unevenness of the narrative. the pacing is very peculiar, with a third case that feels like it belongs in the fourth case's slot due to how heavily referenced it is by the fifth case. and the cast is either incredibly endearing or absolutely repugnant with basically no middleground. i love characters like susato, gina, and even sholmes, but cannot stand characters like von zieks and gregson. also, it seems like this game has a pretty heavy recurring element of racism that doesn't ever get really touched upon in a meaningful way, which is an odd choice imo. it's definitely what i would expect from 1800s britain, but it's just weird to have sooooo many microaggressions (as well as the occasional outright "i hate the japanese" esque comment) and not really make a point of having naruhodo or susato react to them in meaningful ways. in many ways, this is the most divisive cast because the great characters are stellar, while the awful characters are series lowlights.

i'm very interested to see what tgaa2 does considering how heavily this game leans into being a duology. there were a lot of unanswered questions and dangling threads i didn't expect to remain unresolved by the game's conclusion, so i'm hoping that extending them into another game means the payoff will be even better. i've heard a lot of good things in passing about tgaa2, so it'll be hard to not have high expectations. if nothing else, i was pleasantly surprised that this concept that i had next to no interest in was able to deliver a charming experience.

katamari damacy is a very easy game to undervalue. there's likely a decent portion of people who have gone "oh so this is just a quirky game about rolling a ball around to grab stuff? okay" or something to that effect, and disregarded the game. it's very hard to pitch the game without gameplay footage to complement; telling a coworker about this game reminded me of trying to sell someone on ace attorney being fun in spite of its droll-sounding premise. yet, even with this obstacle, i can safely say that this game might be the single most widely appealing and approachable game on the PS2's library short of tetris ports.

this is a deceptively simple game that focuses on doing one thing, and doing it superbly: movement. it is in its precise focus on movement that anyone can enjoy this game while still leaving a high skill ceiling and appropriate challenges to match. truthfully, i think this is a very, very easy game to sit down and beat. if you're just going for the minimum size requirements, even a bad player could swing that, give or take a handful of retries. meanwhile, for anyone who wants to really challenge themselves, the game has comet times, size thresholds, and collection aspects to tickle the brain. and while i think all three of those could use more transparency for the player in plainly stating what they're asking for, that simultaneously lends itself to this mystique that katamari damacy's aesthetic thrives on. i do want the raw numbers, but also, i kind of love that the king of all cosmos will just go "that's a 4/10" and belabor the point by saying he would've done it much better instead of telling you what size would satisfy him.

there's something to be said about what katamari damacy feels like to experience. clinically, i don't think i could name a game that utilizes sound design in a more synapse-stimulating way. this goes beyond the soundtrack, which is immaculate. rolling over objects is accompanied by this extremely memorable sound that i struggle to describe. it sounds like if you were to fire a rubber band at a giant plate of jello. it's minor, but considering all you are doing in the game is moving to collect things, making the act of collecting have an intrinsically pleasing sound is an elegant way to elevate it. and the moment-to-moment gameplay of scanning for both objects your size to get right then while also looking for objects bigger than you to hunt for later as goals is diabolically brilliant design. the player makes both conscious and unconscious decisions about what to preoccupy themselves with and what to work towards. the magic is that it's done instantly and often without the player even realizing how they're being conditioned. katamari damacy doesn't fatigue the player with analysis paralysis, because it immediately makes it apparent that you want to get shit, and you want to constantly be in the process of getting shit.

as for collecting itself, many objects will have sounds that play when you get them, adding to that feedback loop. you roll up an egg and boom, a little chickling briefly hatches and peeps a bit. you roll up a truck and you can bet you're gonna hear its horn. this even extends to people when you roll them up, and often the most fun part of any given level is when you get big enough to roll up random civilians and hear their associated voice lines when you get them. whether it's random teenage girls who give their all in screaming, old men who have no earthly idea what's going on and just moan a little in confusion, or the Towel Guy who makes this sound that easily puts him in contention for most lgbt character of all time. sometimes the fun of the game is not only seeing what you can roll up, but how it will react to you.

and while the game does have only 3 main areas, the structure of each level greatly varies. you could have one level in the house where you're just collecting random household objects like food and legos and then the next level in that same house you're suddenly swarmed with crabs to collect. something i appreciated on this replay was how dollhouse-esque this game's levels feel in their arrangement. they have this exactness to them where you can feel the dev team telling their little stories through object and people placement. it all feels so neatly arranged and deliberate, and it creates this reptilian brain response of wanting to destroy something delicate when you arrive on the scene. people lowball this game a lot and chalk up its appeal to being this silly and quirky game with not much to it, but i think that greatly does a disservice to the intentionality behind the design choices here. katamari damacy organically fosters a curiosity to its world in a way that appears effortless. all of this is done without dialogue or lore drops, just visual arrangement and responsivity to player actions. it's a masterclass.

it feels very surreal to say that this game turned 20 this year. i still vividly remember the toonami mini-review of this game when it was new. i don't want to make this about how i'm getting older, things are aging, and the like, because there's no real place for it here. i don't think katamari damacy has aged in really appreciable, significant ways. there's an evergreen quality here that will never have an expiration date. the simple nature of its gameplay lends itself to this timeless quality. moreover, we're never going to reach a point in the medium where movement becomes something dated. movement will always be inherently part of any game with a world to explore and play in. katamari damacy may not have been planning for the future with its laser-focus on a game purely based around movement, but it is one that has aged better than anyone could've speculated. this is a perfect game in that sense, and it's one of the first things that i would nominate we encase in steel and eject into space to preserve it for future civilizations and species.

an enigma of a game. with most video games that put me off, i'm able to, in some capacity, contort myself into going "well here was the intention and here was the demographic". i truly cannot do that with this game, because who on earth at square enix played dark souls and went "we should add a terrible loot system and necessitate grinding"? it's a damn shame too, because this game has such great catharsis when it works. jack's violent animations just feel good to get, the level design is usually pretty engaging, and boss fights have a nice spectacle to them that fit in with the final fantasy aesthetic while still creating this new, obscene and violent performance.

but i cannot stress enough how shitty the game gets by endgame when it turns out that you basically have to grind your eyeballs out just to get armor that will stop you from dying in two hits, or get equipment with job affinities you want. it's shitty! it sucks! why did they add this! it's another example of square enix getting in their own way with a genuinely great game concept. you could argue that this was always in team ninja's design doc, but i heavily doubt it and more expect the shitty aspects of this game were direct demands from square as a publisher. regardless of how it happened, it just sucks outrageously that this got bogged down with mechanics that actively made the experience worse and turned this unexpected hit into a turbo-mid product.

this is a great DLC, and helps validate my claim that returnal could've been a better game if the roguelike elements had been retooled. this DLC ends up being less roguelike and more arcadey third-person shooter, which works a lot better for this formula imo. improvements include that the tower of sisyphus has guaranteed drops in it that housemarque was able to design its challenges around. there's still choice to be had in these drops as well (do you go for the health upgrade or the damage upgrade? which penalizing parasite do you go for? etc.), so it never feels like the game is taking you on a railroaded experience.

but, most importantly, you're given a guaranteed random level 3 gun by the second floor to pick from, which suddenly makes every single run feel like it can 100% be my fault as opposed to "i got stuck with the shitty base pistol and died because i couldn't get something else to drop". i know i've harped on this, but the guns are such a vital part of returnal as an experience, so amplifies the player experience to get more self-expression from the getgo. these things sound small, but they add up to making the moment-to-moment gameplay retain that fun, frenetic energy while also keeping the player consistently challenged. lastly, algos is a great boss and honestly blows the base game's bosses out of the water for me. he's simple, but focused, and it's refreshing that the game staggers out his second and third phases so you can get comfortable with his first one.

yeah, i'm just really impressed that they were able to refine what didn't work about base game and turn it around here. this has overall made me more positive on returnal as a package, and seeing this much improvement in a free DLC surpasses my expectations. if anything, this has made me interested in seeing what housemarque puts out next, because i can see this being part of an upward trend in quality for them.

though it's aesthetically and narratively immaculate, it pains me to say that i don't like this game that much. i love everything this game brings to the table except its gameplay, because it is a very shitty roguelike. it lacks so many QOL features that you really need to make the genre work. you could argue QOL features would make it too easy when it's obviously going for a "difficult game to emphasis the oppressive and hopeless nature of overcoming the adversity" type of design, but i would disagree. your runs will get dominated by how good your drops are. and god help you if you get stuck with that shitty starting pistol because the game just doesn't give you any guns.

a regular issue i'd run into with this game is that i'd have runs that went extremely well or extremely poorly with very little middleground. this was almost always determined by if i got a good gun early and/or other consumables that were useful (and not useless ones like shocking springs). during those good runs, i'd have a lot of fun and feel that rare kind of stress that video games evoke that makes you feel good. meanwhile, when i had my bad runs, i would think that this was a stupid game masquerading as a brilliant one. that's not even mentioning how boss runs can be egregious and require so much time and effort to invest in that gets wasted when the game decides to give you dogshit to work with. the derelict citadel in general has some of the worst shit to deal with because you have an excessively long boss run combined with enemies that actively punish you for killing them with melee (the broken mech guys) or ones that will suicidebomb you if you don't focus your entire attention on killing them. there's challenging, and then there's just frustrating. this game does not walk that line even close to well.

and i know it's easy to comment "skill issue" or whatever but even when i was doing clean-up runs at the end of the game for the trophies and ostensibly had beaten the game, i was still getting runs that i couldn't get going because of drops. i think a very quick and easy band-aid solution to this would be to add the option for the player to pick between the god awful starting pistol and another randomly picked base gun. there's still bad guns (the shotgun, the disc gun) but at least they're not death sentences like the pistol. if we're going deeper, i think the game would either have to do a lot of restructuring to accommodate how actively unfun it can be to play (retool and balance enemies, change what secret areas can give out, make guns more guaranteed to spawn at certain locations, etc.). or, fuck it, just don't make it a roguelike. i genuinely love so much of this game, but i simultaneously detested its gameplay, and i often just wished it had been any other genre besides roguelike. i can imagine this game playing 20x better as a metroidvania with slightly tweaked mechanics. hell, maybe just turn it into a more platform-y type of third-person shooter like what control was going for. just, something had to be better than this.

i hate to belabor this point but i need to stress that this game plays worse than almost everyone i know has implied and i felt like i was taking crazy pills playing this mid-at-best roguelike formula. i found the setting and the themes of this game captivating, and they were truthfully what kept me going when this game repeatedly burned me and my time. there's a great, fantastic game buried underneath a lot of dirt here. i just wish i could've played that one instead of the one i got.

the nostalgia has worn off and it's hard to say that this was a "slept on classic", like i used to view it. it's still definitely a good platformer and stands out amongst the unsuccessful mascot platformers it was rubbing elbows with. the biggest drawback to this game is that the level design feels less tightly designed and engaging. if gex: enter the gecko was crash bandicoot meets spyro, this game is just super mario 64 (all weird comparisons, i know). you have levels like organ trail and red riding in the hood (dumb but great level name) that are functionally just tall, tall mountain. meanwhile, i don't really have a good analogy for a level like poltergext or samurai night fever. etg was less conventional and it paid off in that way, but dcg does conventional level designs moderately well in a fairly decent presentation, especially compared to etg's rougher textures and fidelity. gex also controls what feels like a trillion times better in dcg than he does in etg.

the biggest thing that might shy people away from this game is that there's less emphasis on platforming as opposed to collecting, though it's not absent wholly. this game leans much more into the collectathon aspect, and it doesn't always hold up (see: the fact that flycoins can glitch out and go beneath level geometry in my three goons.) i do think it's a lot more fun in the moment-to-moment gameplay, though, because the levels are more focused in their theme, and having them only appear once means that there's nothing left on the cutting floor to warrant redoing the level theme. levels like sleepless in seattle, organ trail, unsolved mythstories, and red riding in the hood are great because they each focus on simple ideas and then execute them fairly precisely. meanwhile, levels like my three goons and superzeroes suck the fun out of the game like a vacuum. this is due to their tedious nature and lack of fun level gimmicks that make the moment-to-moment gameplay of traversing the level 3 times more memorable and engaging (something each of the 4 levels i listed prior succeed at.) the contrast between etg and dcg is much more stark after playing them in quick succession; in some respects, i think the best gex game could've been a marriage between etg's solid level design and dcg's polish and refinement.

i would ever so slightly say that dcg is the better gex game of the two (why did they call it gex 3 when there's only 2 gex games? i hope someone got fired for that blunder.), but it's definitely closer than i would've said half a year ago. if you take the best designed levels of etg and put them through dcg's polish and presentation, you'd have probably some of the best 3D platforming you could find from a midbudget title of that time.

it's thps4 with a disney coat of paint; it's serviceable and fine for the most part. the playlist sucks and is way too short but it's a kid's game so it's a little understandable that they cheaped out on it. some of the levels are ass to navigate (graveyard and the jungle portion of human camp) but the rest are good. it's a decent timekiller if you're just looking for something to dick around in and you're already familiar with thps. it's somewhat shameless in how little it brings to the table mechanically but i do get the vibe that the people who worked on this game did care and had some amount of passion for both the disney IPs and skateboarding games in general.

best song on the playlist is "sell out" by reel big fish, do not FUCK with me on this