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.

Coming off of the stressful, methodical gameplay Resident Evil 2 remake, I found it amusing and delightful to experience the same engine appropriated to wildly different ends. Additions like a goofy spot dodge that slows down time turn Resident Evil 3 into a gleeful action game that is the perfect breather after its predecessor. Not a replacement for the original, but a wildly entertaining game in its own right.

From the creators of Moon, the RPG about love, LOL is a wordless game where you wander amongst fellow creatures, observe them, understand them, and ultimately intuit and satisfy their needs. In Moon, the theme is love; in LOL, the action is love.

Star Ocean 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, for its visual splendor, loveable cast, strange narrative choices, combat that is goofy and sometimes opaque but also flexible and tough. Against all odds, Star Ocean 6 delivers on all of those things I loved about its clear inspiration (structurally, aesthetically, and narratively, Star Ocean 6 is the sequel to Star Ocean 2, not 3, 4, or 5, down to the starting choice between a blond space-faring male protag or an earnest local girl). The implementation is wholly modern, with the huge obnoxious compass pointing your way, fast and flashy combat, layers of menus with elaborate UI that take sometimes takes several seconds to load, and (most entertainingly) the ability to zoom and leap around all the buildings. But its core design, including structure, pacing, and narrative presentation, haven’t updated a bit. The cutscenes and dialogue feel strange and stilted until you realize the way the characters move and talk is straight out of 1999. It’s the soul of the Playstation 1 in a smooth, shiny, modern mech suit. It’s also the snappiest and crunchiest popcorn-bucket RPG I’ve ever played. Zooming around really is a constant delight. Laeticia and Midas are two of my favorite characters in any video game, elevated by exceptional (if goofy and stilted, of course) voice acting. The environments are gorgeous, with absolutely wild skyboxes in the planetbound early game, and later sci fi imagery that more than fulfills their promise. Just like Star Ocean 2, and as much any any other RPG I’ve played, it delighted me from start to finish.

Somebody thought it would be real cute to make a platformer that honks a car horn at you every time you move left or right.

The best non-spinoff Kirby game since Dream Land 1, and one of the most fastidious and consistently delightful platformers I’ve played. The levels are dense with clever design and playful themes (giant falling ice cream cones in the snow level, traffic in the city level, etc) that actually make sense in the context of the narrative and progression. Completing all cubes is the perfect quantity and difficulty for this sort of thing.

Like the feeling of walking up to some arcade cabinet, like a Ninja Baseball Bat Man or Clockwork Aquario, attracted by the vibrant colors and detailed graphics of its attract mode; putting in a fistful of quarters; fiddling the joystick and mashing buttons, maybe with a buddy, delighting in the varied animations and their ever-expanding possibilities; not quite comprehending how or why the mechanics work except that you need to keep moving forward; credit-feeding until you win; and going home having absorbed a brief but singular experience worth all the quarters in your pocket.

So badly titled I never fathomed until recently that it might be a full mainline Kirby game - and a pretty good one at that! As a fan of Balan Wonderworld, I enjoy the sort of ethereal unicorn-vomit aesthetic they adopt here, which fits Kirby like a glove (or a ball bag?). The new Hypernova power that supercharges Kirby's sucking ability is put to creative, playful use, and underscores how strange and horrifying a creature Kirby is (the in-game description describes his stomach in that mode as a "veritable black hole"). Richer in design than Return to Dreamland, it naturally doesn't feel as smooth and good to play as the Switch remake Return to Dreamland Deluxe, but we (I played handing off with my partner) had about as good a time with it. My partner particularly praised the smoother difficulty - some of the later segments of RtDL, while not incredibly difficult, were frictionful in a way that was not flattering or fun, compounded by a darker, less playful aesethetic. Triple Deluxe is breezy and bright right to the end. Now that they essentially have an engine for it (this is clearly built on the same foundation as RtDL), we might get a Triple Deluxe Deluxe for Switch, which might be a heck of a thing.

Played trading off with my partner. I’ve often had my doubts about the Kirby formula - the way powers are structured kind of subverts any attempt at design, where powers blast through enemies and the difficulty ends up being around getting and retaining powers rather than making it through the level. As such, Kirby games tend to live or die on their secrets and extra challenges, and while this doesn’t reach the heights of Forgotten Land in that ground, collecting all the gears is a relatively fun and rather achievable enterprise. It’s also butter-smooth; not sure how much to attribute to the remake, but Kirby feels particularly great (and looks particularly adorable) here. I really like the backgrounds. The music is, unusually for this series, quite bad. The story is fun, underscoring Kirby’s gray morality and potential for evil. Vanpool’s last game (RIP).

Delightful video game that, without the spectacle of the entries that bookend it, best demonstrates Sakaguchi and co's brilliance in game design and scenario writing. The flexibility of its systems, the playfulness of its writing, and the briskness of its pacing feel unique in the series. After being sacked from Square, Sakaguchi would revisit this approach with Blue Dragon, a more-than-worthy spiritual successor and one of my favorite games ever.

For the last few years, I've taken to digging through old PS1/PS2/Dreamcast/Saturn games, including unlocalized ones, to find new tastes of what I consider the magic of video games: to step into an interesting space that plays by a unique set of rules. I delight in finding something like Napple Tale, Ape Escape 2001, or Robbit Mon Dieu that has a colorful, weird, unfamiliar world to experience. While I've often been satisfied with mere morsels of this feeling--Napple Tale's hub world, Ape Escape 2001's miniature playgrounds---Balan Wonderworld delivers a whole feast.

Every stage is surreal, varied, and bursting with color. A cornfield bends as you run across it. An Escher-esque interior littered with giant art supplies reorients itself when you pass through a mirror. Mysterious creatures dance just out of reach. Each of these is packed with secrets, requiring creative use of the game's 80 costumes. Often, puzzles will have an obvious solution using a costume you don't have, and you'll need to think outside the box. What at first appears to be a rigid lock and key puzzle quickly becomes an invitation to knock down the door.

You collect these costumes and maintain a persistent stock of them. You can carry three at once to swap between at will, and exchange these three with ones in your closet at checkpoints. If you are hit while wearing a costume, that costume is lost forever, but you can stock multiple of each one. This system is fascinating, versatile, and elegantly encapsulates both action mechanics and health. You may get a rare costume that is extremely useful, but have to use it sparingly lest you risk losing it. You can always replay stages to collect costumes, or with a bit of time investment grind out a large stock of any costume you want. Or you can wing it, risk running out, and improvise.

Each costume can perform only a single action, such as a jump or attack (or, if you're lucky, a jump that is also an attack). That means the strongest in combat are often also unable to jump. Almost every moment presents an interesting decision with real stakes and tradeoffs. The most useful costume I found for damaging the final boss was also incapable of dodging one of its rarer attacks, and if I stocked up three of them for the fight, one would have to be sacrificed periodically. I love this.

The storytelling is entirely wordless. It opens with your character, a child, experiencing such a tragedy (perhaps the death of a parent?) that she sulks around the house and the maids speak of her in hushed tones. She encounters a mysterious being - the thing on the box - that helps her conquer her conquer her grief by empowering her to help others. Each stage is the mind of a different character experiencing some kind of trauma or despair: a snowy mountain representing a girl who lost her sister and is unable to love, the aforementioned Escheresque nightmare of staircases folding on themselves representing an artist trapped by the pressure for artistic growth. Their stories are told through ornate, stylized prerendered cutscenes. Once you help them defeat the manifestations of their despair, you join them in a dance sequence that (sap that I am) brought a tear to my eye more than once. Understanding the pain of others is the best tool for overcoming our own despair.

Balan Wonderworld is one of my favorite games I have ever played. The discrediting and imprisonment of its creator lends the quality of an elegy--for a man, for an era, for a design sensibility unfettered by convention and expectations--that underscores the reality of the pain it depicts, and the desperate need for the hope and resilience we can find by sharing it.