i love this game! :3 it radiates charm and cuteness! another great ost, just like the other games, but now there is a really loving attention to detail permeating the entire game, in monkey variety especially; after the first few stages, it seems like there are many more monkeys with themed costumes or altogether unique outfits than there are monkeys who wear just the colored pants. the theme of television/film is an adorable and logical progression to the disjointed level progression in ape escape 2. and surprisingly the shopping centre is pretty well balanced with how many coins you get in this game too, and i appreciated only having to do very minimal grinding upon completing all the stages a second time. the morphs add a welcome dimensionality to gameplay; theyre a snap to change to, have really cute designs, and almost all of them add some unique element of traversal alongside their unique fighting styles. precious game that always has a place in my heart :3 <3

I’ve always loved games like Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie, that let you loose in cool 3d spaces to find some MacGuffin. I was never quite sure what a star or jiggy was or what it had to do with saving the day, but reducing the goal of gameplay to “find the things!” beautifully centered the game on the joy of exploration and traversal. It also - in a quiet, casual, effortless way - was as nonlinear as anything that would later be billed as Open World.

Ape Escape might be the best of these.

The genius of Ape Escape is that it asks, "What if the MacGuffins were the story?" The narrative, for the purpose of gameplay, is beautifully simple ("The apes have escaped. Catch them.”). The monkeys can be anywhere, in any kind of zany environment and requiring any kind of shenanigans to catch. But unlike Mario's stars and Banjo’s jiggies, catching a monkey in Ape Escape always feels like it matters. The monkeys overflow with personality and fight back. They are rebels, reckoning with their newfound sentience, and creating havoc in the process. Placing a net over each one has profound consequences for both the ape and the story. While you are "saving the world", you are by no means clearly the "good guy", but simply playing a role in a larger drama. This perfect synthesis of narrative and player action culminates beautifully in the final battle after catching all 205 monkeys: reducing Specter to helplessness, and finally putting a net over that little bastard. I cannot express how satisfying this was. It was also oddly poignant, especially when preceded by the revelation that Specter missed his trainer, painting a portrait of a tragic hero who, in his last moments, questioned whether he even wanted the freedom he so desperately sought.

And, of course, all this is to barely touch on the gameplay, which is as fun as anything I have ever played. (Spin the right stick to helicopter, or use it to independently remote control a car!) And the inspired locales and art design. (Seeing a mammoth walk out of the fog in the ice age level was one of many moments that took my breath away. And those skyboxes and weather effects!). Ape Escape is peak PS1 hotness, forging into the unknown territory of dual analog 3d gaming with artistry and verve. The series would produce more classics - Ape Escape 3 is also a masterpiece, and Million Monkeys a hidden gem - but Ape Escape 1 remains a unique and thrilling encapsulation of the most exciting era in video games.

Honestly one of the best platformers ever made. The analogue controls are super intuitive and fun to use. The graphics are simple and cartoony, and honestly have aged super well in my eyes. The soundtrack is super unique and catchy. Perhaps the only blemish are the voices, but they've got their own cheesy charm.

The monkeys themselves are the star if the show and you have to change uo your tactics constantly to catch them all. Backtracking to get any leftovers feels fun, as you don't quite know what to expect.

While the later games further improve the formula, this is a PS1 classic and absolutely worth your time.

This is going to be kind of more of a personal anecdote than just talking about Ape Escape. Ape Escape isn't a game I have childhood nostalgia for, I never had a PS1 growing up and was always more of a Nintendo (and for a while Xbox 360) kid. I played it once quite a few years ago and I can't exactly recall when, but I know that I was playing it while sitting in a call with friends, some that I still know today and some that I don't really know where they went off to afterwards. Maybe it was when we were still on Skype too before Discord? I'm not fully sure. I know that at the time I had thought it was cute and fun but I also hadn't really paid it too much mind and again stopped at some point without finishing it. Years passed since then, and I hadn't really thought about the games besides the Discord server with my closest friends having a goofy little GIF from one of the games set for our server icon. I've been dealing with my own life issues after graduating from my community college several months ago with games and my friends having been both an escape and way to pass time as I wait anxiously for hopeful good news on things like jobs, but a problem I've slowly grown to notice has been my utter lack of patience with things in general.

I used to think about it jokingly with friends but as of late I feel like it's began to directly affect things I enjoy including media and entertainment. A lack of patience with little annoyances in games that grow exponentially more than they really needed to that I would reflect back on later and think "I didn't need to be that harsh towards that", or the growing frustrations I've had from my own addictions to social media. I don't like saying that modern gaming sucks because I genuinely don't believe that and think it's an absurd overexaggeration; there's massive issues with this industry, but the same can be said for other media like film and TV. There's more of it than ever before alongside a wider audience that's also more vocal than ever before thanks to how prevalent and almost unavoidable social media has become. That constant attention to social media, the need to endlessly scroll through posts and comments no matter how incessantly obnoxious and stupid it can get, the constant feed of news that angers and annoys in the personal hobbies I follow and care about. I personally do and should know better than to be opening up Twitter on my phone and end up scrolling that "For You" tab because it continues feeding that cynical cycle of frustration, but I continue to do it anyways out of habit and it finally came up to a breaking point recently. Making myself read posts from people I don't know and don't like talking with their head up their ass about things like tech or, with this industry, how game development supposedly works or how one platform is so much worse than the other and how dare you for enjoying something from name brand here. How dare I be excited for something that I want to play because it came from so-and-so and because it's so chock full of bad thing this and bad thing that. There was a realization I had that I had this feeling, this need to defend the opinions I had, that I somehow had to justify why I felt the way I did on media I played or watched, like I needed to convince others of my own feelings towards something.

The cynicism of social media and more especially within the video game community made that feel like justifying myself was something I had to do even if it was towards my own friends, towards my boyfriend when I absolutely did not need to. And while it's an incredibly silly feeling to be writing such a long wall of text about all this (and especially when at the time of writing, it's plainly obvious I'm mad about how much pure vitriol Twitter loves to push to me about Starfield, a game that I'm excited for because I just vibe with everything I've seen of it and just want to play for myself regardless of what I hear about it), there was a point where I needed to just make myself stop looking at those feeds. I tried to make myself stop opening Twitter or Reddit that much late at night and if I was going to stay awake that late, I should just go play a game that I could take the time for and just try to enjoy, feel the vibe of, let the little frustrations relax themselves and just spend time playing and appreciating.

Ape Escape came to mind first. It might have just been because I saw somewhere that it was relatively short, it might have been remembering that it was kind of fun for a platformer, maybe I had a curiosity for playing PS1 stuff again and I wanted to just play something from that console on an emulator trying to make it as faithful to the original experience; good old 240p and none of the enhancements DuckStation allowed for. It was probably all of those things but regardless of the reasons, what I hadn't expected was just how much this time around, all this time later and purely on a whim needing a break from everything, Ape Escape was the game that I think I needed most right this moment.

Ape Escape isn't just a game that is "full of charm", it's utterly bursting at the seams with such a love and care for pure joyful experimentation down to a player input level. The colors have such intense vibrancy to them, with not just every world theme being uniquely distinct but even down to a per-level basis that exudes playfulness in these time periods that you travel between. These places never feel generic thanks to not just distinctions like one level in the first world being in a rainy swamp with lots of water navigation to the next having you climb up to a volcano area where you try figuring out how you're going to capture a monkey that's riding a dinosaur, but also a soundtrack that absolutely pops the fuck off. I have no idea how it came to be that they picked the composer they did for this game, and I have no idea how it led to a 3D platformer that's full of high upbeat electronic music with a slamming drum and bass but it works to such a genius degree. The handful of levels that catch you off guard too like the one where see this big beast that's just, chilling out inside a wall on the beach; there's no music, just ambience as you walk around exploring a bit, realizing that oh the next area is inside it, and once you're in the music just suddenly kicks in and blasts off with this high intensity strangely electric sounding tune that I just can't get enough of oh my god

But what made my time with Ape Escape so joyful and wonderful was how much passion you could feel emanating from the developers in the final product just playing it. Every single creative choice here was clearly made because the developers thought it would be fun and unique, something that you wouldn't have seen in another game like it at the time even within the 3D platforming genre. A lot of it stems from the forced requirement of the DualShock controller which at the time, most developers didn't really know what to do with and Sony themselves needed something that would sell the accessory. Before the standard for making that second stick work the camera was made years later, Japan Studio's solution was to go absolutely hog wild and see what weird ideas for tools and mechanics could involve using the sticks for and it's such a creative approach to game design that not only have I not really seen even in today's games, but one that has still aged shockingly spectacularly well. Every single tool in your arsenal on the hunt for catching monkeys makes you use the right stick to use them, but it never feels gimmicky or unintuitive because every tool just makes sense to do so. Your saber for hitting enemies and stunning monkeys can be swung in any direction, but twirling the stick makes you spin around too which has its own uses for stuff like switches in the environment or keeping yourself safe from multiple enemies. Being able to swing the net in any direction regardless of if you're standing, running or crawling, and importantly regardless of the direction you're facing doing any of those makes capturing monkeys feel snappy and precise; I never felt like I was fumbling with my movement in difficult areas to catch something in the heat of the moment, and mistakes that were made were purely my own fault. The ideas for other gadgets are just as strange and creative, but they never feel out of place in the full arsenal like an RC car that of course you control with the right stick that works wonderfully for puzzles and hazards that make you multitask, or a hula hoop that you spin around to go faster and hit enemies with, or the slingshot that makes you pull back on the right stick to ready and fire. These tools don't just fit the playful tone that the game aims for across the board, it importantly makes them feel natural to use at all the right times rather than gimmicks.

And even then, the times the game does want to have gimmicky stuff that plays with the controls, they never really annoyed me in any sense and I still found joy in the times the game wanted to use them because they further express that creativity and experimentation. Sure, the rowboat is janky as hell and is next to impossible to steer straight forward consistently, but it's never punishing to actually use and it's still entertaining in its own way! Did the tank need to use both sticks to move and turn? Not really, but it felt silly and somehow satisfying to eventually get the hang of using the thing and especially that one time the game made me try to drive it along a narrow track which felt great to make it to the end of. This playfulness even extends to the three optional minigames you unlock for just exploring and collecting the big tokens you sometimes come across, all of which experiment with the controls in fun ways that match up with the rest of the game. Hell, there's still more insane attention to detail and fun like every monkey in the game being named and having silly little descriptions that would regularly get a laugh out of me along with stats if you spend the time to check the radar on all of them. The developers didn't need to put these little extras in or needed to go this hard with a game that was meant to just "show off what the DualShock was capable of", but the passion to do something special and creative oozes out of every part of Ape Escape in a way that I can't help but utterly admire.

It didn't really matter those brief couple of seconds now and then when something didn't go the way I expected or a platforming mishap because of the sometimes janky depth perception given by a sometimes nutty camera and wobbly polygons the PS1 was known for, or maybe that last level that goes on for just a wee bit too long for my liking. Even during those moments, the sheer joy Ape Escape has was a vibe that I could just continue to jive with in a way that made me respect it so much more. It was enough so that even after the credits had rolled, I still kept playing because I wanted to catch every monkey on the second go-around for that extra secret final boss. Even if I don't really want to bother with 100% completion (because that involves doing the time trials which, yeah no thanks lmao), I'm more than okay with that. It seems silly sitting here now heaping so much praise onto a goofy little 3D platformer collect-a-thon where you run around capturing monkeys with silly outfits and sometimes silly weapons, but it was the right game I needed at the right time. It's the game I needed to just sit back and take a break from things, and play something that dances to the sound of its own tune hoping that you dance alongside it. I'm glad I did all these years later.