B.O.B. had the potential to be great, but the fact it tried to be a fast, twitch-reflex shooter rather than the slow-and-steady labyrinth exploring game that it is, it falls a bit short of the mark.

Our hero has crashed his car and has to trek through numerous alien worlds to return home, with the assistance of a number of guns and gadgets. B.O.B. controls reasonably well, and some of his animations are comical, although some such as running into walls are more annoying, since they leave you open to attack. He can plough through dangers without flinching, which is both good and bad, as it allows you to Rambo through things if you're a strategy impaired person (like myself), but you have no temporary invincibility, which means occupying the same place as an enemy can kill you in seconds. B.O.B. is exceptionally fragile because of that, not to mention how long falls will leave him stunned and susceptible to enemy fire or lava pits killing him before he can recover, and to survive you're going to need substantially use of his tools; which, sadly, vanish and default to minimal uses, along with his arsenal, when he dies. When the game starts throwing projectile spewing enemies just off the corner of the screen when you're at tiny levels of health, it can truly spoil the mood, and not even the password system is enough to save it. It works as an arcade trope, but not so much when tools are essential to completing levels.

The less said about the car levels where you'd forced into a tight maze with an even tighter time limit to reach the end with mines everywhere, the better.

The visuals are kinda lacking - there's only so many tilesets for levels, along with a scant number of songs, and while B.O.B. and his fellow robots look nice and cartoony, other foes tend to have this "off" quality to them, and some levels and bosses look downright nightmarish in contrast to the very light-hearted vibe of the hero's antics. Still, despite the flaws and downfalls, I'd have to say that B.O.B. is a fairly fun game. It's a pity it never got the chance for a sequel to spruce up the better parts, cut off the unsightly blemishes and make a superior product, but what we got is satisfying enough. If you've no moral qualms with abusing savestates because Jesus Christ, that damage ratio is nuts.

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I'll skip over how the hell this came into my possession, how I've managed to play three Beavis & Butthead games but have never seen the actual show, and go straight on to say that it's a generic platformer with some amusing elements and basic gameplay, and even co-operative multi-player of sorts, but it's more of a "lol watch me hit this piranha with baseball bat" game than anything else.

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The arcade version of Captain America & The Avengers is utter bliss. 4-Player co-operative, with such distinctive heroes like Captain America, Hawkeye and Iron Man (and some guy called Vision), great challenge, and the bonus of corny voice clips ("I! CAN'T! MOOOOVE!"), it's only natural they'd port this great game to a console.

And we got this ham hock. Everything is still there; none of the levels have been cut, all the characters are still playable, and heck, even the voice clips survive partially! But everything is still butchered in some way. In the arcade, you could easily get enemies off your back with some special attacks or evasion, but enemies come up and just gang rape you of your health, with no escape except from intervention from a second player, who will likely end up as the next victim. It doesn't help that the controls are wonky, all the enemies are unbelievably cheap, and you can't seem to get enough continues or lives.

If anything, it tided me over until I discovered the arcade version, and at least the graphics and sound are still in decent shape, although only the most generic of the voices are included. Sadly, it doesn't include the heart warming game over message.

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Neither my brother or I are big fans of fighting games; we enjoy the mindless romp that is Super Smash Bros. and we still enjoy a bit of King of Fighters even though none of us know how to do special moves, but... yeah, I've no idea why we bought this.

The characters are wacky, the stages are wacky and the story is wacky, but it doesn't really make for a good game. Not that the producers were going for quality, I imagine, but it's just not that fun, y'know? Being bear-hugged to death by a jack-o-lantern doesn't really make for a fun time, even if you are a ball of goo with a face. And that's my nag: It's all wacky in looks, but the gameplay isn't! Elvis may be able to shoot lightning from his hair, but it really is just a bog-standard fighting game with wacky aesthetics. Even if they did something utterly ridiculous like making the controls like that of a racing game, accelerating and reversing and all that, that'd be slightly interesting, albeit making the game completely unplayable.

There's nothing really wrong with the game, but it's just not entirely noteworthy aside from the wackiness. If anything, at least it's finishable without the need to know special moves.

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[no review]

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I had never seen the cartoon when I bought this, and still haven't. All I knew is that it had a cartoon cat as the main character and judging from the zany antics on the cover and intro, he didn't have much luck. So I'm unsure if the oddly dark graphics, lack of jovial music, and being something other than a generic puzzle platformer is in relation with it's source material. Having never got past the first world, I don't know what the rest of the game is like, but essentially it's the Game & Watch game Manhole taken a step further, with more than just filling in as holes in the ground. Except it's not fun.

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[no review]

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This game means a dear lot to me. My father and I played it almost every day in 1994, and although we never really got far together for we were playing during his hour-long work break, we learnt how to progress further in a shorter amount of time each time, and discovering new ways to handle situations. When he would return to work, I would usually try it by myself and never get past the first level. So I was terrible and my dad did all the work, but we didn't hold that against anyone.

I imagine it's the nostalgia talking, but this is an overall excellent game, and is forever associated with any puzzle involving balls rolling out of tunnels, despite the fact it originated in A Link to the Past, I'll still be saying "so Goof Troop" every time I see it.

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The Hulk, as you can predict, is a platformer. The Hulk can punch, jump, climb ladders, and do other such platform game abilities, and faces a number of robots, people with cement mixers, and enemies from the comics. It's playable, to say the least, and it's got some nice graphics, but I simply don't find it very fun.

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[no review]

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(reviewed September 20 2009)

After the rather interesting labyrinth-exploration-style first instalment, we're then treated to the typical format of a movie licensed game: 2D platforming! Also, it's 2-player! Rather uniquely, instead of being explicitly linear, you're given a choice of six missions which you can tackle in any order you please; given the game's rather harsh difficulty and expectations from the player, this is rather grateful.

After you select a mission, you're given a briefing; admittedly, the basic goal is usually the same - reach the end, kill something or collect something, though it is valuable to know the precise details, as if you go in blind you may be a little lost. One particular stage involves seeking a raptor nest in a cave, and you do that by tracking a homing beacon which makes an audible ping; the closer you get, the faster it sounds, but how it takes a lot of trekking before it actually changes at all, it can be rather misleading. On Normal and Hard mode, each mission ends with an "emergency mission," wherein you're given a new area and objective that must be completed within a time limit, so each level is technically two in one. With a final three missions after the main six are done, that makes for fifteen levels. Not a bad amount.

2-player co-operative, a small variety of weapons and friggin' dinosaurs - what's the problem with the game? Well, it's not very forgiving. In some games I actually approve of such behaviour, like the Super Star Wars series, but I think that was "balanced" in who got to screw over who - the enemies could be cheap and needlessly difficult, but you could also get invincibility power-ups or weapons that killed everything on screen. The Chaos Continues has no such luxury, and quite literally all you have are your six weapons (three for killing, three for harmlessly defeating dinosaurs - kill too many non-raptor dinosaurs and you get a game over), a button that lets you dodge (only works with bullets, dinosaurs will still knock you down) and whatever level of reflexes you have. The two basic weapons do have infinite ammo, which is at least kinder than what B.O.B. offers, and admittedly dealing with both dinosaurs and enemy soldiers isn't exactly a hassle - it's just how the rest of the game works that causes issues.

The camera. As you can see in the screenshot, the character is placed dead centre in the screen. Pretty understandable, but the problem comes when you're progressing - enemies appear just a little bit beyond the boundaries of the screen, and they'll instantly attack the moment they're there, opening fire or pouncing at you. Considering how fast bullets and raptors are, this is a serious pain, and could easily have been solved by having the camera focus more on what's ahead while moving; there's only a few rare instances when you need to watch out for enemies approaching from behind, and given how enemies are obviously going to approach faster when you're running towards them, it only makes sense. See, you want to see where enemies are coming because health is fairly rare and is remarkably valuable - despite the fact there are enemies that carry friggin' rocket launchers, it's the flamethrower guys that will royally fuck you up. Get caught up in a flame for even a fraction of a second and you'll have lost a good chunk of health; you can kill the guys easily if you react quickly, and if you stand at their farthest range they're a joke, but the fact remains that it's all too easy to run straight into a flame and kill yourself with only very, very quick reactions to save yourself.

And if you die, you do the level all over again. You don't respawn at the same area you died at, or have any progress at all maintained - you go back to the beginning. When you eventually face labyrinth-esque levels with lots of possible paths and a tight time limit, you can only imagine how much fun that is.

I'd actually consider the game to be fairly decent. The graphical work is beautiful (the cartoon-style intro is definitely worth checking out) and the gameplay is actually very competent, the 2-player mode definitely being a bonus. The problem simply lies in the rather unforgiving presentation, though I will admit that a few of the maze-like levels are definitely a bit of a drag. It's worth checking out, though only if you're armed with some serious patience.

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This is among my favourite games of all time. It's just jam-packed full of so much awesome, both in the fact there are over seven games and the exploration and discovery and everything, and the fact it can be played with a friend is quite possibly the best thing Nintendo ever did. If there's a downside to it, it's that the game is no exception from lack of difficulty in Kirby games, and that the rest of the series seems inferior.

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[no review]

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[no review]

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[no review]

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[no review]

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[no review]

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[no review]

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There's been over five sequels to Super Mario Kart, all with their own advancements and changes, yet they never just catch the charm of the original. Sure, they may have much more expansive courses with all kinds of little details, loads more characters and larger multi-player options, but they never quite get the single-player appeal of the first instalment.

See, single-player is hard. If you land yourself in a pitfall such as going off-road or in the drink, you'll need to get yourself out of it, with only being rescued after you've wasted a good amount of time. You can't reverse or spin on the spot, you've got to hop very slowly until you're back on track. Not to mention that for some characters, turning is best kept to a minimum what with the ludicrous veering off course when they do the obvious motion when approaching a bend. And let's not forget how item boxes don't respawn, and sometimes they contains coins, which are only good for preventing you from spinning out when you collide with someone!

If I had any sense, I would dub these as flaws. But they're fun. They make the game what it is, and add a nice challenge to the game; not to mention they actually make the 150cc cup difficult!

See, the games after this made single-player exist mostly as an excuse to unlock extra cups and modes. Mario Kart 64, for example, really only gets difficult when you hit the Mirror Cup, as the only flaw the player has is the stupidity of the red and blue shells. Double Dash!! isn't so much difficult as it is monotonous, and if there's one real flaw about the racing in DS, it's just not frantic enough. In Super Mario Kart you're either ahead of everyone or behind everyone, and since things are always being thrown at you then you're never in an ideal situation. The other games lack that constant barrage of attacks, which almost makes them fair. And that's why this first game is challenging!

Multi-player is simple and enjoyable, but the huge arenas and dodgy items tend to make them more "will it work this time!?" more than a real battle in some cases, and the sequels legitimately improve upon them. Mario Kart Super Circuit almost feels like it could've been a spiritually successor, but there wasn't enough ass kicking in it. Which is a shame.

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I don't think I can say much more than that little blurb there, although to be honest my reason for giving it a 10 is via nostalgic bias; it's a fun game, but nowhere near being the holy grail of platformers in my view. All in the nostalgia.

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[no review]

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Well, it's Super Metroid, isn't it? It's not as brutishly user-unfriendly as the first game, thus losing the whole elitism factor of completing that one, but I'm a big fan of this. I gave it a 10 for a reason, after all, and not just because of hideous bias like most other perfect scores. This is for reals.

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Super Star Wars is pretty difficult! I would by no means consider myself an expert player, but usually I'm able to get by on the default difficulty of most games; in Super Star Wars, I was murdered to death by the first boss, never mind the regular enemies! I could very well just be a big ol' pussy, but instead I'll just do what every other gamer does and blame the game for being too hard.

But I love the game for being hard! When I first got it years and years and years ago it had this... odd mystique about it, because of its difficulty. It's the only instalment in the series without a password system, and aside from some level skip code I never got to work, I never saw beyond the first sandcrawler stage. It made the game totally impenetrable back then, and even now it's difficult. And I love it, because often when I go back to a game I once deemed difficult, it obviously isn't as tough as I once thought, but Super Star Wars still kicks me in the ass as much as it used to. You could argue that it's sloppy design, but getting a good hard kick in the arse is good once in a while.

So, basically, it's a platformer, and your goal is to go right. What makes it so tough is that, almost like it's following suit from Ghosts & Goblins, enemies just keep spawning and spawning and spawning. Good luck finding a moment to stop and catch your breath! Airborne critters swoop down from off-screen, Stormtroopers will leap out of the background, killer aliens will march in from the sides of the screen, and projectiles crash into you non-stop before you can even see them. Given the fact there's only slight recall from enemy damage and most damage you take is only slight, it's not as bad as it could be (this kind of enemy activity in a Castlevania game would be hell on earth), but it definitely keeps you on your toes. You do get a variety of blaster upgrades and occasionally a screen-clearing thermal detonator to take care of them, and halfway through the game Luke gets his mitts on a lightsaber, but given the fact he needs to exchange hits to damage the enemy, it becomes pretty useless quite quickly.

The bosses are a mixed bag. The first boss is pretty tough, but it gets progressively weaker from there, the third and fourth bosses essentially being upscaled enemies, but then it throws two bosses at you that are very demanding, requiring either pinpoint-accurate techniques or the convenience of losing health at a slower rate than the boss, but then it just gets easier. Meanwhile, besides the typical sidescrolling there's a few levels set in a Mode7 setting, wherein your goal is to destroy a certain number of targets before progressing; Jawas in the Sandspeeder and towers in the X-Wing. Although certainly exciting as early uses of semi-3D, they're pretty cumbersome - it's hard to tell what things are (I thought the fuel tanks were bombs!), and they control in an awkward manner - the Sandspeeder can only turn around when you use the limited jets, otherwise it just strafes while facing one direction. You can still win the mission just by driving forward, but considering you can run out of fuel and effectively leave yourself facing the wrong way with potentially no enemies to find, it's clumsy design. And the last level... let's just say it hasn't aged well. It makes for an unexciting and anti-climatic ending. You don't even fight Darth Vader directly, not even as a non-canon battle! They swarm the Death Star with aliens and TIE Fighters crashing directly into Chewbacca, but they don't even stretch far enough to let you fight ol' bucket head?

It's a decent and definitely challenging game, and I'd recommend you sit down and play it sometime. I just wish the non-platforming stages weren't so dreary.

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While the first Super Star Wars... although technically a platformer, a lot of the level designs merely involved mostly flat stretches with some slopes and obstacles, and the difficulty mostly came out of surviving the onslaught of enemies and defeating the bosses. The Empire Strikes Back attempts to embrace the platforming aspect, but it only goes to show that's why I found the original game more endearing.

Although it's a platforming game, the actual platforming isn't that incredible. Due to the way the engine works, it's not very precise - enemies nudge you around very easily, and pixel perfect landing is impossible when the landscape is so uneven and jagged. Flying enemies are a real pain, as since you never 'flinch' from attacks, they can very well push you as far as they like; it's not like Mega Man where you can judge where you'll be knocked back to by an enemy attack, enemies can push you far. It's not bad at first, but in Luke's final stages, it's a serious factor to consider.

Likewise, the difficulty curve is rather lopsided. The Hoth sequence, even on Easy, is very difficult, no thanks to the bastardly Wampas, the instant-kill spikes and the pits of death. That is then followed up by a rather non-challenging visit to Dagobah, wherein there are very few enemies and very little danger, though admittedly the boss takes needlessly long to kill and should you miss any of the force power-ups, they'll be lost forever unless you use a password. Cloud City is fairly mundane, though the levels drag on for far, far too long, and the X-Wing segment is hideously boring. And as mentioned in the last paragraph, the final area with Luke features some absurdly hard platforming, and a final boss that, since you have the ability to restore your health, kinda lacks challenge.

On paper it's more polished than the original game, but in practise it just lacks what made that endearing, y'know.

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After some ups and downs, Return finally gets the level design right. It's not the flat stretches of Super, nor is it the hideous instant-death pitville of Empire, it's just... right. It's not a masterpiece, and admittedly some levels have their own problems in how they're too big and expansive for their own good, but it's finally good to have something well-built, y'know. Likewise, character abilities are refined; they no longer slide as ludicrously far as they did in the previous game (which with Han mostly meant that he rolled out of the danger's way and straight into the scene of more trouble), Luke's force powers are accessed with a simple toggle rather than the clunky menu of Empire, and three versions of Leia are now playable. None of them are particularly special, mind you, but still. Also, Wicket! He only gets two stages to himself, but seriously, if he had a berserker attack like Chewbacca does, he would be the best character in the game.

There's less emphasis on vehicle stages, mercifully, and the ones that are there actually aren't that bad. The game begins with some vehicle I don't recognise jumping across chasms, which is pretty fun although horribly non-challenging. The rest of the stages involve the Millenium Falcon, all in different manners - the first is essentially a shooting gallery, wherein you control the turret and rotate it to shoot down TIE Fighters and their projectiles. The second is much akin to the X-Wing and Snowspeeder stages of the previous games, where you just fly around, shooting TIEs and collecting hearts; it's fairly inoffensive, though unremarkable. The last is real friggin' doozy: a first-person escape from the Death Star. From a technological point of view, it uses some fantastic Mode7 effects that still amaze me now, even if it is a rather psychedelic effect, but from a gameplay perspective, it's a shit sandwich with piss pickles. The Falcon is wider than the view you're given, prompting you to crash into walls despite appearing to be a safe distance from them. This isn't bad in the hideously drawn-out first segment that, surprise surprise, involves shooting down TIEs, but in the second segment which heavily features narrow corridors that you have to rotate to fit into, it's a real hassle. The slippery controls are no help at all, as there's acceleration and deceleration to turning, which is realistic, of course, and rather expected given the play style of the rest of the game, but when health is incredibly valuable and one cock-up can drain you of lots of shield power, it's a real pain. It's not fun at all for the final level of the game to be such an unpleasant barrel of suck, and if the rest of the game weren't so decent, I'd say it would ruin the rest of it for me. Seriously.

If you had to play one game of the series, I would recommend this one. The first Super Star Wars has a quirky charm to it, probably for all the wrong reasons, but Return just feels like a good game, y'know. You can't go wrong with killer Ewoks.

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If there's one thing I love, it's nostalgia. But what I love more is worship for something purely through nostalgia. That's the feeling with Tom & Jerry before I reclaimed it through the magic of emulation.

Tom & Jerry is really an easier version of Super Mario Bros. You march through levels to the goal, jumping over enemies and obstacles and collect bits of cheese for the chance of an extra life, and you can hurl marbles ala fireballs. There are four worlds with three stages each, the last stage featuring a boss that's either killed through marble flinging or using the environment to your advantage. And it's got an alternating 2-player mode. The only new thing is that it's got a health bar!

And that's precisely why I loved it all those years ago. I was a terrible game player and would reset once I'd lost my first life. I could barely even play the original Super Mario Bros. and make progress! The easier difficulty and the fact it was based off a pretty rad cartoon meant it appealed more to my easily influenced self, and the 2-player mode only sealed the deal. Then I lent it to a friend as he lent us Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose which was actually a good game so I didn't enjoy it as much. But while I returned the game to him, I never got Tom & Jerry back. Thus became it's mildly legendary status in my eyes!

In reality, it's just a poor man's licensed Super Mario Bros. Sure, there's the health bar, a bouncy jump that makes you go higher and the fact it's Tom & Jerry!!, but it's nothing special. The camera is bothersome at times, not showing you enough below than you want to, and the fact landing from a jump results in a small bounce can be off-putting, but it's really rather inoffensive. If you really need more platformers to try out, why not?

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Toy Story is one of those games I've had for who knows how long, got to a certain stage where I would get stuck, and never be able to pass it. Even with a level skip code, I simply never got the patience to get past that frigging crane game boss. Until around that point, the game had been semi-decent. The platforming lacked innovation, but it's not like that was to be expected from a licensed game. The non-platforming parts varied; playing as RC was an utter bitch and not fun at all, riding on Rex was pretty fun, and the first-person-view level in the crane game was pretty damned awful. Following that part up with the seemingly impossible crane game boss kind of ruined the whole game for me and I never had the patience to get past it or even skip it.

Until eleven years later where I finally did that and found that the difficulty was now rather ridiculous in the following stages, and skipped them too, with a rather crappy ending and verification that the game isn't very good. The graphics are great, though.

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