I never played Marble Blast Ultra so I have no real nostalgia for this game's pedigree (I may have played a teeny bit of the OG Marble Blast on a school computer but the memory is hazy). I picked this up after watching a Patricia Taxxon video where she endorses it and she's correct that it's great; I feel like I have a lot to say but it's all just parroting points in her video. The comparison to a fantasy of a good 3D Sonic game is particularly apt. You even collect gems... can emeralds be purple?

I "beat" this, in that I finished the "last" level, but this is the sort of game where getting to the end is not very challenging and does not feel like the point of the experience. Getting anything less than gold in a level feels like a hollow victory; getting diamond feels tremendous.

The Curse of Monkey Island is a staple of my life like few other games. Point n Clicks don't really lend themselves to multiple playthroughs (unless you're speedrunning or something; I've thought about it) but good ol' COMI.EXE is such a refuge of nostalgic comfort that I come back to it every few years and go through all the motions again and again. I am, frankly, incapable of assessing it as a game with anything resembling objectivity.

Nostalgia aside, much of the appeal is audiovisual. The 480p era of adventure gaming was extremely short lived, and this is clearly the pinnacle of it. The Michael Land music is, unsurprisingly, extremely good. And I'm convinced that nobody in video games knew how to direct voice actors correctly for years EXCEPT at LucasArts, where they were unimpeachable.

Although it's certainly my most replayed, I don't think this is the best Monkey Island game. The first two games were witty but also mysterious, a nuance that Curse abandons almost entirely for pure goofiness. They also clearly ran out of time/money before they could flesh out the final act, which feels more and more tacked-on every time I play. Still: inevitably I will play this again.