Wonder Flower gimmicks are cute until they turn repetitious, which they do by the end of World 2. The badges largely make up for a lack of platforming aptitude which, as a seasoned gamester, means I have to play the game wrong to accommodate their use. But I'm not gonna unlearn my Mario skills so I don't remember to use them outside of when they are clearly necessary for side objectives like an over-polished immsim. You mean I should use the Dolphin badge on the levels right after I got it? Wowee Zowee!

Broadly speaking this feels like an attempt to teach the kids that grew up with the Switch what Mario is about. The hypersleek UI elements, mountains of spoken text as a replacement for other markers of design intent, the badges, the Wowee Zowee, the oodles of characters, the gacha elements of the standees, the multiple currencies (and decimalisation of Flower coins to further litter the field with shinies), the little emojis, the lack of points. These additions and subtractions are by no means bad but I won't lie, it feels a little like I'm playing a AAA game from the 2020s. Because I am. It's hard to read Wonder as a creative reinvention and reinvigoration of Mario because I know it took thousands of people to make this. That every decision was subject to board meetings and focus groups. It's the same problem as your New Super games -- the formula must be adhered to. And even if the formula changes, it's still a formula. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I look for at this point in my life.

I'll keep playing it, I'll probably finish it. It's like a Coca-Cola Creation, y'know? You see it on the shelf, you think 'what the hell do '+XP' or 'Starlight' taste like, the first sip is novel and enchanting, before long you're still drinking Coke. If I want true innovation, I'll reach for the local-made can of kombucha flavoured with some berry I've never heard of before. Like Haskap. Uhhh, for the purposes of this analogy I guess the random shit I pick up on Steam and itch.io are the kombucha.

And I gotta say, I'm sorry but I can't hear the Mario Gang say Wowee Zowee without having flashbacks to Game Grumps Kirby Super Star Part 2 where Jon and Arin argued for like a minute straight over whether or not Arin had said Wowee Zowee before. Back then life was so simple. I was so young. Games held so much potential. Eleven years, gone in the blink of an eye. In another life, I'm the Mario Wonder kid, growing up on a Switch. Who could have known things would turn out the way they did, that I'd be the person I am today...

Feels like a rebrand to cover up some controversial past half the time.

WOAH JUST LIKE GAME GRUMPS 😱

A surprisingly tight and well-rounded platformer, probably one of the better offerings of the PS1 3D jump-and-collect games.

What sets Lost in Time apart is how it uses its licensing and brand. You can tell Behaviour Interactive watched a lot of Bugs Bunny cartoons to nail the tone, character and look of those shorts (especially the look, game looks wonderful). And if (like me) you grew up watching these shorts, Lost in Time really does let you "play" these episodes.

I found the sound effects to be a real underrated aspect of this game in building that Looney Tunes world. Just some cracking slap-stick nosies, taken from the shorts throughout the game. Carrots are now my favourite "coin" to collect. Really good crunch noise. Bugs Bunny also has some great screams throughout the game. (if you get picked up by the pterodactyl in the stone age make sure you hit the square button to hear Bugs go "WHOOOOAHH!!". didn't discover this til much later in the game.)

Its time travel premise also gives it free reign to pull from a variety of iconic Looney Tunes shorts. Things like: The "Duck Season/Rabbit Season" episode, the pirate Yosemite Sam ship battle where Bugs catches the cannonballs in his cannon and fires them back, the matador episode, Robin Hood Daffy, the race to put the flag on top of Planet X. Having moments like these be playable I honestly find really enriching and I couldn't help but smile, as the ACME Anvil of nostalgia crushes me into the ground.

There's also some interesting level design and progression here. The game starts with relatively linear levels, which of course eases the player in. But, as the game progresses, the levels do get more complex. A highlight being the medieval themed "What's Cookin' Doc?", which is an open-ended multi-pathed level which the player unlocks early on. To fully complete the level, they have to return multiple times with different power-ups to chip away at full completion.

Speaking of full completion, Lost in Time is let down by requiring 120 of the 124 "clock symbols" (stars) to access its final world. This was a tad too harsh for my childhood self, so I never saw the ending. As a seasoned gaming adult, the quest for 100% was actually an enjoyable romp and overall pretty smooth.

So, after almost two decades, I finally unlocked the last level of Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time. It's a cutscene.

...yeah, no final level or last hurrah. Game kinda just fizzles out, which is such a huge shame. I still give this two thumbs up to anyone who has enjoyed some Bugs Bunny or some early 3D platformers.

tl;dr it's probably better than banjo-kazooie tbh

There's "hard" and then there's "I feel like my controller isn't working."

There's "hard" and then there's "requiring such pixel-perfect precision that you're just going to be stuck."

I like hard games, but this didn't feel hard to me, it felt shitty.

Seems like a twisted joke that one of the action games from this era that ends up controlling the most fluidly is the one where you’re piloting a spider-tank- it’s the humans of this generation that you’ll need to get a license to operate. Finds a very particular balance between rigidity of tank controls and the ease of circle strafing, and combined with the ability to transition between (almost) every surface, it’s ended up being some of the most fun I’ve had just controlling a character in 3D space. Came away really liking the conspiratorial feeling of dodging enemy fire by totally inverting my angle-of-approach and entering fights by walking in on the ceiling (would love to see another game pick up where this left off).

Think the highlights are some of the densely-packed later stages, which hold up remarkably well thanks to the fact that the game will seamlessly transition from 3rd to 1st person if the area you’re in gets too cramped, and an early-game level where you’ll race against the clock to destroy explosive barrels in an open-ended environment. The timer here is tight enough that there’s some genuine decision-making in finding the best ways to cut through the level and in deciding what shot type to use: spend a few seconds and charge your lock-on or use a limited-use grenade to clear the objective? It’s a great pressure that’s surprisingly absent in the rest of the levels, free to move through them as cautiously as you want. Doubly weird given how the narrative keeps presenting these ticking clocks, with escaping suspects to catch and reactor meltdowns to avert, that have no bearing on the scenarios themselves.

Speaks to a general sense that this great movement was slotted into a game that didn’t quite know how to test it: Hard to believe that the fight against a rival Fuchikoma, which can scale walls as nimbly as you can and cycles through a number of projectile attacks that can track the player, is in the same title where so many of the bosses only entail that you circle-strafe around them and hold the lock-on button to win- not even leading their shots to throw off the player’s movement: just complete non-entities.

It’s further illustrated by its last level, a straightforward gauntlet through a bunch of enemies and a final boss that could function in almost any other action game, none of the hazards capitalizing on the unique qualities here. Probably a lot to expect from a licensed game, but the action is so far removed from any facet of the Ghost in the Shell series that I sort of wished that the devs had been able to ditch the IP entirely, free to construct whatever abstract and outlandish obstacles they wanted.

As with a lot of the middle-of-the-road arcade games I’ve talked about, the fact that its best ideas are still lying dormant isn’t some cardinal sin; start this in the evening, and let its novel movement system and pulsing DnB soundtrack hold you over till sunrise- maybe daydream about what it could be in the aftermath.

Lost in Time is an absolutely stellar b-list platformer/collectathon. It perfectly captures the look and comedy of the classic shorts that were airing on Cartoon Network at the time (they're probably still airing but I haven't had cable in years) and even the soundtrack is great and sounds like something you would've heard from the shorts.

As one would expect from something on the PS1 there's some decent clunk here and there, and some animation looks super choppy in motion but nothing that actually deters from the experience. This game also has options for plenty of different dub languages, which I only mention because as a kid I loved hearing the different voices. The pirate guys in particular (based on a guy named "Blacque Jacque Shellacque", fuckin' great name) sounded hilarious in French.

It's not exactly Spyro the Dragon or anything, but the game holds a special place in my heart regardless and I recommend it to anyone who happens to enjoy Looney Tunes and early 3D platformer games.

A thinking man's game.

When you've got a rubber butt, what happens when you rub one out too much? You would now have an empty metal butt. How else would you maneuver through the cavernous Bubsy 2-adjacent level design without a rubber?! You've got your wooden stiffy jump that flops at the most inopportune times, and you're over here trying to draw naked mermaids while getting blasted by nu metal pirates and vacuum cleaners who won't even give you the common courtesy of a reach around. Here's a tip, be quick on the draw, or eat lead as they say. Get my point?

You attempt to rub another one out, but you constantly miss your mark because what are hit boxes but a suggestion? I'll pen you one right now, or better yet a finger because fuck pens, we pencils in this bizzatch. No more monkey business from you, or it'll be a walk of the plank straight into the giant toilet. With a zillion units sold, the entire multiverse has accepted massive amounts of wood into their homes, and the brick wall industry has collapsed unto itself. The last winning effort to preserve the rain forests was one love tap from a new beloved mascot, move over Mario Andretti or whatever that jabroni's name is, because the stiff competition has found itself on top. A new pencil-necked dude with attitude has replaced the hedgedork as the head of Sega, replacing the current timeline as Nintendo is now the one who missed the mark and has found themselves rubbed out for good.

Say it! SEGAAAA!!!!!

Your favorite president is Woodrow Wilson.

I suspect that when people evangelize the good gameplay of ConqLun, they've been convinced of its quality not by the game itself but by a video essay. This is not say that they're mistaken: the tension between the versatility of the character-building and the management of limited resources (items, gold, experience, marriage partners) makes for exquisite virtual pet raising, and the map design is by far the most inspired and purposeful in the series. Rather, these are all virtues which the game consistently fails to introduce to the player, obfuscating them and encouraging a surface-level approach by which clearing the game on the higher difficulties would be impossible. Conquest is a game desperately in need of a sixty-page illustrated manual. Instead, it has fan wikis and Youtube advocates.

The Fire Emblem series was conceived as a simpler approach to strategy games for a broader audience, and to this end the series tends to hide its mechanical functions and encourage players to think in terms of archetypes. This works to great effect in easier entries like Ankoku Ryuu or Awakening, and is still tolerable in a game like Thracia which is difficult but does not demand long-term planning. ConqLun, by contrast, is almost unplayable if one does not know how its stats function, how its characters can be expected to grow, which skills are offered by certain character classes and how they work, how much reclassing the player will be able to do and when. Learning this would require either multiple tedious playthroughs of the game's Normal mode, or the reliance on external documentation taken for granted by those who enjoy it.

I wouldn't feel this frustration so acutely were my wiki-assisted run Conquest not the most fun I've had with a video game. Gradually solving each map, finding consistent solutions to problems which appeared hopeless, slowly piecing builds together and being able to approach the game in substantially different ways as a result were all thrilling. It's presented, though, as if it were still Kaga's vision of a TRPG where players can gauge how strong an enemy is by looking at its HP stat and each dead horseman's replaced by an interchangeable substitute a few maps later. It's incomplete.

Sometimes the game is about two anime characters standing in a stone hallway with two windows and talking to one another. This is the worst part of the game, but it was nice to see the Awakening kids again and kind of funny when Xander had to convince a girl to marry him by promising to be a beard for her relationship with his kid sister. The map art's extraordinary and it's a satisfying sendoff for the last console on which low-poly 3D was a necessity of the hardware.