And so comes to a close my latest journey through a Ratchet & Clank game, and it's also the last of the pre-reboot games (well, at least the big budget, physically released ones by Insomniac). I got most of the collectibles, but not quite all. This game was just so fun to play, I didn't mind hunting around for the large majority of them, and I even checked out the whole of the in-game museum~. It took me around 15 hours to beat the Japanese (mostly) version of the game.
This game picks up sorta where Tools of Destruction leaves off, but more technically where the digital exclusive Quest for Booty leaves off, with Clank kidnapped by the Zoni and Ratchet off looking for him. Clank wakes up to find the recently returned Dr. Nefarious (from the third game) attacking the Great Clock, a giant complex that keeps time and space from ripping themselves apart. Ratchet still hasn't quite found Clank, but he knows where to look, and the story hops between both of their narratives before their final reunification. The story of this game is something I would call a step down from the previous game (and if you want 2700+ words on why I think that, you can read about it here), but it's still fine on the whole, save for how this is easily the R&C with some of the most poorly aged humor (a lot of really exhaustingly unfunny "oh look at what nerds they are" non-jokes as well as easily the most casual transphobia the series has ever had XP). Gameplay-wise, this is easily the strongest the series had ever been up to this point. The platforming action that returned in ToD is back again here, and its bolstered even more with some semi-open world spaceship flying. Actually fun spaceship flying is back once more! You can fly around a 2D plane in each system you're in, going between the major planets as well as small moons that are either platforming or combat challenges that you can do for extra goodies. You can collect lost Zonis to upgrade your ship (and you'll also need to to progress the story), and there are also a good deal of little side quests to do. These spaceship segments are good fun, and a good way to break up Ratchet's platforming and action, which are as fun as ever. There are also a bunch more very fun guns in this game too, including one which I think is my new favorite. It's basically a burp gun, and you need to time when you fire it to get the biggest possible burp (and therefore the most AOE and damage out of it). While Ratchet does his platforming and shooty-bang-gun stuff better than ever, Clank is off exploring the Great Clock, and he actually gets a bunch of unique mechanics to do it. Clank solo segments have been in just about every R&C game that Insomniac has done, but this is easily the best they've ever been and they've never felt nearly so mechanically or narratively justified. Clank is the keeper of the Great Clock, and therefore a keeper of time, so his segments are made up of some relatively simple action segments, but also a bunch of time-based platforming puzzles. You play through two to four "recordings" of Clank to simultaneously operate parts of puzzle rooms to open the door at the opposite end. They have a really good difficulty curve to them, and never quite out stay their welcome. More straightforward action segments and platforming parts also intersperse between them to give his segments a good sense of pacing. They're not nearly as long as Ratchet's segments, but they're a great and very clever spin on what has usually been a pretty underwhelming series staple up to this point. The presentation is a pretty mixed bag, and honestly the biggest black mark on the game. Visually and musically, the game is great. It looks really clean and pretty, and the art style is good. This is also another R&C game with a pretty solid musical score, and is much closer to the previous Future game than the original series in how good it is. The audio balancing, however, is borderline unacceptable in just how poor it is. I said at the start that I played through the "mostly" Japanese version of the game, and that's because I switched over to English audio about a third of the way through the game because I was sick of just not understanding anything. Not only is this yet ANOTHER R&C game with no subtitles for the large majority of the dialogue, but the directional audio is completely broken. Voices are often far far too quiet to hear unless the camera's perspective is directly on top of them, so Ratchet facing a character is actually one of the worst ways to hear them, paradoxically enough. Even in English, I had a consistently difficult time actually understanding what characters were saying, and it's frankly shocking how it was able to launch in this state. It's far from a deal breaker, but it makes what story is there so much more frustratingly difficult to enjoy. Verdict: Recommended. This is a bit of a weird one to recommend because while it is VERY fun to play, the writing also falls so consistently flat. I wanna say that the writing isn't THAT bad, but I also wrote over 2700 words about how poorly done it is (and that's not even mentioning just how poorly so much of the comedy has aged), so clearly I have a pretty meaningful problem with it XD. If you're someone who can safely ignore story in games, I think this is an easy suggestion to grab as a PS3 exclusive action platformer, and even then, it's fun enough to play that I think most people who enjoy action platformers will be able to look past its faults and have a good time with it regardless.
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An Underwhelming Future: A Critique of Narrative in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time9/29/2020 The soft conclusion to the Insomniac’s original Ratchet & Clank (R&C) series, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time (ACiT) is the capstone of a decade of work for one of Sony’s biggest stars. While it’s very ambitious in certain ways, the narrative and overall world building feel bloated and occasionally self-conscious in how they’re presented. The first of the Ratchet & Clank Future games really upped the ante in terms of not just the gameplay but the storytelling of Ratchet & Clank. Its sequel, however, is littered with fumbles that ultimately keep it from surpassing the relatively high bar set by its predecessor.
Ignoring the awkward misstep that is Ratchet: Deadlocked (which has barely any story to speak of), Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (ToD) is largely a sequel to Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (R&C3) despite the changed naming scheme. Dr. Nefarious, while far more memorable than past R&C villains, still has fairly simple motives for doing what he’s doing. Tachyon, however, manages to fill the gap between serious and campy in the role of ToD’s antagonist. He’s still a silly-voiced weirdo, but he actually has compelling reasons for what he’s done and what he plans to do. His goals are certainly evil and selfish, but what’s important is that they’re also nearly identical to Ratchet’s: Tachyon wants the Dimensionator to bring back the Cragmites (a banished race of which he is the last), and Ratchet wants it to bring back the Lombaxes (a banished race of which he is the last). Both the hero and his antagonist want the same machine to undo history and bring back their people to the galaxy. A people neither of them have ever met, but a people that each thinks will fill their lives with a sense of belonging that was impossible up until this point. The climax of Ratchet’s character arc is when he has to sacrifice the possibility of fulfilling this desire to accomplish the need of saving the galaxy from Tachyon and his fellow Cragmites. It doesn’t shut the door to Ratchet meeting up with his people in the future, but he’s sacrificing personal happiness now for the good of everyone, because he knows that allowing others to suffer to fuel his own happiness makes him no better than Tachyon. It’s not a masterful work of fiction, but it’s a solid and compelling story with high stakes and a moral at the end. In ACiT, the narrative starts where ToD leaves off, with Clank having been kidnapped by the mysterious aliens known as the Zoni. They show him where he originally came from to help him fulfill his destiny. Ratchet sets off on a journey to find him and along the way ends up meeting General Alister, a Lombax left behind when the rest of the Lombaxes used the Dimensionator to escape the Cragmites long ago. Dr. Nefarious is also back, and he’s here to try for the same goal as everyone else: the Great Clock. Clank’s father (the alien that created him) has established him as the caretaker of this great machine in the center of the universe. The Great Clock is meant to stabilize the universe to keep time and space from literally ripping themselves apart. However, it could also be used as a time machine, and that’s why everyone wants to use it. Once again, we have a machine that can rewrite history (literally, this time) that everyone wants to get their hands on. Most of Ratchet and Clanks’ respective stories take place apart, Alister is only in about one half of the narrative as well, and Dr. Nefarious is in even less (as he’s often seen from afar in cutaway cutscenes). While Clank was a main character in ToD, he was very much a sidekick to Ratchet, and Ratchet was the main driver of that story. All of this adds up to mean that ACiT has: two main protagonists, a protagonist that turns antagonist (Alister), and a primary antagonist in Dr. Nefarious all wanting the same selfish thing, and this story is ultimately how their motives come to blows. Doubling the number of protagonists and antagonists isn’t necessarily a recipe for disaster, but ACiT fails where ToD succeeded for various big but interconnected reasons. ---- #1) Justification: The narrative never gives a compelling enough justification for each of the characters continuing to chase what they supposedly are willing to risk everything to obtain. The story makes very clear to each character, either through first-hand or second-hand communication, that trying to use the Great Clock as a time machine will break it and destroy the universe. There isn’t any element of probability to that warning either. It just simply will destroy the universe if used that way. This means that the choice on whether to try and use it for that is incredibly simple. Both Ratchet and Clank want to use it to save their respective parents, but what good are parents if the entire universe is destroyed? Dr. Nefarious has the baffling idea to recreate the universe in a mold where the bad guys always win and heroes always lose, and putting aside the fact that simple time travel doesn’t make that make sense as a concept, it still just makes him foolish for pursuing it because it will destroy the universe. Alister wants to use it to bring back the Lombaxes, just like Ratchet does, but the only difference between them is that Ratchet correctly realizes that destroying the entire universe is a bad trade off for doing anything. While the story does actually have the player go back in time at several points to change the past in minor events to your favor, it hand-waves away those events as reality-destroying disruptions. It is constantly unambiguous in regards to how using the Great Clock as a time machine will definitely destroy the universe, and that nearly occurs in the climax when Alister storms the Great Clock’s control room. In ToD, the stakes were happiness at the sacrifice of everyone Ratchet knew and loved. There was a potential benefit he could be selfish and chase after should he have wanted to. ACiT has no such trade off. Using the Great Clock as a time machine simply will destroy the universe. It’s an utterly uncomplicated moral decision that makes Alister look just as bad as Dr. Nefarious with how carelessly he disregards this unshifting warning from the maker of the Great Clock. It weakens the stakes of the story in regards to character motivations, and makes the character arcs as a whole fall far flatter than ToD’s did. #2) Setup and Payoff: With both Ratchet and Clanks’ respective motivations being about using a universe-destroying machine to find their families, the overall plot of ACiT leans very close to a retelling of ToD’s story. This being the case, the narrative has two obvious options it can take: either 1) have the same moral ending again, or 2) subvert those expectations and have a different message. ACiT not only picks both and neither of those options, but it also avoids a conclusion to the story simply for the sake of it. ACiT picks option number 1 through General Alister. Alister storms the Great Clock and tries to rewind history all the way back to before the Lombaxes lost the war to the Cragmites to try and save them from destruction. This proceeds to begin tearing the Great Clock and the universe apart, just as he had been warned countless times that it would. He has a change of heart at the last second and sacrifices himself to stop his bad decision and stops Ratchet from saving himself instead. He sacrifices his want of saving the Lombaxes for the need of saving the universe just like Ratchet did in the last game. However, unlike how it’s framed in the narrative when Clank tells Ratchet “He did a brave thing,” this is nothing like how Ratchet acted in the last game. There was no selfish alternative to saving the universe. The alternative was just letting the universe be destroyed after he should’ve known better than to not start destroying it. On top of all of that, this is all after Alister disappears for a while and conveniently forgets that Ratchet already made it very clear that he didn’t want to destroy the universe trying to save the Lombaxes. Alister gets angry at Ratchet all over again for a jarring replay of an emotional conflict between them that has already been shown, and all for the sake of a very rushed redemption arc for Alister. It’s a weak attempt to recapture the message made at the climax of the previous story, and it reads as more confusing than heroic. At the drop of a hat, Alister turns from unflinching zealot to a totally selfless hero. With how headstrong the narrative has shown him to be, a more logical outcome for Alister would’ve been to deny that he was in the wrong until the very end. Instead, the game attempts to lionize his foolishness simply because he changed his mind right before death. Alister begins as a character with a lot of potential to be a compelling foil to Ratchet, but the poor justifications for why he’s doing what he’s doing ruin any character arc he might’ve had. ACiT also picks option number 2, to have a different ending, by ignoring the obvious and better choice it’s been alluding to since ToD. Ratchet is trying to find his family and where he belongs, and Clank is with him every step of the way. The narrative really feels like it’s leading up to the realization that they don’t need to find any new family or any new place they belong, because they already have each other. With one another is where they belong. That’s why they’ve been trying to find each other the entire game. That’s why they’re best friends and brothers in arms. They even share a big hug when they’re finally reunited at the game’s midway point (where in ToD they only do a no-homo fist bump). That would’ve been a fine ending to the story that ToD started and ACiT continued, but that isn’t where the writers at Insomniac took it. Upon defeating Alister and saving the universe, Ratchet bids Clank a farewell as Ratchet prepares to let Clank fulfill his destiny as the caretaker of the Great Clock. But Clank has a change of heart. Stating that he can’t be with his family (the digital representation of his dead father that lives within the Great Clock) until Ratchet finds his own, Clank rushes off to join him after giving the role of caretaker to the Great Clocks’ only other occupant. This ending is not only not a conclusion to the story. It also seems to suddenly frame Ratchet & Clank’s entire friendship with one another as a very utilitarian and toxic one. If Clank is really only joining Ratchet to help him find the Lombaxes through some possible 3rd universe-destroying machine, this ending implies that it’s because he just views himself as a tool to his friend. The narrative has this frustrating insistence on pushing this as their end goal despite repeatedly implying that the characters are learning that it isn’t actually important. Despite two adventures pointing towards the fact that finding the Lombaxes isn’t actually what will make Ratchet feel accepted and fulfilled, it keeps repeating that he whole-heartedly believes this, and this stubborn refusal to let the character grow and learn the lesson directly in front of his face makes this story’s conclusion feel not just unfulfilling but outright confusing. #3) Tonal Dissonance and Inefficient Storytelling: This problem isn’t as intertwined as the last two, but it’s still a massive problem that underlines the entirety of the narrative. ACiT has a real problem with tonal whiplash in both its dialogue and its themes. This, combined with very inefficient storytelling, makes the story out stay its welcome while simultaneously hurrying to its conclusion far too quickly. The entire game feels like it’s stuck squarely between the silliness of the old R&C games and the more serious take put forward by ToD. As discussed with problems #1 and #2, ACiT does try to touch on some serious topics with its story, albeit similar ones to ToD. However, what ACiT has that ToD lacked is a horrible bloat of extraneous races and characters. The races of the Terachnoids, Fongoids, Argonians, Vullards, and Valkyries feel very shallow, with most of their appearances dedicated to being exhaustingly not funny. Although issues with humor can be chalked up to the decade of time passing since this game came out, it can’t so much be hand-waved away when it occupies so much of the game’s body of text. Lord Vorselon, Dr. Nefarious’ #2 in command, feels almost entirely superfluous in the narrative and only really seems to be there to be someone other than Nefarious for you to fight occasionally. As discussed in Problem #2, even Dr. Nefarious’ motives are so superficial that you could make the story about the Argonians simply causing chaos because they can and it fundamentally wouldn’t change at all. While Tachyon had a legitimate grudge against Ratchet in ToD, Ratchet and his allies also had legitimate grudges against Tachyon, and it made for a more engaging story. The pile of side characters in ACiT serve mostly to enhance the gameplay at the severe detriment to the narrative. Nowhere do I think this issue of humor at the expense of depth is more represented than in how Captain Qwark’s chance for redemption is so brashly thrown away. Captain Qwark, the cowardly, narcissistic, self-proclaimed hero has always been the butt of jokes in the R&C games since the beginning. He has often played at least some role in the plot, but at the end of the day he never really does much more than simply get in the way or make things worse out of his incompetence. This is even the case in ToD, where he unwittingly delivers the Dimensionator straight to Tachyon. In ACiT, however, Qwark actually comes along for the adventure at several points and is instrumental in Ratchet’s reunification with Clank. In removing Clank from Ratchet’s side and so often replacing him with Qwark, Insomniac gave Qwark more pathos than he’s ever had before. They give him the chance to, for once in his life, stand up and really be the hero he so often claims to be. However, similarly to how Alister is forgotten from the narrative for nearly a third of the story, such is the fate of Qwark. Despite finally learning to risk his own hide to save the day, he’s reduced to being a silly, after-credits joke where he’s alone on an asteroid being mauled by a monster forever. Rather than give Qwark the chance to actually finish out the series by doing something important or at least finding some shred of self respect, he is used as a narrative device to get Ratchet information that he needs and then carelessly discarded when he’s no longer needed. They don't even have him ever face off against Dr. Nefarious (a character here almost entirely for fan service), a character who is ostensibly his nemesis. Insomniac don’t write a totally serious game, nor do they even indulge in the easy fan service they allow themselves, and it makes for a game with more than a bit of an identity crisis. ---- To be completely fair, Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time isn’t actually the last piece of the pre-reboot R&C timeline. That honor goes to the short downloadable-only game Ratchet & Clank: Enter the Nexus. In that game, Ratchet is finally given the narrative conclusion of realizing that he has more to live for with Clank than he does with other Lombaxes. However, I do not believe that that excuses the sins of ACiT’s storytelling. Each entry in a larger serialized story should be, at least to some extent, a fulfilling story in and of itself, even though it is ostensibly part of a larger story. ACiT’s overly derivative plot, careless character writing, and horribly confused pacing sully what is easily the strongest of the games mechanically up to that point. It makes for a very underwhelming narrative in what would turn out to be Ratchet & Clank’s last big game on a console for the next seven years. If ToD showed that Insomniac can write a compelling narrative for a R&C game, ACiT shows just how disinterested they are in actually pursuing that goal. This is sorta a replay, sorta not. I've beaten Mario Galaxy before, but not only have I never beaten it with 121 stars (let alone also getting 121 stars on the Super Luigi Galaxy mode as well), but this was also played on the Switch's Super Mario 3D Collection. There's enough difference there (and it's also been like 13 years since I last played this) that I figured it was fair enough to call this one not a repeat playthrough, certainly given other things I've also qualified as "not repeats" XD. I don't know the exact time, but I reckon it took me around 25 or so hours to 100% both the Super Mario Galaxy and Super Luigi Galaxy modes in the Japanese version of the game.
The premise for the story is that it's the star festival, where a comet that passes by every century drops tons of shooting stars down onto the Mushroom Kingdom. Bowser and his fleet of airships crash the party, steal Princess Peach's whole heckin' castle, and disappear off into the sky. Mario tries to give chase up the castle, but Kamek blows him away into the stars. He's found by Rosalina (or "Rozetta", as she's called in Japanese), and she gives Mario the power of a Luma ("Chiko", in Japanese), baby stars, in order to defeat Bowser and save Peach. Bowser already stole the Grand Stars that power her spaceship, aka the "comet" that causes the star festival in the first place, so she has a vested interest in helping kick Bowser's butt outside of just helping our hero. The story and premise are very light, as with most Mario games, but compared to Sunshine, there's a bit less overall character to the game. The Lumas and little aliens you meet are charming, but are more or less just set dressing or tutorial-giving machines rather than little characters you can briefly talk to. I don't think that's an awful thing (it's not like Isle Delfino was a well of well-written narrative, after all), but it's something worth mentioning. The writing does what it has to to set the tone and the stakes and push you along to your adventure asap. Mario Galaxy's overall design is, I feel, a clever response to the poor mission design that bogs down so much of Mario Sunshine. Rather than invest so much time into creating these larger maps that will change slightly for six or eight different missions there, there are instead a bunch of groups of planetoids that house these sets of missions. Mario goes from planetoid to planetoid, messing with gravity and spin-jumping around, to do each mission, and this helps easily create variety in even the same "world" since very often the three main missions of a world won't even visit most of the same areas in each. It keeps each mission feeling different from the others, even in the same worlds, and helps to keep up the pace of gameplay. Also present in each of the larger worlds are (usually) three extra stars. One is a hidden star that the game will tell you the mission its present in after you beat the main three, one is a wandering comet, and one is a purple coin comet. The hidden stars are usually an extra little side-area you get by feeding a hungry luma, and they aren't often that hidden. They're often easily spotted or stumbled across playing a level normally. The wandering comets are special variants on a mission you've already done. They range from a time attack, to a sudden death (one hit and you're dead) challenge, to sped up enemies, to a race against Shadow Mario (or Luigi). They're a fantastic improvement to the secret stars in Sunshine that were so often simply red coin trials in the formerly Fludd-less areas, and it's one more thing to help keep the action fresh. The purple coin comets only appear after you beat the game, and they're this game's take on 100 coin stars. They give you a section of that world (sometimes somewhere you've been, sometimes somewhere totally new) where 100 purple coins are scattered around in and you've gotta collect 'em. There are untimed ones, which are largely scavanger hunts for all 100 purple coins, and they're endurance tests of your time and skill (normal healing coins are quite rare in these, so 3 hits is usually all you get before you gotta start over). Then there are timed ones, which usually have 100 or 150 coins spread out over a perilous obstacle course, and those ones were my favorites out of all the comet challenges. The comet challenges do create a kind of haze/filter over the screen corresponding to the color of the comet (like the galaxy is passing through the comet's tail), which can be quite annoying at times, but that's nothing major. The purple coin challenges aren't always the best thing in the world, but I think they're a good idea to try and spice up the otherwise not terribly exciting 100 coin challenges of the previous two games. Control-wise, Mario is much more back to his Mario 64-self, but not entirely. First and foremost, Mario moves noticeably more stiffly than he has in the previous two games. It's hardly a game breaker, and it's something I adapted to very quickly, but there are a few things that make this a tough transition if you'd just played another Mario game. Most notably, you need to wait until you're actually skidding on the ground to do a backwards flip jump, and it takes a while to re-learn that timing from just how immediately they can be performed in Sunshine and Mario 64. The planetoids can also cause their own unique issues, especially on the smaller ones. Occasionally you can get stuck in little circles and you'll need to stop moving and start again, because between the camera angle and gravity, Mario can't quite figure out which way you want him to go. Outside of those infrequent problems, Mario controls great. No more Fludd, so you can once again do things like long-jumps, and those are really fun to do on the smaller planetoids. Just launch yourself forward and get FLUNG with gravity X3. Mario also has his new spin-attack from the Luma helping him out, and this is both a kind of AOE punch move as well as a tiny double-jump you can perform in mid-air. It allows you to do some fairly silly platforming at times if you combine it with high jumps and/or wall-jumps, and it makes platforming around and trying to sequence break lots of fun. Once you get all 120 stars (that last one is a final secret) in Mario's mode, you can unlock the ability to replay the game as Luigi, who controls slightly differently. As is so often the case with Luigi, he has less ground friction but moves faster and jumps higher. All of the game's challenges are designed with Mario in mind, with some exceptions, which means those higher jumps and speed can make some levels way easier, but the lower friction on your feet means it can also make some challenges a fair bit harder. The only levels outright unique to Luigi's mode are his Shadow Luigi levels, where he races a Shadow Luigi, and those levels are often quite a bit harder than the Shadow Mario stages, since Shadow Luigi REALLY knows how to use Luigi's move set to the best of his ability, and you'll have to learn to as well if you wanna beat him~. In terms of the Mario 3D Collection on Switch and how that plays and changes things, I think it's the best piece of that collection. Mario Galaxy looks really nice up-scaled to run properly in HD, and the way they've made the game work on a Pro Controller is great too. You can still shake the controller to spin-attack, but you can also simply press the Y button instead. The pointer is also just bound to the gyro inside your controller, and you can press R whenever to recenter that to the middle of the screen. For someone like me who really doesn't like using the Wiimote and Nunchuk to play games, this is an excellent upgrade to Galaxy that is very much appreciated. Finally, there's the presentation, which I absolutely adore. I love how colorful everything is, I love how cute the Lumas are, and I especially love the music. The pretty orchestral soundtrack really grabs your attention in a lot of tracks, which my personal favorites being the main theme, the theme for the purple coin collecting missions, and both of Bowser's themes during the final boss fight. Yet another mainline Mario game that absolutely does not disappoint in the graphics and sound department <3 Verdict: Highly Recommended. Before this replay, I thought Galaxy was just okay, but this has really given me a huge re-evaluation of the game. It's certainly no Odyssey, and it's also no Mario 3D World, but it's definitely my favorite of the Mario games that had been made up to that point. The 3D Collection is also a fantastic way to play it that I highly recommend (if the price point doesn't shy you away from it ^^;). And so my journey through the Crash PS1 games via streaming them on Twitch comes to a close. I had been looking forward to this one since last week, and it didn't disappoint~. I didn't even try for 100% after the slog that was doing that with Crash 2 last week, so it only took me about 2 and a half hours to get through the Japanese version of the game.
Crash 3 picks up just around where Crash 3 left off, with the blown up Cortex Vortex crashing down to Earth after blowing it up at the end of the previous game. It happens to crash into an ancient ruin where Aku Aku (Crash's friendly mask friend) sealed his evil rival Uka Uka eons ago, freeing him to run rampant once more. He teams up with Cortex to try and N. Tropy to build a time machine to collect power stones from across history and the future to try and rule the world, and it's up to Crash to stop him. Once again it's all fully voice acted, and it's good quality silliness interspersed throughout your adventure, usually Cortex & Uka Uka or also sometimes that world's boss taunting you. They're all very extra and make the romp through the game that much more silly and fun. Gameplay-wise, it's both a refinement and an augmentation to how Crash 2 handled things in many ways. Crash himself controls similarly, but has has his movement tightened up that much more compared to Crash 2 and it feels just that little bit better. There are also returning alternate stage types, such as the animal riding segments, but there are also new ones like bike racing, jet skiing, and biplane flying. The bike racing is a bit too difficult compared to the rest of it all, but other than that, they're fun diversions from the good platforming stuff, and the fact that you often get to play as Crash's sister Coco during a lot of the vehicle sections is also fun. There are 25 base stages across five worlds, and each world has its own boss. There are also several hidden stages, like in Crash 2, that are accessed through similarly arcane and otherwise nigh-completely hidden means, like in Crash 2. Although unlike in Crash 2, I don't believe any of those hidden levels dump you back into previous stages. Also like in Crash 2, there is a power stone to collect in each level, but they're barely hidden like they were in the last game occasionally. They feel almost pointless with how easy they are to find, and just finishing the stages would be an equivalent difficulty. Also like the other Crash games, there are diamonds to collect in each stage, either hidden behind breaking every box in the level or by discovering an alternate path. It's the same platformer-meets-collectathon thing that the other two games have, and it's refined that much more to be a little more forgiving and more fun. Something a good deal less forgiving and more difficult, however, are the time trials that are now in every stage. Like it would later be in Crash Team Racing, it's going through a stage but all the boxes normally there are now numbered, and each one you break freezes the clock for that many seconds. Crash 2 had a couple secrets hidden behind time trials, but these are the genuine article, and the whole game is designed around them. This also means that every level was designed with the intention of being easily sped through, which means the levels as a whole feel like they have a much better rhythm to them than the previous games, and you can get a really good flow going far more often than the other games allowed you to do. The time trials themselves aren't really my thing, but I think their inclusion makes Crash 3's level design easily the best out of the 3 games because of how it influenced the stage design. However, there is also a little bit of a unique weakness to Crash 3 in how it uses those time trials. After beating every boss (including Cortex & Uka Uka at the end), you get a new power to expand Crash's move set. This includes a bigger area on your belly slam, a double jump, a run button on L2, and even a bazooka with unlimited ammo. With the exception of the bazooka, these serve to underline the design of following stages, with the run button especially intended for time trials. However, the bazooka sorta messes up the intended flow of the last world and of box 100%-ing. You need to stop to aim the bazooka, so you'd never use it for the time trials (more or less) despite how efficient and safe a way it is of defeating enemies and breaking boxes. But this trivializes a lot of the difficulty in the later stages, as do your expanded platforming abilities somewhat trivialize a lot of the difficulty of early stages upon your return to them. It's not a bad thing, per se, but the emphasis on time trials may have helped the level design, but I think it also hinders the game design to a certain extent too. In terms of presentation, Crash 3 continues Crash 2's trend of looking dramatically better than its predecessor. It's not quite the jump from 1 to 2, but it's still significant, especially on the character models. The music is also once again quite good, as is the Japan-exclusive theme song (even if it is highly derivative of the theme from the 2nd game). That theme song, the usual Aku Aku tutorial messages, and a few new incidental voice clip reactions and sprite designs are really the only things changed for the Japanese release of Crash 3. Out of the 3 Crash PS1 games, Crash 3 is easily the least changed, but it was already quite good, so it clearly didn't need those changes. Verdict: Recommended. Crash 3 has its weak points, particularly in how hit or miss the vehicle stages can be (once again), but it's easily the strongest out of the 3 PS1 Crash games. Those weak points don't ruin the experience, but they do add up for some particularly frustrating difficulty spikes from time to time (especially if you're going for 100%). I wouldn't call it a must-play or an all-time favorite of mine, but it's a fun time that's totally worth going through in an afternoon if you can pick it up for cheap. I'm a fan of kart racers. After all the mainline Crash games on PS1, I figured I may as well pick up CTR (known as Crash Bandicoot Racing here in Japan) as well since it was also just a couple bucks. I beat the main story mode in about 3 or so hours, and then went and did a bunch of time trials and a few medal missions over the course of another 3 or 4 hours.
The story of the game is fairly simple. An alien named Nitros Oxide comes to Earth and claims to be the fastest racer in the galaxy. If no one can beat him in a race, then he'll enslave everyone on the planet and take over. In response, a bunch of the cast of the Crash games build their own karts, (in some cases) learn how to drive, and gear up to see who among them is the fastest so they can challenge Nitros. It's a silly, not terribly present story, but it does make the game's overall construction more like Diddy Kong Racing than Mario Kart 64, as it has races against boss characters much like DKR does. As a racer, it's a pretty darn fun one. Mechanically, it's a well-put together racer, and very thankfully also has dual-shock support (as one would hope a PS1 game in 1999 would do). The most notable positive change from something like Mario Kart 64 is how you do boosting. Jumping at the top of a ledge will give you a boost upon landing, but the way grind-boosting is done has also changed from prior kart racers. Instead of just grinding for a while and then getting a speed boost, you wait until the bar in the lower right goes from green to red (or watch for the smoke coming out of your kart to go from white to black, like I did) and then press the other shoulder button to activate the boost. You can even do this trick up to 3 times per grind! It adds a lot of active thinking to racing beyond just grinding whenever you can and taking corners as well as you can, and I really liked it. The biggest negative thing in the game's mechanics I would say are the way it handles powerups. Now, for the most part, the powerups in the game are fine copies/modifications on the things Mario Kart brought to the table previously. Potions don't just slow you down like a banana peel would, they also make it so you can't use items for a while. TNT boxes don't just slow you down like a fake box would in Mario Kart, they hop on you for a while and if you hop enough yourself, you'll be able to get it off of you and not get slowed down. What I think the game really stumbles on is how you can collect Wumpa Fruit as you race. Get 10, and your powerups get even stronger. TNT boxes now become nitro crates that explode on contact. Potions now not only make it so you can't lose items, but also slow you down significantly. They seem to kinda miss the point of powerups as an equalizing force in these kinds of games, and overly reward people already doing well in a way that I find drags down the whole experience. It's far from a game breaker, but it's not a mechanic I have any love for. The game has 16 different tracks to go through its story mode with, as well as a handful of battle mode tracks (which also have associated use in the story mode) as well as time trials and versus modes of course. The story mode also has a big world map to drive around to the different tracks in, just like Diddy Kong Racing has. The time trails are kinda weird, as it's not just racing fast through the courses (at least in the adventure mode). There are boxes with numbers on them littering the course, and hitting that box will freeze the countdown clock for that many seconds, meaning you're not just racing through the tracks quickly, but quickly and precisely (though the game does have normal time trials and "ghosts" to compete against as well). It's a neat take on time trials to give the story mode a bit more to do, and the battle courses have similar "collect all the things within the time limit" aspects to their inclusion in the single-player mode as well. There are also medal challenges in the story mode's normal tracks, which involve not only winning the race, but also going to shortcuts and out of the way parts of the track to collect big 'C', 'B', and 'R' letters (the title acronym), which adds another element of challenge to races you've probably gotten pretty good at by now. The only really negative part of the story mode is the boss races, something that CTR takes from DKR and fails to really make any more fun than they already aren't in that game. The concept of the boss tracks is that they serve as gates between the differently themed areas in the world map, and there are five of them in total (and if you do a BUNCH of the extra content, you can even unlock most of those guys as playable characters if you're keen to). They're one-on-one racers on a track from that area, but they're not against big animals like they are in DKR. They're against boss characters from Crash who race like normal racers. The bosses have really strong rubber banding and also infinitely spawn powerups behind them whenever they're ahead of you. However, the prize boxes on these levels also very frequently give you triple packs of rockets (this game's red shell), so a lot of these races comes down to not very fun one-v-ones trying to dodge powerups and then rocketing them close enough to the finish line that they won't have time to rubber band ahead of you. These are easily the worst parts of the game, and it's just a small mercy that they're not super hard due to all the rockets. As far as changes between the English and Japanese versions of the game, there really aren't many. Those that are here are cosmetic and mostly found immediately, namely the change to the title (now it's CBR instead of CTR), the new title screen, and the new title screen music (as all the other PS1 Crash games have in Japan). Other than that it's clumsily integrated rumble support and a few very minor cosmetic changes, like all the trophy girls having their eye colors changed to brown. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's not my new favorite kart racer or anything, but it's a damn good racing game, and certainly one of the best to ever try and steal Mario Kart's thunder from this era. The mistakes it takes and innovates on from other racing games of the time are unfortunate, but they're minor enough that they don't come close to ruining the entire experience. The positives to this game easily outweigh the negatives, and this is a game I can easily recommend to anyone who likes racers (even over the remake, because this one isn't bogged down with crappy, post-launch micro-transactions). After beating the Japanese version of Crash 1 on stream last week, this week I beat the Japanese version of Crash 2 on stream~. It took a little longer, at more like a little over 4 hours, but that extra time was moslty due to messing around trying to get full completion on levels as I went through them. I then spent another 4-5 hours getting 100% in the game. It was an experience I won't soon forget, but also one I'll probably not soon repeat. At any rate, it was an entertaining use of a Sunday XD
Crash 2 picks up almost literally where Crash 1 leaves us: with Cortex's little flying bike having JUST been blown up by Crash and him plummeting towards the ground. In an underground cave he comes across a crystal (localized to Japanese as "power stones), and hatches a plot most evil(?). The plot then jumps forward a year as Cortex is working with N. Jin in an orbiting space station that is being powered by the crystal. Cortex needs the other 25 power crystals out there in order to power his Cortex Vortex and "save the world." But with none of his henchmen on the planet anymore, he kidnaps Crash's sister to manipulate him into helping him. Of course, all is not as it seems, and Cortex actually is going to take over the world with his machine, not save it, and you need to defeat him. However, upon his defeat, the orbiting Cortex Vortex stays in tact, and you need to collect all 42 diamonds (100%-ing the game) in order to see it finally destroyed. The story is campy, silly set dressing for a platformer game, and it's good fun. The returning characters and new characters have a lot of personality to them despite many only having a few (if any) lines of dialogue (such as my personal favorite, Pola the baby polar bear <3), and the character design is on-point as usual for the series. Aside from the more obvious addition of this game going to being fully voice-acted where the original was just text, it also has some extra cutscenes and voice lines that weren't in the original. Most of this surrounds Crash's sister Coco, who in the English version has her transmissions to Crash as mostly garbled noise, but in the Japanese version has totally understandable sentences and even one entirely new bit of expository dialogue near the end. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it's worth mentioning that it's there. Aside from that and the continued use of Aku Aku as a tutorial-giving machine upon pickup, the changes to the game compared to the English versions are very slight and come down to small technicalities around presentation or bug fixes. Crash 2 in Japanese is nearly identical mechanically to its English-language counterparts compared to how radically different Crash 1 is in Japanese. Mechanically, you're going through 25 stages (and a few hidden stages) and 5 boss fights to defeat Cortex in a very similar way to the first game but with some major improvements. Crash moves far more fluidly, and you can even use a dual-shock controller to get even a little more control than that. I found myself swapping between the D-pad and analog stick when things called for more/less precision, but it's a really nice feature to have. Crash himself controls a bit better than the first game, and the level design is on the whole more solid and far more fair, despite the crystal collecting feeling a little bit like a tacked-on mechanic more than something meaningful (you'll need to replay the stage if you miss it). Speaking of fair, the game also has a hub area between stages instead of a Donkey Kong Country-style world map, and this area lets you save and load your game WHENEVER. After the first game limited save points exclusively to the end of bonus levels, this is an absolute god-send of a mechanical change. The changes aren't that numerous on paper, but the kinder level design (although not much less steep difficulty curve, frankly) and new save system add up to make this game a far more fun time than the first for just playing through it casually. Going for 100% completion is also far more easy than the first game, mostly because in the first game if you died ONE TIME in a stage, you needed to redo the whole thing or you wouldn't be able to get all of the boxes needed to get the diamond on that stage. In this game, you maintain boxes between deaths if you hit a checkpoint, which makes going for everything far easier. However, going for 100% completion is still a proper miserable time at many points. Like the first game, this game really pushes what it could possibly expect the player to do to get 100% completion, and that includes but isn't limited to: finding invisible warp points to hidden stages, learning a level in the dark because you run out of enough light to break all the boxes in time, backtracking towards the camera in a forward-directed level to go down a different fork in the road to get more boxes you missed, and more! The game feels very vindictively designed for anyone wanting to go towards 100% completion. After I announced that I'd beaten the game this way in a Discord I'm in, a friend asked me if it had been worth it, and I can safely say now as I did then that I don't think it was XP. Crash 2 is best enjoyed just playing it normally, and I'd only recommend going for 100% if you REALLY love the game and have nothing else you could possibly be doing XD Verdict: Recommended. I'm not sure I can quite give it a highly recommended, since overall I don't feel like I liked this game THAT much better than the first game, but it's still a really significant improvement. Certainly compared to the English version, Crash 2 will likely be a far more enjoyable time than the first game, but it still hits a lot of the same awkward pitfalls the first game does in regards to awkwardness of the camera, the 3D-ish environments, and the controls from time to time. It's a fine time if you can pick it up for cheap-ish, but it will probably be best enjoyed by those who already like challenging platformers. This is a game I'd heard about ages ago, but had never thought of playing until recently. I picked it up for cheap the other day, and today seemed like a good a day as any to play through it. Despite the wonky controls, I was very happy with the time I spent with Jumping Flash, and it was a fun 1.5-ish hours of my time going through the Japanese version of this iconic early PS1 title.
The evil Baron Aloha is attacking the planet, and it's up to the robot Robbit to stop him! It's a fairly short adventure through just 18 levels, some of which are just boss fights, but what's here is good. You're either killing a boss, or you're hunting through a level for 4 carrot-shaped rocket pods to unlock the exit to the next stage. After beating a boss, you get a cute cutscene of the little squid-creature controlling it going to a little Japanese-style dive bar to complain to its buddies how it just got its butt kicked X3. The game's design is very lighthearted and silly, which serves it well. The overall presentation is really nice on the whole as well. There isn't a ton of music in the game, but there are a lot of really great tracks that I'll definitely be adding to my MP3 player before long. The visual design is also very abstract and cartoonish to fit with the low-polygon necessity of a 1995 PS1 game. The game's controls are fairly clunky, but they're very serviceable (and at times exceedingly clever) given this is a 3D platformer with no analog sticks coming out before the revelation that was Super Mario 64. You control Robbit in a first-person view, with up and down on the D-pad moving you forward and back, and right and left turning you the respective direction. Robbit can also double-jump, and upon doing your second jump, you automatically look down to get a view of your shadow so you'll know just where you're going to land. This is a really clever take on 3D platforming, and it really makes the whole game flow really well. The only real problem I encountered with the platforming is that left and right on the D-pad don't have entirely consistent functions. Sometimes they'll turn you in the mid-air of a double jump, and sometimes they'll simply turn you. It has something to do with your height of where you are in the jump, but it's still annoyingly inconsistent in a pinch. Robbit also comes equipped with lasers (I like to imagine they fire out of his eyes <3 ) as well as special weapons he can launch if he finds special weapons tokens. The combat is fine, and the bosses are good fun, especially as you can also Goomba-stomp enemies by jumping on them to hurt them (this is a really fun thing to try to rush down bosses with). That said, it's a little awkward that you need to hold L1 to stop in your tracks to look around if you wanna aim anywhere other than directly ahead of you (or directly below you, if you're post-double jump), and given that R1, R2, and R3 aren't used at ALL in the default control scheme, the lack of a button you can hold to strafe is kinda difficult to forgive, even if the game is more than easy enough to complete without it. Honestly, your jump-stomps are so good and Robbit can take so much damage that you're better off using your guns as a last resort if you even need to fight at all in the normal levels. Verdict: Recommended. It's not gonna set the world on fire, and it's a bit short, but Jumping Flash is still a really solid game despite how far 3D platforming has come since its release. It's certainly not worth paying an arm and a leg for, but if you can find it for a couple of bucks like I did, it's well worth spending an afternoon with. I first learned about this game during the unveiling of the Game Gear Micro a few months back, and then I was happy to discover that it's also on the 3DS eShop's Virtual Console. This month's Together Retro was a good enough excuse to finally use the credit I had sitting in my account to pick it up and play through it. I ended up being very pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed it, and I'm very happy with the sort of weird train of events that led to me learning about it and eventually playing it XD . It took me 7.5 hours to beat the game on the 3DS.
At its core, this is basically just another Nazo Puyo game, which were a series on the Game Gear and Master System that are preset puzzle versions of Puyo Puyo. Stages have requirements, and you have only so many pieces to meet that requirement (things like "get a 5 chain" or "match 4 colors at once" or "erase all red puyos"). There are more than 100 levels in the game, but you only need to complete 100 to complete your adventure, as there is a "pass" feature on each stage you can choose from the pause screen if you're just so stumped you wanna move on (although I believe it does cost you a life). There is also (usually) a hint on the pause screen that'll give you a kick in the right direction if you need it. One level I saw had a "hint" that was just "This is a trial. There is no hint.", and one or two levels had hints that just didn't help me nearly enough to actually beat the level, but I'm pretty proud of myself for actually managing to beat the whole thing without looking up any puzzle solutions~. The game does use a password system to return you to the last opponent you beat when you run out of lives, but I wanted to keep retrying puzzles, so I used save states at the start of each puzzle to effectively give me infinite lives. Life mechanics don't usually add that much to the experience of a game, in my opinion, and in a puzzle game that is even more so the case as far as I'm concerned. The thing that differentiates this game (and its Master System counterpart) from the other Nazo Puyo games is its presentation. It's not just a notebook you flip through to get to puzzles. It's a sort of adventure game where you play as the protagonist of the Madou Monogatari series, Aruru, as she is on a quest to go to town and get ingredients for her curry for dinner. That's it. The "Ruu" in the title is a Japanese approximation of the word "roux", which is also used to refer to curry mix. Despite the fact that Satan (the big bad of the Madou Monogatari games) himself tries to get in your way to steal your food at one point, the only stakes here are Aruru getting to make the dinner she wants X3. You go through different market squares and then a long path home, talking to different NPCs to either let you pass through or to give you the ingredients they have. They'll only oblige if you beat 5 of their Nazo Puyo puzzles, though, and 20 NPCs makes for 100 puzzles you'll need to get through. The writing is lighthearted and silly, and Aruru's interactions with the NPCs, albeit always brief, are cute asides from the puzzles. The presentation on the whole is very good, and it looked and sounded great on my New 2DS XL's big screen. There aren't a ton of music tracks, but those that are there are pretty darn good, especially the one that plays during the "boss" fights of the last two NPCs you "battle". The graphics are also very pretty, and the character designs are nice, as the Puyo Puyo games always do. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really great little puzzle game! It doesn't require any knowledge of Japanese to play aside from knowing the hints, but you'll need to look up/trial and error to figure out the level objectives, I suppose. It gave me the same kind of "I FINALLY did it!" rush a game like Baba is You has in the past, and if that's what you're looking for on your Game Gear/emulation box, then this is a great game to look into~. Like with the Ratchet & Clank games, the Crash games (and the Spyro games too, still) are iconic Sony classics that I'd always thought looked/sounded neat but had never sat down to try before. I did a bit of retail therapy for myself last Friday and got a bunch of good PS1 games for 300 yen a piece, and Crash 1 and 3 were a part of that trip (gotta still find Crash 2 XP). I polled my friends on what they wanted to see my stream last Sunday, and Crash 1 beat out Ace Combat 3 (another game I got during that trip), and I ended up playing through the entirety of the Japanese version of Crash Bandicoot 1 over the course of a little over 3 hours on stream.
The premise for Crash Bandicoot is pretty simple. Crash is an experiment of Dr. Neo Cortex who escapes, but Cortex kidnaps his girlfriend and so Crash has to defeat Cortex to rescue her. Very standard "Save the girl, save the world" kinda stuff. It's a setting that works fine for the action, and the character designs are fun (and VERY polygonal X3). The gameplay is a 3D platformer of the early 3D era, and that shows in many ways including the low polygon count mentioned earlier. The game is kind of a 3D 2D game, as you're mostly only going either forward & away from the camera, or going left and right, but you aren't ever actually running around a 3D space Mario 64-style. This can lead to some quite awkward and wonky platforming at times, but Crash has pretty tight controls and a clearly defined shadow beneath him. The biggest problem I ever had playing it was that I think the D-pad on my controller is dying ^^; I think now is time to mention the differences between the English and Japanese versions of the game (granted even the American and PAL versions have differences), as there are MANY and they are significant beyond a few new (and often not as good) music tracks. There are far more bonus stages, and that amounts to way more extra lives and way more save points. Aku Aku gives you tutorial hints in just about every level you pick him up in, so the game actually just tells you about stuff like the colored gems, keys, and tips for killing bosses. There are generally a lot more extra lives in stages, and many platforms have been widened to make the timing on many jumps far more forgiving. The level order has even been shuffled around a fair bit to give the game a smoother difficulty curve. Some levels (like the second boar-riding level) have been outright removed. All this is ultimately towards the goal of making the game easier and more enjoyable, and I think they succeeded big time in that endeavor. While some parts felt a bit wonky, the game overall had a really fair-feeling difficulty to it, and I always felt like I had enough lives to feel safe experimenting and failing (I still beat the game with over 70 lives). I'm really glad that I streamed it, because a lot of my friends watching had played the English versions before quite a bit, so I was able to get perspectives on just how different this version of the game was. Verdict: Recommended. Crash Bandicoot 1 hasn't aged perfectly, and the controls and level design will likely be quite frustrating to some (especially those who aren't fans of platformers in the first place), but I really enjoyed my time with it. The Japanese version makes the whole game's difficulty curve far more forgiving and more fun as a result. It might be heresy to some who love the original English version, but to someone who wants Crash 1 that doesn't kick your teeth in quite so hard, I think this is a great version to play. The 5th R&C game made by Insomniac, and a fairly early PS3 title, this game provides a very welcome return to form for the series after the strange, arcadey experiment that was Ratchet: Deadlocked. Not only that, but they really go above and beyond to try and imagine not just Ratchet & Clank as you've always known it, but Ratchet & Clank + a little bit more. It took me about 12 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game over the course of a couple days.
R&C Future's story starts at kind of a reset, but I mostly only mean that in terms of how this just starts with R&C hanging out in the city, repairing an old ship. It's very reminiscent of the first game in that regard, but it's notable in that this is the first Insomniac-developed game in the series not to pick up more or less directly from where we last left our heroes. They receive a distress signal from Captain Qwark as the city is suddenly under attack by a mysterious unknown force. On their way to meet Qwark, they're surrounded by these mysterious invaders and approached by their leader, the eccentric Emperor Tachyon, who informs them that not only is he only here to kill Ratchet, but that Ratchet is also actually the last of his species. They outsmart Tachyon, steal his spaceship, and end up in the system where Tachyon is originally from and embark on a quest to stop him. R&C Future's story isn't just a reset to distance itself from the not very well received Ratchet: Deadlocked. It also marks a point where Insomniac are actually trying to tell more a more engaging and developed story beyond the buddy cop comedy that usually fill the runtime of the dialogue of these games. That's not to say the game isn't funny, but it's nice to have the game actually explore the motivations of Ratchet, Clank, and even their side characters and villains in a less binary way than past games. I didn't see the day coming when I'd suddenly care about the story in a Ratchet & Clank game, but here we are! XD Mechanically, this game continues the (usually) consistent upward trend of each game improving on the last one. After four games you can FINALLY use the shoulder buttons to lock on and fire, meaning you can actually play without claw-handing the controller to hit both the face buttons to fire as well as using the right stick to turn. The guns are also a great balance of "situational" and "just damn good" that makes them all really fun to use (and you'll probably need all that firepower to survive, really). Ratchet also still plays great, the Clank sections are more fun than they've ever been before, and the Star Fox-esque spaceship parts are actually really fun. Most of the other games have at least one "oh heck, this part" moment, but R&C Future really doesn't and I love it. The game is pretty hard though, and I was routinely surprised at just how much damage I would take during the occasions I'd get hit ^^; This is another R&C game, like 3, that actually has some pretty darn good music in it. My personal favorite was the pirate level theme, but overall I felt this game had a few more memorable tracks than the past games have. It's also a very pretty game, having a simple yet effective art style despite being such an early PS3 game. It has a physics system and some destructible terrain, which honestly feel more like they tax the PS3's CPU than anything (the intro level especially having some very noticeable framerate issues), but the game generally runs just fine despite the occasional enemy getting caught in a wall when it dies. Only once did I ever have to save and load due to a flag to progress not triggering, and that's an acceptable margin of error for me. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Ratchet & Clank land onto the PS3 generation in a big splash and an excellent return to form. It has me super excited to play the next one, which I've heard is even better in just about every way. You don't need to play the previous games at all to appreciate this one, as Captain Qwark is really the only returning character who isn't one of the titular characters Ratchet & Clank, and this is probably one you can find under $10 that will be well worth your time if you like action platformers. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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