Year 12, 2005 ~ We Love Katamari (PS2)

 

It's March Break, and my parents are out of town for the week. They know I'm not responsible enough to look after my younger brothers and myself for that amount of time. So they call in my cousins Emily and Sarah, and Emily's boyfriend (now husband) Nick to look after us. And they bring a PlayStation 2 and videogames. Boy, do they bring videogames. Videogames that will change my life forever, including Guitar Hero, Katamari Damacy, and We Love Katamari.

Here's the thing: growing up, I didn't play a lot of weird games. I was just never exposed to weird games. We were a Nintendo house, mainly just Mario and Pokémon. We didn't know about all the cool, experimental stuff going on in Japan and around the world. And then the cousins bust in with some weird fuckin shit all about cousins.

Did you know the Katamari games have a story? It's hard to notice the first time you experience it because you're too busy experiencing the rest of the game: you're just a little guy, you got a sticky ball, and you gotta roll it so things stick to it. The more things it accumulate, the bigger the ball gets. The stuck objects also change how the ball rolls: if you roll up an eraser, you have to contend with the sudden rectangular hump on your otherwise spherical ball until you roll up enough tuff to make the ball more or less perfectly round again. But the more you play, an eraser can go from a serious contention to a miniscule spec on a ball so big you're rolling up pets, humans, cars, houses, skyscrapers, clouds, islands, countries, even gods, all to make new stars in the sky. Stars your drunk ass father, the King of All Cosmos, destroyed in the first game and made you rebuild by rolling up the people of Earth and all their possessions.

Somehow, Earth's survivors all became huge fans of the Katamari experience and wanted MORE BALLS. The King, a deeply broken man not used to feeling wanted and adored, upon the receiving the first words of encouragement in his life, sends his son, you, the Prince, back down to Earth to keep fucking with the humans while the King relives his childhood trauma. Also your cousins are there.

Also, my cousins were there, and it was the first time I'd ever had adults around me for a long period of time who didn't just like videogames, but had games they wanted to show me. Neither of my parents liked videogames, so I wasn't used to feeling supported in what I really liked. Videogames were always something my parents begrudgingly allowed in the house, so it felt really good to not just have adults around me who supported that love, but actively encouraged it and expanded my ideas for what a videogame could be. In turn, my cousins have their own kids now. Just a few weeks ago and talked with her son for hours about what he was playing.

This experience kicked off a lifelong obsession with games that went against the grain, like the works of Suda51, Hideo Kojima, Daniel Mullins, Toby Fox, Davey Wreden, the Frog Fractions series, Tim Schafer, and Sam Barlow. I would have never played games like Chulip or Okami either. This is a wide swath of creators and games of very different genres, and I don't know if I ever would have wanted to try them and expand my horizons if not for the best March Break ever.

I think more than ever these days, especially these last few years, I'm one of the luckiest people in the world to have the family I have.

Other games I've loved from 2005:

Star Fox Assault (NGC), Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening (PS2), God of War (PS2), Lego Star Wars (NGC), Burnout Legends (PSP), Jak X: Combat Racing (PS2), Ratchet Deadlocked (PS2), Soul Calibur III (PS2), Guitar Hero (PS2), Shadow the Hedgehog (NGC), Sonic Rush (NDS), Need for Speed Most Wanted (XB360), Super Mario Strikers (NGC)

Year 11, 2004 ~ Need for Speed: Underground 2 (NGC)

 

One night at a sleepover, a friend broke out a game I'd never seen before. It was a racing game, but it wasn't like Mario Kart. I'd only ever seen and played Mario Kart games. It was gritty, it was loud, gone was the fun goofy Nintendo music and the chaotic power-ups, it was all super speed boosts and a Much Music Big Shiny Tunes hard rock and nu-metal soundtrack. You could blow up gas stations and crash through buildings. After seeing this game at midnight in the basement of a rich kid who liked to cosplay like he was poor, my middle school brain was officially off its skateboarding phase and all-in on street racing. And that game was Need for Speed

...Most Wanted.

Yeah we're not talking about that game. That game is much better.

After experiencing NFS Most Wanted in the company of someone I would simply not tolerate as an adult, I immediately went to Jumbo Video and Blockbuster and rented the only other Need for Speed game I could find, NFS Underground. It wasn't open world, but it also had a cool soundtrack, nitrous boosts, and a little bit of customizing. It was cool, but it wasn't what I was looking for. Then one day at EB Games we were returning an Action Replay we couldn't use because it had no Mac compatibility and I found Underground 2 in the GameCube section. So I... "convinced" (bullied, sorry guys) my brothers into going in on a game only I was interested in. And it did have an open world! It had body modding! It had a cool soundtrack! But it stunk!

NFS Underground 2 was the first Need for Speed game to feature an open world. It did not handle that change gracefully. You end up repeating a lot of the same races over and over again, and in a lot of cases when you find a race in the world it jumps you to somewhere you just straight up don't have access to as part of the main game. In a lot of ways the open world feels superfluous, like it artificially extends a game which relies on the formula of the arcade racing the series was known for up to that point. This was truly a game that walked so its sequel, Most Wanted, could run.

I never actually beat NFS Underground 2 as a kid. It did become part of my regular Saturday routine. I'd do my paper route, bike downtown and get samosas at the farmers' market, come home and boot up the game. And you know what? It made playing Most Wanted and its sequel, Need for Speed Carbon, all the sweeter when I got my own copies.

Other games I've loved from 2004:

Sonic Heroes (NGC), Drakengard (PS2), The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (NGC), Mega Man Anniversary Collection (NGC), Burnout 3: Takedown (PS2), Katamari Damacy (PS2), Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (NGC), Ratchet 3 Clank: Up Your Arsenal (PS2)

Year 10, 2003 ~ The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (PC)

 

My dad and I don't share a lot of interests. He's a baseball guy, I'm a professional wrestling girl. He's a Beach Boys guy, I'm a Pink Floyd girl. He writes non-fiction, I write poetry. He hates videogames, I clearly love them. These are differences cultivated over time. We love things in a lot of the same ways, particularly in their histories and contexts, but our interests don't always align.

But when I was a kid he did that thing dads do: introduce their favorite things to their kids so they could connect. Baseball didn't land, but Star Wars did. One of the earliest memories I have is watching the original trilogy on VHS on the couch, without all the new scenes and re-edits, introduced by Leonard Maltin's interviews with George Lucas. I also remember him taking me to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace at a movie theater that doesn't exist anymore. If there's anything we do share, it's a taste in film and TV. He would much later get into Twin Peaks, and I would in turn get him into Dune. Arguably he likes the Dune franchise way more than me; I've read the first book and he's read most if not all of Frank Herbert's run.

Likewise, Lord of the Rings.

These are my dad's favorite books. Dad took me to see all these movies, he took me to a local theatre production of The Hobbit, he gave me a chess set using figures based on the Fellowship and the orcs, and he told me everything he knew about J.R.R. Tolkien's world. He had every book and he wanted me to love the books too. I have tried to read the books, but I've never really made good progress. I did read Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories" during my undergrad and I liked it very much! I have found his prose easier to digest as an academic rather than a fiction author. Maybe it's time to give it another shot. And more than anything I'm just happy to have this connection with Dad.

The Return of the King game is pretty good! It's a fun little 3D hack-and-slash. Good single-player, great co-op, cool game. Broke one of the keys off Dad's work laptop playing it.

Other games I've loved from 2003:

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (NGC), Soul Calibur II (NGC/PS2/Xbox), The Simpsons: Hit & Run (NGC/PS2/Xbox), Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando (PS2), The Hobbit (NGC/PC/PS2/Xbox), Mario Kart: Double Dash (NGC), Need for Speed: Underground (NGC/PC/PS2/Xbox)

Year 9, 2002 ~ Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (Mac)

 

So, I come home from school one day, and the furniture has been moved around a bit. The computer is missing and the desk has been moved. There's a big white cube with a silvery keyboard and a see-through mouse that's all one button coming from it. It plays CDs. It plays DVDs. It lets you make your own movies and burn them to blank discs. It seems like it can do anything. Mom says it's called an eMac, and it's our new computer. I had never seen anything like it. I was obsessed with all the cool things I could do with it and all the little ways it was different but familiar to the old Windows 95 we'd been using as the family computer for years.

But of all the things I could do with it, I couldn't install any of the PC games I had on it. I'm not sure if this is still really a problem, but back in the day if you bought a game for PC, it didn't work on a Mac. You had to buy a completely different version of the game to play it. I realized that it was kind of like the difference between a PS2 and an Xbox—a PS2 game wouldn't work on an Xbox even though they were both basically DVDs. So even though I had a bunch of games for the Windows 95 or my dad's work laptop running Windows XP, I couldn't install them on our new eMac. Mom was probably pretty happy about this; if I'm remembering right, she got the eMac because she was picking up more freelance writing work.

But just because we didn't have any games for Mac, that didn't mean the Mac didn't have any games for us.

For some reason, the eMac came pre-installed with two games. One of them was Deimos Rising, which I genuinely had to look up for this post because it is abandonware ephemera. My mom wouldn't let us play this game. After looking up gameplay footage I genuinely have no idea why. It's not particularly violent. There's no blood and gore. There's not even really suggestions of death. It's vertical shooter, often compared to Xevious. It's got funky 3D renders of sanitized spaceships for you to shoot down. It's the sequel to a shareware game called Mars Rising, which is exactly the same kind of game. I think my mom must have thought it was a Doom clone based on the title because upon reviewing the footage I feel like it's a step above being told not to play 3D Pinball: Space Cadet.

But the other game on that eMac was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.

Here's the thing: if mom was going to ban me from playing either of the two games on that eMac, letting me play Pro Skater 4 but not Deimos Rising was absolutely the wrong choice. Pro Skater 4 was effectively my gateway drug to Jackass, South Park, hip-hop, punk rock, ska, and even straight people porn. I played this game a couple years after it came out when I was in middle school so I was like right on the cusp of realizing I could google search the name of the porn star they got to record voice lines for one of the characters. For the crime of inadvertently introducing me to ska music, my mother's sins are truly unforgiveable.

That being said, Pro Skater 4 is both the best Tony Hawk game to on-ramp into the series with but the worst game to start from if exploring the back catalogue. Pro Skater 4 is where they ditched the strict time limit arcade format of the first 3 Tony Hawk games and entered the open-world era used for much of the franchise after that point. The open-world format is probably better recognized for the two games which came after Pro Skater 4, Tony Hawk's Underground and Underground 2. Gone were the two-minute score attacks and trick challenges, replaced with a series of parks with funny people with weird problems asking you to do crazy stunts for money. And I'll be honest, I think it holds up extremely well.

The thing about Pro Skater 4 is it's so big that I truly have to encourage you to seek it out for yourself. What it is and what it encompasses deserves a lengthy video essay which I straight up don't have time to make. Going through and replaying it again, I was so impressed with how expansive each level was and how much stuff to do there was. It wasn't all cheap thrills (unlike THUG2), it's still a highly technical game. It's a blast to just jump in, and it's accessible enough that you can fumble your way around this first level and more or less figure out how to play the game if you skipped the tutorial. But there's actually incentive to play the tutorial, because there's money there.

One of the things I admire so much about this game is how purposeful everything is. There's no abundance, no bloat, only exactly as much as there needs to be. This goes right down to the tutorial, which is its own unique area of the game with its own collectibles. You don't just get money in this game for completing missions and whatnot; you also have to find it scattered throughout each level. And there is exactly enough money in the game to buy and unlock everything, including character customization items, bonus characters, extra levels, bloopers and interviews, everything. If you want to have the complete Pro Skater 4 experience, you truly need to complete it down to its bones.

Luckily, I think the game does an excellent job of guiding you along that path. You will naturally get better at the game the more you play it. This is one of those games that gives you everything you need to improve at it, it's just a matter of dedicating the practice time. I think if the franchise had stopped here it would be going out on the highest possible note it could have.

Now, I actually played this game for this blog last year, but the thing is that shortly after I finished playing it, they announced Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 for all current-generation consoles. I thought I'd put off writing this post until it came out so I could experience what I hoped would be the best version of the game. And here's the thing: it's not a bad game by any means. But it's just not the same.

Not only are a good amount of maps left out of the Pro Skater 4 version, but the open-world mission structure has also been replaced with a score attack system comparable to the first 3 Pro Skater games. As many reviewers have noted, it's more of a re-imagining of Pro Skater 4 than a full on modern port. That's not a bad thing. They've also gutted the soundtrack and replaced it with more current music, with only a few songs from the original Pro Skater 4 soundtrack returning. I think what this signals is that you shouldn't approach this remake as the authentic Pro Skater 4 experience, but one built from the ground up into essentially a new game with familiar locals. If you really want to you can extend the score attack style timer to an hour long, which is more than enough time to meet all the stage goals. But because each stage leans more into the same overall pattern of goals, it loses a lot of what make the original Pro Skater 4 special. It's not bad, it's just not for me.

Other games I've loved from 2002:

Shantae (GBC), Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2), Ratchet & Clank (PS2), Metroid Fusion (GBA), Metroid Prime (NGC)

Year 8, 2001 ~ Sonic Adventure 2 (DC)

 

So, fun fact, there have been several drafts of this post. This game should be easy to write about; it's my all-time favorite videogame. I've replayed the story mode many times. I fell in love with it the minute I saw it on a GameCube demo disc. I didn't know anything about Sonic the Hedgehog before then. I had vague memories of watching an old cartoon called Sonic Underground before then but I'd had no idea it was part of a massive multimedia franchise. For all I knew this was a completely unrelated product. I just knew the Mario Kart Double Dash and SuperStore demo kiosks of the first two levels of Sonic Adventure 2 weren't enough. I never could have known that this game would cause a life-long obsession.

Part of what has made writing about this game so hard is the absolute enormity of the impact it had on my life - not just the time I first played it, but even to this day. I still play Sonic the Hedgehog games. They are among the only games I pre-order. And it's a great time to love Sonic games because they've never been better. Each new release rewards long-term investment in this franchise in a way I never would have expected. And so much of it is thanks to the lasting impact Sonic Adventure 2 has had on its players.

In writing about Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo, I spoke about how much renting videogames and consoles became a staple of my summer vacations growing up. Eventually we stopped renting a Nintendo 64 and started renting a GameCube instead, including all the cool games we'd seen on those demo discs. Naturally that meant Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. But while we could rent consoles and games, we couldn't rent memory cards, so we never actually got to see all of Sonic Adventure 2 while we rented it with our progress being wiped the minute we shut off the system. I even remember one week where we just never turned off the console and left it on overnight so that we could pick back up and try the levels we were stuck on. As long as we could only rent it, we could never finish Sonic Adventure 2. But our summer rental weeks would eventually come to an end.

When I was 12, my parents told me I was going to get a job delivering newspapers. I delivered The Daily Gleaner in the neighborhood I grew up in on and off for three years, carrying a big sack full of almost 40 papers at my peak before or after school. I don't even know if kids can still get this gig anymore. It wasn't fun. But it was good money to a 12-year-old, enough for my brother Aidan and I to save up for our own GameCube. Our parents relented and said we could, finally relaxing their years-long mandate to never let a game console stay in the house longer than a week, and we took full advantage of the timing. The Jumbo Video down the street from us was making space for the upcoming 7th generation of gaming, so we actually bought the copy of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle we'd been renting for years. And we bought a memory card. It was time to finally make it to the final boss.

Or at least, that was the plan. It didn't really work out that way. It took us forever just to beat the story mode. With three different play styles per story - high-speed platforming, treasure hunting, and run-and-gun combo shooting - it was a lot to keep track of. If you think finishing story mode is the end of the game though, you're sorely mistaken. There's also a boss rush mode, a kart racer, the Chao Garden virtual pet simulator, and five missions per story level. Each thing gave you one out of 180 completion markers called emblems. Not only did you have to do all of this, but you also needed to hit a certain high score on all the missions to get graded an A, and you got an additional emblem for getting an A on every mission with each character. There was so much to do that it was just easier to play the multiplayer levels or replay the story mode.

But over the years me and my brothers chipped away at everything because we'd heard there was a cool bonus at the end of the game if you got all the emblems. We were all good at one thing or another. I took on the kart racing and the boss rushes, Aidan did the Chao raising and shoot-em up levels, and Ben took on the platforming levels. But none of us wanted to do the treasure hunting, so we just kept putting it off. We got the GameCube in 2005, and there were too many games we wanted to play instead of focusing on one game we would play the hell out of for a bit and then put away. But we kept the same save file, gradually working on it through the course of our lives, with hundreds of hours of play time and years of experience, always making a couple steps closer to finishing it. This went on for years, through schools, through homes, through jobs, through entire phases of our lives individually and as a family. Until 2016.

I was in a bad way Christmas 2016. By this point I was 23. I was having terrible panic attacks, and I was about to drop out of university to get my head right. That's a story for another day. It had been a big year, and a particularly big year for my siblings. I was used to all of us being in the same city, all nearby so that we could hang out at the drop of a hat. But that fall we'd gone our separate ways for undergrad degrees. I was staying put in our hometown for school, Aidan was moving three hours away for college, and Ben was moving two hours away for university. My mom had also moved house, still the same city just further away, and my grandmother had passed away earlier that year. This wasn't the main reason I was having a nervous breakdown, but it was weighing on me. It was a big change of life, something I have never handled well. But my brothers were home for Christmas. I wanted to do something nice for us, something to make the time we had to feel special. I knew it was an irrational thought, but for some reason, the state I was in, I felt like I would never see my brothers again after that Christmas, like they would just never come home again after that.

So, I plugged in the GameCube, pulled our rental-stickered copy out of the shelf, and started working through the rest of the A-Ranks in Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. I only remember needing to do all the treasure hunting levels before I got it done. I thought it would be a slog but honestly it was kind of relaxing. I thought it was so funny, I put it off for years because of the way I thought of it when I was a kid, but playing it as an adult was very manageable. I'd definitely played worse games. When I got that last A-Rank, I turned the console off so that we could experience the bonus level together.

Fast forward eight years to Christmas 2022. I'm finishing my first semester of my Master's degree. I have been blessed with a free-ride scholarship thanks to the federal government and more income than I'd ever seen before in my life. I wanted to treat myself, so I bought an Xbox Series X. I chose the Series X entirely because I wanted to play some old Xbox 360 games at 60fps from the frame boost effect. One of the compatible games was the Xbox Live Arcade port of Sonic Adventure 2. By this point I'd already made my 30/30 list. I thought I'd knock out another game on this list, so I tested out my brand new $805 game console (yeah man Canadian prices are crazy) on a 10-year-old port of a 20-year-old game. But it was enhanced with Auto HDR, so hey, you can really see every screaming pore on those Dreamcast textures.

And obviously I had a great time. It's my favorite videogame. I knew it by heart. But something didn't feel right. I tried to sit down to write this entry about it, but the story didn't feel complete. And then I realized what needed to happen: I needed to complete the game, and this time do it alone.

Naturally I put it off two years. Grad school is tough, and a lot of other things needed to take priority. I knew that it wasn't the time yet. It only really felt right this past Christmas in 2024. I couldn't tell you what it was, I just knew it was time.

I've been completing Sonic games for years. I adored Sonic Frontiers and Shadow Generations, and I'd already completed Sonic Colors and Sonic Lost World in years prior. I'd also finally dragged my ass through completing Sonic Forces. I got it in my head that I was going to try to get every achievement in every Sonic game I could play on my Series X after finishing Sonic X Shadow Generations. I felt even more emboldened to go back to Sonic Adventure 2 after seeing Sonic the Hedgehog 3 at my local movie theater. I thought for sure the movie was going to be garbage like the other two movies, but I never stopped smiling the whole way through. Like I said, I just knew it was time to complete Sonic Adventure 2.

And it was an experience. I went through peaks and valleys playing it. Trying to A-Rank City Escape and Radical Highway, literally the first high-speed platforming levels in the game, proved to be an immediate hump. I spent days trying just to get an A on the very first mission of these first levels. It made me almost give up on the whole premise.

But the biggest valley was easily the Chao Garden. I hate Chao Gardens. I've never liked them. They're supposedly the only thing critics and players can agree on as unambiguously good content, but I've always always always hated them. Grinding out the same levels for the necessary Chao food to raise their stats high enough to finish the Chao minigames annoyed me so much that I almost pleaded to my roommate to raise my Chao for me. This was also the only point in my completion where I relied on a glitch to get through it. There's a glitch where, depending on how close you are to your Chao when you feed it, the drives and animals you can feed it won't disappear, so you can keep reusing the same one. This makes levelling your Chao a lot easier because everything is single-use only otherwise. In the words of the great Gordan Lightfoot, "It's alright for some, but not alright for me."

But it made it all the sweeter when I finally unlocked the last emblem. This monumental task, which I'd only been able to do with help through most of my life across hundreds of hours, I'd worked down to about 60 hours of total play time.

You can see a lot of Sonic Adventure 2 in every Sonic game after it, especially in the structure of the Cyberspace levels in Sonic Frontiers. One of the incredible things about Frontiers is how it takes a lot of the half-baked ideas from past 3D Sonic games and makes them work: the shorter levels from Sonic Forces, the right-shoulder boost from Sonic Lost World which feels like driving a car, the open world of \Sonic Adventure, just a bunch of interesting things updated for a game that feels like a genuine new step in the direction of the franchise without sacrificing all the things it already does well. But while I was playing Sonic Adventure 2, I recognized in the five missions per level a more streamlined version present in each Frontiers level. Rather than having to complete missions as separate levels like in Adventure 2, every level in Frontiers has a standardized five goals you can complete per level, and getting the highest rank is something you do for the level overall instead of for each task. People joke about Sonic being shit, and honestly, yeah it's pretty shit sometimes. But no franchise rewards you for long-term investment like Sonic.

I'm burying the lead here a bit, dancing around the bonus level. It's a 3D recreation of the original Green Hill Zone from the first Sonic the Hedgehog. It's ultimately pretty underwhelming because every other stage lasts much longer. It is a faithful recreation, unlike the Sonic Generations Green Hill levels which massively expand the original into sprawling new levels. The Sonic Adventure 2 Green Hill is the garnish of a delicious cake rather than a whole dessert unto itself. But that doesn't make it feel any less special. It feels like a genuine reward for putting yourself through the whole ordeal of a 180-part gauntlet. And again, it rewards you for long-term investment.

The final narrative beats of Sonic Adventure 2 show long-time franchise heel Dr. Eggman teaming up with Sonic and friends for the first time to stop a threat bigger than himself. As the credits roll, you see Eggman reconciling with kid genius Tails, talking about how he always looked up to his grandfather. It's the first real human moment we ever see from Eggman. This was supposed to be the very end of the franchise, as Sega finally bowed out of the console wars with the commercial underperformance of their Dreamcast console. This was the last Sonic game developed for Sega hardware. By sending you back to Green Hill in the bonus level, you reckon with the franchise at its end, urging you to return to the beginning. It reads as an uncertain future after a notably hopepunk climax ripped straight out of Michael Bay's Armageddon. At the time, in that context, it reads as an admittance: we don't know what comes next, but look how far we've come, look at what we've accomplished, look at this incredible adventure we've taken together. If the good times are over, remember those good times and cherish them, renew them, hold to them without feeling stuck in them, and always keep moving forward.

This game was the impetus for the 30/30 project. I wanted to replay my favorite game on its 20th anniversary. I wanted to complete the game for myself for the first time. I got exactly what I wanted out of it.

Other games I've loved from 2001:

Mario Party 3 (N64), Devil May Cry (PS2), Super Smash Bros. Melee (NGC), Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (PS2)

Year 7, 2000 ~ Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo (N64)

One of my earliest memories is watching the original Star Wars trilogy with my dad on the couch. We watched them early in the morning on weekends. I couldn't have been older than 4. These were the old VHS tapes with the interviews between George Lucas and Leonard Maltin at the start, no new edits, no new effects or scenes. He got the hooks in me early, I fell in love with that series like so many others did. He would later take me to see the original theatrical release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It's the first movie I remember going to see in the theater, a little two-screen place behind a McDonalds in my old neighborhood. That McDonalds is still there but that theater sure isn't.

We always had Star Wars stuff at home. Dad would buy the updated rereleases whenever they came out. At one point we owned each movie on DVD in both full screen and wide screen editions. But one thing we couldn't have at home was videogames, at least on console. This was actually on me to a certain degree. I mentioned in my post about Capcom's Aladdin that we had a Super Nintendo. My parents took it away because I got really worked up playing, of all things, Super Star Wars ("it's like poetry, it rhymes"). We were allowed to have computer games and Game Boys, but we lost the Super Nintendo.

However, my parents did let us rent a Nintendo 64 for a week every summer. If you ever did this, maybe you remember the huge black plastic briefcase with the N64 logo on the front. It had such a good texture, sometimes I'd stim contentedly against the plastic grain. But I could never seem to repack the N64 as well as it had been packed there. Sometimes we'd get it from Blockbuster, other times from a regional rental store called Jumbo Video. I think for a while the old two-screen theater had been converted to a Jumbo Video. But occasionally we'd go with our third option, Rogers Video.

Rogers Video is such a strange thing to me. To my knowledge there was no, like, Shaw Video or Bell Aliant Video. I can't imagine a lot of other cable companies with their own video rental stores. But it's relevant to this story because one summer, when my dad took me to rent the N64 and the games, he took me to the Rogers Video up by his workplace. I can't remember if Rogers was just getting rid of old stock or if they just had the game for sale, but when we were picking the games out I saw Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo. For some reason Dad didn't rent it, he bought it. I thought it was so strange because we didn't own a Nintendo 64. We couldn't play it, it didn't make sense to me. It gave me false hope that he was also going to buy us a console too. But I was still excited to finally own what felt to me like a real videogame.

When we got home Dad opened a closet by our front door. On the top shelf there were all our scarves and gloves for winter. He said we'd just store it up there when we weren't using it. By the next time we rented an N64 he'd already forgotten that cartridge was up there. I had to remind him he'd bought it for us and stowed it there.

I realize I'm talking more about renting the game than the game itself. Here's the thing: I don't actually have much to say about this game. It's a spin-off of Star Wars Rogue Squadron, easily one of the best Star Wars games ever made. There's no doubt Battle for Naboo has a lot of the same quality. It's a prequel to the prequel, detailing the invasion of Naboo and their subsequent resistance efforts while the rest of the movie happens on Tatooine and Coruscant. While the spectacular aerial combat returns from Rogue Squadron, there are also ground missions in speeders and boats, as well as garages which let you transition from ground to aerial combat mid-mission. But while in Rogue Squadron you get to play as Luke Skywalker, in Battle for Naboo you're just Some Guy, new on the job with the Royal Security Forces. With the exception of this one detail, this game actually does a lot of work to make you invested in what's happening on Naboo, something the movie probably should have done.

But here's the dirt... I didn't actually finish this game. I gave myself the stipulation of having only one week to beat this game, like having a week of rental time. I didn't think I'd need it, but at a certain point the game got so hard that I couldn't get past it. I tried lowering the difficulty, I tried cheat codes, no matter what I tried I just couldn't do it. Grats to Factor 5, I love what you make, but it's too hard.

Other games I've loved from 2000:

Mario Party 2 (N64), Pokémon Stadium (N64), The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64), Banjo-Tooie (N64)

Year 6, 1999 ~ Disney's Villains' Revenge (PC)

 

Remember One Saturday Morning? I have to believe that's not really a thing anymore, like there are dedicated channels for cartoons now instead of a weekend block on ABC or whatever. Or idk maybe the kids don't watch anything except streaming apps or YouTube or TikTok. I don't know, I'm not a parent, I don't know what the kids are up to. But when I was growing up in the 90s we had Fox Kids and Snit Station and One Saturday Morning. I feel so disgustingly back-in-my-day right now.

Anyway, One Saturday Morning aired on ABC in the 90s. For a while this was what I watched in the hours before gymnastics or soccer practice. I loved Recess. This was also an era when commercials were kinda interesting to watch, and there would of course be ads for Disney videogames because ABC was owned by Disney. This is where I actually found out that all the little minigames Timon & Pumba games I was getting individually were actually one big game, Timon & Pumba's Jungle Games. There were also ads for this strange game, Disney's Villains' Revenge.

Everything about this game exists in an uncanny valley of clashing aesthetics. The game opens in the middle of the night. You look around a room in first-person, in an almost photo-realistic looking 3D environment. You hear a voice asking you to find a light switch. If you've seen the character before, you'll know his voice before you find the light. When you find the light, you see that it was Jiminy Cricket talking to you. Jiminy is not rendered in 90s photo-realistic CG, but appears to have been drawn into the scene like transitional 2D animation. It appears as though the character has been lifted straight out of the Disney Pinocchio. But if you don't know what you're looking for, you're just kind of looking for, you're just left to look around this dark, creepy bedroom, with a voice yelling "Hey, over here!" over and over.

Jiminy points you to a weird book on a desk in your room, a book containing all the stories of classic Disney movies. He starts reading them to you, but gets bored, and starts writing new endings. This, apparently, causes the stories to come alive, where all the villains win, and turn their worlds into evil twisted fucked up hell dimensions. Dumbo's Ringmaster runs a circus out of a giant clown head like he's soft cosplaying KarnEvil, staffing his performance with gremlin energy clown freaks, performing to an audience of awful people who just like humiliating the tiny flying elephant. The Evil Queen from Snow White is stuck in witch mode and she turned Snow White's cottage and put her to sleep with a stronger apple, and erased(???) Prince Charming or whoever it was who could wake her up. The Queen of Hearts actually fucking cut Alice's head off and hid the head in a maze, which CALLS TO YOU SO YOU CAN GUIDE HER HEADLESS BODY INTO THE MAZE, WHILE THE PLAYING CARD KNIGHTS AND CHESHIRE CAT ALL TRY TO TAKE YOUR ASS OUT. And Peter Pan grew old and started using a sword instead of a dagger. You gotta help Jiminy fix this mess!

THAT'S RIGHT BAYBEE IT'S ACTIVITY CENTRE KINGDOM HEARTS.

You sword fight with Captain Hook so geriatric Peter Pan can take a breather, and yes, it's very unsettling to see Captain Hook swipe at you with a rapier in first-person. This is a quick time event game and it sucks. Like I said, Alice is trapped in a Wonderland garden maze and it's really fucking weird and disturbing to run around a 3D screensaver maze where you gotta take out the walking playing cards before they take your ass out. It's a quick time event game and it sucks. You gotta make a potion to reverse the knock-out apple Snow White ate, and it's heavily implied that you're on an invisible timer, so you gotta figure out the clues in the witch's drug den to make the wake-up juice. This one's pretty good! You gotta get Dumbo's magic feather back by making a rube goldberg device out of the circus freaks and their acts to take it back from its keeper. This one is okay! AND THEN, FINAL BOSS, YOU PLAY FIRST-PERSON BREAKOUT AND IT'S RIDICULOUSLY HARD. And then you make it to the end of the game, where it just actually becomes an activity centre with themed minigames.

I wanted this game so badly when I saw the ads for it on One Saturday Morning. But then once I got it, I saw just how strange and uncanny the first-person perspective was. This was the first time I felt like a game was weirdly threatening me, which I don't think the developers intended. But I see this game as a precursor to Doki Doki Literature Club or Slay the Princess, games that adopt a first-person perspective with second-person narration that give you a sense of blurred boundaries between software and hardware.

But this game also game with a bonus disc: fucking Nightmare Ned. This mediocre minigame collection with wildly menacing CG was how I ended up with a copy of one of the most disturbing games I've ever played. Not gonna lie though, I'm not upset about that. While there isn't much to say about the actual game part of the game with Villains' Revenge, the aesthetics of this game and the unforced uncanny dread of it all made it fun to navigate for an evening. Plus I've already gushed about Nightmare Ned, genuine work of art that it is.

Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1999:

Super Smash Bros. (N64), Mario Party (N64), Pokémon Snap (N64), Pokémon Stadium (N64), Sonic Adventure (SDC)