Super Mario Galaxy Platform: Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Switch Released November 1, 2007 (Wii) October 2, 2025 (Switch) Directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi Developed by Nintendo Included in Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 or Sold Separately $59.99 caught a falling star and put it in her locket in the making of this review.
“I’m going to be excited and nostalgic for this any second now. Annnnnnnnnnnny second now.”
Back in 2012, I said that Super Mario Galaxy was one of my ten favorite games ever and that, quote, “It will be special to me forever.” Of course, I answered the question “would I ever play it again” with a firm “no.” Well, wasn’t I just wrong in every way a person can be wrong? I did replay it again over the last couple weeks, and it wasn’t special at all. Oh, I wasn’t bored or anything, either. Mario Galaxy was a lot of fun. But the game I remembered as a milestone never showed up. There were no highlights and honestly I thought the level design was uniformly forgettable. I’ll never forget the gravity, but what they did with it? (shrug) So what happened?
I realized that my brain mostly remembered the gravity and not necessarily the layouts they built around the gravity.
The above screenshot sums up the primary gimmick of Mario Galaxy: gravity is your bitch. You’re not just hopping around platforms, but under them. Screwing with gravity is a time honored tradition in games, but the way Super Mario Galaxy did it felt fresh in 2007. It even still feels kind of fresh in 2026 because it’s tinkered with in pretty much every way it can be. I won’t deny that I experienced a childlike glee in the whole thing that made me overlook that this was basic level design with the twist being simply the angle you’re walking. Like, how many times can you run around a tiny round planet? A lot, apparently.
Even the big final battle against Bowser takes place on a series of tiny round planets and feels nearly identical to previous battles you’ve already done.
But while the levels are just basic platforming levels with a twist in the angle, it never comes across like a facade. Even if it kind of is. Hell, this is even taking into account that sometimes the gravity screws up and makes you run around in a circle. It happened to me a lot, and I died a few times from it (and I wasn’t alone). So it turns out my Wii controller wasn’t on the fritz in 2007.
“Walk across every button” has been done to death. “Walk across every button and, oh yes, the buttons appear to be a vertical wall you’ll bind to when logically you should fall” is the twist.
If the gravity works and aged (mostly) well, why didn’t the game I loved at the age of 18 ever come close to showing up at the age of 37? I just don’t think the level design is what I’m looking for in a platformer anymore. It starts with the fact that Galaxy has one of the worst hub worlds in the franchise. There’s minimal sense of exploration to it, and the layout is so unmemorable that it’s kind of easy to lose track of which main port has which level. There’s forty total levels, and since levels offer a lot less missions and overall content than both Mario 64 and Sunshine, a drop down list for those who don’t give a f*ck about the hub would have been appreciated.
By the way, calling levels “galaxies” is kind of insane given the fact that none of the levels in Mario Galaxy are very big and a few can even be beaten in a minute or two and then offer no other content. Seriously, if it took me two minutes to finish “Boo’s Boneyard” on my first attempt, I’d be surprised.
This isn’t Peach’s castle from Mario 64 or Delfino Plaza from Mario Sunshine, where there’s a joy in the exploration and discovery of new rooms or new nooks and crannies. Rosalina’s Comet Observatory f*cking sucks as a hub world. Nothing is really “hidden” except a couple extra lives. The sense of exploration that was so rewarding in the previous two 3D Mario games? That’s gone, and I mean GONE-gone. And that tracks with the rest of the game.
Whereas I feel Mario 64 and Sunshine were about exploration and triggering a sense of vertigo, Mario Galaxy is more like a series of quick, narrow-in-scope bite-sized linear, point-A to point-B segments that are glued together to create the missions, making it feel closer to the 2D games. Actual wide-open levels like you saw in the previous 3D Mario games? That doesn’t really happen here with only a couple small exceptions early in the game.
Most of the time, there’s only one path to take, so your enjoyment will be based on how exciting you find that path. Again, I had fun. Lots of fun. But I look for other things in 3D platform games now. I don’t want a 2D experience in three dimensions. I want to explore.
When the levels are more open, they’re still certainly nowhere near as big as the levels in previous games were. The overwhelming majority of the individual segments are pretty small and funnel you directly to the warp star that shoots you off to the next planet. It’s not like these segments are directly connected. Usually they’re separated in a way that makes them unreachable unless you do the linear activating sequence.
Even when levels look like they might be a little more “open” they’re typically walled-off in a way where there’s not much to explore and there’s strict transition spots between chunks.
As a result, I didn’t enjoy the sense of discovery as much even in limited instances where it was there. Take the first level where you can become Bee Mario. It LOOKS like it’s going to be a Mario 64/Sunshine like-map. It’s not. It’s segmented into three distinct areas that present only a few, if any, chances to go off the beaten path and f*ck around.
And one of the only times you can, what’s hidden? A star? A hidden level? Nope, just a pipe with a cube-maze that pays off star bits. Once you realize how many of these things they hid in the game, they start becoming kind of downer every time you find one.
The game just needed more stuff to collect, in my opinion.
So despite the crazy physics, there’s something about the levels that feels too limiting and rigid. You feel like you’re being queued through the experience in a way you never felt in Mario 64 or Sunshine. That probably makes it sound like I hated the experience. Just so I’m clear, I actually did have a lot of fun replaying Mario Galaxy. It’s seriously a very fun game with a few nice set pieces and bosses. But nothing about my 2026 experience made me wonder if I was playing one of the ten best games I’ll ever play.
While I can’t believe I’m saying this, the truth is I had a lot more fun replaying Sunshine. For all the problems of that game, I felt it offered a much bigger variety of stuff to do. I might even think Mario 64 is better just on variety alone. Mario Galaxy is like all the boilerplate Mario challenges, only wrapped around a cylinder or sphere. Once you get over the idea that you’ll do some areas upside-down and some areas vertically and some will require a full circumference of a sphere, the actual meat and potatoes of the game is old school 2D.
How basic are we talking? I thought the ice levels were the best in the game. THE ICE LEVELS! That never happens!
I guess the structure of the game didn’t excite me as much as it once did. Finding an alternate transport star off the path sometimes felt like a downer because I didn’t want to go through the process of playing the level again at all. Some levels, really glorified side-levels, only have one or maybe two stars total. Primary levels only have three main stars, aka the missions. That’s it. Three. There’s also “prankster comet” levels that add extra challenges, but they’re mega-sized pains in the ass since you can’t just activate them willy-nilly. The comet has to be orbiting that “galaxy.” A dumb idea in 2007 that aged badly. So did the life count. Every time you turn off the game, you lose your entire stockpile of lives.
Spring Mario is the worst power-up in the history of the franchise. In an already gimmicky game, it’s SO gimmicky. It feels like an alternate bonus challenge and not something that’s a primary mechanic for a level.
In fairness, I didn’t exactly just play Mario Galaxy in optimal conditions. I’ve been unwell for a couple weeks and played Mario Galaxy two or three stars at a time, then napped, then played some more. So maybe that’s why nothing really stood out. Except, how I played should have worked for the game. It didn’t, and I’m hard pressed to remember any non-boss fight that made me sit up and think “that was actually incredible.” The vibe is incredible. But what it does with the vibe? Not so much.
Okay, I didn’t really like the one-off or two-off gimmicky levels like “blow the bubbles through the maze” as seen here. I would have rather had a large platforming maze to find my way through.
The game is just always really, really good but without any true highlights. The power-ups kind of suck. Bee Mario is underwhelming. Spring Mario sucks. Fire Mario and Ice Mario wear out too quickly and are too limited in usage. Boo Mario sees even less usage than either flower does. This type of “nothing sticks around long enough to bore” rapid-fire style platformer works for 2D Mario games. Both Super Mario 3 and Super Mario Wonder utilized it to great success. Mario Galaxy’s levels are technically bigger, but despite the space setting, they never felt large to me. I just never really thought the level themes or set-pieces were all that amazing.
It doesn’t help that Rosalina looks almost identical to Peach in her character model AND she’s a bore. Like, the story is that she laughed all the stars into existence. So let me get this straight: this emotionally vacant, dead-behind-the-eyes husk of a woman allegedly went into a laughing seizure and created the cosmos. Bullsh*t. I don’t believe this person has ever laughed once in their entire existence. I assume it’s a coping mechanism to make up for being abandoned by her parents, who presumably left her for dead, or possibly mistook her for being actually dead. I mean, how would you tell with her?
If it isn’t the bite-sized chunks and lack of exploration, I think Mario Galaxy’s standing plummeted with me based on how generic so much of the design is. It’s not just that this game’s princess is a different character who looks nearly identical to the already established princess, but like, for whatever reason this Mario feels like it’s one of the least experimental or bold in the franchise. As if the designers burned through all their courage with the gravity and played it safe from there. Imagine if Mario 64 had that attitude with 3D. Who knows where we would be?
Meanwhile, the new characters besides Rosalina look like they could be from any platform game BUT a Mario game. Look at three of the new bosses pictured above. All three are really fun boss fights, don’t get me wrong, but something about their design makes them feel detached from the Mario franchise, and not in a good way. They don’t feel like new Mario characters. They feel like generic cartoony bosses. The one in the middle looks like what the last boss would look like in a video game based on the board game Fireball Island, for God’s sake, and the other two could be Spyro or Banjo bosses for all I know. Galaxy somehow feels like every Mario game, and yet the least Mario-like game in the series.
Even the tacked-on Wii pointer with the starbits I found to be not as fun or useful as I remembered it. I only really used it in top down sections, like the annoying race against the Boo, where I used the pointer to get rid of the bombs that I was just trying to plow through like a moron. This is probably the star that took me the most attempts to get.
I finished with 76 stars and I didn’t even come close to the 240 total in the game, and I’m fine with that, as honestly I’m ready to be done with Galaxy and jump to Mario 3D World or Super Mario Odyssey. The magic from my youth was gone, and I really only kept playing long enough to beat Bowser so I could do this review. Maybe Galaxy 2 will be where I find the more bold design. In 2012, I paired 2 with 1, and that’s how it’s sold now. But I need a break from weird gravity before doing that one. I guess the best thing I could say about Mario Galaxy is that, besides the comets or Spring Mario, there’s no low points. (checks notes) Christ, there’s a lot of comets though, isn’t there? Okay, so that’s not actually the complement I thought it was. What I’m trying to say is I had a LOT of fun, and yet, it was nowhere near as much as I thought I would. Now I know why they made Galaxy the sequel to the movie, because that’s what watching it was like. Verdict: YES!
Wario World Platform: Nintendo GameCube Released June 20, 2003 Directed by Kouichi Kimura & Hitoshi Yamagami Developed by Treasure Published by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2
“I hope doing this piledriver move never gets old!”
After Super Mario Sunshine, I guess I hadn’t gotten the idea of searching for treasure out of my system, so why not turn to THE treasure hunting Nintendo character? Plus, Wario World is actually made by Treasure, as in the legendary studio made out of Konami cast offs. Prior to Wario World, I’d only reviewed one other Treasure game: McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure (yes, as in THAT McDonald’s) for the Sega Genesis that was seriously one of the best 16 bit platformers I’ve ever played. Go read McDonald’s Classic Video Games: The Definitive Review for that review. If Treasure didn’t phone-in a Ronald McDonald game, there’s no way they would do that with a Nintendo IP, right? RIGHT?!
“That doesn’t look too bad.” Oh, but it is.
Calling Wario World a 3D game is a little misleading. I don’t think it’s truly 3D most of the time. I’ve heard it described as 2.5D. I’ve heard comparisons to Crash Bandicoot. Either way, the game is framed so that it feels like a 2D game that has depth. “Isn’t that 3D?” No. It’s closer in gameplay to a top-down 16 bit game. A throwback to SNES/Genesis collect-a-thons, with a fixed camera angle that offers only a little wiggle room. When I say “fixed camera” I mean strictly the angle. The camera follows you, so don’t expect old school Resident Evil. Think more like a Zelda game or something like Super Mario RPG. There is absolutely no “looking around” in the levels themselves. You can view a little in front of you, and sometimes you can tilt the camera at a downward angle, but this type of looking:
Super Mario Sunshine (2002 – GameCube)
Well, you just plain can’t do that in Wario World, and I never experienced a single instance in any level overworld where I found the limited camera options to be useful. Even a level based on using reflections in a mirror, where you’re specifically told to use the camera angles, I didn’t think it helped. Hell, changing the default camera angle usually made things worse. But that’s not always the case, as the bosses and puzzle rooms can feel closer to the type of 3D game that was well established in the early 2000s. Wario World has eight levels, and each level has eight trap doors that look like this:
Doing a butt stomp into the trap door takes you to a “puzzle room” and in those rooms, you can do a full 90 degree rotation of the camera. It’s still not a free camera, but you can also tilt the camera downward (never upward) or make the game take place entirely from a bird’s eye view, and sometimes it’s actually helpful.
By “sometimes” I mean I felt I had to use it once. It was in this room, which is the very last puzzle room in the game. And I only used it here because it’s the biggest room in the game and consists entirely of narrow walkways. Going top-down made this downright easy to navigate.
So, right out of the starting gate, Wario World feels like a relic in terms of style of game. A massive, massive downgrade from the humongous levels of Super Mario Sunshine. But hell, it’s not 2003 anymore and I’m all about exploring different styles of games, so what might have hurt in 2003 just plain doesn’t matter in 2026. Despite that, I found Wario World to be a total slog and one of the worst Nintendo-published mascot games ever made. I literally can’t believe Treasure made this, because Wario World is f*cking boring.
This, the second level of the game, is the one decent level and the only one I had to do significant backtracking to 100%.
For whatever reason, the game leans into Wario as a sluggish, lumbering oaf. Okay, so he’s fatter than Mario, but so what? He could jump and platform around every bit as good as Mario in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Virtual Boy Wario Land. Then, following those two games, for Wario Land 2 and 3 Nintendo turned the character into a high concept “you can never die” puzzle platforming experience where Wario changed form based on allowing enemies to hit him (I’ll review those soon).
Falling off a ledge doesn’t result in your death. Instead, you’re taken to a penalty room where you have to punch boxes. All but one box will have a bomb. The correct box, which more than once was the only one left after I broke literally every other box, will have a spring that returns you to the surface. You don’t lose health, or at least I don’t think so. Instead, you lose coins if the ghost rhinos grab you or if you touch the water or whatever that is. Since coins are everywhere, I never came remotely close to finding out what happens if you lose your coins. This was just a massive waste of time.
So there’s a precedent that Wario is every bit as limber and capable at platforming heroics as Mario. That’s all out the window here. Wario can barely jump and the pitiful level layouts do well accommodating that, IE they’re not exciting to navigate at all. He also doesn’t spring off enemies and has to rely on ladders or these little balls scattered throughout the world to climb even small structures. Very rarely, you might use an enemy for climbing, but those moments are few and far between. It’s also one of the poorest controlling Nintendo games in that the timing feels….. off.
Behold: the treasure hunting aspect. The majority of these are just laying around somewhere.
But Wario’s games are about finding treasure, right? Well, about that………
In Wario World, each of the game’s eight levels (not eight worlds. EIGHT LEVELS) has eight treasure rooms that are guaranteed to have a crystal in them, so 64 total red crystals. You need X amount of crystals to unlock a level’s exit and face the boss, but you’ll just naturally pass by enough puzzle room doors to get them if you don’t go for 100%. There’s also eight statue pieces per level, some of which are in the puzzle rooms and some of which are “hidden” on the levels. Another 64 things. There’s eight separate treasures per level that have to first be spawned by hitting their corresponding button and then locating the platform the chest is on:
Sometimes a button requires a little backtracking to find its treasure platform. Thankfully the buttons and platforms are color matching and once you nab the treasure, the platform turns gray to show it’s claimed.
And sometimes the buttons are up against a wall and have to be activated by having an enemy thrown at them. So I’ll call it 64 for the buttons + 64 for the treasures themselves. Finally, there’s five elf things trapped in boxes in each level, and again, sometimes they’re in the overworld and sometimes they’re in the puzzle rooms. There’s forty in total and, apparently, they’re the only thing that changes the ending. As per tradition, Wario World has multiple “endings” though your reward for 100%ing the game is a f*cking static screen of Wario sitting on a throne.
Oh f*ck off with that lazy sh*t. Seriously, really?!
But the journey is the reward or whatever. 64 + 64 + 64 + 64 + 40 = 296 total things to find in Wario World. Gosh, that sounds like quite the treasure hunt, right? Yeah, no, as maybe two dozen total things require a little bit of off-the-beaten-path searching to locate them. Most of the crap you’re looking for you’ll pass along the one and only main path in each level, with MAYBE a small hint of having to walk up and down to spot something.
Wario in Baby’s First Treasure Hunt.
If it actually requires searching, it’s not THAT much searching or backtracking. Sometimes you’ll pass a treasure platform and then the button for it is a little further up ahead. If the elf boxes or statue pieces aren’t in levels themselves, you’ll probably find them right next to the crystal in the puzzle rooms. It’s baffling. Less than a handful of times, the puzzle rooms separate the crystal from whatever the other reward is, but not in a way where you have to do additional challenging things.
The “puzzle rooms” are more like ultra-stripped-down versions of the “pure platform” challenges in Mario Sunshine.
And the puzzle rooms are completely toothless bores. If you fall off the edge in those rooms, there’s NO punishment besides having to start over. You don’t lose any health. They’re the most rudimentary of platforming challenges. Maybe two or three out of sixty-four in the game put up an actual fight or made me stop and think about how to tackle them. And locating them isn’t exactly hard. Because the levels are fairly linear in their layout and branching paths don’t branch off too far, I could count on one hand how many times I needed to actually look around to find things I missed.
The Christmas theme goes to waste too.
Thankfully, if you miss stuff and need to restart a stage to 100% it, you can quit and return to the hub as soon as you gather the treasure and it still counts. So, total times I needed to significantly backtrack? Twice in the entire game: once in the second level for a single statue piece and once in the Christmas/ice theme because there’s a slope that you can’t climb up once you’ve passed them. It took me like five minutes to get what I was missing. The rest of the stuff I got just by spotting it through normal progression. The treasure hunt is a complete failure.
If the puzzle room has steel doors, like seen here, you must piledrive an enemy through it to enter it. Or, instead of an enemy, just the little weightless bombs the enemies fire at you. Holding ANYTHING that you can slam will work to open these doors. Since enemies respawn (sometimes you have to walk away and come back a couple times to make this happen) this is just busy work that adds NOTHING to the game. Sure does pad out the run time like a champ, though. See, that’s why they give you the big bucks, Treasure. You think of things like that.
So if that’s the case, what’s even the point of Wario World? They seem to have been aiming to make a brawler-platforming hybrid. The game constantly spawns the same tiny handful of enemies that are reskinned to look different on each level, but functionally they’re the same two or three basic enemies you were introduced to at the start of the game. You can punch and tackle them to kill the smallest ones. The medium or large ones have to be “finished off” by using a power move.
By the way, this clip is the entire Wario World experience in a nutshell: fighting the same couple reskinned basic enemies you met less than a minute into the first level while you “locate” a chest full of coins, a puzzle door and a treasure chest just by literally crossing paths with them along the level’s main path. Astonishing in how uninspired it is, really.
I’d say the brawling was probably the main focus, except it’s just too limited. When enemies are seeing stars, this indicates you can pick them up and do a power move. For example, you can jump in the air and do a piledriver, which not only kills the thing you’re smashing but does splash damage to everything around it. It’s the quickest and lowest effort of the power moves. Or, if you’re stupid, you can throw them, but this has to be charged up and aimed. The piledriver doesn’t require charging or aiming. Just pick-up, jump, and press a button for maximum splash damage to everything around you. You can also swing them, and I’ll get to that. But that’s the extent of the combat.
This seems to have been the sole idea the development room had and they had to base an entire game around it.
Now the game does reward you with coins for throwing enemies at other enemies or hitting piledrivers off higher and higher ledges, but coins are literally everywhere. The infinitely repawning enemies drop them, and if you leave a puzzle room and come back to it, all the coins are restored and the treasures you got out of it are replaced with chests full of coins. But unlike previous Wario games, coins don’t boost the ending you get. Neither do the statue pieces, which instead increase your health by a half heart if you get all eight out of a level. The treasures are useless on the Nintendo Switch 2 since, on the GameCube, they unlock samples of MicroGames from WarioWare Inc.: Mega MicroGame$. The only thing that affects the ending is the boxes with the elves. So combat is both the focus of the game and usually unnecessary towards progress. After a while, I found myself avoiding combat sections.
The one clever bit in the game happens twice. In one level, you have to knock out evil flying magnets and throw them at steel walls to turn them into platforms. In the final level, they do the reskinning trick and turn the evil magnets into evil flying garden shovels that you throw into dirt walls. It’s not the worst idea, but it’s wasted in this game.
Technically the game is split into four worlds that each have two levels and a big boss, but the worlds have no connecting themes at all. Like, the final world starts with a magic mirror level, and then the final level of the game is a totally uninspired Ancient Egypt theme. AND BY THE WAY, TREASURE: the desert/Egypt theme is very well established as a mid-game theme. Especially in the Mario universe, where Wario, like it or not, will forever be compared to. You can’t end a game on a desert level. It makes an already short game feel downright sawed off.
And it actually feels exactly like a mid-game level too. There’s NOTHING special or unique about it. It’s the boilerplate desert style level. Like the mirror level that starts world 4 would have made so much more sense as the climax of the game because at least it has a unique gimmick.
And what’s frustrating is none of the levels feel like they have their own personality, with two exceptions and one of those doesn’t last. The first is a creepy circus level. Oooh, that’s a titillating theme for a Wario game. Imagine what you could do with it! Except, again, almost all the enemies are just reskins of the same enemies you’ve been fighting from the start. Same attack patterns, same weaknesses, different looks, and that muffles the potential for the theme to land because if the enemies are just a facade, logically the set dressing will feel like a facade too. And that’s exactly what happens. Then, halfway through the level, it turns into a generic city theme anyway. Look! This screenshot is from the circus level!
It’s like they ran out of ideas for a circus so they just stopped. Wario World is like drinking a glass of flat soda. There is something missing with the experience. There’s no pizazz. No kick to it. All the levels feel samey because the themes are superficial and mostly feature the same kind of enemies and puzzle rooms you’ve been fighting all along. The mirror level is the most notable stage in that you’re supposed to use your reflection to navigate, and for about ten seconds, it does an interesting thing where you can only see enemies by their reflection. It sounds great, but the actual level design isn’t ambitious at all. It’s so basic that it makes you realize they never actually got far past the “use your reflection to navigate” pitch. It’s basic, because they didn’t really think it through.
That’s just so lame, you know? Not once in the entire game did I look at something and say “that was really clever” or “that was really elegantly crafted.” That last one really bugs me. You expect Nintendo publish games to be elite in terms of craftsmanship. Maybe they thought “well, it’s Wario so we don’t need elegance.” The character is inelegant. Fine. But the worlds Wario has been established to explore have always been thoughtfully designed. They didn’t bother with that here.
This might LOOK cool, but it’s just the hub world, which has no hidden stuff to find. EVEN THOUGH THE PAUSE MENU HAS THE SLOTS FOR THEM! In retrospect, that was an ominous sign of how bad the entire game would be.
For me, the swinging attack is the element that shows they just didn’t care. Knocked out enemies can be picked up and swung around, taking out other enemies or activating switches. The game leans so heavily into this that almost every level has a segment where you’re locked into fighting wave after wave of enemies for 60 seconds, usually with columns nearby in order to do the spin attack (even though some enemies block literally every shot from them). But you have to physically rotate the control stick, so it doesn’t happen instantly. And then they incorporated it into the navigation, like so:
In that clip, I didn’t slip off the platform, but you can, and it’s actually easy to do so. To do these things, I had to literally place my controller down and then spin the analog stick because anything shy of spinning perfectly will likely cause you to wobble off. At other times, there’s dials that you have to rotate, sometimes clockwise and sometimes counter clockwise. Using enemies to solve puzzles is fine, but the cartoonish violence vibe they were aiming for doesn’t land at all because the controls are so fickle and sloppy. There’s no joy in these moments.
To damage this tree, you have to knock the acorns off it, then butt stomp the ground to cause them to roll at an angle where you won’t hurt yourself picking them up, then you have to throw them back at it. But the collision is imprecise and I usually took damage anyway. It feels like a game that’s still in its beta stage. I just can’t believe the same people who turned out a masterpiece starring Ronald McDonald could make such an amateurish mascot adventure FOR NINTENDO. It’s actually weird Nintendo said “this is fine.” It’s really not. It’s a pretty bad game, folks.
So the treasure hunt is a total fail. The combat is repetitive and pointless. The levels feel hollow, with poorly executed themes. What else could they possibly f*ck up? Well, it’s Treasure and Treasure makes awesome bosses, so SURELY they didn’t screw up the bosses? Actually, Wario World’s bosses are some of the most janky and inelegant I’ve ever played against. This is where I actively question if Treasure’s heart was in this or if this whole game was a holdover from the PS1 era that they inserted Wario into years later or what (apparently this came about because Nintendo and Treasure enjoyed making Sin & Punishment together). Each level has a boss at the end, and then every world has an additional boss, then there’s a final boss. So how many bosses are good? One, and it ain’t the first big boss, which is this thing:
The scale is awesome, but the the battle isn’t exactly the art of video games at its peak.
I was totally pumped when I saw the huge scale of it, but then the actual battle feels like an enemy that’s much smaller. The only addition to the normal combat is having to grab its tail and do a butt stomp to it. You don’t really do anything all that clever to fight it. Most bosses you still cause damage by picking up and doing the throw or piledriver to them. You might have to wait for an opening, but the combat feels, more or less, identical to the exhausting and repetitive combat that wore out its welcome during the levels.
And this somewhat hurts when the game does do clever bits. That mirror level I talked about? That stage’s boss is a play on the “follow the cup” thing that’s usually a bonus game in these types of releases. I’ve never seen it turned into a boss battle. Cool. After you do the normal punches to the boss and avoid his attack, he’ll retreat to one of three cups. Then the cups mix up and you have to follow it and select the right cup. Oh, and he’ll hide inside the correct cup so after selecting it, you then have to punch the cup in the air to knock him out of it. They should have made THIS the damaging move, but they’re really committed to the “mad moves” bit so you have to pick him up and piledrive him here (or do a charged-up throw).
A for effort, at least this one time.
But the bosses don’t scale right either, and sometimes the big bosses don’t feel any more or less special than the stage bosses. Like the second big boss is a two headed dragon that you punch like a basic enemy, then get out of the way and let the other head fry it. I didn’t even realize I was doing damage to this because it’s one of the few enemies you don’t execute the power moves to.
This was ALMOST clever, as the boss can attack by spitting out dozens of platforming sticky balls that, if you cling onto them, will pull you out of the battlefield and cost you health. But I beat this thing in about a minute on my first attempt. OKAY, so it took me down to my final hit. (shrug) I won, didn’t I?
The actual battle features sloppy attack patterns and strange timing between the two heads. And besides that, the scope of the battle doesn’t feel bigger than the two stage bosses you need to beat to unlock it. While I don’t think either fight is particularly good, they were a lot more memorable in their character models and just plain better as boss fights because they felt a little less sloppy. Look at the screenshot above and then look at the two below. Would you be able to guess which is the world boss if I hadn’t already told you?
Level 3 Boss
Level 4 Boss
So Wario World was a total letdown for me. I actually had this when I was a kid and I remembered basically nothing about it outside the piledriver. I don’t think I ever played past the second level, but I didn’t remember it being bad, exactly. I think it’s in the same boat as Luigi’s Mansion: one of those games I put off playing because nothing about the first couple stages held my attention. But, unlike Luigi’s Mansion, I think I always assumed it would get better and I just wasn’t far enough along. Boy, was I wrong. I was SO bored playing this in 2026. I was hoping it was a slow riser that would eventually make me nod and say “okay, they had SOME inspiration.”
One of the best examples of lacking polish is the Medusa fight. It drops these rocks that you have to throw into volcanoes that cause them to erupt which causes it to crash so you can punch it, pick it up, and piledrive it. Except, there’s a pronounced delay in when the eruption happens. Like they thought it was too easy so they programmed in wonky timing with the movement of the boss flying overhead and the thing you activate to knock it out of the sky. But it doesn’t come across as challenging. It comes across as f*cking amateur hour programming.
Instead, Wario World comes across as one of the most cynical Nintendo releases, and probably Treasure’s worst game (though I’m going to need to review a lot more to certify that). At best, Wario World feels unfinished and uninspired. At worst? Hell, the worst thing I can say about it is the worst thing I can say about any game: it has no heart at all. It clearly doesn’t come from a place of inspiration. It exists to fill out a release schedule. You can tell from the puzzle rooms alone, because they’re so interchangeable and lack any imagination or stakes.
It’s like they didn’t have enough ideas to fill eight per level. Then don’t make it a hard rule that each level must have eight. You know, in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Virtual Boy Mario Land, there was no guarantee a level had one of the game’s treasures, and that made locating a piece of treasure a little more special. They didn’t shoehorn one into every level for the sake of a checklist. Incredibly, the relatively primitive Game Boy or Virtual Boy adventures with the same character have way more personality in their settings than a less technically limited game made by two of the most revered companies in gaming. Wario World has no charm, no personality, and given the circumstances, I’d be hard pressed to name a more disappointing video game. Verdict: NO!
Let’s face it: the only thing anyone remembers about this game is the pause music.
Super Mario Sunshine Platform: Nintendo GameCube Released on July 19, 2002 (JPN) August 26, 2002 (US) Directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi & Kenta Usui Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2
This type of thing is the good stuff, in a game that’s overstuffed with plenty of bad stuff.
Believe it or not, Super Mario Sunshine was my first day one console Mario game. Well, my first mainline Mario game that wasn’t part of the Mario Advance series. That means, even though I became a full-time gamer at the age of 9, I didn’t get my first day one Mario game until right after I turned 13, and it’s the Mario game that most people would probably call “the weird one.” Despite being promised for Switch Online around the Switch 2 launch, it took a while for Mario Sunshine to arrive, but I finally replayed for the first time in nearly a quarter-century (well, I did start a game in Mario 3-D Collection but didn’t keep playing long), and had a lot of fun. And also nearly threw my controller about two dozen times, give or take.
You certainly fight too many of these sludge plants early on, and it gets old fast.
The funny part is, even I remembered Sunshine as the Mario game where you had to spray gunk off various playfields and walls, but the reality of the game doesn’t quite match that. The overwhelming majority of Mario Sunshine isn’t about cleaning up levels. Oh, those are there, and there’s a learning curve to using the sprayer, but most of the game is an exploration-focused platformer. There’s seven primary levels, each of which has eight chapters that end with you nabbing a star or “Shine.”
“Shine, come back!”
Despite being only the second 3D Mario game and the direct sequel to Mario 64, Sunshine is a massive improvement over that game, at least mechanically. The camera is a LOT better, among other things. In fact, the camera works so well 95% of the time that the 5% of the time it completely sh*ts the bed and simply does not work, it’ll have you inventing brand new swears.
“YA GROGFROCK’N WHORE!”
Thankfully the controls were adjusted to make the game work on the Switch. On the original GameCube, you had to lightly press one of the shoulder buttons to move and squirt. BUT, on Switch, they mapped “run and squirt” to its own button. So if you were worried about winning the battles against Shadow Mario, hey, all you have to worry about is how tedious, repetitive, and boring those segments are.
Every 7th chapter (out of eight) in each of the seven levels is entirely based around chasing and squirting Shadow Mario, along with another pair of “chase and squirt” missions in the game’s hub world, and they ALL suck. Just the most samey, dull mission. Sunshine feels like the Mario game where the people in charge were told “no” the least because when it’s bad, it’s really bad.
For the most part, the water pack named FLUDD is a platforming tool that allows you to hover and, eventually, blast high into the air. The “rocket nozzle” feels like a big deal when you locate it in most levels, as it opens up (and often quickens) exploration.There’s also a “turbo nozzle” that I used less than a handful of times and honestly they could have removed it from the game and lost nothing. Meanwhile, the primary starting nozzle, the hover nozzle, is just about the most genius and intuitive platforming enhancement in 3D gaming. It was fun and intuitive to use in 2002, and it holds up in 2026.
For all the crap the water pack gets, I had basically no adjustment period for using it to hop around. It was like the last twenty-four years never happened. I wish that was the case since I enjoyed being 13 a lot more than I enjoyed being 37.
Unlike my experience replaying Zelda: Wind Waker, where my brain deleted the majority of things I disliked about the game in the decades since I first played it, I remembered everything that I hated about Mario Sunshine, specifically the maddening challenge of some of the missions. Each level has eight primary chapters, though you only need to beat the first seven on each to face off with Bowser. Even with modern emulation tomfoolery that Switch 2 includes, IE save states, the challenge was still insane. So insane that I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to go for a 100%. I finished the game with 89 Shines 90 shines and that’s fine by me.
I remember HATING the red coin challenges as a child, but this go around, they were almost certainly a highlight every time they showed up. Well, except when they’re bonus missions, where I found the time limits too strict. Attempting the first one was such a miserable experience that I immediately decided to skip all of them.
I think it’s safe to say they went a little overboard with some aspects of Sunshine. There’s far too many timing based challenges where I wonder who exactly play tested the thing. The worst chapter was one where you have to ride a Yoshi and squirt Cheep-Cheeps with fruit juice because it turns them into platforms. I assure you that I didn’t have a stroke and just type out gibberish there. That’s literally what you do, but the platforms you create aren’t on set paths. They are, however, moving platforms. EVEN USING SAVE STATES, I think it took me an hour to finish the chapter, and the entire time I was thinking “they intended people to start this mission over from the beginning if they screwed up even one jump?! Are they sadists?” The answer is, yes, they might actually be sadists.
I breathed out a sigh of relief when it was over, though I just barely made it before the Yoshi vanished.
That’s the thing that bothered me about Sunshine: the game’s hub world and the seven primary levels are all well constructed and lend themselves well to exploration, but there’s so many BORING chapters where the boredom is based almost entirely on bloated difficulty. Back in 2002, a single mistimed jump in the Yoshi sequence would have you starting over, which means climbing out of the water, returning to the dock, retrieving the fruit to wake the Yoshi from its egg and beginning the massive journey to the star all over. It’s a long way to the goal and the timing gets more and more fickle as you go along. F*ck that. Seriously, WHAT THE F*CK?! WHO TESTED THIS?!
And on top of all that, Yoshi has a time limit, limited ammo, and the platforms you make move, so it’s not like you can pace yourself.
When time limits are involved, Mario Sunshine tends to suck. It’s not universal, but it’s close enough. Personally, I think Mario Sunshine is at its best when it’s you, the water pack, a whole lot of climbing and looking for things. Chapters based around making you explore high into the sky are exhilarating. The game sets off an even more satisfying sense of vertigo than something like Shadow of the Colossus. It’s an incredible experience when it’s based around the sky.
Yes, more of this. (taps wrists) Put it in my veins.
These segments work out so well that I’m left completely astonished that the people who created them didn’t recognize when something was f*cking boring, like chasing Shadow Mario down for the eighth time or having to roll a watermelon without touching a single tree or one of the two billion enemies between the start and the goal. I’m always kind of baffled when good games become boring, but it’s especially jarring in Sunshine because they seem to have grasped that the vertigo was the game’s bread and butter. MOST of the game builds around this idea.
Sometimes the blue coins are fun to nab, especially when, again, they’re built around vertical exploration. Blue coins like this one are a hoot. Blue coins where you have ten seconds to cross a continent and the camera f*cks up so badly that you’re not even sure where it’s at? Not so much.
And those segments work so well that, when you move away from them, the game immediately suffers. It’s not just the primary levels, either. Of course, there’s the segments where you lose the water pack. Every chapter has one or two such segments, which play a remix of the original NES Super Mario theme to let you know these are the “pure” platforming parts of the game. Sometimes they involve spinning platforms. Sometimes they involve a lot of wall jumping. Hell, one is shaped like a giant Pachinko machine.
Usually the “pure platforming” stuff still has some kind of gimmick. Like this entire segment is fashioned like a slide and is probably one of the easier ones.
Personally, I thought these got really old, really fast. I didn’t care so much about losing the FLUDD. It was the fact that the sense of exploration was off the table, as these are (mostly) straight forward “go from point A to point B” moments. Mario Sunshine is so much better than Mario 64 when it focuses on looking around. I sincerely enjoyed looking for the blue coins (you can cash in ten of them for a Shine), and hell, I even enjoyed gathering 100 normal coins for a bonus star. Okay, sussing out which chapter is the one to go for 100 is annoying (some have more coins than others), so I didn’t do it for every level. But it’s not a deal breaker. What is nearly a deal breaker is the fact that grabbing the 100 coin star ends the level and sends you back to the hub world, so you can’t really do anything else. Why’d they design it like that? It makes no sense.
Usually the 100 coin Shine is then placed on the other side of the globe from you. You know, it wouldn’t have killed them to just hand you it.
I don’t think it’s just the FLUDD and the toxic waste that makes Mario Sunshine the weird one. Sunshine is haphazardly paced and lacks memorable bosses. My brain had completely deleted memories of the giant Wiggler, the manta-ray that divides into smaller ones, or the King Boo that you defeat by feeding it peppers. Actually, the only boss that I did remember from 2002, the giant Blooper, is repeated two more times when the original fight would have been enough. So really, even the good bosses are run into the ground. And hell, even the final encounter with Bowser (set in a giant hot tub) feels like it happens out of nowhere and is completely forgettable.
And I beat it on my first attempt too, so all the save states I laid down with the intent to cheat were a waste of time.
Actually, the whole ending sequence made me wonder if they had no clue how to end it in a satisfying way, so they just didn’t bother and phoned it in. After you defeat the final Shadow Mario chapter, the hub world floods and you follow Shadow Mario into a volcano that’s a relatively short final level. Some of the chapters where FLUDD is taken from you are longer than Sunshine’s entire ending sequence. When I say I was startled that the game was wrapping up, I mean it. The entire finale takes place in a long corridor with a few instakill spikes and fire traps and then an extended boat sequence where colliding with any rock is an instakill. And after that, you get the rocket nozzle and launch yourself up a handful of cloud platforms that have no enemies or other obstacles, and then you reach the final boss. Talk about going out on a whimper.
The kicker? It’s a BORING final level, especially compared to the excellent Bowser stages in Mario 64.
Having just spent a few days with Mario Sunshine, I get why it’s not among the most popular Mario games. Even though it was the #3 best-selling GameCube release (behind only Smash Bros. Melee and Mario Kart: Double Dash), a lot of people didn’t like the FLUDD, and I’m not really going to argue passionately that they’re wrong. I liked the hover aspect and the rocket, but the sludge cleaning and the combat? Well, I could do without, because it’s completely lacking in elegance. Sometimes, the combat with the FLUDD feels like it barely works at all.
Even the first big boss (and its rematch, seen here), there’s an inelegance to the combat. It doesn’t really feel like I’m drowning it with water. It feels like I’m hitting a solid target and the boss is growing fatter, but the two things feel disconnected. I just didn’t “buy it.”
I’ll also credit much of the dislike to the settings. Even though levels have gimmicks (IE one has a theme park, another a hotel), every level is still in a tropical, seaside setting with the same generic villagers. Compare this to the massive variety of themes that Mario 64 had and it feels like a major step backward. You would think a theme park setting is a great idea for a Mario game, but half the level is a completely separate tropical beach, IE that thing half the levels and the hub world itself have.
This screenshot was actually taken in the theme park level. What, can’t you tell?
Once you enter the theme park section of this stage, regardless of which chapter you’re in, I’m pretty sure you can’t return to the beach. As for the rides themselves, they’re not really all that interactive. The highlight isn’t the roller coaster, which sucks, or the Ferris Wheel, which you can’t even get in the carriages. No, in an entire theme park setting, only the two swinging ships feel truly “interactive” in the way you’d expect a Mario theme park level to be. What a letdown.
The best idea they could come up with for a roller coaster was not one but two target shooting segments, and neither of them is particularly fun.
So Mario Sunshine is plagued with samey levels, a lack of a balanced challenge, and an ending that’s given the bum’s rush more than the final couple seasons of Game of Thrones. But, I still had more fun than not, and really, it’s not even close. Oh, I’m not going to argue it’s an unsung masterpiece. I’d even say that the lack of variety (real or imagined) paired with the inelegant combat makes Mario Sunshine feel like it’s a third party game that somehow scored the Mario license. “Well, we were HOPING for the SpongeBob license but hey, we’ll settle for making a Mario game. I guess.” Like, the required-by-law level themed around the Boos is a hotel that’s not even outright themed like a haunted hotel.
“What if there was a hotel with a casino that was haunted by boos?” “As long as there’s a beach in front of the hotel and sludge to clean up.” “We’ve got, like, a dozen other beaches in the game. There’s other places people go on vacation besides beaches, you know?” (shakes fist) “I SAID PUT A BEACH IN FRONT OF IT!” “Fine, then I’ll, like, add a ghost manta ray on the beach that poops electric slime and splits into smaller manta ray ghosts when you squirt it or something.” “As long as it happens on a beach.” “Sigh.”
And I had an incredible time exploring the hotel. It really feels like they squeezed it for everything they could. There’s all kinds of hidden rooms, secret pathways, trapdoors, etc. But then there’s a casino section inside the hotel where just some guy blocks your entrance to it because it’s not supposed to be part of the chapter you’re playing right now. Then the actual casino is very limited and not really anywhere near as fun as exploring the hotel had been. There’s nothing clever about it at all, really. You just spray the reels on not one but two oversized slot machines with the FLUDD, then spray panels of a not-puzzle puzzle until they’re flipped the right way. Yawn.
Part of the unlock method is just spraying the reels until they match up. Nothing clever about it at all.
Then the King Boo fight is a slog as well. Even though it takes place on a giant roulette table and he has a slot machine that decides his attack pattern, none of it feels like it meshes well. Again, I just get this weird vibe that no idea was ever said “no, let’s try something else” to. So one of the best levels in the game has an entire section that sucks and a boss fight that didn’t really work for me at all. That’s the Mario Sunshine experience in a nutshell. Two-thirds of it is really fun, sloppiness and all, and one third of it ranges from boring to misery.
In theory you can just grind on this boss, deliberately avoid attacking him and score 100 coins via his slot machine. Again, haphazard.
Oh, there’s more than enough good game here for me to give it a YES! I think I fell just short of outright loving Mario Sunshine. Of the GameCube’s “big three” it was the weakest of the three for me and I’m guessing most GameCube owners. As a child, I loved Metroid Prime and Zelda: Wind Waker, but I’m fairly sure that I never even finished Mario Sunshine and walked away from it without regrets. Had I not been able to cheat, I would have likely done the same thing in 2026. I fully admit I used save states during this play session, mostly to eliminate the agony of falling and having to re-climb large sections of the game. I turned what could have been a months-long play experience into one that lasted just a few days.
Hell, I probably saved several hours on just the “you died. Return to the hub world, re-enter the level entrance, re-select the chapter, re-watch the opening spiel, and then start playing again” downtime. Like this, the only main course chapter where you lose the FLUDD, saw me die plenty during my childhood. That’s a LOT of resetting and restarting that you no longer have to deal with.
Sunshine is one of those games that’s actually better with emulation cheating because it can be used to eliminate so many tedious restarts and downtime. I used it to create my own checkpoints, not eliminating the difficulty entirely (I still had to, you know, make my jumps) but taking the edge off. That Yoshi segment I whined about? Setting my own checkpoints sure as hell didn’t make it any less challenging. What it did do was eliminate the time climbing out of the ocean and starting over from the beginning. You know, the part that would have been so boring that I never would have finished it at all, otherwise. Save states assured that most of my playtime with Mario Sunshine was fun and not frustration. So like when I died dragging this f*cking thing around:
How I hated this level as a child.
I didn’t need several minutes of downtime to start over and try again. I laid down the save state as I approached it, so that I could make a good faith effort at actually completing the full challenge. If I felt they went overboard, I would heel-toe it through a chapter. So what? I still had fun! Now that Sunshine is a game that can be played on your own terms, I can finally appreciate it on gameplay merits besides how damn weird it is for a Mario game.
Another example of “eliminating downtime.” This chapter took me days as a child. Through the magic of save states, I beat it in maybe an hour or so. The challenge was still there. I had to navigate it correctly and, thanks to a problematic camera, it’s still a pain in the ass. But if I fell, the misery of starting over from the beginning was gone. I wish I could play every game this way, even new games. I’m in favor of fun by any means a game can be fun.
I can’t stress enough that there were many, many chapters I loathed as a 13 year old that I enjoyed the hell out of as a 37 year old playing this with save states. For that reason, this might actually be the true killer app for the GameCube lineup on Switch Online. So, if you weren’t excited to play Super Mario Sunshine, my pitch is that, with save states, it feels different now in the best way possible. A game where the good parts are still good, but you might discover the bad parts are now, in fact, also good as well. Of course, it also makes the bad parts feel worse than ever when you realize not even save states can make the act of playing them fun. Ahem.
By the way, literally as I was finishing writing this review, I was going to be fine with that mission being the one and only main chapter I didn’t finish. But then I realized I had no screenshots of it, so I went to get them and about three minutes later I had the Shine. I’m not entirely sure what I did differently. The things that had been aggressively swarming me suddenly felt like they couldn’t care less that I was rolling the watermelon right past them.
Thus I finished with 90 Shines and, hey, I’m totally satisfied with that experience. So if Mario Sunshine left a bad taste in your mouth back in the 2000s, or you felt it was too challenging, give it a second chance on Switch 2. It’s not necessarily a whole new experience, but an optimized version of a flawed game. Imagine if you could remove just the frustration out of the most frustrating game experiences. That’s sort of what Sunshine is like now, and I’m all for it. Verdict: YES!
Okay, so I missed two 100 coin challenges. (shrug)
New Pokémon Snap Platform: Nintendo Switch Released April 30, 2021 Directed by Haruki Suzaki Developed by Bandai Namco Studios Published by Nintendo $59.99 was mistaken for a Crystal Bloom in the making of this review.
Needless to say, you ain’t playing the N64 game anymore.
I almost never get excited for the announcement of new Nintendo games because, well, I grew up. You can take it for granted Nintendo is going to keep releasing their cash cows and it’s embarrassing that adults act surprised when they’re announced. “Wait, they’re making a new Mario game, you say? Gosh, I thought the last one was certain to be the last one. Do you think it’ll have Bowser in it? OMG, it DOES have Bowser?! Are you kidding me?! Mario is back, baby! This is the greatest moment of my life! HYPED!” Yeah, I was like that once. You know, when I was 10 years old. But when New Pokémon Snap was announced in 2021, I reverted back to being a squealing 10 year old. I didn’t see it coming. I don’t think anyone did, as it’d been over twenty years since the original game. Easily the most hyped I’ve been for any video game in this decade. Then, when New Pokémon Snap was released, it not only lived up to my expectations, but left the original game in a smoking crater. New Snap is the rare sequel that improved upon the formula to such a degree that it rendered the original game practically unplayable.
And apparently despite selling two-and-a-half million copies, almost nobody actually put that much time into it. It probably killed the franchise off for good, and I even have proof of that, but I’ll get to that.
For all the bitching that I’m about to do, make no mistake that New Snap’s scoring system is so much better than the original. There’s no ridiculous “doubling the points for centering the photo” crapola. No, there’s all kinds of other crapola. I think I’m about to set the world record for complaining about a game in a positive review of the game.
The core gameplay from the first game returns. Don’t think of Pokémon Snap as a photography game but rather as a video game version of an old school arcade shooting gallery where the bullets cause the robotic contraptions to react. While traveling along an on-the-rails path of each level, you can interact with a series of mostly preset encounters with Pokémon. You can feed them or bash them over their witless heads with apples, or use the apples to lure them towards other Pokémon or points of interest, and while they do this, you’re trying to center them in the frame and snap photos of them. The challenge comes from the fact that you can only submit a single photo of each species of Pokémon to be scored each run through a level.
Since the franchise is basically fantasy cockfighting for children, of course there’s multiple instances where they fight, but it usually involves multiple steps. As an added bonus, in many fights, you can actually choose who you want to win by throwing an illumina orb at either one. This isn’t one of those cases, as this fight can be interrupted with a call for peace. It’s adorable.
It might sound exactly the same as the original, but New Snap is a much, much meatier game. The original Snap only saved one photo for each of the game’s 63 total Pokémon. Once you found the highest-scoring pose for each Pokémon and got a quality photo of it, the game was basically over. The scoring system was pretty simple and kind of primitive, doubling the score of a photo just for centering it, among other balance issues. So while it might take a while to get that one coveted photo centered or angled just right, it wasn’t exactly the deepest game.
You also needed to be zoomed in for the original game in order to take a picture. That’s no longer the case. Plus, I mean….. Christ, look at that. Nintendo 64 should be renamed the Dairy 64 because it aged like milk and now all that’s left is cheese.
New Pokémon Snap not only has nearly four times as many Pokémon at 234 total, but it’s seeking four different (wink wink) photos of each of them. Original Pokémon Snap challenged players to find the 63 highest scoring poses of each Pokémon. New Pokemon Snap? It wants you to find an eye-popping 936 photos for the Photodex, aka the thing that tells you what your ultimate score is.
Sometimes crappy pictures score fairly decently and sometimes good pictures don’t score what they ought to. And sometimes you wonder how you found an extra two points between one crappy picture and another. Welcome to New Pokémon Snap.
The scoring system is more elaborate too, measuring things like pose, size, direction, and placement within the photo to the single digit. The poses are placed into different “star rating” categories, with the more basic poses being one star and the more complicated ones being four star. In theory, at least. Whether or not it makes sense is another matter that I’ll get into, but it certainly adds to the excitement. I’ve literally had dozens of instances of beating previous photos by a single point, and hundreds of new photos won by single digits. Anything that scores 4,000 or more points earns diamond status, IE the maximum rating.
Outside of the photodex itself, you can save any photo you want. I’ve never really played all that much with the editing tools but they’re pretty extensive. The re-snap button shown here allows you to change the angle of the picture like you’re back in the level, zooming in and out. It doesn’t count for your score, obviously, but it’s a nice addition. You can also earn, through the special requests, things to present them like frames or stickers. It’s really elaborate, so if you’re a creative type, this will have even more meat on its bones than I’m going to talk about.
And that’s not all the content, either. There’s also 234 special requests that don’t necessarily have to count towards your Photodex. For the requests, your score doesn’t matter at all, and the first time you submit a request photo, the request is fulfilled forever and that photo is permanently saved as a memento (and can’t be replaced, even if it really, really sucks and/or likely shouldn’t have even counted).
When a photo fulfills a request, it’ll have this little “talk” bubble on it, so at least it’s not a random guess whether or not you’re submitting a correct photo. BUT, you do have to actually submit the photo for evaluation to clear the request, so if it’s hard to get, you might not want to take other photos of that species and have the temptation of finishing a request versus scoring on a photo. I kicked myself many times for passing on a special requests to roll the dice on a high score opportunity.
Throwing apples at the Pocket Monsters and the flute returns from the first game, as does turbo boosting, but in the new game, you can now also do “scans” that not only locate Pokémon, objects, and alternate routes, but the scan causes various effects to the Pokémon. The majority of the time, it gets their attention and makes them perk up at you, and usually interrupts whatever they’re doing. The scan might also trigger an event or scare off the Pokémon. The pester balls from the original game are gone, replaced with “illumina orbs” that light up the Pokémon, sometimes activating effects (such as picking the winner of a fight) or just making them stand out more in pictures (it matters too).
One time I got these two Pikachus running through the beach. They’re not supposed to be reachable like this, but I was both smashing them with apples and getting other Pokémon to stop the vehicle.
Another new idea that’s barely covered (if it is at all) in the game’s instructions is the fact that you can subtly manipulate the approximate physical location of the vehicle on the track, along with delaying various timing-based Pokémon actions. Okay, so this is kind of hard to explain. While you’re on a preset path, the direction you point and zoom the camera DOES actually make teeny tiny adjustments to the physical location of the vehicle. Let’s say you’re approaching a Pokémon on your left and you want to get closer to it than the “natural” path does. If you turn your camera left, zoom in (zooming slows the vehicle down) and stay that way, even if you’re not focused on anything, you will actually be a hair closer to Pokémon when the vehicle arrives at its location. It’s called drifting and it’s the key to a lot of photos.
This was done using the drifting technique to get a fraction closer. If you zoom in directly on a Pokémon, you ALMOST approach it. Think of it as the Autopia at Disneyland where you’re not really driving a car but kind of wiggling it just a little bit back and forth.
And this zooming in on nothing can also prevent certain actions from beginning, allowing you to be closer when specific animations happen OR when Pokémon spawn into the course. This is absolutely essentially for some time-sensitive photos such as in the forest when Pancham and Bulbasaur are riding a Drampa and you have to get a photo of Pancham smiling at the camera, UP CLOSE, in the split second before they round a corner and the shot is no longer possible. If you look down at the ground or to the side or anywhere but the location the Drampa flies into the playfield, it will delay when it makes its entrance. There is no other way to get the 4K in points needed for the diamond status. So even the movement of the on-the-rails vehicle itself offers a LOT of user-controlled flexibility.
And that’s what I have to show for it. It scores 4,284 and took me roughly a million attempts, give or take.
Finally, if needing over fourteen times as many photos as the original game to complete your album isn’t “big enough,” there’s the actual levels themselves. The original game had six levels and a “boss fight” for lack of a better term where you try to get a photo of Mew. What levels it had were fairly straight forward and offered little in the way of alternative ways to play. New Snap has fifteen locations and six boss fights. I called them locations and not levels because every single location offers multiple variations, or “levels” of content that are further split into day and night, which usually involves roster changes in the level and has a different variety of pose opportunities.
Sadly, only The Reef has “evening” as opposed to “night” and a truly awe-inspiring sunset. This is seriously a beautiful game when it wants to be. God, I would love for this to get the full Switch 2 upgrade treatment.
While you can look at the “levels” of each course as a difficulty setting, really it’s best to think of them as a complexity setting. The higher the level, the more variables there are. BUT, that doesn’t mean high score chasers will want to only play on the highest level. Sometimes specific events only happen on lower levels. One of the best examples is a pose that happens between the Carbink and Sableye. Both are found in the Cave courses and, exclusively on Level 2, there’s a scene where three Sableyes are chasing a Carbink. Giving the Carbink two illumina orbs causes it to attack the Sableyes.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, this is the only spot in the entire game where you can get a 4,000 point or “diamond status” three star photo of Sableye and THE ONLY three star pose Carbink does in the game, and it happens outside of the highest level of complexity the Cave has to offer. You don’t even go that direction in the Cave on level one and the scene doesn’t happen at all on level three if you take that branching path. By the way, in creating that clip, since I didn’t know if I should focus on the Sableyes reaction or the Carbink’s attack, I did both and ended up nabbing two new high scores.
Even after you reach the maximum levels, the game gives you plenty of reasons to adjust to lower ones because there’s dozens upon dozens of other poses that only happen on those levels. So, how many total levels are there in the game? Well, following the free-to-download DLC update, the map has fifteen selectable locations, like so:
Still plenty of blank spots, Nintendo. Just sayin’.
But, keep in mind that “Illumina Spots” are boss levels and are NOT the same courses as those they’re paired with. So when you click the dot for Florio Park and you see that you can play day, night, or illumina spot, it’s one course remixed five ways (3 Day, 2 Night) and a separate boss course remixed twice. There’s six bosses, so just this map alone has twenty-one different courses. Occasionally, an alternate route in a course is so dramatic it might as well be two different courses in one, as is the case with the Undersea course, but I’ll just count it as one. “There’s only fourteen dots on that map.” Right, but the game’s main menu is also itself a course, the Research Camp (you click the upper left hand corner), which also has two variations. If the menu screen looks like this:
You’ll start the course near that campfire. However, if the main menu looks like this:
If you want to change which of the two starting locations you’ll enter, it’s a cinch. Just click research, then exit back to the main menu and it’ll be the other one. The Research Center is by far the shortest level in the game, but even it’s packed with stuff.
You’ll start in front of the lab and have completely different poses and photo opportunities. Even the alternate path that takes you briefly inside the lab has changes based on which of the two starting locations you pick. So with that said, how many total levels, alternate paths, and hidden paths (IE the game doesn’t prompt you and it requires a special activation) are there in the game? Hell, I don’t know, so I’ll list them, or at least the ones I know about.
Research Camp (Camp): 2 Different Starting Locations or “Levels” One major alternate path in each that takes you into the lab
Florio Nature Park (Park): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels, and 2 Illumina Spot Levels Day level 3 and Night levels 1 & 2 has a minor alternate path that takes you across the Bidoof dam.
Both Day & Night can transfer to Secret Side Path, although any pictures taken there are scored separately.
Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has four different randomly decided starting positions for Meganium.
Secret Side Path (Side Path): 1 Day Level, 1 Night Level
Both Day & Night have a major alternate path that takes you off the main path and into Snolax’s den.
Day has a minor hidden path. Playing the flute in the first hollow log will take you above Torterra instead of underneath it.
Both Day & Night end on a remixed version of Florio Nature Park’s final scene, though any pictures taken there are scored separately.
Founja Jungle (Jungle): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
Every level Day & Night has a major (but short) alternate path that takes you off the main path and through a swamp.
Day level 3 & Night level 2 has an additional (but short) major alternate path that takes you off the main path and behind the waterfall.
Night level 2 has an additional (but short) hidden path where a Liepard knocks you off the tree in the main path.
Mightywide River (River): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
All levels have a major alternate path that takes you off the main path through a cave.
Day level 3 has a minor hidden path where a Quagsire knocks you off the main path (can’t go into the alternate route if you activate this).
Night level 3 has a minor hidden path where a Feraligatr (briefly) knocks you off the main path.
Elsewhere Forest (Forest): 3 Levels and 2 Illumina Spot Levels The level is like a maze structured as a main chamber, a scene based on a season, a main chamber, and an ending scene Level 1 will take you randomly to Spring or Summer for the second scene.
Level 2 will randomly take you to Fall or Winter for the second scene.
Level 3 allows players to control which of the four seasons they go to based on how they interact with the Espeon, so four major alternate paths.
Level 3 has a hidden path that’s permanently unlocked as an alternate path to a different finale if you lead the Deerling through the second main chamber.
Blushing Beach (Beach): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
Every level Day & Night has a major alternate path that takes you out into the water.
Maricopia Reef (Reef): 3 Day Levels, 2 Evening Levels
Every level Day & Evening has a major alternate path at the end.
Day levels 2 & 3 and Evening levels 1 & 2 have minor hidden paths based facing left or right when you approach Wailord.
Lental Seafloor (Undersea): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
Levels 2 & 3 have a major alternate path near the start that takes you through, for all intent and purposes, an entirely different course.
Level 3’s alternate path has an additional major hidden path if you rescue a Lanturn from a pair of Frillish that takes you into Lugia’s lair.
Sweltering Sands (Sands): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels Day levels 2 & 3 and Night level 2 have a major alternate path leading to a different final scene.
Barren Badlands (Badlands): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
Day levels 2 & 3 have a major alternate path that changes the entire middle of the level.
Night level 2 has the same major alternate path as Day, but it requires you to photograph at least three Digletts at the start of the stage to activate.
Fireflow Volcano (Volcano): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
Level 3 has a major alternate path that takes you to a different final room.
Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has a hidden path based on how soon you put out the fires in at least one Volcarona.
Shivering Snowfields (Snowfields): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
Day Levels 2 & 3 and Night Level 2 have a major alternate path.
The alternate path either rejoins the main path or you can take a second major alternate path that takes you to a different ending.
Outaway Cave (Cave): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
Level 3 has an alternate path in the middle of the level.
THAT alternate path has a hidden path that takes you to a different ending.
If you stay on the main path, there’s another hidden path near the end of the level that takes you to a different main path ending.
Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has a major alternate route with a different ending.
Ruins of Remembrance (Ruins): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
There’s a minor alternate ending to all three Ruins levels.
That’s a sh*t ton of game for $59.99. With all the character variables factored in, we’re talking millions, if not billions of variables at your disposal. In a game based around finding the highest possible scores in four different tiers for each Pokémon, that’s a lot of flexibility a player is given. After over 800 hours of gameplay (UPDATE: despite it saying that in my profile, I did the math and it’s physically impossible I played the game so much from where I started this review, so I think the game is counting hours even when the Switch is on sleep as long as the game is on, so it’s probably closer to 200 hours) and at least four multi-week binges since 2021, I’m still finding new high score poses. I just found this one a couple days ago literally in the first course of the game. It had been staring me in the face the entire time.
After over five years of playing this, including six weeks straight of addiction to this, I’m still finding higher scoring pictures off total flukes. Like I would never have found this photo if I hadn’t zoomed through the park before the Dodiro runs away AND taken this one single picture of it, thus forcing my hand to choose this photo for evaluation.
And of course, a new discovery doesn’t end with the discovery. Like in the above example, once I realized the scoring opportunity that happened there and the angle that the game desired, I replayed it and ended up increasing the score from the 4,796 it started the day at to 4,942, and loving every moment of it. Multiply that experience by 936. THAT is what New Pokémon Snap is offering players. That’s a LOT of gameplay for one game.
Most importantly, I never got bored with New Pokémon Snap. Every single main course is a banger and there’s just so much stuff inside each of them and so many different ways to approach each run you make. I’ve been playing this since the week it came out in 2021, and for this review, I’ve been playing New Pokémon Snap for SIX WEEKS STRAIGHT, and I really don’t even want to stop. If you wonder where I’ve been for the last six weeks, this really is it. It worked out for me too, except the way it worked out for me also made me realize we’re unlikely to ever get a Pokémon Snap 3, even though this sold around two-and-a-half million copies.
Mew was the last boss in the first game. Now it just shows up as post game content in the Jungle course, both day and night. “Is that 5,923 points for a photo not even centered in the frame?” Yep.
As a scoring-based game, New Pokémon Snap has global leaderboards, the main one of which measures what your Photodex’s score is, IE the combined score of the highest scoring version of each photo. You wouldn’t expect me, someone with shaky hands and not exactly a professional-quality gamer, to be ranked high on New Pokémon Snap’s leaderboard. The game is five years old so people have had plenty of time to get their scores up. And, well, it’s Pokémon. One of the biggest franchises in the world. But, as of this writing, in a game with 2.5 million copies sold and even more players, I’m ranked #212 in the world for Photodex and (with the help of my family, since not all course records are mine) #403 for total course score.
Individual photos don’t have leaderboards. Only the Photodex, the total course scores, and the individual courses. At one point, I couldn’t claim my Photodex score was entirely mine, as I play this game a lot with my family and they had some high score photos. But I’ve since replaced every photo not taken by me (I think there might be one or two exceptions but come on) with higher scoring photos, and any family sessions take place on a separate account, though it’s not high scoring because I ain’t allowed to play. I can watch, but I’m banned from playing because I “know where everything is.” You know, fam, I really don’t. Total bullsh*t, I tell you.
UPDATE: The day after this was published I climbed to #208 in the world. I’ll quit at 200. Cross my heart.
This should be a huge deal for me. I mean, I’ve set literally dozens of digital pinball world record scores, a few of which still stand, BUT, digital pinball isn’t exactly on the level of popularity as Pokémon. Plus, it’s not like I found myself this high on the leaderboard because the game just came out. I started this review six weeks ago ranked around 90,000th, give or take, and now, I’m 212th. I’m not THAT good. Something about that sounds fishy, right? Well, the score is legitimate and I didn’t use any cheating tactics or glitch the game. Well, except maybe this photo, which my family and I have dubbed the “Mystery Bidoof” photo.
Absolutely no clue why that scored so high, as it normally doesn’t get 945 pose points. Something happened. It’s not facing the camera. It’s not even lit-up. We’ve tried to replicate it and never come even close to getting 945 in pose. When this was declared the new high score for the two star Bidoof, I almost didn’t realize it. The only reason this was submitted for evaluation was because it was the only photo I had of Bidoof that run. (shrug). But otherwise, my Photodex is legit, and #212 in the world. What. The. F*ck?! The problem is, people don’t seem to be “beating” New Pokémon Snap. But at least it gave me a direction for this review: WHY?! Why is this amazing, immersive, unique gaming experience that’s overflowing with content getting so little engagement?
It’s really not even that high of scores in my Photodex either. This pic right here is still my four star photo for Starmie. Top players are easily over 5K for photos like these. I’m not using guides to find the photos outside a handful of instances when I was still trying to get one of every picture so that I could have this review up in a reasonable time (hah, how’d that work out for you, Cathy?!). Actually, online resources are woefully out of date for this game and often not helpful at all. Guides to “diamonding” the pictures usually are just advice to get the bare minimum 4K and not pictures with higher-yielding photos. Sometimes the advice is outright bad. Most of my photos were found just by plain old looking around. That’s the point of the game, right? That’s the fun stuff.
Well before I had any clue where I would end up in the rankings, I wanted to have a different angle for this review than contemporary reviews. The game is over five years old, after all, so ironically “New” Pokemon Snap isn’t really new anymore. I chose this for the next review after the big video pinball feature because I knew I was guaranteed to have fun and have plenty of stuff to talk about, but I didn’t want to just do a plea for a second chance for New Pokémon Snap. I needed an angle, so I came up with “how hard is it to 100% the game?” I defined 100%ing New Pokémon Snap as scoring a diamond rating (4,000 points or more) on all 936 photos and completing all 234 special requests. I thought it would make for a neat review, and I did end up reaching my goal. This link takes you to all my scores. 4K or more on every photo. Done and done.
This three star photo of Swinnub was one of the final diamond pictures I needed (I think it was second-to-last). This only scored 4,049 points and took me a half hour by itself to clear the 4K mark.
Except, something startling happened along the way: my global ranking. Not just how high I was, but how fast it happened. I entered into the top 500 global rankings before I even had all 936 photos. Actually, when I tied for 499th, I still had seven photos missing from my Photodex and nineteen others that didn’t have the diamond status. What?! And THAT got me into the top 500? Okay, so most gamers don’t ace games these days. That’s not a newsflash, and anyone who has heard the “rare achievement” chime on their Xbox knows that way too many achievements get that chime because most owners never actually play the games, Hell, I’m sort of guilty myself with this very game since, again, even though I’ve been playing this at least a couple weeks a year since it came out, I started this review ranked around 90,000th and with a very incomplete Photodex. Like so many others, I never tried for 100%. Once I did try, I realized a really, REALLY low amount of players are actually exploring New Pokémon Snap.
Technically I’m also ranked #403 in total course score, but that one isn’t ALL me. When you play a level, you get a course score based on the combined score of each photo you submit multiplied by the number of Pokemon you took pictures of. Unlike my photodex, some of the course records on the Indie Gamer Chick account don’t belong to me, but instead my family, and I didn’t really try for any during this review. I’ve reached the point where I’ll enter a level and just take pictures of two or three Pokémon I’m working to bump-up the scores on. So *I’m* ranked 212 in Photodex while the Vice Family is #403 in course score.
I thought the Pokémon franchise’s fans were into “catching ’em all” and all that jazz. That clearly isn’t the case with this game, which didn’t capture young people’s imaginations the way the original game captured mine. My nieces and nephew all agreed the low engagement has to do with the sparse roster (234 sounds great, but it’s still nowhere near a complete franchise roster even in 2021) and the lack of “Shiny” hunting, which is a popular mechanic in the franchise. They’re big Pokémon fans so I assume they might be right, at least for their age group and general Pokémon fans.
This is a totally RNG-based pose, as all characters “idle” from time to time, and most have multiple idle poses chosen at random. Pikachu alone has five or six different ones, if not more. I actually like that luck factors in a little bit. While it doesn’t totally prevent the characters from feeling like animatronics, it comes close. I also like that there’s no shiny hunting. BUT, if they wanted to include it, they could use it to incentivize high score chasing. Like make it so you can’t get a “shiny” photo unless you’ve diamonded the character. There’s so much untapped potential in this, not just for casual Pokémon fans like me but hardcore Pokémon fans who this game, apparently, doesn’t really appeal to.
Based on how I climbed the leaderboard and what those scores I passed along the way were, I guesstimate that, conservatively, less than four-thousand players have gotten all 936 photos (unless they just walked away with poses scoring 3,000 or less on tons of photos) and well under a thousand players (out of over 2.5 million) actually tried to get a diamond rating on every photo. Not get every diamond, but just tried. The truth is, it really wasn’t that hard to get one of each photo. The diamonds and a couple of the special requests were, but one star through four star photos themselves? I could probably count on one hand how many put up a real fight. Yet, I’m in the top 0.00848 of all players.
Look! It’s Luxray’s butthole! Confirmed: Pokémon poop!
It’s like a f*cking dagger to my heart because I love Pokémon Snap as a concept and as a gaming franchise, but with engagement THIS low on a Pokémon game? Hell, it’s probably the death of the Snap series. And I’m not even using some of the lame ass tactics the top ranked players are using. A popular strategy involves pausing and unpausing the game repeatedly, which automatically centers the camera’s focus and also increases the scoring window for specific poses, even glitching them out somewhat (IE you can see the pose on the screen before it actually starts to animate). I swear to God, I’m not trying to judge anyone based on their style of gameplay and if you actually have fun doing this sh*t, more power to you. But personally, *I* think it looks like a boring, tedious slog of a way to play a game, and what are you accomplishing? A high ranking on a game that I entered the top 500 on without even finishing all the objectives? You’re turning THIS game into a slog for THAT accomplishment? It’s like I said in my Pac-Man review: I might not be setting any world records, but I bet I’m having more fun than the people who are, because that sh*t looks f*cking boring.
Of course, in fairness to those players who are turning an exciting game into a slog, that strategy does exist for a reason. Okay, here comes the negative side of this review, and please, remember, this is a YES! review. I love this game. I want you to play it. I want to plummet down the rankings because New Pokémon Snap gets a second wind and a new wave of popularity. I would be VERY happy to wake up and find myself 250,000th in the world. Got that? Good. Here comes the bad.
Look, it’s Wailord. What, you don’t see it in this photo? Neither do I.
I have a theory as to why the game isn’t being finished by more players or even just played more, and that’s because New Pokémon Snap is (checks notes) broken. Like, broken-broken. People are quitting not because they dislike the concept but because the game often doesn’t work and who wants to bother with a game like that? The #1 most obvious broken element is sometimes the game takes the picture of the wrong f*cking thing. Each photo counts towards one Pokémon or object, and only one. Even if they’re the same species and all clustered up, while you’re getting points for all of them, only one is considered the focus of the picture and the main thing being judged. So take this photo:
This pose happens at the end of the River course on level 3. To activate this pose, you have to throw illumina orbs at three Swamperts “hidden” along the river course to set up the pose and then one final orb right at the very end of the level. The three Swamperts will launch out of the water and dive back in within a single second. Because it takes work throughout the whole level, this isn’t the type of picture you can just spam and quickly submit over and over. It takes time to set up. Even with those circumstances, I’ve activated this “pose” at the end of the river course a few dozen times and this was my highest scoring photo of it. Top players using the pause technique are scoring between 5,500 to over 5,700. I’m stuck at 4,924.
Notice I said “highest scoring” and not “best.” I’ve actually had WAY better pictures of this sequence. Ones that should, based on my research, have scored 5,200+ minimum, only when I submitted them for evaluation, they scored under 4,000 points. Wait, what? How? Because the camera wasn’t focused on the closest Swampert, but one of the rear ones. This is why players who discovered that the game automatically centers photos and delays or extends scoring windows started pausing and unpausing, sometimes extending one second poses into nearly a minute to get that one photo. If you’re like me and think that sounds miserable and ruinous towards fun, your only other option is to aim, shoot, and hope the game focuses on the correct one. Remember the panda on the dragon?
This one?
That’s another photo that you have to manually activate over the course of a level, and this pose happens at the end of what is probably the longest course in the game. Even if you go for ONLY this photo, each time will take five minutes just for this, give or take. Again, I’ve had MUCH better photos than this one that sits in my Photodex. Dozens of better ones, in fact. Closer, with the Pancham facing me. But they weren’t counted as Pancham pictures. Instead, they counted as Drampa pictures. Unless you’re slamming the pause button over and over like you’re doing your best NES Advantage “slow motion” impersonation, you don’t have time to stop, aim, and shoot on this. This pose is gone in a second, and there’s nothing worse than THINKING you got the picture you were looking for only to find out it’s actually something else after the level ends and you see what you got.
I’ve had worse examples but I wanted to give you an idea of how hard this is.
Normally as a game critic, I don’t offer solutions for problems with games. That’s not my job. I’m a reviewer and a critic, not a game maker. But the solution is so self-evident that it’s stunning it wasn’t part of the game all along, or patched in later. Nintendo and Bandai Namco should have looked at how f*cking tediously top players were playing the game to earn their points and adjusted the game accordingly. I don’t mean blocking the pause technique. If people want to be boring while playing a game, no skin off my teeth. But they could have eliminated the need or desire to do that by allowing players to select any Pokémon in the photo as the focus on the photo. Look at these three pictures of Grookey:
Grookey – Two Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,177
Grookey – Three Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,476
Grookey – Four Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,124
They look the same (which is another huge problem I’ll get into), but they’re actually three different tiers of photos that happen in a two second window at the end of the Park. You only have a split second to get the four star photo of Grookey, and then it shifts to the two or three star photo. Again, I’ve done MUCH better, for all three. But even with Grookey focused and perfectly centered in the frame, hundreds of different times the game said “this must be a photo of the crystal bloom” or one of the other Pokémon in the picture.
While there is a crystal bloom section in the Photodex, they’re not Pokémon and score no points as photos. In the linear story part of the game, you’re required to photograph them, which is why this is a thing. The problem is, long after you NEED to photograph them, the camera, in any close call, will always prioritize them over the Pokémon. There’s no way to stop it. There’s no toggle to prevent the camera from focusing on non-Pokémon, which is another fix that’s so obvious that it makes me think the developers are morons for not including it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is why, going off the global rankings, literally millions of players quit the game early and never returned. Those above pictures are in the FIRST COURSE IN THE GAME!
The big photos of Pichu, Shaymin, Scorbunny, and Grookey have them grouped together around the crystal, and literally every photo in this area becomes problematic. It would be REALLY nice if they patched-in a toggle that the camera would never, under any circumstance, focus on a crystal bloom or ancient ruins. Allow players to opt out of it. Since they never even attempted to fix this, I assume it’s deliberately trollish design, signed off on by all bosses at Nintendo and Bandai Namco, for the sake of making it “challenging.” God, I can’t imagine why this had such low playtime among its 2.5 million copies sold.
While I sincerely believe New Pokemon Snap is an immersive game, this problem actually breaks the logic of the immersion. In the story logic of the game, you’re handing these photos to a professor for evaluation. So why would a professor look at this photo:
It’s actually more rare to get the photo you’re trying for during this sequence because the hit boxes for the mushrooms are overlapping where the Cleffa is placed. Why even set this with a gap large enough to clearly see the Cleffa if the zooming and focus will always go to the Morelulls? “Maybe it’s meant to be a scene for the Morelulls?” Nope. The Morelulls have their backs turned to you, thus assuring very low direction points and making it clear this is NOT a scene created as a photo opportunity for them.
And not ask the person handing him it “what is this picture about?” Why does it have to be decided at the moment the photo is snapped if the whole shtick of the game is that a photographer is handing already taken photos to someone else to have them rated? Wouldn’t the photographer be able to decide what the photo is about at any time before they submit it for review? This is immersion shattering to a degree that’s stunning. It’s such an obvious fix, and one the game engine should easily be able to handle because it already recognizes and awards points for everything in the photo. This is EASY, guys. As easy as any fix in the history of video games is. This type of thing is not a rare slip. VERY often, you can have something appear suddenly in the camera, like this Gliscor that is so very clearly the focus of the picture:
Oooh, look at the pretty butterfly. So majestic. What, you don’t see a butterfly in that photo? Yeah, me neither. You’ll also note that of the five pictures it thinks are Vivillon above, three of them can’t even be submitted because they’re so far away so as to be absurd to rate. Even though the photos DO have a Gliscor up next to the camera. GOLLY GEE F*CKING WIZ, DO YOU THINK IT COULD BE A PHOTO OF SOMETHING ELSE THEN? This is a deliberately brain dead engine because presumably Haruki Suzaki was more worried that this photography game for children might be too easy than he was about turning players off forever because the game feigns ignorance about what the subject of photos is in the name of adding difficulty.
So you quickly snap photos because it happens suddenly and then is gone from the screen. You’re excited because your reflexes were sharp. You saw the thumbnail in the corner during the course and KNOW you got the picture in the center or close enough. Then you finish the level and the photo isn’t there. Instead, you have pictures of Vivillons (which are in almost every course) in the far, far, far, far background of the photo you THOUGHT you got of something else. Why would any photographer give this photo to a professor and say it’s a Vivillon? Why would any professor assume this is a photo of a barely visible butterfly in the background? THIS IS NOT IMMERSIVE, BECAUSE NO PHOTOGRAPHER OR PHOTO RATER WOULD BE THIS DENSE! This is why most players quit early and never returned and others are pausing and unpausing the game in a way sure to self-lobotomize the fun center of their brains. Because otherwise, once the camera focuses on something, it’s hard to unfocus on it and refocus on something else. There’s a spot in the game where a Squirtle rides a Lapras, and if your timing is true (or you have burst mode on the camera) you might even catch it winking at the camera, which lasts for about a tenth of a second and scores maximum pose points.
Awesome photo, right? But it only scores 4,728 points. I’ve had it where it was bigger in frame, more centered, and facing me more when I captured the elusive wink, but instead of it counting as a Squirtle photo, it counted as a photo of the Lapras. Now Squirtle has a wide variety of poses in multiple courses, but sometimes a Pokémon only has a single viable pose for the diamond rating and it’s almost entirely luck if the photo actually is correct. Such is the case with Mawile. Its only other four star poses are physically impossible to score 4K on (it’s buried head-first in snow, so direction gets basically nothing), so this is it, but the overwhelming majority of the time, the photo instead counts for the Mamoswine its literally engulfed in, and the picture MUST be taken at the point of impact for maximum (IE enough to clear 4K) points.
I seriously can’t imagine why my relatively mediocre photo gallery is ranked 212th in the world. And hell, sometimes it really, REALLY makes no sense what it focuses on. Look at this photo, which broke me. I mean seriously, I’m about to lose my f*cking sh*t.
I assure you that I was not aiming at the f*cking Bidoof in background in this photo. I was clearly aiming at the bunny I just beamed in its f*cking face with an apple, so why would even a bad AI camera focus assume I wanted to take a picture of the thing far in the background and not the other thing that’s closer, dead center, and had literally just been interacted with by the player? Even the stupidest, glue sniffing, window licking idiot on the planet would look at this photo and choose the Scorbunny as the focus of the picture. And yet, because of how I zoomed in while playing the game, it decided it had to focus on something while I was waiting for the bunny that I knew was going to run up to the stick BECAUSE I THOUGHT THAT’S THE F*CKING OBJECT OF THE GAME: TO FIND THE F*CKING POSES AND WAIT FOR THEM! Somehow the brain dead engine decided I was aiming for the sleeping Bidoof and never unfocused on it even after I unzoomed the camera and rezoomed to get this picture. Hey, sh*t for brains idiots that made this game: what the actual f*ck was wrong with you? Have a little f*cking pride in your work and fix this sh*t! OH, IT’LL MAKE THE GAME TOO EASY? WHO CARES ABOUT CHALLENGE?! YOU KNOW, DIFFICULTY AIN’T WORTH SH*T IF PEOPLE JUST QUIT PLAYING BECAUSE THE GAME IS SO F*CKING STUPID IT CAN’T TELL THAT A CHARACTER THAT IS DEAD CENTER IN FRAME IS THE FOCUS OF THE PICTURE AND NOT THE THING COMPLETELY ENGULFED BEHIND IT! YOU SERIOUSLY SIGNED OFF ON THIS ENGINE? ARE YOU STUPID?
Actually, THIS is the one that broke me from two days earlier. Yeah, it happened twice. Actually it’s probably happened to me alone about forty or fifty times for this one photo alone (thankfully I found a better version and never have to do it again). I swear to god this review is technically an endorsement and I admire the creativity of this game, and I also think the people who made it are dumb f*cks that couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Sigh. I feel like an idiot for caring because clearly nobody in charge of making this game did. And there’s other problems. Actually, the crystal blooms cause lots of issues, and not just because they suck the focus away from the Pokémon so much that I’ve apparently taken over 1,300 photos of them (yes, it counts them). The game requires you to take, like, five or maybe six to complete the story, and that’s exactly how many I would have voluntarily taken. But an even bigger logic problem comes with “background” points and how the crystal blooms relate to them. “Background” in general is a problematic scoring category. Look at the very worst photo in my Photodex:
This is a photo of a Sobble and it scores 4,680, ranking it #150 out of 234 three star photos. It scores 556 points for “other Pokemon” and 291 in “background points.” Huh? Okay, first off, “background” in this context doesn’t really mean “background.” It means anything in the photo the makers of the game have decided is point-scoring neat. Any photo taken with the waterfall in view on the jungle course scores high in background points, even if the photo is so obviously not as good. See:
By the way, this picture is now over 5,000 points and I don’t hate it anymore.
While the right picture is CLEARLY a better, more interesting picture of the cat that someone collecting photos of wildlife for, say, the Pokémon version of National Geographic would prefer, the left picture is providing much more background points. So going back to that Sobble, even though the waterfall is in the foreground, the picture is being boosted by just the presence of the waterfall, and by one other thing. Did you spot it?
That little red fleck? What is it? Well, it’s the edge of a crystal bloom, and the crystal blooms are so heavily prioritized that even having just a tiny sliver of the tip of a leaf from it, or even the glow from one if you activate it with an illumina orb, boosts the background points significantly. So while this is advertised as a game where the object is to photograph Pokémon, really it’s Crystal Bloom: The Game and the actual object is to try to get Pokémon photographed around them. Bonus points if you do it with a background that scores points. Remember that beautiful sunset from the reef course? Well the game actually doesn’t have a concept of beauty. Look at these photos I just took:
Seriously, Reef Evening might be the single most beautiful video game level ever made. Total background points between those four photos: 181 points, and they’re all for the fourth photo. The first three pictures above scored zero background points.
After this, I played the Research Camp for about, no exaggeration, ten seconds and got not one but two separate photos right off the bat that scored more background points than all four of those beautiful reef pictures combined. Take a look:
So wait, what’s the background? The vehicle. Anything taken with the vehicle in view is guaranteed to score tons of points. Or hell, I just today got this photo while I finished editing this feature:
112 in Background points? Where? The grass? Nope. That photo was shot right in front of the vehicle, and even though you can’t see it at all, apparently the “glow” of it or something is boosting the background score, because LOGIC! But hey, new record for my two star Meowth photo so yeah for me. Now let’s compare two pictures taken on the beach. This Lapras pic has a tropical island behind it that draws attention to the eyes. Surely that island is there for some reason besides set dressing.
Nope. It scores NOTHING for background points. Now don’t get me wrong: set dressing is important for immersion, and make no mistake that New Pokémon Snap is one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played specifically because of the variety of settings and how well dressed those settings are. BUT, with that said, when background is given such a high scoring premium in this game, you really need to go through the environments you’ve created and assign background scores to anything that catches the eye. That is NOT a random tree or a tuft of grass. It’s an island. It stands out prominently, and then they specifically placed a Lapras to swim directly in front of it. Compare that photo, which scored zero background points, to this photo that scored an insane 232.
This isn’t actually my three star Pikachu pic.
What are the background points for? The coastline? Nope. The shovel, which will eventually (on the Beach’s night course) be a Pokémon, but isn’t now. You don’t even need to have the Pokémon interact with the shovel, either. If the photo has a shovel in it anywhere, it will score at least some points for it. So the scoring system is deeply, deeply flawed, as neither the crystal nor the background stuff makes the game better. It kind of makes it worse, because you’re no longer incentivized to try to get the best action shots wherever they happen. Instead, you find yourself trying to get the best pictures within the limited scope of the crystals or whatever else awards background points. You’ll note that Pikachu is scoring 766 pose points and 232 background, so obviously my three star picture of Pikachu is a better version of that picture, right? Nope. It’s this photo:
Where are the 131 background points? The flower? Nope. Just the glow of a crystal bloom right next to it. For comparison, here’s my one star photo of Shaymin with a flower right next to it:
Zero background points. It’s glowing because I lit it with an illumina orb. So what could be worse than having to base pictures around crystals? How about not doing enough to make sure each tier of photo has no look-alike photos. This is a BIG problem. My two star and four star Pikachu pictures are basically identical, taken in the same location during the opening moment of the Beach at night on level 2.
Because there’s a second Pikachu there, that photo scored 543 “other Pokémon” points for the two star and 409 for the four star. So even though there’s a HUGE variety of Pikachu poses in the game and lots of things they interact with, it’ll be tough to beat the four star picture. At the research lab, you can get Pikachu to pose on one of the vehicles, but the amount of background points the vehicle scores can’t compete with the bonus points for the second Pikachu, plus you’re just plain not close enough.
The tier concept is kind of the problem. Needing more than one picture of each Pokémon is great. It’s part of the reason why I can never go back to the original Snap. But, sticking like glue to the “four pictures AND ONLY four pictures” format for each Pokémon is kind of insane. Not all of them have four pictures worth of content, while some have significantly more. Pikachu is like that. In the research camp level alone, in addition to the special pose of him getting on the vehicle, you can make him jump on the trough. While this isn’t the best example since I didn’t get the timing for framing perfect, you can still see how big the gap the score has. It can NEVER hope to compete with the picture I have.
The thing is, the sleeping picture you pass right by without doing any work to make it happen. All I had to do was light the crystal and hit him with an apple. The trough picture is actually pretty fickle to activate. I can’t just “do it” and make it happen by will. You have to lead him to the thing, then hope he jumps up it. Sometimes he just stops moving like the CPU’s run cycle is stuck. So of the two photos above, one takes maximum effort and one takes almost none. But it’s the one that takes almost none that is all but unbeatable against all other three star photos, and that’s not even the worst example. At one point, Pikachu rides a Mantine in the reef, which is its four star pose. To activate it, you need to light two crystals, and then time it perfectly because it flies by you quickly. I’m SO proud of this picture:
BUT, that’s actually my three star picture of Mantine, not my four star Pikachu picture. Getting the Pikachu version of this picture is really hard because literally every “something riding something” picture is hard to get the camera to focus on the rider. Eventually, someday, I will turn THAT picture into my Photodex’s four star Pikachu picture. I almost did a few minutes ago grabbing the photo for this review. But look at the pose points:
The degree of difficulty to time that picture, center it, aim, shoot, AND THEN have the focus actually be on Pikachu and not the Mantine is so much higher than that boring beach picture. They’re so far apart in the skill required to even get them that it’s kind of insane that the two shots are actually in the same category. But the Pikachu riding the Mantine photo only gets 500 pose points and competes head to head with the beach picture that can also be the two star photo depending on what the second Pikachu is doing. Again, I could beat that four star, and I will eventually. But why are they even put against each-other in the first place? They’re nothing alike.
UPDATE: Here’s a couple better examples, including one of a Pikachu that’s very clearly evil and, now that he’s mastered riding Mantine, is going to take over the world and enslave humanity. I messed up getting a screenshot of the second pic’s score, but it gained size points and lost “other Pokémon” points. These pics are actually taken at two different locations on the reef course and utilize different angles, but it doesn’t matter. The degree of difficulty is many multiples higher than those beach pics, but both the Mantine pics still only award 500 pose points, putting a much more visually interesting and desirable concept of a photo at massive disadvantage at the moment they’re taken over the bland and easy to grab beach scene that doesn’t just cover one tier, but two. It’s ridiculous. And that’s far from the only identical photo in my album.
What the f*ck? There’s actually TONS of poses for Pichu, but because they made it so the same f*cking moment changes from two star to three star based on whether or not Scorbunny is also celebrating, you can actually get two 5K photos in the three second window, and the only real challenge is making sure the camera focuses on the Pichu and not the Torterra. This pose happens every single time you play the level. You do nothing to activate it. It’s the finale of a battle between a Torterra and Dodrio, and not one of those “you pick the winner” fights.
Update: GOOD BYE double Pichu, though the reason it took me so long to get this photo is because every previous attempt photographed the bloom or something else.
Speaking of Torterra, here are its monster-scoring one and two star photos.
Again, no work needed for either of these besides lighting them with the illumina orbs. You pass right by them. I could use the “they’re the same picture” meme but instead I’ll just note that there’s at least six or seven situations where Torterra does something visually interesting in the two courses it appears in (Park and Side Path), but none of those things score the pose points, other Pokémon points, or background points the above two almost identical situations taken in the same location do and can’t hope to compete. Also, the game weirdly prioritizes sleeping pictures. Shaymin is the worst about this. Here are its two, three, and four star photos.
Again, despite its small size, of course it does more things. You can feed it apples. You can make it jump for joy. But none of it matters because THREE OUT OF FOUR pictures of it are sleeping pictures taken right next to clusters of other Pokémon. The game doesn’t lack for variety. It might actually have the biggest variety of stuff to do in any game I’ve ever played in my life. The problem is, it actually doesn’t reward you for discovering that variety. All the Pokémon behave differently after you hit them with an apple. Some growl at you. Some play it off cool. Some dust themselves off. The Bewears even try to kill you, the only such instance in the game where Pokémon attack you so aggressively that the game automatically speeds up, cinematically running for your life from the murder bears.
But typically, none of the post-hit animations score the maximum pose points, and in fact, they usually score under the 500 pose points average, in the 450 range. Even if you match size, beat direction, beat placement, and the timing is much, much more difficult (since the timing of the hit is almost entirely user controlled while the reaction isn’t), the game simply does not reward the harder to get photos. It rewards the most uncreative, unimaginative ones.
Even though the “dust off” animations are unique and memorable, the game heavily rewards the moment the apple impacts the Pokémon. That usually scores anywhere between 750 points to even the max 1,000 points (2,000 for “special” Pokémon). There’s exceptions of course, but it’s yet another example of how the game created these elaborate personalities and then actively punishes you for thinking they’re the prize.
Sometimes the game wants Pokémon facing you and sometimes it wants them from the side, but sussing this out is actually part of the fun. For all my bitching, I really enjoyed feeling like the world’s most unhinged zoologist in this game. “Ah yes, but what if I hit them with an apple while they face due east?”
The same goes for feeding the Pokémon apples. That takes time, and you have to wait while they eat them. You would think the slowest Pokemon would yield massive rewards for their “joy” poses after they finish eating and some actually do, but most don’t. The big prize is the moment of impact, IE the one thing in the game where almost every character, regardless of shape or size, acts exactly the same way.
I won’t say that finding the low scoring poses or stuff so far in the background that it’s useless towards scoring isn’t fun. I had fun when I found out there’s a moment where Kangaskhan places another character in her pouch, even if it happens so far from the camera that it can’t ever make the Photodex. I was having fun before I understood the game wouldn’t know a beautiful background if it bit its ass and I was having fun afterward when I started looking for these arbitrary point getters. But I kinda wish they just threw out the background category and the four-tier limits altogether and just allowed more photos. Ideally, the game should be a scavenger hunt for the poses, and it’s not. Applin is a great example of that, and it shows ANOTHER problem in that photos can’t show off motion. Here’s its one star and three star poses.
As you can clearly see, both those photos are nearly identical. Oh, you think the three star is a higher ranking because it’s eyes are slightly more wonky? Nah, it’s because it’s actually rolling in that picture, whereas the one star is completely stationary. The rolling picture doesn’t actually look like it’s rolling, because, you know, it’s a photo and there’s no sense of motion (there’s an idea for a sequel: have players search for ten second clips of Pokémon. Something the TikTok Generation can get behind!). But I promise you it is rolling, and its only other three star pose can’t compete with the roll. How someone seeing the photo in a scientific journal would know it’s rolling is beyond me. The sad thing is, the other three star photo is the perfect alternative to prevent that sameness.
It’s hanging upside down from the tree and when you draw near it, its eyes pop out to get a good look at you. Great photo, right? Nope. That is also a three star pose, and because the Applin spooks too easily and retracts its eyes before you’re close enough to get its size points up, I’ve literally never gotten 4,000 points from it. The “direction” points plummet if the eyes aren’t out. So distant photos of this compete head-to-head with the rolling pictures, which will always look vastly less interesting than the hanging-from-the-tree picture but yield much, much more points. Applin is one of the smaller Pokémon and is very, very hard to get close enough to get enough size points to clear 4,000. For the smaller ones, you practically need the f*cking things pressed up against the lens. Meanwhile, some other Pokémon have such limited and low-scoring opportunities for some of their tiers that I swear to God it’s like the entire f*cking development team forgot about them. Here’s my four star Inkay photo.
Pretty lame, Milhouse. So, to get that photo, you have to light a crystal bloom that’s well out in front of you, and then race these two Inkays who are swimming to the bloom. They’ll separate when they reach it, and then jump out of the water and cross paths. This is the only time IN THE ENTIRE GAME they’ll do that. If only one Inkay is in the photo, it drops to the three star tier. That above photo is only the second time I’ve cleared 4,000 points. The only saving grace is that it happens right at the start of the Reef Evening levels 1 and 2. But in literally hundreds of attempts, that’s my best: 4,016 points. F*ck. Off. It’s universally regarded as one of the toughest diamonds in the game. In the clip below, I got 3,994 points.
So why not scoot back when it’s easier to get them both? Well, because size becomes an issue. For Inkay, THIS is a 2,000 in size:
This is 1,999 in size:
Okay, so size changes based on the pose, right? Not really, as the two pics above are actually kind of the same size. What you’re seeing in my jumping pic scored 1,360 in size. The size points drop that quickly, and there’s also a “focus” issue of course as you want the one facing the camera to be the focus, but it happens in a split second. I just grabbed a quick example and it’s not a perfect example because it’s not even close to centered, but it should give you an idea of how quickly size points drop. Literally every fraction of a frame in distance traveled subtracts exponentially more points. Just a teeny, tiny bit further away from the camera and I’ve lost nearly 300 points in size alone.
What’s with the 762 in pose? Again, some poses are measured in fractions of a second. Like, the game is frame-specific on pose points. For some, that fraction of a fraction of a second is the one and only max point chance for the entire character in a tier. Oh, there’s another four star Inkay photo, just like how the Applin has a second option for the three stars. And, like the Applin, it happens so far away from the camera that it can’t score enough points. It’s actually one of those special requests that takes approximately six weeks to complete (now you know the truth of where I’ve been this whole time) and involves feeding two Inkays an apple, then feeding them each another apple in another spot along with third Inkay, then feeding the third one again, and then feeding another along with four others, and if even one of them doesn’t eat the apple because two of them are bumping into each-other, you have to start over. BUT, if everyone eats their apples, THEN they’ll f*ck off well away from the camera and do this four start pose:
It’s a tedious nightmare of a task that takes forever, is super easy to f*ck up because sometimes they just refuse to eat the apples, and the end result happens so far away from the camera that it can’t score 4,000 points because you’re not even close to getting the size bonus. The photo I submitted of all five jumping scored around 3,700. So that crossover picture is the only option, and you have literally a split second to get this one diamond photo of one of the smaller Pokémon. The small ones are problematic in general. Look at the size scores on Minior, one of the smallest Pokémon in the game.
Now sometimes you get too close and it takes points away, but these aren’t of the “too close” variety. Despite how small this thing is, they actually expect bigger photos than what I have. You can see in the one star picture that Minior is barely bigger than the apples you throw. That means not being able to get any interesting looking photos since you have to be so close up that details like backgrounds or other Pokémon are going to be nearly impossible. Look at my four star photo of it:
Sigh.
The process to activate that pose involves waking up seven different Miniors buried in the sand, using only your scan to find them (and even then, you don’t throw the orbs where you think you should). It’s awful and one of the most tedious poses to activate in the game. Even then, it took me roughly a dozen attempts to break 4,000 points because the pose literally flies right on by AND it also lumps in the “focus on the wrong thing” problem because if you focus on any of the other Miniors but the center one, your size points will plummet. It wouldn’t have f*cking killed the people who make adjustments to the “size” for smaller Pokémon. It might have made the game more fun, but their priorities were completely out of whack.
Which of these three do you think is the focus of this “I literally can’t believe this scored 4,894 points” photo. If you guessed the Piplup, thanks for actually reading this review because you’ve clearly been paying attention. This is yet another example of both finding a monster score because it was my one and only photo of the thing and thus I had to submit it and also me trying to take a picture of one thing and the game counting it as a photo of something else, though in this case, it broke my four star record for the Piplup by over 500 points, as the logical “center the Piplup” shot didn’t score THAT much. I can’t see how it’s possible to beat this photo, actually. So hey, thanks for once you miserable broken piece of sh*t engine.
Believe it or not, I haven’t even shown you the single worst photo opportunity in the game. The canary in the coalmine that shows how little they gave a sh*t to make sure every Pokémon has logical and/or exciting high-yield scoring chances belongs to Drampa. Drampa is an elderly dragon and he’s located in the Elsewhere Forest, which is a great level with awesome themes. So in theory there should be plenty of stuff you can do with this character. You saw the panda and the lizard with a cancerous tumor called Bulbasaur riding it. That’s a four star photo of Drampa, but not THE four star photo. If you beam the Bulbasaur with an apple after they hop off the ride, Drampa gets pissed.
This scored 5,217 points, plus, you know, it just looks cool.
It’s actually a legitimately frightening moment the first time it happens, and it’s such a cool f*cking picture. So they actually did do well by it, except for the three star photo. As far as I can tell, and apparently as far as anyone on the entire World Wide Web can tell, there’s only one single three star picture for this thing in the entire game, though it’s in the same spot on all three levels of the Forest during the standard finale. Here’s my version of it:
Yep, that’s it. In theory, I could make it better by having a nearby lizard appear a little more prominently in the picture (you can still see it a little bit in the bottom left hand corner, hence the 19 “other Pokémon” points), but 4,189 is actually a very high score for this piece of sh*t picture. The problem is, this is literally the game’s only three star Drampa opportunity. I don’t mean the only one capable of scoring 4,000 points. I literally mean THE ONLY THREE STAR DRAMPA OPTION IN THE ENTIRE GAME. It’s sleeping in a way where you can’t even see its face. There’s no way to cut that grass to get a better shot, and if you wake it up, it changes to a two star or one star photo. What the f*ck is that sh*t? In a level that has more variables than any other level in the game, that’s it. Your one and only three star photo pose of Drampa, and hell, it took me dozens of attempts to line it up in a way that scored the diamond rating and another few dozen attempts (done only because I was playing that level and you pass by it every time in the standard finale) to get the score up to 4,189. But at least there’s multiple other places to find Drampa for his other tiers. Can’t say that about Jolteon.
F*ck this thing.
Jolteon appears exclusively at the end of the hidden path found in the alternate path of the Cave on level 3, so even reaching it requires both taking an alternate route AND then manually activating a time consuming hidden route. AND THEN it has to be prompted to actually jump into the play area with not one but two apples, which if the apples bounce wrong, it’ll walk away from you to go eat them. It has an easy four star photo. Just hit it with an apple once it’s walking around. But its three star photo is notorious despite having two options. The first is the one in the above pic of it leaping onto the playfield after you hit it with two apples. The above photo is so hard to get that it was literally the final diamond rating I nabbed for the full set of all 936. That photo above scored 4,012 points, and that’s considered very high for the jump since it doesn’t score a lot of pose points. The other option is this:
That itch scored 948 just for the pose, ultimately awarding me a whopping 4,168 points (that’s the 9th lowest among my three star photos). And I did literally nothing, because that’s one of its random idle animations. Almost all Pokémon have one or more RNG based idle animations if you just leave them alone. They’re one of the few RNG elements in the game and sometimes they won’t happen if you’re zoomed in and waiting for one, I assume as some kind of trollish “a watched pot never boils” thing. So getting that RNG picture of Jolteon close enough to score 1,521 size points (yes, that’s really all that photo got for size) is totally luck based. And here’s a clip of the room it’s in.
The room it’s in is lumpy and thus hard to use apples to lure it because they bounce awkwardly, covered with dense foliage that blocks it from view and dramatically takes away points, and the area it can travel before being stopped by a drop-off is very limited. It doesn’t move very fast, and if you hit it with an apple, it’ll stop to do its angry electric storm animation. Like, the limit is just a few seconds short of where that clip ends. So in Jolteon’s only appearance in the entire game, and an appearance you have to actually take multiple steps to even activate, you have just a matter of seconds to get the full range of poses in an area that’s covered thick with things that block it and lower its score. In the above clip, I did successfully get a centered pic of its gratitude pose. How’d that do? Not even 4,500 points, because it wasn’t close enough.
Note that the heavy photo-bombing weeds scattered all over its lair don’t even give you background points.
Better in pose. Better in direction. Better in placement. BUT, a teeny tiny bit further away from the camera, but that teeny tiny bit cost me 407 points. Compare that to this photo:
WHAT THE F*CK?! REALLY!? Well, I can explain. Most levels have some kind of “special” Pokémon that, if the reaction to my nieces and nephew is any indication, are there as a fan service. These special Pokémon score bonkers points just by existing. These aren’t bosses, which I have no objection to scoring higher. These are just normal Pokémon, though some (maybe all) show up as post game content after you’ve finished the linear story of the game. The game so dramatically overloads scoring for these that it’s fish in a barrel. Look at this one:
It’s not even in the f*cking frame properly and it’s scoring 5,509 points. That’s my 12th highest scoring one star photo. So what did I do to activate this high-yielding Pokémon? Nothing. It literally is just there at the start of every single level, 1 through 3, in the Ruins course. Just the act of throwing an illumina orb at it changes it to a two star photo. Here’s that one:
Again, not a great photo. Timing was somewhat off. 5,505 points, my 10th highest scoring two star photo, and again, I can’t stress enough: it literally just slowly floats directly into view at the start of the Ruins, without doing anything, and it shows up at other times in the level too. (throws up hands) I get that it’s special in the Pokémon story, but for the purposes of this game, it’s really not and it shouldn’t get that many points, especially when it takes no work to get it. Compare that to the enormous pain in the ass that is Jolteon, and it really just makes the whole thing feel kind of half-assed. Hell, my #1 scoring Pokémon isn’t a boss. It’s Celebi, which to its credit, you have to hit with an orb as it zooms around the start of the standard finale of the forest to be able to get poses. But it’s not THAT hard to do so.
As of this writing, that one star photo of Celebi is my highest scoring photo in any tier. A one star photo beats even my highest four star photos, and I wasn’t even really trying for it. I was stunned when I got it, and I only got it because I actually screwed up activating the four star photo, which looks kinda the same.
That one star Celebi photo, taken because of a screw-up on my part, passed this photo of last boss Xerneas by five points, even though THIS photo takes a few steps to activate and is pretty difficult to frame correctly.
So the game has way too much emphasis on these special Pokémon, many of which outscore the f*cking bosses with a fraction of the effort even if the photos are no good. It’s so demoralizing to work your ass off trying to get the perfect picture of something that’s hard to move, hard to center, has a touch of RNG, and might even require interacting with other Pokémon, only to then get monster points for a photo of the “special” Pokémon just f*cking laying there in the same level. F*cking really?
By the way, that picture, taken back in 2021 and probably only submitted because I missed the crystal blooms that wake it up, is still my #1 photo of Lugia just because of the 448 points for background. THAT picture scores more points than the three harder to get action pictures of the same thing.
Again, is it any wonder I’m ranked #212th in the world despite not really having amazing photos? New Pokémon Snap is, at times, outright broken in a way you don’t expect from a Nintendo-published game, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to figure out why 99.99% of all people who spent $60 on it didn’t bother to try and get high scores. It didn’t have to be this way. They also didn’t have to make the bosses so f*cking miserable to play. The bosses are my final major complaint, because, well, they’re kind of boring. It’s not enough to simply photograph them. You can, but they won’t score very much. Unlike normal Pokémon, you MUST light them up, often with multiple illumina orbs, to get them to glow in a way that looks like they have magical stink lines coming off them.
What the f*ck is with sleeping photos scoring so much? EVEN THE BOSSES? Did the development team just really need a nap or something?
While lightning the bosses doesn’t sound too bad, three specifically are really, really hard to actually hit with the orbs. Steelix (when he’s not in slumber land), Wishiwashi (which has slow motion underwater physics to the throwing mechanic), and especially Volcarona cross the line from innovative takes on the photography format to trollish snoozers. They move fast and erratically but you still have to hit them with orbs and then still manage to get the photos when they barely fit into the frame. Wishiwashi and Volcarona have additional steps, as Wishiwashi requires you to orb multiple versions of the smaller fish that make up the larger one, while Volcarona is on fire and has to be put out with TWO apples AND THEN lit with an orb, and also there’s two of them on level two. They’re slogs, plain and simple. Wishiwashi is especially boring to play, and on top of that, it’s the lowest-scoring boss by far.
It should feel like a sea monster which is like seriously my #1 phobia, but it’s so boring that it doesn’t even give me nightmares. The cutesy, sweet and innocent Milotic actually has given me two nightmares where I was in its lake and couldn’t swim to reach the shore (only one less verified nightmare than of the sea serpent from Shadow of the Colossus), and it’s lovable and huggable. I mean, allegedly, if you’re into that sort of thing. I think it’s an unholy abomination but that’s just me.
If it sounds like I hate New Pokémon Snap, well, I kind of do. And also it’s maybe my favorite video game ever. Again, I’ve spent six weeks in a row playing it basically all day and I don’t even really entirely want to stop. The only real thing I hate about it is that they stopped updating it. It needs a lot of work. I didn’t even mention all the times I’ve crashed the game on the park course. I’m almost certain it’s tied to this thing:
It doesn’t crash during the course, but in the transition between taking your last photo (or even just hitting the exit) and the photo selection screen. I think it’s Florges specifically because most crashes happen when I’m excited about some photo I got of it that also uses up the end of my 72 photo roll. Without exaggeration, it’s over twenty crashes back to the Switch or Switch 2 menu, and if they haven’t fixed it by now, I assume they never will. I’m not happy with my 19,730 points for Floges (which comes in five randomly selected colors) because I f*cking know I’ve beaten every single one of those four photos and it didn’t count. I know they can fix it. I know they can fix the focus issues. They’re just choosing not to.
I want to go to this place. I mean without the monsters.
Most of all, I know they can add more content. I can’t stress enough that all the main courses in the game are outstanding. There’s SO much to do and so many variables. Plus, they just feel alive and real in a way the Nintendo 64 game could never hope to do because of the limitations of the tech. The preset locations do give the game a dark ride vibe and make the Pokémon feel more like animatronics than living creatures, especially when they have a plastic look to them like this:
Most don’t look this way, but that means the ones that do stand out so much more. These look like a diorama, don’t they? A plastic diorama.
But the actual environments can totally pass for ecosystems that you would expect exotic creatures to live in. Combined with the Pokémon themselves, owning New Pokémon Snap is like owning your own collection of sixteen really amazing interactive Disneyland rides that you can go on anytime, and I love it for that. But there is so much more they could do with this. If they want to stick to the natural environment theme, fine. New Pokémon Snap doesn’t have a mountain level. It doesn’t have a true swamp level (a swamp appears for about ten seconds in the jungle level), or a grasslands style plains. There’s an underwater level that’s essentially two levels in one, but no level set in the sky. Hell, there’s enough alien or robotic Pokémon that they could do a course set on a moon.
Actually, scratch that one. They might base it around this thing.
But, like, why stop at the whole “nature environments” theme? That makes NO sense, because in the world of Pokémon, they’re everywhere on the planet. Not only is the entire global economy based around them and literally everyone owns one, but they even have rights and work jobs in cities. So why not roll with that and have levels set in cities, offices, carnivals, haunted houses, graveyards, museums, etc.? I felt physically ill when I realized that, despite selling 2.5 million copies, very few people are actually playing this. No updates are coming. This is the end of Pokémon Snap. This isn’t an alarmist view. This is reality. I’m 212th in the world despite having some fairly pathetic photos still in my Photodex, like these:
To my credit, those are all really hard photos to diamond at all, but they’re hardly record setting. Yet, out of 2.5 million owners of New Pokémon Snap, 99.99152% of them have lower scores on their overall Photodex than me. Look at those last four photos and ask “is she awesome at it or is nobody playing it?” I’m not awesome, and nobody is playing this. Nobody played it in 2021 and nobody is playing it in 2026. I think people probably tried to play it, but when the game constantly f*cks up what the focus of a photo is, you know, not everyone has the stomach for that. Challenge is awesome, but if that challenge is broken, you should actually expect people to just opt out instead of accepting that challenge. That’s how I, someone with shaky hands, could brute force myself into the top 250 of a major multi-million selling game. Because most people quit playing it after getting f*cked by the focus one too many times, and I can’t totally blame them.
Realistically, most Pokémon are not going to be THE focus of pictures. Yet, sometimes I just like to look at what’s happening in a level. There is always so much going on, especially on the higher levels. It really is something special, for all its problems.
Still I’m going to make this plea to everyone who has passed on New Pokémon Snap or quit early on: give this one another chance. Don’t look up guides for it. Just turn it on and look around. Even five years later, it still has gas in the tank and offers an experience unlike anything out there. Give everyone in charge of this game a reason to second guess this franchise. Nintendo seems to be under the impression that even owners took a hard pass on New Snap’s gameplay. I think they’re wrong and it’s NOT the gameplay that made people opt out. It’s the jank. The gameplay is awesome. For all of its many, many flaws, I could not put this f*cking thing down, putting my website’s momentum at risk because, f*ck it, I was having fun. That’s the whole reason I have this blog, and it hurts my heart that so many of my readers passed on this, and will continue to pass because, yeah, I had to do my job and list all my grievances with it. And I have many, many grievances. Stuff like this:
DIRECTION MY F*CKING ACHING ASS! IT’S THE SAME F*CKING POSE, ONLY CLOSER TO THE CAMERA AND MIRRORED, WITH THE OTHER DOG AND XERNEAS EVEN MORE PROMINENT! AHHHH! CATHY MAD! CATHY SMASH! GET REVENGE ON WORLD!
Well, I can totally understand why putting up with that isn’t for everyone. I might even call New Pokémon Snap the most broken good game ever made, because make no mistake, it is broken. (nods) Broken-broken, with no fixes in sight, even if those fixes would be the most obvious fixes in the history of video games. You know how Nintendo is doing “Switch 2 Editions” of many prominent Switch 1 games? Yeah, I wouldn’t expect such an update for this game. It didn’t sell enough because “2.5 million copies? Pssh, chump change.” And it obviously isn’t being played enough to justify such an overhaul. Just the act of hitting the game’s stated top scoring goal of 4,000 points for every photo put me well into the top 500 global leaderboard rankings. That’s VERY damning for how much engagement this game gets. You don’t think Nintendo pays close attention to this stuff?
They actually put a photobomber in the river level. Look at this picture of Arbok. What, that’s not an Arbok picture you say? Of course it is! Look at what it says! Maybe I was wrong and the people who made this aren’t stupid, but instead are complete f*cking assholes.
Now, read all my grievances again. I STILL WANT TO KEEP PLAYING! That’s my pitch. After six weeks and thousands of instances of getting f*cked by a bad engine, I’m still game to keep going. Maybe I’m just wired for addiction to this type of scoring based thing, and the whole “interactive dark ride” thing (I’m a HUGE Disneyland fan) made this an especially potent addiction for me. But I don’t think it’s just me that’s wired like that. I sincerely think people who haven’t given New Pokémon Snap are missing out. After hundreds of hours of gameplay over the last few years, I’m still finding things I never knew were there. Interactions I’d never seen.
Ready to have your mind blown? I just found out a couple days ago that I hadn’t actually 100%ed the game. Look at this map:
Every course, including the illumina spots, has a map in the Photodex menu. I never used them. They’re kind of worthless. Well, the other day I was playing the Xerneas Illumina spot and nabbed a photo of a random non-Xerneas character that I didn’t know was in that course. After it finished tallying my score it gave me a fake achievement for completing my fifth map, meaning I not only found every Pokémon in the map but every single location of them. Since day and night courses have their own maps, there’s thirty total maps, and I’d just filled out my fifth. “Wait, you meant to tell me I still have twenty-five maps left that have stuff I’ve technically never seen or submitted or whatever?” Yep. If the map is complete, it gets a crown next to it. For all my work, and my high global ranking, as of this writing I’m still missing twenty-four out of thirty crowns. The only ones I have are Park Day, Park Night, Research Center, Side Path Day, Side Path Night, and the Ruins Illumina Spot.
T
Huh. Wow. So, yeah, that’s my pitch: look what I’ve done with this game. Look at the time I have in it. Look at the score I’ve achieved. And yet, there’s still at least twenty four things left I haven’t done. Folks, this game is packed. And broken, but packed, and so very, very fun. You’ll be in for a world of frustration and pain, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll have the time of your life too. OR you’ll hate it and I’m wired for this type of thing and maybe just a little sadomasochistic. I suppose I can’t rule that out. Verdict: YES!
Pokémon Snap Platform: Nintendo 64 Released March 21, 1999 (Japan) July 26, 1999 Directed by Yoichi Yamamoto, Koji Inokuchi, and Akira Takeshima Developed by HAL Laboratory Published by Nintendo Included with Switch Online Expansion Pack
If you’ve ever wondered what the f*ck is up with “Jack and Beans” trust me, the story is bonkers.
Miracles do happen. If you need proof, look at Pokémon Snap actually making it to release. It almost didn’t happen. It was to be a launch game for the Nintendo 64’s 64DD accessory. However, it wasn’t even meant to be a Pokémon game, and it’s not even entirely clear if it was primarily a photography game. I say “entirely clear” because nobody knows what exactly the original game, titled Jack and the Beanstalk, was meant to be. Yes, as in “Jack and Beans” which was the code name for the development team at HAL working on the project. I’d never actually heard this story before starting this review and only found out about it when I tried to look up who this developer Jack and Beans was that I’d never even heard of so I could give them all the hero cookies in the world for the good job they did.
I’ve never been into bird watching. I like zoos, I guess. I’ve been to the San Diego Zoo three times, which is once more than I’ve been to the San Francisco Zoo that’s like thirty minutes from my house. But I’d take a trip to Disneyland over the zoo, and I’ve never been on safari. Yet I wish there were other games like this. I think it would be my favorite genre.
It kind of makes sense that I’d never heard this stuff before. The thing is, I couldn’t find anything that outright confirms what kind of game Jack and the Beanstalk was going to be. Not so much as a single screenshot has ever been released. Besides the mysterious Return of Donkey Kong for the NES (my personal theory is it was going to be a re-spriting of some Famicom game, possibly Adventure Island), the Jack and the Beanstalk project is probably the single biggest Nintendo mystery of them all. What is known is that nobody at HAL or Nintendo was happy with how it was turning out and the project stalled. When Nintendo was caught by surprise by the sudden popularity of Pokémon, here sat a fairly impressive game engine hosting a game the makers didn’t like. Satoru Iwata seems like he confirmed it was a photography game, but did he really?
Originally, Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64 system wasn’t a Pokémon game, but rather a normal game in which you took photos, but the motivation for playing the game wasn’t clear. We wondered what players would enjoy taking pictures of, and later on we made a somewhat forced switch to taking pictures of Pokémon.
-Satoru Iwata in 2010
So it had photography BUT no clear reason to take pictures, but I don’t believe it was actually a photography-focused game because too many other known details don’t mesh with that. Like planting seeds that would grow in real time using the 64DD’s clock. I think pictures was *a* mechanic, but not THE mechanic. In other words, it would be like saying Animal Crossing is primarily a bug catching game because you have a bug net. That’s only part of the story. Another aspect of the Jack and the Beanstalk legend is that some elements of the cancelled game were transferred to the Earthbound 64 project, also for the 64DD, which was “near-finished” or “half-finished” and probably the single most wanted cancelled video game EVER. At this point I’ll note that the decision to move Snap to just the plain old N64 happened at the eleventh hour. It could have just as well been cancelled. By the way, if you want to freak out, take a look at a screenshot from Earthbound 64.
Now take a look at this completely unrelated picture I just took of Pokémon Snap that I’m placing here for absolutely no reason.
Is he cross-eyed?
If you just did a double take, I’m right there with you. So, based on the information out there, there’s a few safe bets that I’m going to make. I think that Jack and the Beanstalk was an on-the-rails game designed NOT around photography but instead primarily on the lobbing mechanic that eventually became the apples and puffballs in Pokémon Snap, including lobbing seeds. I think the photography was a side-quest or puzzle solving element that was directionless, but a switch was made when someone realized it was the most addictive part of the game and would allow them to explore the Pokémon characters in their natural habitat. The end result was one of the N64’s most unsung gems. If you’ve rolled your eyes at the concept, I’m going to really ask you to give it a shot……
The first time I actually triggered this scenario as a kid, I ran and got my parents so they could see it. Lapras was my favorite Pokémon. I mean besides Pikachu, obviously.
Pokémon Snap was probably my third favorite Nintendo 64 game growing up, behind Banjo-Kazooie and Ocarina of Time. Calling it a “photography game” doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like a puzzler crossed with an on-the-rails shooter that replaces bullets with photons, with a safari setting AND constructed like a Disneyland dark ride. Riding a specialized vehicle that you have no directional control over and, actually, don’t even unlock the ability to speed forward until late in the linear part of the game, you travel through six levels and then the most disappointing finale since Seinfeld, snapping pictures of the pocket monsters and occasionally smashing them over the head with apples or poisoning them. The object is to collect the single best photo you can of all 63 Pokémon in the game. Yeah, the roster is sparse.
This is one of the best photos I’ve taken, except, thanks to an emulator, I found out a different picture that wasn’t remotely as visually satisfying scored a lot more points. I love(d) Pokémon Snap, but it has a lot of problems.
There’s two twists. The first is that you’re only allowed to take sixty photos per stage. The second twist is that you can only submit one photo of each Pokémon for evaluation, and you won’t know if you chose the highest possible scoring photo. I have to admit, the closest thing to fun I had during this play session was from using an emulator because I could mess around with the road not traveled, sometimes with frustrating results like the above example. You see, the real object is to manipulate the Pokémon into making higher-yielding poses. The scoring system judges you on how big the Pokémon is in the frame and what its pose is, then doubles those two totals if the Pokémon is in the center of the frame. Sometimes there’s also a special condition, like this:
Pikachu surfing is worth more than Pikachu on a ball, even if the ball one looks RIGHT AT THE CAMERA, the only time it actually does that in the game I think.
If there is a special bonus, its score is also doubled, which tilts the scoring towards these conditions. Finally, you get bonus points if there’s more than one of the same type of Pokémon in the photo. If the score is higher than your previous best score, the new photo is automatically added to your photo album and the old one is deleted permanently, so you’ll have sixty-three photos in the ultimate album that have one combined total score. You might need to replay stages just to incrementally get a shot that’s ten points better than your previous best. There’s almost no RNG. Where a Pokémon is located is where it’ll be located every time you play, but you can then alter its behavior by, say, luring it closer to you with an apple or playing the flute to make it dance. It’s very addictive, and frustrating.
This is an example of a “puzzle.” Hit this Electrode with an apple, causing it to explode and clear the path for the next stage. You only have to do this one, then it serves no purpose.
Sigh. This is the part where this review becomes seriously the most difficult one I’ve done in a while. I loved Pokémon Snap as a kid, but the moment New Pokémon Snap for the Switch released, it completely left the original in a smoking crater. It’s a better game in every imaginable way. It has *a lot* more levels with better, more immersive level design. It has more lifelike Pokémon behavior, a LOT more Pokémon (234 total following the free content update, 3.7x as much as this game has), more puzzles, and you’re not just looking for one high scoring photo of each Pokémon but instead you’re looking for four. The goal of 63 perfect photos is now instead nearly a thousand. New Pokémon Snap might actually be, not kidding, my favorite video game ever. THAT game offers tons of side quests, and the levels usually have multiple branching paths, and each level offers multiple tiers of the level that have different lineups of Pokémon behaving in different ways, all while retaining the best aspect of the first game: no RNG. You know what will happen and when it will happen in the level. Levels are so full of interesting visuals and well-placed Pokémon that every single level legitimately feels like an interactive Disneyland dark ride.
This came out in America less than two weeks after I turned 10 years old and I was hooked. I spent the last third of the summer of 1999 playing this and only this, and I still don’t know exactly how I’m supposed to take a picture of Magneton. It’s the game’s poster child for its issue with unintuitive poses and scoring.
I never made the Disneyland dark ride connection with the original Pokémon Snap. The photography is genuinely fun. But, thanks to the limits of the Nintendo 64, the levels aren’t really visually interesting. They’re kind of bland and don’t feel “lived in” except maybe the river. The Pokémon also almost never feel like living creatures. They usually feel stiff, emotionless, and robotic. Because of that, sometimes it’s not entirely clear what exactly gets the big points. Pictures of things like Slowpoke that seem like the same pose to me sometimes score 750 points for the pose and sometimes 800, and it’s not intuitive at all. Or look at the above photo. Where’s the center of it? It’s not between the three. Professor Oak yelled at me for that. New Pokémon Snap has this problem too and plenty of other problems, but asking for players to collect four poses total of the Pokémon while still playing by the same rules as the first game, IE only submitting one photo of a specific Pokémon per level, eases that frustration a great deal.
To unlock the final stage, you have to find a “sign” IE a natural formation that looks like Pokémon in each stage. This is the volcano level’s sign, though it looks more like something out of Weekly World News.
The scoring system is also vastly improved in the sequel, and the controls, and the menus. Even the photography itself. You have to zoom to take a photo in the Nintendo 64 game. You don’t in the new one, and boy, does it make a difference. I never expected Pokémon Snap to get a sequel, and the fact that it not only got one but it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played in my life made playing THIS version of the game kind of boring. A lot of my childhood games didn’t age well, but few have been rendered as completely obsolete as Pokémon Snap. I was going to give it a YES! anyway because I was like “well I can’t say it’s a bad game.” It’s not. Seriously. This is proof that sometimes games just die of old age.
Pokémon Snap ends with a sort-of boss fight in that the only Pokémon in the final stage is Mew, who has a shield that blocks you from photographing it. You have to hit it with three “pester balls”, then hit it with another before it reaches the shield, then snap a photo of it. I *hated* this as a kid, as the time investment for this level, all to get ONE Pokémon that then automatically scores huge points and is guaranteed to be your “best photo” in the menu regardless of how good it is. The sequel is even worse about its multiple bosses, which are easily the low point of the game.
I’m heartbroken for Pokémon Snap because the truth is it didn’t really do anything wrong. But I spent the whole time playing it thinking “I wish I was playing New Pokémon Snap instead.” Literally, no matter what level it was or what I was doing, I didn’t want to play it at all. I wanted to play the sequel. The charm is lost. The excitement is lost. Hell, even the menus made me say “I wish I was playing New Pokémon Snap instead. They go quicker.” Everything is lost, and thus Pokémon Snap, literally a game that completely owned me for months as a 10 year old and then replayed multiple times in the years that followed, is just not fun anymore. Usually only sports games deal with obsolescence through the advancement of gaming technology. After all, the quest is still fun, right? The levels? The characters? And had the sequel never come out, yes, that would have been the case with Pokémon Snap just like any other score-driven game. But New Pokémon Snap did come out, and the original is dead. Sad but true.
In fairness, not ALL the Pokémon feel not-alive. The single most alive feeling ones in the game are the Charmanders, who will call out to others that some bozo is feeding them. The one and only time I smiled playing this in 2026, even if the actual scenery made me wonder “how did I EVER get immersed in Nintendo 64 games?”
With Pokémon Snap, I’m grateful for the hundreds of hours of entertainment I got out of it during my childhood. I will always cherish those memories. But it’s seriously not realistic to think that a game like that would age well. I am NOT going to get that quality of entertainment out of it in the 2020s or beyond. It had a time, and that time has passed. But myself and my family have have put hundreds of hours into New Pokémon Snap and intend to keep playing it. I’ve already put a lot more time into it than I ever did Pokémon Snap, and I f*cking LOVED Pokémon Snap, for years. So really the sequel will be the age-proof game. Well, unless another sequel comes out that adds even more levels and things to do. So if someone asked me “should I play this?” I would say “no, you SHOULD play New Pokémon Snap.” I can’t recommend a game I literally wished I wasn’t playing even if I did sink hundreds of joyous hours into it twenty-seven years ago. It’s not 1999 anymore. RIP Pokémon Snap, killed by fratricide. Or possibly parricide depending on how you look at it. Verdict: (wipes tear) NO! Way to ruin your 15th anniversary, Indie Gamer Chick! Thank you EVERYONE for fifteen years! Classic Pinball Video Games: The Definitive Review will be released very soon. I’m still working on it and a review of New Pokémon Snap.
Pokémon Snap 64 fans when they read this review. Listen, I’m going to drool all over the sequel.
Zombie Nation aka Abarenbou Tengu Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released December 14, 1990 Designed by Takane Ohkubo Directed by Norio Nakagata Developed by KAZe Published by Meldac Sold Separately for Nintendo Switch (w/ Japanese ROM) for $11.99
This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a giant ugly head wrecking sh*t.
The only reason I fired-up Zombie Nation wasn’t for this review. It’s because I had started playing Super Pinball: Behind the Mask for the SNES and, while looking at the credits for that game’s director, Norio Nakagata, I saw that this was his first game directed. “Zombie Nation? Isn’t that the weird shmup with the head?” Yep, so I fired it up with the intent to crack wise on it in my giant-sized Classic Pinball Video Games: The Definitive Review (coming July 1, celebrating 15 years of IGC!). Guess what? I can’t crack wise on it! The f*cking asshole had the nerve to make a pretty damn good shmup! What a jerk, right? I guess I mistook Zombie Nation for being one of those games that shows up on “worst NES games” lists. It seems that the lists it usually shows up on are “weirdest video games” lists. Oh yes, because it’s totally normal to have a plumber double in size when he eats mushrooms as he goes on an adventure to rescue a princess from an evil half dragon, half-turtle. But a disembodied head trashing a city and fighting a living Statue of Liberty? THAT’S WEIRD! Isn’t that weird, Lokar, the disembodied head that attacks Angel Grove in the first season of the unprecedented pop cultural phenom Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?
“Bitch, who are you calling weird?”
Beg your pardon. I, uh…… Carry on! What I meant is…………..
Isn’t that weird, free-moving Statue of Liberty featured in the major motion picture Ghostbusters II, a hugely successful and famous smash hit (even if it sucks) that debuted #1 in the US box office THE YEAR BEFORE ZOMBIE NATION EVEN RELEASED?!
“Somehow not as weird as New York being attacked by a giant monster made of marshmallow in a movie that’s about ghosts but everyone just acts like it makes sense!”
Seriously, how the hell did this make a weird game list? Wouldn’t the shorter list be “NES action games that aren’t weird”? By the way, I spent the entire game waiting for the fight against the Statue of Liberty and it turns out the gigantic Medusa head at the start of the game was the Statue of Liberty fight. Now granted, I’ve never actually been to New York City but I’m pretty sure it’s not a statue of f*cking Medusa.
I’m now looking at the screenshot and feeling like a complete idiot. How didn’t I realize it was the Statue of Liberty wearing an oversized novelty Medusa headdress? I think you can buy one at Spirit Halloween, though if your head is THAT big you might need to special order it.
Honestly, Zombie Nation ain’t a bad little game at all. Certainly not $11.99 good. City Connection, I seriously advise you to drop the price to $4.99. For a thirty-six year old single game on any platform (and packing the Japanese ROM doesn’t make it a two-pack even if the sprites are different) $11.99 is a LOT of money. A person can buy Atari 50‘s base set that includes 115 classic games and literally hours worth of extra features for $39.99 and you’re charging over 25% of that set’s price for one obscure NES game and its nearly identical Famicom counterpart which can be beaten in under an hour in a package that only includes a handful of normal emulator features as “extras.” You’re pricing yourself out of the market and that really pains me in the case of Zombie Nation. I think the average gamer would absolutely shell out for $5 or less for a game like it. $11.99 is one of those “we have to think about it” things, something usually reserved for collections of mostly obscure games like Taito Milestones 2. But $4.99? That’s the impulse buy sweet spot. You’re doing more than double that price, and you ought not to.
Oh it’s total chaos, but trust me, it’s charming as f*ck.
Pricing aside, Zombie Nation is a fun little game. Using this disembodied head, you travel through what the game says is four levels, but levels 1, 2, and 3 are actually divided into two parts so functionally it’s seven levels and five bosses. You have a pretty fun to use basic gun that can be upgraded by catching falling humans. Wait, are you eating them? Why is this called Zombie Nation? Why does the cover suggest a Zombies Ate My Neighbors-like zombie apocalypse?
There’s more. So much more. It’s bananas and glorious.
And the whole disembodied head isn’t some weird “lost in translation” thing because the Japanese game does the same thing, only with a different head. The Japanese version is based on the concept of a spirit of vengeance taking the form of a Namakubi, which is literally a freshly severed head (it’s one of Japan’s most popular themes for tattoos).
Abarenbou Tengu (Famicom)
Abarenbou Tengu (Famicom)
Abarenbou Tengu (Famicom)
Otherwise, it’s the same game. Instead of changing the theme for the US release, they just changed the hero sprite and turned the Statue of Liberty into a giant Medusa. Wait, they did what? Oh…….. OH!
I guess they don’t have Spirit Halloweens in Japan.
Okay, well, either way Zombie Nation is a fairly basic SHMUP with the biggest twist being you don’t really have lives. You essentially have a life bar with eight segments. That doesn’t necessarily mean you get eight hit points. Even with a wide variety of enemies, the main antagonistic element of Zombie Nation is often pinning players into a smaller section of the playfield using lasers, lightning, smoke stacks, etc. The game leans into this in nearly every level. Even boss fights do it sometimes, and crossing the path of one seems to take your hit points all the way down to the last segment. But it actually works really well at keeping the action tense.
You really don’t want to get caught behind them, though most of the time you do get a chance to make a move before you’re forced in. I got a feel for the timing pretty quickly.
On the other hand, some enemies and bullets don’t stand out as much as you’d hope. When I died, it usually wasn’t because I ran out of options but instead was caught off guard by a random bullet or enemy that I lost in the fog of war. Thankfully, you also get a handful of continues (and get an additional continue after each of the first three bosses). Some people say Zombie Nation is hard. I used autofire and didn’t think it was more or less difficult than your average generic NES shooter. Something like, say, Abadox. In terms of difficulty, the controls aren’t quite as accurate as a game based around precision movement probably should be, but Zombie Nation shouldn’t be impossibly hard for even average shmup players who don’t feel up to mashing buttons and go with autofire.
You can also die from being crushed by the auto scrolling. Even this is worked into the level design, as there’s a pipe maze in the third stage that, at one point, splits into a five-way pick-a-path. Thankfully the game does give you enough time to know which is the correct one before the squishing happens.
What makes Zombie Nation work is there’s almost always stuff to blow up. Not just enemies but buildings and caves and rock walls. The opening level set in the city feels especially cathartic and destructive, like if the game Rampage was turned into a shmup. I’m not sure exactly how blowing up a city that’s clearly populated with citizens is saving the world, but I’m not going to argue with a game where this is the second boss:
What the actual f*ck is that?! Has Santa been training for a body building contest?
I also wish the game had a more Konami-like inventory system. While the basic gun can be upgraded by rescuing falling citizens (you can tell them apart from human enemies by the “HELP” word balloons as they fall to their deaths), all it does is add extra bullets and, once it’s maxed out, a screen-clearing bomb. A bigger variety of guns that have different bullet sprites would have helped to keep the game even more fresh. By the end, I admit I was happy the game only had the four (seven) levels because it was starting to get exhausting. It doesn’t help that the third boss is one of those scrolling large vehicle boss stereotypes that has the lamest primary target I’ve ever seen from the trope, and then the boss before the final boss is just what seems to be tiny little fish skulls leaving trails behind them. Seriously, the last two level bosses were so disappointing given the wackiness that had already happened. Did they run out of drugs or something?
3rd Boss
4th Boss
Last Boss
Thankfully Zombie Nation, a game about ZOMBIES with ZOMBIE right in the title that doesn’t seem to have a single enemy zombie, ends with a boss fight against a humongous green alien that appears to be sleeping in a room covered in bubble wrap. Ahhh, that’s the good stuff. So I’m happy I threw on Zombie Nation for the purpose of making a joke in an almost completely unrelated review that won’t even be posted for a month-and-a-half. It’s certainly not perfect, but I really like old school shmups and this is one that goes for absurdity and mostly succeeds. I think it’s a safe bet that the developers had this hilarious idea for a parody of the shoot ’em up genre but ran out of gags with BARELY half a game. The last level is a stereotypical cave or volcano and it’s just not at all what I signed up for after the first level. It still has some good visuals, but the personality is gone. I guess these lava or rock monsters could be sh*t monsters:
Give these things opera singing lessons and they could have become gaming icons.
So while the combat is fun and cathartic, Zombie Nation doesn’t completely escape being generic. The same concept would have probably worked out so much better in 16 bits, where the absurdity could have been cranked-up and there could have been more visual gags. But, let it be said that Zombie Nation might be a joke game, but the action is no joke. It’s a lot of fun and, frankly, it doesn’t last long enough to get boring. Oh, it does come dangerously close, but even when enemy and level themes are phoned-in, there’s almost always some genuinely exciting level design based around close calls and non-stop shooting action. There’s even two difficulty levels. So yeah, I really liked this a lot. Zombie Nation does NOT belong on “weirdest game” lists. But you know what list it does belong on? “Most underrated NES games.” Zombie Nation is one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had in 2026, and I was even happier when I saw it was being sold on the eShop. Priced too high? Sure, but nothing worth losing your head over. Yeah, I deserve boos for that one. Verdict: YES!
Hold on……. Is it called Zombie Nation or Samurai Zombie Nation?
Jaws Retro Edition Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, PC Released February 13, 2026 Authorized Nintendo Entertainment System ROM Hack Originally Developed by Westone “Enhanced Edition” Designed by Jeremy Parish Published by Limited Run Games $14.99 jumped the shark in the making of this review. This review was played on a Nintendo Switch 2
This is really just a review of Jaws: Enhanced Edition, the ROM hack included in Jaws Retro Edition alongside the original game. Make sure to read my original review of Jaws for the NES. That game is included in this package and all the reasons why I awarded it a YES! are unchanged. I played one quick round. It was still okay. There is one small quality-of-life update to the original game: you can now pick-up seashells on the edges of the screen. Well, at least you can as the diver. Still can’t with the sub. Before I get to the review of the new game, let’s talk about the emulator.
Since this isn’t EXACTLY a retro collection despite having two games, I’m going to do a quick summary of the Special Features in this caption. Please note the lack of LJN logos or branding in the special features. You get a heavily censored ad, box art (no Nintendo seal of quality, either), the original instruction book, plus a jukebox with all the music and sound effects. There’s also a CRT filter and three different borders (four if you count no border at all) and three aspect ratios. Pretty basic set of extras. Nothing to write home about, but I’m happy what’s here is here.
Jaws Retro Edition features a solid emulator with one damning omission. It gets the job done with a clean menu that offers a single save state file per game (two games total: Jaws and Jaws: Enhanced Edition) and plenty of rewind buffer. BUT, it’s missing a couple very important gems to be a true Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation. In fact, it might be missing the single most important feature of them all: button remapping. Oof. Remapping isn’t just an emulation feature but an important accessibility option. Were I to treat this the same way I would review a retro collection, I would stiffly penalize the entire set for it, probably awarding half the maximum value since button remapping is required for players to comfortably connect to the game on their terms.
I think it’s great that they included a warning to do the saving manually. Even Digital Eclipse missed that.
There’s also no quick save or quick load, which I prefer to menu-based save states features. Quick save/load is often missing in most collections so I’m used to it, and there’s also no jump-in full gameplay videos. Given the random nature of Jaws, I didn’t expect it and don’t miss it. Finally, because of how Enhanced Edition is designed where getting automatic fire is an upgrade you have to purchase, they had to not include autofire as an emulation option by necessity. I don’t like that. To me, autofire is an accessibility feature, not a gameplay feature, especially in a game like Jaws that requires so much nonstop shooting at times. But overall the emulator does a good enough job to not ruin the game, and really I guess that’s all I should hope for. Now, with all of that out of the way, the real reason to buy Jaws Retro Edition is that the original 1987 NES game has been reworked and expanded. The included ROM hack, Jaws: Enhanced Edition, is one the greatest ROM hacks of all-time.
Very cool.
Jaws: Enhanced Edition was designed by the man I consider gaming’s most underrated personality and my personal favorite gaming content creator: Jeremy Parish. I even made my own NES Works playlist. I mean I sort of had to since, for whatever reason, he included the intolerable Athena soundtrack in the chronological playlist, even though it makes no f*cking sense because it’s not content HE made and offers none of the history lessons people presumably subscribe to his channel for. It’s just….. noise. Horrible, horrible noise generated from one of the worst video games ever made. I’m already someone who, to the annoyance of my readers, plays most games muted or with the volume very low. I would never listen to an NES soundtrack for fun, even the ones I like. But history lessons on games? I love those, and Parish does some damn insightful ones, always providing the background of games in ways that are entertaining and forthright. He’s a historian who has, gasp, opinions. As a holder of many opinions, I like that. Hell, we both felt Jaws was very Atari-like in its design, and now I’m honestly wondering if I came to that realization on my own or my brain absorbed it from his video. If you’ve never seen NES Works, here’s his Jaws/Karate Kid video. We certainly disagree about Karate Kid. Oh, it’s bad and I gave it a NO! because I’m not insane, but I think it could have gone down as a solid game with some minor fine tuning, while he considered it one of the worst NES games up to that point. Oh come on, it’s not THAT bad, Jeremy.
Anyway, the Athena soundtrack story, and it’s a true story: years ago, I was in a nice, deep sleep during a week when I was green with the flu. I was so sick that it was a tiny miracle that I’d been lulled to sleep by the scholarly voice of Mr. Parish providing detailed histories of early NES games. And then, all of a sudden, I discovered that, if I’m startled badly enough, I’m capable of leaping four feet into the air from a laying-down position using only my ass. I learned this about myself when the soundtrack to Athena BLARED through my bedroom, seemingly fifty f*cking times louder than any of the other videos in the playlist. So I must like his work because, instead of never watching his channel ever again, I made and maintained my own NES Works playlist that’s basically the same as his, minus that Athena clip. Something HE SHOULD DO HIMSELF! By the way Jeremy, I hold grudges and I’m vindictive, and I will get my revenge. Oh yes. You’ll be nice and asleep when all of a sudden your home will be surrounded by speakers blasting Athena’s soundtrack so loud that it will liquefy your organs. I’ll wait for him to finish NES Works first, of course. I’m not going to ruin it for everyone else. I’m not a monster. Maybe now that he turned Jaws from an okay game into a pretty damn good one, I’ll just blast the soundtrack enough to get a tiny trickle of blood out of his ears.
Actually I quit maintaining the playlist and stopped listening to YouTube when I sleep. Burned too many times by volume issues. I’ll stick with Audible. BUT, I would go back to NES Works as something to fall asleep to if he pulled that Athena soundtrack from his playlist (since I’m like 60+ videos behind). Jaws: Enhanced Edition? That’s a good idea. A bad idea is inserting an obnoxiously loud (and bad) soundtrack for a terrible game into a playlist that has no other soundtracks. As far as I can tell, the only soundtrack in that playlist of 228 videos and counting is that one, and there’s no way to opt out of it. You have to make your own. It would be like if you threw on a Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary marathon and, after a couple episodes, the marathon was interrupted for twenty minutes of machine gun noises and screaming. Then again, I would never want to go to sleep listening to anything by Ken Burns. I would (and did) for Jeremy Parish. Alas.
So what’s new with the “Enhanced Edition” of Jaws? Well first I want to stress that you should set your expectations accordingly. This is not a complete tear-down and rebuild like Deadpool did with Ninja Gaiden. This is an Iron Chef effort that utilized only the available ingredients. Jeremy Parish took the original 1987 Jaws and stretched out a game that could be beaten in thirty minutes into one that has much, much meatier action. Instead of just playing until you kill Jaws, you now kill Jaws four times because the game now is divided into four segments, one for each movie (I’m kind of surprised he didn’t include a satire where Jaws wears sunglasses and smokes a stogie). Instead of just upgrading your attack power, you now have to upgrade your attack power, your speed, and your health, along with collecting other items. At the start of each segment, all your upgrades are lost and you must start over from scratch, with the only carry-over being the money you earned. And there’s a hard cap on the max money you can earn that increases with each chapter to prevent you from screw grinding on easier stages. Upgrades are no longer automatically done when you pull into the port. You can select and buy them manually and create your own strategy. It works SO good, too.
Jaws: Enhanced Edition (2026)
Jaws: Enhanced Edition (2026)
Don’t worry about the resetting between each level part, either. Even with that, Jaws: Enhanced Edition remains a fast-paced action game. The seashells are still the currency, but now there’s two types of them. As I noted above, you can upgrade your health. Jaws: Enhanced Edition is no longer a one-hit-death game. You can build up life, and if you take damage, enemies might drop red seashells that restore a tiny bit of health. Also, those float to the top of the playfield while the money sinks to the bottom. Hey, risk/reward factors. Very cool. Meanwhile money seashells award different values of cash depending on the type of enemy you killed for them. The system Jeremy created here is really well done, making the combat more incentivized than ever before. I was a little worried about the speed upgrade, but it never becomes so fast that it’s out of control. He did a great job. Same with the attack power, which no longer applies only to Jaws. Every enemy’s health is accounted for with your attack power. Basic enemies can start out taking so many hits that they get their own on-screen life bars now and will level-up too via palette swapping. With each new level comes new attack patterns and faster enemy speeds. While the early enemies and the ways they try to kill you will be familiar to fans of the original NES game, all creatures eventually become legitimate threats.
No more invisible random encounters. You now see the enemies on the map, Zelda II style. Eventually you’ll get an item that even shows you the primary enemy type in the combat scenario (as seen in this screenshot), including the blinking ones that fetch quests require. Later still, you’ll get an item that freezes enemies so they don’t move about (excluding Jaws, of course). I do have one complaint: you can also see and pick up health refills and money using these items. I thought that screwed-up the risk/reward factors. Especially the health refills. Why pay $1,000 at the shop when I can just sail around and find health shells just laying around? Or if I need a little more money (which was rare by that point) why would I risk the combat when I can get it on the surface? His heart was in the right place because it removes some end-of-stage grinding, but, I mean, come on! It’s Jaws. The entire game is grinding. It’s an idea that should never have made it past play-testing.
There’s brand new enemies in the game as well, which is especially impressive because I’m pretty sure there’s no new sprites in Jaws: Enhanced Edition. Or if there is, they’re so small and insignificant that they don’t really make a difference. What Jeremy did instead was take existing sprites that were previously used as items and turned them into enemies. The stars and crabs are now antagonists that provided a much bigger challenge than the rays or even the jellyfish because he managed to give them some pretty clever attack patterns. The starfish multiply like sea bunnies and the crabs spit bubbles at you that, if you get caught in one, you can’t shoot for several seconds. Perhaps too long, actually, as I found them to be so dangerous (especially in the fourth level) that I had to fight them very conservatively. The returning enemies are beefed up with new movement and attack styles as well. The rays will eventually have a curve to their trajectory, the jellyfish float up and down and even jump out of the water, and the baby sharks (and yes, Jaws as well) can turn around instead of making a full screen pass. That causes them to cluster, but it works.
In the first couple levels, you get to actually land shots on the big fella BEFORE he reaches the boat. In levels 3 and especially level 4, don’t expect it. Still, it’s such a subtle little change. All Jeremy did was move Jaws a little bit down and then have him make one pass across the screen so you actually have room to shoot him a little. But this tiny change yields so much satisfaction. I really hope he’s proud of his effort. He did very good with the tools he had.
And then there’s Jaws himself. George Lucas would be proud because he becomes faster and more intense as the game goes along. Upgrading your attack power is not enough. You have to find the special items that allow you to kill him. The game will tell you how to find these things, which usually involves slaying specific forms of basic enemies that flash (you can think of them as mini-bosses) and/or retrieving special items from a map, including the submarine in levels three and four. The bonus stages with the airplane are removed from the first three levels, and in the fourth level it’s now a special challenge that requires you to hit twenty-one jellyfish. After doing this, you can then pay extra to attack Jaws with the airplane. By the way, I never knew you could slow down or speed up the airplane in the original NES game until I started Jaws Retro Edition and found out while searching for button remapping. Huh. I was already pretty good at the bonus round too. Once I knew about the speed control, I…….. actually couldn’t hit anything anymore because it totally f*cked up my muscle memory. So thanks for that, Jaws: Retro Edition, you bastard.
“Bitch, you’re bombing me from the sky now? I can’t go up there. Not cool.” You have to pay $5,000 for 30 seconds of bombing Jaws, but by the time you get to this point, you should be out of things to upgrade and this is the only thing left that costs money. None of the fetch quests cost actual cash, which might have been a mistake since, despite all the new upgrades, it doesn’t take long to max everything out (four times over, nonetheless). At this point, you might as well just bomb the sh*t out of Jaws. The only catch is you can’t score the killing blow on Jaws from the sky, and he’ll get two bars of health back when you finish anyway. You have to be in the water when you drain those off to enter the final kill sequence.
My biggest knock against this new version of Jaws, by far, is how spongy even the basic enemies get in the third and fourth levels. Another new option added to this game is you can abandon any random encounter that doesn’t include Jaws himself and return to the boat without any penalty. In the fourth level, I had to do that several times while I built-up my attack power and speed because enemies were sucking up bullets on nearly the same level (or hell, maybe even higher) than Jaws himself did in the original game. And mind you, I had the max amount of money when I started level four and poured all of it into attack power AND bought the double shot (the only level you can buy it). Every enemy was still a complete bullet sponge even after I maxed out attack power. It wasn’t until I got the submarine and the weapons upgrades in the stage that it didn’t feel like I was trying to take down enemies with spitballs. I certainly spent a little time questioning whether Jeremy took things too far with the enemy health. The first three levels were some of the best NES gaming I ever played. The fourth level is skinny dipping in an ocean of frustration, at least at the start of it.
Since Jaws basically requires everything to be manually unlocked in each level, the fourth stage started very slowly. Autofire? You have to earn it. Being able to shoot more than one bullet at a time? Earn it. You’ll feel the difference, too.
Thankfully, in three out of the four levels, the sponginess of enemies doesn’t take that long to overcome. Money drops are generous, and despite how much stuff needs upgrading, it still goes fast. In total, I needed just about five-and-a-half hours to beat the entire four level experience of Jaws: Enhanced Edition, and all of it was spent having some degree of fun. I normally play games as short as this twice, but my hands were, no joke, legitimately aching from all the sections before I bought the autofire. Again, you have to buy it four times total. The other problems caused by sticking so closely to the original game are the lack of variety in the backgrounds and the fact that the map is unchanged from the original game and it’s not a very good map. How you use the map is different. In levels one and two, you ONLY use the left starting port and can return to it as many times as you want without having to travel across the map and back. The right port does nothing. There’s no penalty for grinding near the shoreline. Hell, the game encourages it. In level three, you ONLY use the right port with the left port now doing nothing.
One jarring aspect is that it uses the same static screen for every item or major event. This one, which still looks like a fishing pole being rammed up Jaws’ ass, complete with look of shock.
Only the fourth level has you going to both ports, with different upgrades and fetch quests at each one. Even then, there’s nothing to prevent you from grinding. The rule that requires you to travel back and forth between each port is gone entirely. Eventually you’ll get options that allow you to press buttons to see where the enemy encounters are. Really, I don’t have any major complaints. I guess I wish whatever was the current “mission” was displayed. Like if all I had left to do to get a key item was encounter Jaws X amount of times, I wish it had said so on the main screen. You might also have to talk to one of the options in the port multiple times when you’ve already met the conditions to unlock whatever it does. It’s a little janky, but in an authentic 1987 NES kind of way.
See the little crosshairs? Boy, do they help. The act of defeating Jaws after you whittle down its health has gone from a confusing, sloppy mess to perhaps too easy. I went four-for-four in defeating Jaws in one shot. I never screwed it up even once. I suspect Jeremy wasn’t a fan of this sequence at all and would ditched it for something else altogether if that had been an option.
The most important part is I never got bored. Frustrated? Oh yeah, especially in the fourth level. But never to the point that I wanted to stop. Simply put, Jeremy Parish has taken a game that was a cynical cash grab developed in roughly a month that lucked into being halfway decent and expanded it into a game that feels like a much more fully thought-out experience. It sure as hell no longer feels like an up-jumped Atari game. Even on its own merits, Jaws: Enhanced Edition is a very good action game. Not a great one. Sticking like glue to the established sprites was admirable, I guess. But the original Jaws is the way it is because they took only a month to make it. A month. While I get what Jeremy was trying to prove here, there’s nothing inherently sacred with the original game’s sprites or roster of enemies. For all we know if they had two months instead of one, maybe someone on the development team would have said “hey, let’s put squids and octopi in this.” Jeremy, YOU ARE THAT MONTH! I mean.. you know what I’m saying. The bigger variety of enemies and tiers to those enemies is nice, don’t get me wrong, but it’ll still leave you wanting a little bit more. Still, taking a middle of the road game and pushing it to the brink of greatness puts it in the pantheon of ROM hacks, at least in my view.
Finding items and the presentation of finding them does lack a little in pizazz.
Jaws: Enhanced Edition feels like the type of ROM hack that a talented coder takes on as a personal challenge to themselves and not necessarily something that got a big, splashy rollout with full digital distribution on major platforms like Jaws Retro Edition got. That’s not a weakness, though. That’s its greatest strength. Usually the only “enhanced edition” style retro releases are reserved for big, successful games. The type of games already famous for being good or great, or at the minimum, historically important games. Jaws is a game that, whether it deserves the reputation or not (it doesn’t), it’s mostly remembered as a joke. It doesn’t surprise me that someone took what was, at best, a decent but very limited 80s action game and turned it into something much more substantive and enjoyable. I’ve seen it done before with games good and bad. I’ve reviewed quite a few (they’re under the “new games on old platforms” section of my retro index) and I plan on continuing to review them, even if only 0.1% of my readers will ever play them.
One of these days, I’ll get around to reviewing Super Pitfall! 30th Anniversary Edition by NES Rocks, which is one of those “personal challenge” games that is famous for turning one of the worst video games ever made into a competent and even fun one. Hey Limited Run Games: I’m pretty sure NES Rocks is available for hire. And if you ever do Goonies 1 & 2, use NES Rocks’ quality of life update for Goonies II. It’s really good.
Games like Jaws: Enhanced Edition DO NOT get wide releases. Except this one did, and nothing would make me happier than if mainstream gamers said “we like this! More please!” and publishers actually listened. They have these huge catalogs of ne’er-do-well releases that passionate fans have turned into borderline masterpieces. Jaws: Enhanced Edition isn’t as exceptional as it would appear. This is what you get when you let fans show how much they love catalog games, and you have to love a game to make it this good. Sucks for Jeremy though because if his effort had failed I would have given this a NO! and considered that revenge enough for waking me from my slumber. Alas, he can sleep tight knowing that, someday, he’ll look out his window and his house will be surrounded with skyscrapers. Then seconds later, he’ll realize those aren’t skyscrapers. They’re actually speakers, and he’ll know the debt is about to be settled. Verdict: YES!
I couldn’t get the Commodore 64 game Frank Bruno’s Boxing working. In case you didn’t know, it’s an unauthorized rip-off of Super Punch-Out!! that predates Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! by a couple years.
UPDATE: My review of Punch-Out!! for Wii is now live! Click here!
Punch-Out!! is a legitimate contender for my favorite Nintendo franchise. Actually, the only bad one really is the original coin-op. That would be more impressive if there were more games in the series, but I’ll get to that in a moment. I wanted to start my 2026 at IGC with something big. I was going to JUST review Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, which is one of my favorite video games ever, but I figured “why not do all the pre-Wii Punch-Out!! games?” And if you want my thoughts on the Game & Watch, be sure to read Game & Watch: The Definitive Review, though I should note the Punch-Out!! Game & Watch, sometimes called simply “Boxing” is nothing like Punch-Out!! at all. In fact, the formula used in that game evolved into Urban Champion.
Probably a good idea to cancel an 8-bit/16-bit boxing Definitive Review. Boxing games usually aren’t very good. I’ve tried a couple times to review Rocky for the Sega Master System. I’m a HUGE fan of the movie, the first sequel, the fourth sequel, and I even liked Rocky Balboa and the Creed films. Rocky III and Rocky V suck. The Sega Master System game is for sure the Rocky V of video boxing. It’s bad. It doesn’t belong in this review, and honestly, I don’t think I can possibly get an interesting review out of it. It’s such a nothing game.
I originally intended to include other games in this, but my family vetoed Teleroboxer for the Virtual Boy due to flashiness and eye strain, and my friend Dave talked me out of doing other boxing games. Some of them were literally impossible for me to recreate with my emulator because the coin-ops had unique inputs (Sega did a few that tried to mimic the feel of throwing punches). Others, like the Master System game Rocky or James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing for the Genesis, I really don’t think deserve to be compared to Punch-Out!! because it’s apples and oranges. Those are actual boxing games, and Punch-Out!! is much, much more than just boxing. But I wanted at least one “bonus” review so I found a very good ROM hack of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! to close this feature. So there’s seven total reviews in Punch-Out!!: The Definitive Review. I hope everyone enjoys! Here are the games reviewed:
Punch-Out!! (Arcade)
Super Punch-Out!! (Arcade)
Arm Wrestling (Arcade)
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (NES)
Power Punch II (NES)
Super Punch-Out!! (SNES)
Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! (NES ROM Hack)
HAS PUNCH-OUT!! RETIRED ON ITS STOOL?
Even non-gamers get references to Punch-Out!! in pop culture. It’s astonishing to me that Nintendo isn’t doing anything with this franchise.
So why isn’t Nintendo doing anything with Punch-Out!! Around this time last year, reports came out that it was due to the roster being filled with ethnic stereotypes. Next Level games later denied reports about this and instead said the format has been taken to its limits and there’s nothing “unique” to do. Either way, I really don’t want to get into politics or political correctness. Anyone who has read me over the last fourteen years can probably guess that I find these things exhausting at this point. BUT, I figure this would be a good place to point out that Nintendo obviously can’t think the situation is THAT bad because Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! are both available on Nintendo Switch Online. If the franchise has been vanished the cornfield, it seems weird to still have the old games with the same characters widely available, doesn’t it? Plus Hamster Co. sells the arcade Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! as part of the Arcade Archives series. Hell, I even suspect that the Wii Punch-Out!! will be re-released before the 2020s are up, possibly with some small modifications. But those are legacy games and the Wii is now old enough to be “retro.” The Wii Punch-Out!! game is over a year older than Angela, for God’s sake.
I kind of hate that there’s so much focus on negative stereotypes because it takes away from Punch-Out!! having one of THE great African-American characters in gaming. In a franchise defined by boxers who, let’s say, don’t exactly follow the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, Mr. Sandman has no time for such tomfoolery. He’s one of three characters who appeared in all four formats (Arcade, NES, SNES, and Wii) and the only Punch-Out!! character who doesn’t cheat or have any aspect of his style, appearance or personality that is illegal under the rules of the sport. Mr. Sandman is just a bad mother f*cker. I was so happy he became the last boss of the Wii game. I liked that it came down to a boxer who wins by boxing. I think he should have been the final pre-dream fight of the NES game because Sandman’s fight is much harder than Super Macho Man’s. Well, except his triple uppercut is probably easier to dodge than Macho’s spinning punch, but one move shouldn’t decide who goes last. I think Sandman has harder timing than Macho for most punches. I know I needed more attempts to beat him than Macho the first time.
So is Punch-Out!! well and truly dead as a franchise? Assuming Nintendo is skittish about the stereotype situation, just ditch basing the characters around nationalities and create new characters that aren’t fated to age badly. Or, instead of new characters, use old ones, but old ones from different games. One of the most popular franchises in gaming of the 21st century is Smash Bros. That could provide the template for Nintendo to revive Punch-Out!! Everyone loved the battle against Donkey Kong at the end of the Wii game, right? There you go! Imagine how many copies a Punch-Out!! where you box Link, Mario, or Samus Aran would sell. Captain Falcon could FALCON PUNCH Little Mac on Little Mac’s home turf. Kirby could eat him. 36 MILLION copies were sold of Smash Bros. Ultimate. Even if this hypothetical Punch-Out!! sold one third of that, it would be considered a smash hit and almost certainly bring back a lot of old school gamers to Nintendo. I can’t think of any franchise as universally beloved, critically acclaimed, and best-selling that is completely shut-out of modern gaming like Punch-Out!! is. What the hell are you doing, Nintendo? Three console games and it still feels like you’ve barely scratched the surface of what Punch-Out!! COULD be. Knuckle-up already and bring it back! ON WITH THE REVIEWS!
GAME REVIEWS
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account, at least for the games themselves. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
Punch-Out!! Platform: Arcade Released February 17, 1984 Designed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
Sold Separately via Arcade Archives
Glass Joe will EVENTUALLY throw his hat in the ring as a contender for the greatest opening stage in video game history. Here, he’s just an early sign of how unresponsive this whole game is.
I reviewed the coin-op Punch-Out!! a little over seven years ago. I didn’t like it then, and while I’m willing to admit I was wrong about Vs. Super Mario Bros. (and I used to have a snobbery streak a mile wide) I was spot-on about the coin-op Punch-Out!! Everything that a person could love about the three console games seems to be here, only it doesn’t really work. If you expect the counter-punching format from the home games, boy are you in for a disappointment. Not that it’s missing entirely. You move left and right to dodge attacks, but the actual act of throwing leather is frustratingly unresponsive. It just takes FOREVER to get the hang of because “counter-punching” in this game literally means counter-punching. You throw a punch, they block and counter-punch, then you might be able to counter-punch and get some stunned punches on your opponents.
You can see in this picture that Bald Bull’s eyes are yellow. No, the hard drinking didn’t finally get to him. This is “telegraphing” but consider those quotes to be of the sarcastic variety. The boxers will just sit still and run out the clock unless you throw a punch, and then you will be the one to trigger them “telegraphing” their punch, which they’re already doing because they’re winding back. What the f*ck do you think he’s doing in this picture? Stretching? Squeezing out a turd? I hate this game.
But whether I played Punch-Out!! on Arcade Archives or MAME, it didn’t matter. The controls are incredibly unresponsive. Many button presses go unanswered, and it reduces Punch-Out!!’s good intentions into a mindless button masher where you’re happy when you land a string of punches. I have problems with the offensive game, but even the defensive one is problematic. Sometimes something as simple as raising or lowering your guard can have a delay in it, and every time I changed my defensive stance, it felt like I was punished on the offensive side of the equation by being unable to throw any punch for a second or two. Maybe they were trying to make it feel more “scientific” or “boxing-like” but it really just came across as responsive. When I don’t like popular games, I get accused of “playing it wrong” but in the case of the coin-op Punch-Out!!, I was constantly questioning it.
Pizza Pasta probably comes the closest to feeling like one of the NES or SNES fights. He does the same “lethal dry hump” move that Aran Ryan uses in the SNES game, and after he finishes he throws a big uppercut. If you dodge it, you can unload on him and he remains stunned EVEN IF you throw the special punches.
Eventually I did at least get good enough to beat all six fighters without cheating, though only about 10% of it felt like the home games that I fell in love with. And it’s not simply the gameplay I dislike. For a boxing game, there’s no sensation of violence at all. The NES game had punches that gave off a violent, impactful vibe and the uppercut in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is so satisfying. Getting punched in the NES game feels devastating too, as it should. The NES game does 8-bit violence just about as good as the console is capable of. None of that is present in the coin-op original. Even when you charge up the KO meter and throw uppercuts and right hooks, it has no OOMPH to it. Neither does getting punched. It feels like people fighting with oversized novelty gloves. Feathery play-fighting, and that’s being generous. Finally, I thought half the roster of fighters were forgettable and generic. Piston Hurricane (who would be much better in the SNES game), Kid Quick, and Pizza Pasta have pretty dull designs and Kid Quick’s fight is just very bland. It’s almost hard to believe they stripped this game down and still managed to turn it into a timeless, cherished NES classic. Punch-Out!! does have jaw-dropping graphics for 1984 and I’m sure it was attractive to arcade goers, but it’s just not fun, you know? Verdict: NO!
Super Punch-Out!! Platform: Arcade Released September, 1984 Designed by Genyo Takeda Developed by Nintendo Sold Separately via Arcade Archives
I expected more of the same, but instead, this is inching closer to what the console games would be.
Super Punch-Out!! is a no-doubt-about-it improvement over the original in basically every way. The previous game was apparently developed as a result of Nintendo having a surplus of monitors, so who knows how much their heart was really into it. With Super Punch-Out!!, it sort of feels like the development team realized that they were onto something and leaned heavier into the more fun aspects. The counter-punching relies more on left-right dodging instead of using your gloves. The big, slicing uppercuts and hooks that the console games would make famous are thrown more frequently here, and finding an extended sequence of wide open “stunned” punches is basically the main object now. The controls are still often unresponsive-feeling but even that’s not as bad. Super Punch-Out!! is immediately, noticeably better.
And actually, the offensive game is now based around the stunned punches.
And it also feels much closer to the console franchise in terms of personality. Annoyingly, the already sparse roster has been cut from six opponents to five, but these five are big in personality and they, you know, cheat. Well, Dragon Chan does (and technically in boxing you can’t ever face away from your opponent, so Super Macho Man’s spinning punch is very illegal). This required an additional dodging move, the duck. Weirdly, I only remember needing it for three out of the five boxers: Bear Hugger, Dragon Chan, and Super Macho Man. Also, Great Tiger doesn’t do his famous “teleporting” move and really just feels like a faster version of Piston Hurricane, complete with the “Hurricane Punches” move from the original game. You can actually feel that they’re starting to experiment and get a sense for what Punch-Out!! SHOULD be, but as an authorized enhancement kit for the original coin-op, they were limited by the problems the original game had.
Just think: by decade’s end Nintendo would be making a deal directly with the U.S.S.R. for the rights to Tetris. I wonder if they knew about “Vodka Drunkenski” at that point. If not, maybe the Steins could have poached their deal by bringing a copy of Super Punch-Out!! with them.
If the first game was a prototype for better things to come, Super Punch-Out!! is the game that confirms Nintendo recognized that and had ideas for how to get there. Punch-Out!! should be about everything but boxing. If it feels like you’re obeying the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, well, it’s kind of boring, isn’t it? Here’s where it gets really weird: I couldn’t wait to be done with the first coin-op. The second game added something to the upper screen: K.O. Time, IE how long you need to knock a boxer out. This added SO MUCH replay value. I was still frustrated by the controls, but nowhere near to the degree I was the first time around. When I knocked out the unfortunately named Vodka Drunkenski in 44 seconds and change, I literally let out a cheer. The time trials also clued me in that I wasn’t fighting Dragon Chan right, as even on my fifth fight against him I failed to put up a good time.
I heard a lot of chatter about Super Macho Man being tougher than Mr. Sandman, but honestly I thought Super Punch-Out was exponentially easier than the original, including the final fight. It doesn’t really FEEL harder until the title defenses. More responsive controls do that every time, you know?
There is a downside to the time keeping: the rematches after you beat Super Macho Man don’t record times, so if you want to treat Super Punch-Out!! like a time trial game, you have to not continue when you get knocked out during the title defenses. Speaking of which, the second wave of fighters I found to be much harder in this game. Hell, I lost the Bear Hugger fight a couple times, and I never actually made it to the second Macho fight. I decided to not reload for rematches because I wanted to challenge my fastest times. That’s what put Super Punch-Out!! over the top for me. While all the problems with the lack of authentic-feeling, painful violence returned from the original, Nintendo got close enough to the Punch-Out!! that *I* fell in love with to win me over. Verdict: YES!
Arm Wrestling Platform: Arcade Released May, 1985 Designed by Genyo Takeda Developed by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This was the very last ORIGINAL Nintendo coin-op. Also, “Stud Horse?” Seriously, is Texas Mac bragging about how well he’s hung? It kinda sounds like it.
Arm Wrestling is one of the few Nintendo coin-ops that Hamster hasn’t brought to Arcade Archives, though I have no clue what the story on that is. I mean, Arcade Archives released Sky Skipper (which I reviewed on my 30th birthday), a game that never got a wide release and which only one unit is known to still exist. A game that rare, and rare specifically because of bad route testing, gets modern love but Arm Wrestling doesn’t? That seemed ominous to me, and then there’s the fact that Arm Wrestling has been shut out historically by Nintendo on the same level as StarTropics and Zoda’s Revenge. No references in any other game. Not even a wink in the Smash Bros. series or a microgame in WarioWare. So, I was a bit nervous, but truth be told, I think I like Arm Wrestling more than Sky Skipper. Maybe. As I type this paragraph, I’m not actually finished with my play session. I’ve only beaten all five fighters once, but Arm Wrestling is positively exhausting, like one of those button mashing Track & Field games. I doubt any game wearing a Nintendo label has been this physically taxing, at least not without some kind of Power Pad or Balance Board.
There’s an excellent guide to the surprisingly complicated rules of Arm Wrestling at GameFAQs. If you give this game a shot, you’ll want to at least read through the basics because Arm Wrestling is NOT intuitive. At all. Even that guide I’m not entirely sure is right. It says that I should press two buttons when the bubble has a “!!” in it but that didn’t do sh*t for me. The only thing that worked for me was pressing RIGHT and I still rarely got 100% of the bubbles.
I can honestly say I’ve never played anything like Arm Wrestling before. Well, that’s not entirely true. This is considered part of the Punch-Out!! franchise for a reason and shares DNA in that both are about counterattacks. But instead of throwing leather, you want to mostly tap the joystick LEFT to try and muscle your opponent’s arm down. Eventually they’ll make a move that’s telegraphed by a facial expression or some other telltale sign, at which point you want to counterattack by quickly pressing RIGHT instead. Doing this will stun them like a Punch-Out!! sequence, at which point little bubbles will appear above the fighter that require you to hit the POW button. A “!” bubble requires a single press while “!!” might require two presses or it might require pressing RIGHT. I honestly never figured it out, but I know that just pressing buttons always seemed to fail. A money symbol does no damage to your opponent but scores points. If a skull appears, you have to wait it out. A “?” is a 50/50 chance for points or a skull. Did you get all that?
Two of the five fighters (Mask X and Alice & Ape III) require you to perform a pull. Mask X’s pull is done by pressing UP. Alice’s “pull” move is basically an instakill and has to be stopped by pressing RIGHT. It’s sort of like the Bald Bull’s Bull Charge, only if you didn’t get up if he hit it.
As noted in the above picture, there’s more to it than just jerking left and right on the controller. Two of the fighters require special finishing techniques to beat, and a few have Punch-Out!! like moves you have to dodge, including the final fighter spitting fire at you. Okay, so Arm Wrestling is unintuitive and physically exhausting to play, but I…….. kinda liked it. It’s also an innovator in a few ways. You know the Mario Kart “hit the gas at the right moment to get a boost” thing? Arm Wrestling did it first! Every match has a starting pistol. If you hit LEFT before the pistol, you get a foul. Two fouls is a game over, but if your timing is true and you hit LEFT on the exact right frame, you can score super quick KOs on opponents. The time trial system from Super Punch-Out returns, and honestly I think it’s more potently addictive here. Plus, unlike Super Punch-Out!!, the second wave of fighters ALSO has time trials that are exclusive to the rematches.
An hour ago, I lost this fight over a dozen times. Now I’m beating it in under 12 seconds, and it’s exhilarating.
And those rematches are no slouches. I literally could not beat the first fighter, Texas Mac, in the first rematch. His fighting style is totally different. When I was just about to wrap-up this review, I went back for one kick at the can, and not only did I defeat Texas Mac II using the Mario Kart trick, but I won the fight IN FOUR SECONDS! I literally screamed.
This was the last fight I won.
Arm Wrestling isn’t perfect. I never got the hang of defending against the skulls. I never got the hang of the timing of the bubbles at all, really. In the rare instances where there was a mix of “!” and “!!” bubbles, I was always surprised when I actually got all five correct. I’m also suspect Hamster took a pass on this because it’ll be bad for analog sticks. I’m guessing even the most durable arcade units took a LOT of abuse from players, which probably explains why Arm Wrestling is a rarity. Still, it didn’t deserve to be historically blanked like it has been. It’s loaded with personality and has some of the most unique gameplay Nintendo has come up with. Yet, it can’t even get a microgame in the WarioWare franchise. I won’t suggest that Nintendo is sitting on a goldmine, but as a unique novelty game, Arm Wrestling deserves better. Verdict: YES!
You’ll note that I didn’t mention the, ahem, infamous sound effects. For over fourteen years now my readers have given me endless sh*t because I often play games muted. Well, have a listen to what I muted this time. HAH HAH! WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?🖕🤪🖕
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! aka Punch-Out!! Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released October, 1987* Directed by Genyo Takeda Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
*A version of Punch-Out!! without Mike Tyson/Mr. Dream was released September 18, 1987 for the Famicom in Japan. Sort of. Only 10,000 units were made but only as prizes for special events or drawings. In this version, Super Macho Man is the final fight. Mike Tyson actually IS in the game code and requires a Game Genie to unlock, and he replaces Glass Joe. Heh, imagine if that’s how it really worked. Talk about tough love training.
I’ve played Punch-Out!! and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! to death. “I need something to make it fresh for me” I thought, so I tried the PlayChoice 10 version (the first time I’ve ever played PlayChoice 10, I think), only the colors on it are, ahem, loud. So I stopped and swapped back to the NES because, no joke, my eyes started to ache.
You know what blows my mind the most about Punch-Out!!? I’ve always known that there’s really only six body types, with King Hippo being the sole one-off and the other ten fighters each being the twin of another (all the Punch-Out!! games but the Wii one do this), but I’ll be damned if it isn’t easy to forget because they did such a good job of hiding it. Like, Glass Joe and Don Flamenco don’t feel alike at all. Neither does Piston Honda and Mike Tyson. It wasn’t until I paid really, really close attention during this review that I started to “feel” the similarities besides the shape of the sprite. Before paying close attention, the only pairing that felt too similar was Mr. Sandman and Ball Bull, who both spin their hands before throwing a punch and look hilarious when you slug them in the gut. There’s also no hiding that their hooks look identical, though oddly I found the uppercut spite to feel unique, even if it really isn’t. For this review, I actually looked for shared moves for the first time and they weren’t hard to spot. Like Von Kaiser and Great Tiger both have an easy-to-exploit weakness when they duck. Glass Joe and Don Flamenco both have the same hilarious knockdown animation where they change directions a few times. Soda and Macho’s big, cutting uppercuts look and feel identical. Yet, my mind is blown because, if you’re not LOOKING for them, it really never does feel completely like a palette swap. There’s eleven fighters, period.
Super Machoiski
Soda Popman. Just seeing if you’re paying attention.
If there’s such a thing as the competition for the best job of “stripping down” a coin-op, the NES Punch-Out!! has to be the outright winner, right? Given the limitations of Famicom, especially when this started development, the “vibe” of the coin-op with huge characters and an emphasis on counterattacking was not only retained by actually optimized in a way the coin-ops never were. In terms of graphics, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! probably had the biggest character sprites seen in a game console up to this point, and they don’t feel like a “cheat” like the gigantic bosses of Contra. These aren’t bits in the background being with an invisible hit box that creates the illusion of size. If the sprites were ugly, it wouldn’t matter. But they’re strikingly memorable and create a real sense of threat. One thing that neither coin-op successfully conveys is a sense of being hopelessly outsized and outmatched. In the NES game, the opponents feel HUGE and you feel so very, very small, and on behalf of small stature people everywhere, thank you Nintendo for that. The violence is also vastly improved. Punches feel authentic and savage, thanks in no small part to some of the best damage sprites 8-bit gaming ever saw.
From spit flying out to Bald Bull and Soda Popinski’s “slot-machine eyes” to just looks of painful surprise, punches feel impactful and important. Since it’s a boxing-themed game called PUNCH-Out!!, getting the violence right is a pretty important thing. And then there’s the match design, where dodging left and right allows a chain of stun-locked punches and it’s SO SATISFYING. In addition to sussing out patterns, you can preemptively stop an attack with a well-timed punch. Doing so often earns a star and allows an uppercut. Again, the coin-op had some weak-ass vibes to its power shots. In Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the sound design and the graphic of Little Mac building up momentum before throwing the punch AND that excellent revving-up sound effect make it one of the all-time satisfying video game attacks. There’s multiple “all-time” accolades for Punch-Out!! Heck, the game starts with one of the all-time great opening stages in Glass Joe. Nobody thinks of him as a “stage” but he’s the perfect introduction to the gameplay. I’d put him right up there with level World 1 Level 1 in Super Mario Bros.
If I have to make one complaint about Punch-Out!!, and I sorta should since it’s my job, I guess I wish it made more logical sense when the opponents are able to dodge the uppercut. For the last five or six opponents, sometimes it feels like they all whiff. I’m fine with missing if I don’t have them stun-locked, but if you’re going to allow the opponents to dodge the big uppercut, stop giving out stars. It feels like punishing players for good gameplay. (shrug)
So what else could I possibly complain about? Well, I guess I wish there were a lot more fighters. There’s a hidden second quest that requires not only a password but a special way of inputting that password, but all it does is take you to a very slight remix of the World Circuit that includes the King Hippo and Great Tiger fights from the Major Circuit. If this changed up the fights themselves, it’d be awesome. It doesn’t. As far as I can tell, the only difference is losing a fight is a game over with no option for a rematch. I guess I could also complain about the logic of “winning by decision.” It’s based on a points system that makes no sense and is the final element that shatters the illusion that Punch-Out!! is a sports game. You could pummel someone into a coma and never get punched once, but if you don’t reach a scoring benchmark, they’re awarded the victory. Some of the points required are so high that I can’t imagine a person can reach them without winning by TKO (or even KO) before the bell rings at the end of the third round, and none of the title fights (or Mr. Sandman) allow victory by decision. I’d say “I wish they got rid of them entirely” but the first time I beat Mike Tyson (well, Mr. Dream, same diff) it was by decision and made me feel like a world beater.
I don’t have a problem with Mr. Dream. I really don’t. I get it. My complaint is “THIS IS THE BEST THEY COULD COME UP WITH?” He’s SO generic looking.
Okay, let’s talk about the rampaging elephant in the room. No, Nintendo is never going to re-up with Mike Tyson. One thing you have to remember is that the deal that landed them Tyson was lousy for him and would never happen again. At the time they made the deal, Iron Mike hadn’t even won his first World Heavyweight Championship yet. As the story goes, Minoru Arakawa was having a drink after hours at the 1986 Winter CES and on the bar’s TV was a match between Tyson and a guy named David Jaco (it HAD to be that match, because it’s the only one that lines up with the CES story). Tyson was just starting to become nationally known and the boxing fan Arakawa, like everyone else who witnessed Tyson, couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Tyson’s body was atypical for a heavyweight. He could be described as “compact strength” in that his muscular build was packed into less space than you would expect. He also had unimaginable speed for the weight class combined with his absurd punching power. He was a completely new style of heavyweight boxer. I wasn’t around for the meteoric rise of Tyson, but my father and AJ were, and they both shake their heads with disbelief when they talk about what it was like to witness it. “When he burst onto the scene, it really felt like he was changing what a heavyweight boxer would look like. But it’s been forty years and there still hasn’t been another combination of a squat frame, speed, and power. There will NEVER be another Mike Tyson. Heavyweights might do some of the things he did, but none of them do EVERYTHING he did.” Minoru Arakawa must have agreed with my father.
My timing is not what it used to be, but it’s a LOT easier to beat Tyson with today’s emulators than the one I used on my Wii back in the day. I fought Tyson eight times for this feature and won twice. I think that means I get a match with Evander Holyfield next to decide who is the greatest Tyson slayer of our time. I promise I won’t bite.
Predicting that Tyson would eventually claim a version of the world heavyweight championship wasn’t exactly as bold or risky as some people make it out to be. During Tyson’s rise in the mid-80’s, the heavyweight division was relatively weak following the retirement of Muhammad Ali and the biggest champion of the transitional era, Larry Holmes, was not a popular national figure (“most underrated boxer of all time” says my father). The welterweight division was where most of the fandom was at with guys like Sugar Ray Leonard. But Arakawa predicted, as did everyone else who saw him, that Tyson had a clear path to the heavyweight championship and his presence, charisma, and domination would revitalize interest in the entire sport. What’s beyond belief is that Tyson’s people agreed to the deal Nintendo offered. The price? $50,000 for three years exclusivity. Not $50,000 a year. $50K, up front, no royalties. Within a year, you wouldn’t even be able to buy a meeting to pitch to Tyson’s people for that price. It was a horrible contract for Tyson even by the standards of the era, and any “yeah but Nintendo was taking a risk” talk is mostly bullsh*t. If there’s such a thing as inevitable in sports, it was Mike Tyson: World Champion in the winter of 1986, and his handlers should have told him $50K with no royalty was a crap deal.
You have to give them credit for a VERY lifelike Mike Tyson sprite. No need to use your imagination with this one. It looks just like him. It’s worth noting that the Jaco match that Arakawa witnessed was only Tyson’s 16th match. Just like today, there were multiple governing bodies that each promoted a world champion along with two unofficial world champions, the Lineal Champion and the Ring Magazine Champion, both of which are taken very seriously. HBO had organized a unification series for the alphabet belts. It wouldn’t be until a dozen matches after Arakawa’s CES story, on Tyson’s 28th match and now under Nintendo contract, where he would be able to claim a world championship, the WBC version. His 29th match would see him also win the WBA title, and his 31st would let him claim the IBF title to be the “Undisputed” Heavyweight Champion of the World. Except it was totally disputed because Michael Spinks had never been beaten in the ring and held The Ring Magazine and Lineal Championship. It wouldn’t be until his 35th match when he beat Michael Spinks in 91 seconds to become the no-doubt-about-it Undisputed Champion. By the way, if you watch the match, Spinks looks like his life is flashing before his eyes before the match even starts. Mind you, Spinks had never lost a match in his professional career and he looked positively terrified. I’ve watched boxing my entire life, with some of my earliest memories being of sitting on my father’s lap while he explained the sport to me, and I’ve NEVER seen a guy with the accolades of Spinks look like he’s about to call the whole thing off like that. My father is right: Mike Tyson will never happen again. We’ll get a second coming of Michael Jordan before we get a second coming of Mike Tyson.
What I can’t believe is that there’re people who refuse to play Punch-Out!! without Mike Tyson, like he alone made the game worth playing and not the outstanding mechanics, authentic violence, revolutionary graphics, or the over the top roster of characters. I wonder if a lot of these stubborn people even beat Mike Tyson? It’s not the most interesting fight in the game. I think the Mr. Sandman fight really is the highlight. If they insist that it was Tyson’s game, I have news for them: he wasn’t even in the original Japanese release. In fact, there is no “Dream Fight” in that version. The game ends with Super Macho Man. It was one of five versions of Punch-Out!! I played for this feature, and there’s subtle differences in that original “Gold Edition” release.
“Gold Edition”
US releases.
Gameplay differences though? I mean besides having no Dream Fight? Nope, there’s none. It’s the same game. And that speaks the highest volume to how good Punch-Out!! on the NES is. I just played through it FIVE TIMES in a single day and I never got bored. Even though I know how to win every fight, I can still play it and have a good time. It might have aged better than any game released for a home console in the 1980s. This gameplay is age proof. I’m fairly certain stuff like Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. 3 will still be fun in a hundred years, but I can’t actually guarantee it. I can with Punch-Out!! Even non-boxing fans love it, and that makes sense. It’s not a boxing game. It just has a boxing theme. What genre does it belong to? Who knows? Who cares! It’s Punch-Out!! I don’t ever render verdicts based on historical importance, but since Punch-Out!! is cruising to an easy YES!, I want to point out that Punch-Out!! represents an underrated leap forward in game technology thanks to the MMC2 chip that allowed for the bigger sprites. It looks like a carton probably more than any game that isn’t on laser disc up to that point. That’s one of many reasons why it’s timeless, and not because of Mike Tyson. And by the way, I think this aged better than the SNES game. Stay tuned for that. Verdict: YES!
Power Punch II Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released June, 1992 Developed by Beam Software Published by American Softworks Sold Separately on Steam Available on Evercade Piko Interactive Collection Vol 1.
Beam Software doesn’t have a reputation for quality games. But, let it be said they at least gave us an excellent Itchy & Scratchy Game Boy title (which I reviewed in Simpsons Games: The Definitive Review Volume Three). It’s like all the unplayable crap they made before that built up to that one game. And it really is fantastic. Go play it. Don’t play this.
Please note that nothing I say in this review is directed at Piko. I’m fine with re-releasing old games. It’s God’s work, even if $8.99 is a ridiculous price tag for THIS. I’m also not blaming the programmers for it, either. They didn’t do the marketing for this. They made a sh*t game, but that happens all the time.
I’ve mellowed out a lot over the years, but every once in a while I’ll play a game that makes my blood boil. What can I say? I hate cynical games, and Power Punch II is maybe the most cynical NES game. If Where’s Waldo or Action 52 doesn’t have that title, it’s Power Punch II, which is clearly trying to imply a direct connection to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! In fact, the original version of the game was even going to have Mike Tyson in it before all his legal problems started and he was removed from the game. There is ZERO question that the intent of all parties was to deliberately trick consumers into believing this was a sequel to one of the best selling and most beloved video games of the 1980s and that a similar quality should be expected. That really pisses me off. Unlike stuff like Where’s Waldo, I actually think in the pre-internet days that average consumers and not just unknowing parents could be fooled by this one. The Tyson name combined with the screenshots of a game that looks kinda like Punch-Out!! probably would have worked. Where they lost any plausible deniability of their intent to deceive consumers came when they had to remove Tyson, they changed the name from “Mike Tyson’s Intergalactic Power Punch” to the much closer to Punch-Out!! sounding name “Power Punch II.” You’ll note there is no Power Punch #1, but does Mom and Dad know that the original game is called “Punch-Out!!” and not “Power Punch?” What a disgusting thing to do.
If the game behind all this was any good, maybe it wouldn’t be so infuriating of a business practice. But coming from Beam Software, Power Punch II is of course a horrible game. This might look like a knock-off of Punch-Out!! in screenshots, but the gameplay never comes even a little close. There is no fine-tuning effort at all in this game, and no sense of OOMPH to the punches. There seems to be a very vague attempt to recreate the counterattack system, only with looser movement parameters. The first opponent you can just throw hands with, with no sense of finesse and no dodging/countering to speak of. The second opponent turns Power Punch II from just bad to outright boring and bad. The f*cking thing keeps backing away from you and the only way to actually win is to wiggle back and forth and hit it one jab at a time since it counterattacks every punch you throw when it’s up close. And it was all downhill from here.
Anyone who praises the character models……. seriously? You think THAT looks good? It looks like Mac & Me is going through a midlife crisis.
It’s rare I do one of these reviews and decide to quit before I finish the game, but I had no interest in seeing Power Punch II through to the end. Absolutely no effort was made towards creating a quality game. It’s the gaming equivalent of a “mockbuster” made by The Asylum, only video games in the 1990s were expensive and it’s not inconceivable a kid who was a big Punch-Out!! fan got stuck with this for their allowance money or as a present over a better game because they thought they were getting the actual sequel to Punch-Out!! I have no problem with studios making terrible games. It happens every day. I have a big problem when you try to tie that game to a legacy you didn’t build and don’t deserve, and Power Punch II goes out of its way to do that, literally. They did it with the celebrity endorsement that fell through. They did it by attaching a sequel number to the end of the name. They did everything possible to make people believe this was the next game in the Punch-Out!! franchise except make a quality game. Disgusting, guys. Shame on you! Verdict: NO!
Super Punch-Out!! Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released October 24, 1994 Directed by Makoto Wada and Yasuyuki Oyagi Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
I didn’t attempt the “pause” trick, and most certainly not because I couldn’t get it to work. Cough.
Reviewing games that I spent a lot of time with in my formative years is always tough, but Super Punch-Out!! is REALLY tough because I got so hooked on it once upon a time that my experience playing it in 2026 bears no resemblance at all to the first time I played it. The fighters that once seemed so intimidating and insurmountable landed a combined total of two punches on me over sixteen fights. And hell, it’s actually possible to beat all sixteen fighters in under fourteen seconds each. Some of them can be beaten in under six seconds, and most can be in under ten seconds. It’s actually not even that hard to learn how to come close. It’s simple pattern recognition with a touch of RNG luck (and a trick using the pause button). Super Punch-Out!! is the easiest game in the franchise to figure out the timing for. By far, actually.
Once upon a time, I could NOT beat this guy. He was by far the fighter that took me the longest to beat. Today I beat him in 21 seconds and change. By the way, I think Super Punch-Out!! ending on two identical, generic muscle guys is a weak ass finale. Nick Bruiser is one of the all-time letdowns of a final boss, and really I think both Bruiser Bros. are too generic. I think a better ending would have been shifting them to the 2nd and 3rd fights of the special circuit and making the game end on Hoy Quarlow. What an amazing, unexpected twist it would have been to reach the final fight and have it be a 78 year old man with a walking stick and a record of like 999 – 0 or something along those lines. It would have made him one of the all-time great finales in gaming. He’s the toughest fighter in the game. He should be treated as such.
I’ve said something to this effect before, but besides other games in the franchise, the video game Super Punch-Out!! shares the most DNA with is actually Shadow of the Colossus. Both games are, more or less, boss rushes based around taking down much bigger, stronger, more capable opponents. Even the opponent count is exactly the same, and both games are damned by losing a significant chunk of the replay value once you know how to win, leaving only time trials as the main reason to come back. Well, except Shadow of the Colossus offers a gigantic world to explore for sightseeing. For Super Punch-Out!!, once Time Trials run out of steam, you have to find your own fun.
Okay, let’s do that. For this review, after beating Super Punch-Out!! with a 16-0 record and needing barely 30 seconds to beat most opponents (I did need 55 to beat Rick Bruiser), I replayed it all the way through, only I didn’t use a single power punch and I didn’t use any interrupting counterpunch. I only dodge-countered and threw random punches. If I accidentally did an interrupt, I rewound it and allowed the punch to land as punishment.
By the way, at sixteen fighters, this is the biggest game in the franchise, except it’s really not. The Wii game’s thirteen rematches aren’t just remixes, but whole new fights. Even the Glass Joe rematch is legitimately difficult, at least the first time. It’s something the older games like this could have REALLY used, and then after them, there’s one last big surprise that made the Wii game probably the best in the series. If only they would re-release it.
As I noted at the end of the NES game, I think it aged better than the SNES game. Even when I didn’t throw uppercuts or hooks, the speed of the enemy punches is much slower and the challenge just isn’t there. I’ll still struggle with some attacks in the NES Punch-Out!!, from Soda and Sandman’s uppercuts to Super Macho Man’s spinning punch. Similar attacks in Super Punch-Out!! are much, much easier to dodge, and there’s more defense options. Ducking is a cinch and moving your defensive stance up and down is intuitive. Because of the slower speed, I never had stress timing dodges too much. The first time you play Super Punch-Out!!, you’ll certainly struggle with some of the fights. A few decades ago, I got my clock cleaned even in early fights and needed multiple attempts to beat every one of the back eight fighters. If I didn’t lose over twenty times to guys Mad Clown, Narcis Prince, and Rick Bruiser, I’d be shocked.
After losing to Mad Clown about a billion times (give or take), I kind of cheated. When he’d throw the balls, I’d pause the game to see where the gap was. Tell me I’m not the only one who did that!
Really, once you know each guy’s attack patterns, there’s not a whole left for Super Punch-Out!! to offer except the time attack. Without throwing a single power punch, I was still able to beat most fighters (but not all) without getting punched once. Did I still have fun? Sure, but not as much as I thought I was going to have. Not even close, and I think what fun I did have is more of a credit to the formula itself. The Punch-Out!! formula is cathartic, you can’t completely zone-out while playing it, and being a tiny person defeating gigantic bullies is boilerplate wish fulfillment. The Punch-Out!! formula itself is the bulletproof thing, at least once it transitioned to a console franchise. The content of a Punch-Out!! game is practically incidental. It’s why I can tolerate generic characters like the Bruiser Bros. or Gabby Jay, but for the record, I think Super Punch-Out!! probably has the weakest roster of the console trilogy. I think EVERYONE would have preferred Glass Joe to Gabby Jay, I think Mad Clown should have been dumped in favor of King Hippo, and as noted in the caption above, I think the Bruiser Bros. are lame as f*ck and Hoy Quarlow should have been the final boss.
To Super Punch-Out!!’s credit, even the weaker character designs usually include one memorable aspect. Heike Kagero is near the bottom of the barrel in terms of character design, but that hair whip move is unforgettable. Still, I can’t help but wonder if this fight was meant to be Great Tiger at some point with the “Mirage Dance.”
Don’t get me wrong. Super Punch-Out!! does a lot right. I marveled over how convincing the palette swaps were in the NES game, but somehow I never noticed that the SNES game does the same thing for all but two characters as well. I mean, of course I realized Bear Hugger and Mad Clown used the same body, and the Bruiser Bros. needed no explanation, but I swear to God it wasn’t until I played today that I realized everyone else but Narcis Prince and Hoy Quarlow share a body with someone else. The pairings are Gabby Jay & Bob Charlie, Piston Hurricane & Aran Ryan, Bald Bull & Mr. Sandman (and they did in the original coin-op as well, duh), Dragon Chan & Heike Kagero, and Masked Muscle & Super Macho Man. I’ve played this for years and I never realized that and now I feel stupid. But, to my credit, none of the fights feel like palette swaps. The Dragon Chan and Heike Kagero fights couldn’t be more different. This has to be right up there with the ninjas in Mortal Kombat in the palette swap hall of fame.
Playing this now, I literally can’t believe I ever struggled with some of these fights. Like Narcis Prince? Even without throwing uppercuts, once I knew how to beat him, he was so easy. I didn’t use an uppercut or an interrupt and still beat him in under a minute with just normal punches. Still, I love his “OWWHOW!” cry when you knock him down. It’s so satisfying to hear.
If not for the fact that I can specifically remember how much I enjoyed Super Punch-Out!! the first time I played it, this would be one of the weakest YES! verdicts I’ve ever given. Again, I had fun but I’m pretty sure this will be the last time I ever play Super Punch-Out!! The magic is, simply put, gone. And I mean gone gone. In order to jog my memory on what my original experience was like, I had to avoid using the fun punches. So Super Punch-Out!! doesn’t hold up like the NES or Wii games. I don’t necessarily think it’s impossible to get bored with this. I played the NES game five times for this feature. I was ready to be done with Super Punch-Out!! halfway through my second run today. It’s too easy. It’s too slow. It’s too clockable. I just played all sixteen fights and didn’t throw a single power punch. My record? 16 – 0 again. Was it worth doing? Not really, actually.
OOF, that was close. This was the only exciting thing that happened playing Super Punch-Out!! today. You know, part of me wonders if this would have held up better if it used the NES’ star system. The meter makes building up an uppercut too easy, and you get unlimited uppercuts until you get hit. Maybe that’s too much of an advantage to the player. Also, I think there’s too many opportunities for interrupts. Even when I was deliberately trying to avoid doing it, I interrupted eleven total punches over the course of sixteen fights just by trying to throw random punches. Most of those came in the World and Special Circuits where the punches come in faster, meaning there’s more opportunities to interrupt-stun.
I did get punched more than twice, and in fact, I got knocked down three times. Bald Bull, Super Macho Man, and Rick Bruiser each got me once with a one-shot knockdown, but otherwise, not one single fight even reached the second minute EXCEPT Nick Bruiser, who I beat with about thirteen seconds left before running out of time. In over fourteen years of writing game reviews, this was without a doubt one of the hardest I’ve ever had to do because I have to go off memories from over a decade-and-a-half ago and remember that, yes, I had the time of my life playing Super Punch-Out!! once. Now, if you’ve somehow never played it, ignore this review, get off your butt, and play it. Super Punch-Out!! is, simply put, fantastic, at least when you play it the first time. Unlike other Punch-Out!!s, there ain’t going to be a whole lot left once you know the game, and it’s not that hard to memorize. By the way, that’s fine. Not every game has to hold up to the scrutiny of endless replayability, and frankly, not every game NEEDS to be replayed at all once you finish it. Give me one unbelievable day with a game over a lifetime with a middling game. Super Punch-Out!! IS one of the all-time greats and it aged well, and once you know what to do, it’s not exciting anymore. Verdict: YES!
Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
Released April 20, 2010 (Updated March 25, 2016)
Developed by Master Phred Link to Patch at RomHacking.Net
I use THIS TOOL to apply patches.
Yep, that’s Rick Bruiser! You fight him twice before fighting Nick Bruiser. The first Rick fight is one of the easier ones in the game. The second one? Not so much.
You knew I HAD to do a ROM hack in this feature. Actually, given the popularity of Punch-Out!!, I was genuinely, no bullsh*t stunned that there aren’t a lot more. I mean, people have worked actual magic on Super Mario Bros. 3 to turn it into virtually whole new games, but there’s been tons of Mario games over the years. Since Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, there’s been only two sequels. Apparently, the lack of ROM hacks isn’t due to a lack of interest. I’m not versed in this stuff but from what I’ve gathered, Super Mario Bros. 3 specifically lends itself to this form of game development as a ROM hacking building block in a way Punch-Out!! doesn’t. Re-Spritings Punch-Out!! is relatively easy, but using it as a template for new-feeling gameplay isn’t. So the fact that Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! even exists is kind of astonishing. Don’t think of it as a NEW version of Punch-Out!! but rather a remixed version that changes the speed and tinkers with some of the punches. But boy, does it tinker with them in a way that works.
I’m guessing there’s a lot of inside baseball in this game. I don’t know the story on the developer or the original characters in this. I sincerely thought the manager was supposed to be Dante from Clerks and Ken Barryhil was supposed to be the Angry Video Game Nerd. YOU SEE IT TOO, DON’T YOU?
First off, you feel the “turbo” part of WAIT give me a second…………
Okay, NOW it looks like the Angry Video Game Nerd. Where was I?
You feel the “turbo” part of “Cool Punch Out 2.” The speed is dialed up, which I was worried would make the game feel unresponsive. It doesn’t at all and works WONDERFULLY. That uptick in the speed of gameplay by itself would have probably made this worth a look as a curio, but then Master Phred messed around with the punches in a way that works. Take a remix of Glass Joe/Don Flamenco based around Disco Kid from the Wii sequel. Disco throws off-speed punches that pack a lot of power behind them, but the timing is unlike anything in the NES Punch-Out!! The Bruiser Bros. from the SNES game are here and their punches are especially hard to dodge, some of which barely have any warning at all. I’d be impressed if someone could plow through all fifteen fights on their first try based just on their Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! experience and knowledge. I don’t think it’s even possible. This plays on your expectations, and it does a pretty good job of doing so.
The remixed version of Super Macho Man, who now looks like something out of Futurama, still throws the spinning punch. But the pattern leading to that is new, and the timing is different.
Mind you, nobody is throwing a NEW punch. Everything in Cool Punch Out 2 is done using the already existing assets within the game. The designer couldn’t make the new version of Glass Joe throw Piston Honda’s rapid-fire punches. He couldn’t make Soda Popinski do Bald Bull’s bull charge. He also couldn’t seem to change the rules of the game, which means the Bald Bull fight where you have to score an uppercut STILL needs to be won by an uppercut even though it’s now Rick Bruiser, and this game’s King Hippo stand-in can’t get up when he’s knocked down, nor could he have a different fighting style or even a weakness. For that reason, it’s inevitable that some of the fighters feel like very little has changed.
King Hippo is replaced by Doc Louis. The fight was changed as much as I imagine the developer could humanly do. The “Hippo Dance” that King Hippo rarely does is now done frequently, but you still punch him in the mouth and then the stomach. It’s worth noting the amount of damage done is reduced significantly, which prolongs the fight. I needed two rounds to win. Also, like every fight, the timing is different enough to feel fresh.
So it’s Punch-Out!! with where the punches are tweaked ever so slightly. But, like From Below (a Tetris game staged during a giant squid attack) already proved, small changes can yield BIG gameplay results. It’s a lot of fun, but certainly not perfect. I don’t think the game scales very well. I kept waiting for something shocking to happen in the first Rick Bruiser fight, but it was so easy it could have been a minor circuit fight. Stars are more plentiful in this game. Too plentiful, probably. Not only are there more opportunities for them, but you can now bank seven stars instead of three AND you start every fight with two. To counter this, a lot of the fights are now based around limited stamina. I’ve never turned pink so many times playing Punch-Out!! as I did in this game.
The Tyson fight has been remixed, with the first round having a particularly difficult pattern. Instead of trying to one-shot you in the first minute-and-a-half like in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the new final boss actually has a brutal jab combination for the first minute-and-thirty AND THEN he throws the big KO shots. Okay, so the design was pretty disappointing, but the fight feels very fresh. I was really impressed with this whole effort.
If you set your expectations correctly, I think any Punch-Out!! fan will enjoy what Master Phred has accomplished here. I remember being excited when I found the code for “Another World Circuit” in Punch-Out!! and then being disappointed that all the fights were identical to the ones I’d already done, with only two Major Circuit fighters added to the existing World Circuit lineup. Frankly, when I found out about that code, I was hoping for something like this. So, while I was disappointed by the drought in Punch-Out!! ROM Hacks out there, the one that’s a full remix IS absolutely worth a look. It’s not going to change your life or anything like that, but it’s the “second quest” that fans of the original game have probably wanted for a long time. It turns out, even with all the limitations of ROM hacking that comes with Punch-Out!!, you can get a lot of mileage out of something as simple as playing on the expectations of the timing of a punch. Verdict: YES!
Luigi’s Mansion Platform: Nintendo GameCube Released September 14, 2001 (JP) November 18, 2001 (US) Directed by Hideki Konno Published by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2
I ain’t going to win any friends with this review.
My first day one Nintendo console was the GameCube. I was SO excited, even though 2001 had already broken my heart twice with new game machines (and the early demise of Dreamcast). The Game Boy Advance’s screen was like playing video games with three pairs of sunglasses on and the Xbox’s controller was NOT made for the hands of an already-small-for-her-age 12 year old girl. But that’s okay because that GameCube controller felt custom built for me and there’s no way Nintendo would ever bungle a launch lineup. All I can say is THANK GOD for Super Monkey Ball and Star Wars: Rogue Leader. And then Super Smash Bros. Melee came out a few weeks after launch and THAT dominated my next couple months of playtime and was everything I wanted from a new game on a new machine and more. So my GameCube worked out just fine in the end, and so did the Xbox and GBA (just not THAT GBA). Eventually, I did finish all those 2001 day one launch games. All except one. I never got around to finishing Luigi’s Mansion until I did this review. I’m not even sure I beat the second boss.
This is either the first boss fight or how fans of Luigi’s Mansion will react to this review.
I remember Electronic Gaming Monthly had an Xbox versus GameCube issue and someone actually gave Luigi’s Mansion a 5.5, which was jaw-dropping for a Nintendo-published game. Literally shocking. But it only took me about an hour of playing Luigi’s Mansion to get where they were coming from and, actually, I thought a 5.5 was generous. As a 12 year old, I thought Luigi’s Mansion was a boring all around experience, and now as a 36 year old, I feel the same way. It feels like a ten second long proof of concept hardware trailer that was stretched into a full length game. Because that’s exactly what this is. They took the 10 seconds of Luigi in a haunted mansion footage from Spaceworld 2000’s GameCube tech demo (the same one that got people hyped for Zelda before the cel-shading) and turned it into a full-length game. It’s kind of stunning that Nintendo didn’t throw every resource they had at making sure a Mario game was ready for launch. Apparently Hiroshi Yamauchi’s last request before stepping down as president of Nintendo was “make a Mario game for our new game machine!” Presumably he also asked “why don’t you have one already? Are you f*cking stupid? Don’t you remember how Virtual Boy did with no (real) Mario game to send it off?”
I thought “Game Boy Horror” was trying to play a launch day Game Boy Advance.
But hey, I liked the idea of Luigi in a haunted house as a kid. I was as hyped for that Spaceworld footage as anyone else. I wasn’t expecting a Mario game, and good thing for that because there’s no running or jumping in Luigi’s Mansion and the primary method of combat is basically tug-of-war. So much tug-a-war. First, you have to stun-lock the ghost by pointing a flashlight at it, and when its heart dings, you have to suck it up with a vacuum by holding the opposite direction the ghost pulls. And, well, that’s basically the whole game. Just do that over and over and over and over and over again. If you don’t like the combat, you’re going to be bored with Luigi’s Mansion. If you like it, you won’t be. It’s really that simple. I thought it was boring as a kid and I still think it’s boring now.
God, the Nintendo fans are going to have aneurysms with this opinion, but, yeah, I think the character designers are really forgettable and generic. I just didn’t like anything about this at all. And before you burn down my house, remember that I’m not a Nintendo hater. Read some of my other Nintendo reviews. Try Mario Wonder, the Switch remake of Mario RPG, Yoshi’s Island (from the same director as this), and hell, just go to my retro review index. I even gave the lazy as all f*ck Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition a YES! because I had more fun with it than not. So I think Luigi’s Mansion has no redeeming qualities. So what? It’s okay to not like one Nintendo game, you know?
There’s just not enough twists on the ghost catching formula. The idea is supposed to be that the “portrait ghosts” take extra steps to expose their weak spot. Like the guy in the above chair? He’s not visible if you face him. You have to turn around and wait for him to yawn, and when he does, THEN you can stun lock him and suck him up the same way you do basic enemies. All the portrait ghosts have 100hp and could take multiple stun-locks and suckages to capture. And again, the actual combat is exactly the same as it is for the basic enemies. It just gets so old, so quickly, and that’s before you factor in things like poison mushrooms. They spawn spontaneously during boss fights (and are also hidden in some fixtures in the rooms) and shrink you in size. I don’t care so much about the health ping. It’s easy enough to get health back. But you can’t operate your vacuum while shrank. It’s not hard to avoid damage once shrank, but it takes too long to grow back. It’s one of many, many aspects of Luigi’s Mansion that feels like it only exists to pad out the run time.
Safe bet that the team behind this were gigantic fans of the Haunted Mansion rides at Disney theme parks. Many of the gags are straight from the ride, including this candle bit. There’s also the whole mansion setting and portrait theme, a fortune teller with a crystal ball, dancing ghosts, a graveyard, a music room, suits of armor, and ghosts seen through shadows. Really, all that’s missing are the busts and the stretching room. This isn’t a knock on Nintendo, BTW. So, in a way this is kinda the third game I’ve reviewed based on that ride, including Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for the NES and the Super Famicom exclusive Mickey no Tokyo Disneyland Daibouken. So does this mean in another twenty years we can look forward to Waluigi’s Pirate Adventure? Because that would slap. And if you’re a Nintendo fan who has never rode the Haunted Mansion and are rolling your eyes at me right now, Disney+ actually has the full Haunted Mansion ride point of view. Watch it and tell me I’m wrong. Yes, the Tokyo version of the ride is basically identical. Hell, even the music is kind of similar to Luigi’s Mansion at times.
Every ghost portrait ghost is caught by the vacuum and the sucking mechanic. No exceptions, not even the bosses, whether it makes sense or not. At one point, you meet a fortune teller and the object is to retrieve five of Mario’s personal items and bring them to her. When this is done, she asks you to use your vacuum and suck her up. “All right! At least with this one I won’t have to watch the number 100 tick off yet again.” Wrong. She still resists the vacuum and still has 100hp. Why? She literally instructs you to capture her. She’s going willingly. Shouldn’t the gag be that she has 1 hit point, or none? It makes no sense.
Maybe this is how ghosts do foreplay.
And that’s what my general problem with Luigi’s Mansion is. Anything potentially clever is kind of ruined by reverting back to the same, tired mechanic that’s used on all enemies great and small. Plus, on the Switch 2, I’m not entirely sure it worked as it’s supposed to. I was constantly getting the dings for stun-locking ghosts and then immediately cuing up the vacuum, only the ghosts vanished in the transition to the vacuum. Maybe that happened when I was 12 too and I forgot, but once I switched off a GameCube controller (a $70 accessory, mind you) and moved to the Joycons, it didn’t happen as much. Oh, it still happened. It happened a lot. This isn’t the “pulling back to suck them in” part but just initiating the combat itself. For whatever reason, the flashlight felt less effective than I remember it being.
I do have one nice thing to say: for such a darkly-lit game, it’s not as flashy as you would think.
And what I said about the flashlight above really only applied to the generic basic enemies. I don’t remember it ever being a problem for any of the “portrait ghosts” that are the main objective of the game. In general, I assume the combat is supposed to feel very frantic and wacky but I thought it was underwhelming and repetitive to the point of exhaustion. Eventually the basic enemies can be dealt with by using the different elements you can suck up into the vacuum: water, fire, and ice. Some enemies require one of those three things, but when it was optional, I preferred using the elements because it worked every time, unlike the vacuum. The problem with that is there’s no PUNCH to using those elements. No feeling of doing damage. You just watch a number count down and then the ghost dies when it reaches zero. They don’t even really react to it. They just kind of stop and fade out with no satisfying death animation.
I’ve jokingly called this “Luigi’s Tech Demo” for years but that’s really what it is. It’s meant to show off how cool the GameCube is. And this IS a massive upgrade over the jaggy Nintendo 64. I actually was surprised by how low resolution this looked. I hadn’t played a GameCube game in a long time. This certainly didn’t hold up as much as Wind Waker did. I mean, it’s not a deal breaker or anything. It looks fine.
And then there’s the Boos. One of the main objectives of the game is to unleash a cluster of fifty boos into the mansion, then find them and suck them up. They don’t put up fights as much as the other ghosts (some of the Boos don’t attack at all), but they can have as much as 300hp. That sounds like busy work by itself, and that’s before you get to what they CAN do: run away, leaving the room entirely. I was using save states to reload them, but eventually I gave up on that and started chasing them into hallways and other rooms. A ghost that has 300hp might require you to follow it back and forth into a room over a dozen times. It just creates more busy work, and again, it’s the same thing you’re already doing with basic enemies and portrait ghosts.
I think the vacuum could have been satisfying if they significantly dialed back the HP on the ghosts. If there was a quick, snappy pace to it, hell, for all I know this could have been one of the best games ever made. But the way they did it just makes it feel like a grindy slog, especially since the ghosts just reset if you don’t catch them in a single pass. The only positive thing I can say is “at least they don’t require you to repeat every single activation step.” Faint praise.
If the mansion offered anything but the combat, like a genuine sense of exploration or getting lost or hidden things, I’d have liked it more. But it doesn’t. The “puzzles” in Luigi’s Mansion are really rudimentary stuff, and there’s really no room puzzles at all in the “you’re locked, how do you get out?” sense. Everything is based around the ghosts. But haunted mansions are almost never JUST about the ghosts. There’s two “hidden” rooms. One of them you fall into from the roof and the other you enter by scanning a mouse hole with the Game Boy Horror, which is like the game’s radar.
Besides the “speedy ghosts” I did get everything in the game, including all 50 Boos. Initially I finished the game with 49 out of 50. There was a hidden room I missed and my OCD got to me while writing this review. Worth the effort? Not really, but at least I’ll have this to figure out how much the sequels improved the game. Which I assume they must have because it can’t get much more boring than this.
But activating the ghost battles isn’t exactly something that requires you to have a seat on your thinking couch. Move a curtain with the vacuum. Move an airplane on the ceiling with a vacuum. Spray a sleeping ghost with water. Spray a bathing ghost with ice. Spray a frozen ghost with fire. Even late in the game, there’s a ghost that you just have to wait for it to basically say “boo.” Activate all the musical instruments or clocks in a room by pressing the A button next to them. The engine is just too limited to do anything more complicated or clever. If you can’t manipulate it with the vacuum or with a single press of the A button, the game can’t handle it. That’s probably just as well. The most complicated enemies require you to clog the vacuum with a ball that you then can launch back at them, it’s pretty haphazard. The controls in general are. Even then, I wish each ghost had a unique capture method instead of vacuum.
Like, these guys WOULD be fun battles since they fight back and feel boss-like (but they ain’t bosses). Except the method of capture is the same for them as it is everyone else. It gets old.
I guess I pictured in my mind a Clue-like mansion (or maybe the Winchester House, which I totally recommend visiting at least once) with lots of hidden rooms, secret passages, booby traps, and puzzles. Instead, it’s the facade of a haunted house, with all the expecting trappings but barely any of the interactivity I would hope for. A lot of the rooms look interesting and have lots of furniture and fixtures, but you don’t really do anything with them but shake them (sometimes it looks like he’s dry-humping them. At least I hope it’s dry). If they have money or health refills in them, it flies out inelegantly. Maybe a drawer or door opens or a chandelier sways, but that’s basically the extent of what you can do with the setting. At one point, I had to walk on a treadmill to get a key and the moment stood out so much I couldn’t believe it because so much of it just sits there doing nothing.
Another weird thing, at least for me, is how the Boos are the central focus of the game, yet they don’t look like the portrait ghosts at all. The portrait ghosts are the only eventful parts of the game, so when you think about it, shouldn’t the portrait ghosts be Boos playing dress-up instead of being humanoid ghosts? Especially since the last boss is also just an ordinary looking Boo with a crown on his head. Maybe his expression is a little more sinister, but he’s just a Boo, right?
So, I thought Luigi’s Mansion was a mostly empty game with boring combat and a plodding pace. I literally didn’t like anything about it. Even the bosses were snoozies. The first one, a giant baby, was probably the most memorable. The second one I honestly thought looked just like the basic enemies, and the third one IS just a giant Boo that you have to lure into the spikes of unicorn statues. Then the last boss is also a Boo but he’s the last boss because he has a crown on his head. Well Boos are like 94% head anyway and it’s not like he’s going to wear the crown on one of his flippers, but at least he also operates a robotic Bowser so that the game can feel climatic.
That’s the second boss. Brought to you by AT&T because they phoned that sh*t in.
I was wrong though about Luigi’s Mansion being cynical. Hey, I can admit when I’m wrong. No, I think the problem is the game was rushed out because they didn’t have a Mario game or anything remotely Mario-like for the GameCube launch. Luigi’s Mansion is a very simple game. Simple combat. Simple puzzles. Nothing too complex. Nothing ambitious at all, really. Maybe the least ambitious Nintendo launch game ever made (well, besides Mario’s Tennis on Virtual Boy). One of the biggest general complaints about Luigi’s Mansion is that it’s too short. That’s kind of bonkers because it’s one of the most artificially padded games from Nintendo I’ve played. If not for the poison mushrooms or tedious life bars, this might have only taken a couple hours to finish.
Honest to God, this guy felt more boss-like than two out of the four big bosses. He also had one of the more involved “puzzles.” You had to suck up the foot he was eating, then capture the waiters who would bring him more food, and THEN dodge his attacks when he had a tantrum, and THEN he was ready to be captured. Hell, I thought he WAS that floor’s boss. It felt like an event.
I don’t happen to think the layout of the mansion was optimized in the way, say, a Zelda dungeon is. But even if I ignore that, the game does so many things that grind the tempo to a halt. After you beat the giant Boo boss, it takes you back to the lab to turn the portrait ghosts into paintings. The next thing that happens? You have to manually walk back to the spot where you just fought the giant Boo on the third floor, at which point lightning strikes the mansion and knocks the power out. This is done as an excuse to restore basic enemies to the floors you’ve already cleared (basic enemies stop appearing in any room with the power restored), at least temporarily. You can go to the basement and restore the power. Why couldn’t the lightning strike have been a cut scene after you beat the Boo? Or why couldn’t the circuit breaker to the house be somewhere else? I guess the reason I found Luigi’s Mansion to be so boring is because nothing about it feels optimized. If you enjoyed it, hey, it’s okay. I like plenty of things that people find to be boring. I watch competitive ballroom dancing and everything. Verdict: NO!
They went to all the effort of programming these upside-down gravity swap panels that you can step on and then they totally underutilized them. I think like two rooms in the entire game use this. To me, this is the prime exhibit in “they had a lot more plans that had to stay on the drawing board.” And really, I think this is the only time that you use this to reach something. You have to drop down on a table to reach a chest. Wait, isn’t Luigi the better jumper of the two? You mean to tell me he can’t reach up and open a chest on a table? Yeah yeah, I know, because then it wouldn’t be a game. But this upside down mechanic could have made for some interesting maze-like design. There’s none of that type of thing in Luigi’s Mansion. Rooms are just boxes that you wander around in. There’s no sense of a labyrinth of mystery. It’s just a shell. I expect more from Nintendo by 2001. This came out after Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, etc. And even 2D games had evolved past this by this point. (shrug)
Marvel Cosmic Invasion Platform: All Current Platforms Released December 1, 2025 Directed by Fred Gemus Developed by Dotemu Published by Tribute Games $29.99 Hulk-Smashed baddies in the making of this review. This review was played on a Nintendo Switch 2.
SOME SMALL ROSTER/BOSS SPOILERS AHEAD
Yeah, don’t sweat it. You’ll get lost in the fog of war playing this. I must have attacked my own teammates once or twice every stage. And that’s to say nothing of how many times I walked off the goddamn Bifröst.
Yep, this unofficial sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is everything you want in a Marvel brawler. Old school fisticuffs with new school sensibilities. The fifteen starting characters (you know DLC is coming) all feel completely different from each-other and have unique fighting styles and move sets. HUGE move sets. It could take you a while just to get the hang of one character, let alone fifteen. But even if you have no gaming skill at all, it’s okay. This game’s a cinch for everyone! During a recent get together I threw on Marvel Cosmic Invasion, handed out four controllers, and mostly just watched. I wanted everyone to get a turn, and the sheer joy that everyone had was something to behold. There were a lot of kids and their parents, and what made it cool was the parents recognized the gameplay from their own childhood while their kids were hyped because Marvel is scorching hot right now. Frankly, this feels like a better use of the genre than Ninja Turtles because there’s just so many superheroes to choose from and such a wide variety of superpowers to mine for moves than you can get from four nearly identical reptiles.
After the big group-wide session was finished, we had knocked out this much of the unlockables.
Technically, you don’t just pick one character in Cosmic Invasion. You take two characters and can swap to your second superhero on the fly at any time AND you can execute double team moves with the press of a button. Each character has their own life bar too, so it’s really hard to die. Unless some twerp you’re playing with takes all the health even if they’re full, DAD! Sure, you can mash buttons if you want, but it only takes a little practice to be able to pull off combos. In theory if you’ve got the right group of people, you should be able to easily juggle enemies from one player to another like no brawler ever before. I do have one petty complaint about that: the juggling can continue long after you’ve inflicted lethal damage on an enemy. That sounds like it could be fun, but it eventually became obnoxious while playing with psychotic children who thought it would NEVER get old to keep bouncing the lifeless carcasses of enemies while everyone else waited for them to actually walk forward and continue playing the rest of the game. There was at least one kid every stage who did this, to the point that everyone waiting for their turns had to yell “STOP JUGGLING AND MOVE!” It should never have come to that. Again, cute in theory, but annoying as all hell in practice.
For the most part, MCI (what an unfortunate acronym) avoids having enemies linger on the edges of the screen, which is my #1 brawling pet peeve. But, it does still happen, and a couple bosses even feel tailored around it, like Thanos Finnegan. He has a ballsack on his chin-e-gan. Killed half the universe but they came back again. Poor old Thanos Finnegan-egan-egan.
Other than the juggling stuff, if there’s a means to keep the beat-em-up action from becoming stale, it was probably done here. I can’t stress enough how unique each character in the game feels, which is especially impressive given the roster size. However, I’m not the biggest fan of upgradable stats in arcade-style brawlers. For something like Castle Crashers? It’s fine, I guess. For stuff like this? The problem with them is that upgradable stats discourage players from swapping characters in the middle of a quest, which means it has the exact opposite effect of what a large roster of characters is meant to do: keep things fresh. Go ahead and swap, but you’ll be playing level six or seven or eight with a character still on their base stats. GO AHEAD! SWAP! What, you don’t want to anymore?
Some of the dialog is so self-referential and fourth-wall breaking that you would swear it was meant for Deadpool.
And also, I guess I have to mention that the roster was very disappointing for basically everyone. Missing from Marvel Cosmic Invasion: Thor, Hulk, Captain Marvel, Bucky, Doctor Strange, Falcon, Blade, Starlord, Groot, Gamora, Deadpool, Daredevil, Punisher, Ant-Man, Vision, Black Widow, Colossus, Nightcrawler, War Machine, Beast, Drax, Cyclops, Gambit, Wasp, Shang-Chi, and the entire Fantastic Four, among others. Kind of annoying since characters nobody wanted like Nova, Phyla-Vell (well Sasha the Kid liked her at least), and f*cking Beta Ray Bill (are you kidding me? Over Thor?) are in this. I’m not entirely sure how balanced the characters are. Whoever used She-Hulk seemed to have had the most fun, as she has a wide range of attacks while also having some of the hardest-hitting moves. In general, the whole game does an excellent job of feeling like strikes are impactful and violent. Now, there is a catch: some characters fly, and some don’t. Sometimes enemies feel like they’re tailored for flying heroes, but if nobody is using a flyer? It can get a little frustrating. They kind of reminded me of the Baxter fight from TMNT in that it was hard to line-up with the flyers properly.
There were like twenty people over at our house during that first play session, and two things happened that broke my heart. This isn’t a bit I’m doing as a joke. I literally mean “I got a pit in my stomach” heartbroken. The first thing was that several kids opted out of playing because they had already watched their favorite Twitchers or YouTubers playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion and somehow had gotten everything they needed out of this without ever picking up a controller. Why have fun playing a game when you can watch someone else have fun? I couldn’t believe it. It actually made me almost sick to my stomach that a lot of kids would rather watch some idiot play games instead of playing themselves. By the way, those kids then went on to smugly spoil all the hidden characters, level details, and boss fights for everyone else. They were the absolute worst, to the point that my normally jovial father, seriously the nicest guy in any room he’s in, said something to the effect of “no more games when these Twitch kids are around. They can’t take a hint to not ruin it for everyone else.” And they really couldn’t. Not little kids, mind you. Ages 11 to 14 or 15, and I guess it was their way of showing how smart they were to everyone else that they remembered what happened in a video they saw that week. They kept it up the entire time and simply didn’t give a sh*t how annoying it was. The second heartbreaking thing was that every single kid saw the missing characters as the cynical cash grab for future DLC packs that it was. There’s interviews with the development team that say they really just wanted some oddball selections, but why do that at the risk of alienating fans of MAJOR comic characters unless you were certain you could make up for it later with DLC? For the kids, there was literally no question in their minds that both the missing heroes and the missing supervillains (no Doctor Doom, no Green Goblin, etc) were missing because they’re going to be up-sold later. Again, not a bit I’m doing. There is something tragic that kids are that jaded about why games are the way they are. If that doesn’t hurt your heart, I don’t know what will. I hate cynicism, but it was totally justified and likely accurate. Gaming shouldn’t be cynical for children. It should be magical. I hate that it’s come to this. I know that it’s a business and they have to make money, but don’t turn kids into cynics. It’s not cool.
So what’s there to complain about? Well, besides the juggling and some of the weird character selection options? Honestly, I don’t know what more anyone could want out of a brawler. I guess the tutorial took forever and almost caused the game to get shut off during that party. And some of the extra goals in the game aren’t awesome. Hitting X amount of a specific move using a specific character on a specific level being a check mark? What if nobody picks that character? Or sometimes the goal is not taking any damage from a swarm of enemies. Those goals became so distracting, especially since you have to pause the game to see what the goals are, that we all voted to not attempt them anymore. We also took that pledge when it was just me, Dad, and Sasha the Kid replaying this for this review. And everyone seemed to agree that some of the bosses were letdowns, especially the final boss. I think everyone was so unimpressed with Annihilus as the finale that they really thought someone else would be the final boss (except my nephew who thought he was “very Shredder-like”). Oh and the whole battle against Silver Surfer was a groan-inducing slog that had everyone listless. Actually, none of the bosses that become characters are exceptional. BUT, there’s also a ton of fantastic boss fights in this. I can’t stress enough: we were NEVER bored playing this. It was just so good.
I guess I kind of wish there had been more things like these turrets that you can smack to take out waves of enemies. For the most part, the environments are REALLY well done. I don’t think any 2D game EVER has as many one-off visual gags as Marvel Cosmic Invasion has. There’s so many little winking nods to famous Marvel stories and characters. And luckily we had a few kids who told us when those things were coming before they showed up on the screen. Even after we asked them not to. All while their witless parents had a thousand yard stare, hopefully contemplating all their birth control choices that led to this.
Probably the strangest thing I can say about Marvel Cosmic Invasion is that I was kind of over it as soon as I finished. That seems weird, because while I was playing it, I was thinking “this is probably the best brawler ever made! It does everything right.” I mean, it doesn’t, obviously, but it comes close enough that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could hope to top this take on a 90s style brawler. It’s like an all-star game of all your favorite arcade fist-throwers. Yet, now that I’ve kind of played it twice (during the party I only played two or three levels), I don’t really want to play it ever again. I have no interest in more levels or DLC. I’m good. I had a great time while it lasted. Me, Dad, and Sasha the Kid had fun running through it so I could actually do a proper review. I usually enjoy competently made brawlers, and this goes far beyond competently made. It’s a masterclass in cathartic beam ’em up action.
“MJ is going to be SO MAD when she finds out what we’re about to do. This is her thing. Meh. Maybe she’ll be down with it.”
But it’s also an empty calories game. This genre was perfect for arcades for a reason. It’s video game junk food. That’s fine, by the way. Gaming is a big tent and there’s room for brawlers. For a while, this genre was the dominant genre at this very blog because they’re really easy to review. Give me a variety of eye-catching set-pieces (even if they’re facades), a variety of moves, and OOMPHful hits that feel legitimately violent and I’m a happy camper. The only way you can screw it up is not enough variety, or moving off the formula too much, like what happened with the Digital Eclipse Power Rangers brawler that I didn’t like. Even then, their heart was in the right place. Brawlers can get tiring. I enjoyed playing through Invasion’s fifteen levels. Doing that twice sounds exhausting to me. Maybe that’s why the genre works. I guess that’s why I’m annoyed by upgradable stats in games like this. Who on Earth would want to play this over and over again? It’s perfectly fine for a game to be a one-and-done. Besides, you need good games like that to make those good games you do want to replay again and again mean something. It should be special when a game has replay value. It should be equally special to play a game that’s fantastic, tons of fun, and has no replay value at all. Verdict: YES! This is Cathy Vice reminding you to help control the annoying child population. Have your mate spayed or neutered! Whether they like it or not. Merry Christmas, everyone!
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Games like Jaws: Enhanced Edition DO NOT get wide releases. Except this one did, and nothing would make me happier than if mainstream gamers said “we like this! More please!” and publishers actually listened. They have these huge catalogs of ne’er-do-well releases that passionate fans have turned into borderline masterpieces. Jaws: Enhanced Edition isn’t as exceptional as it would appear. This is what you get when you let fans show how much they love catalog games, and you have to love a game to make it this good. Sucks for Jeremy though because if his effort had failed I would have given this a 
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Marvel Cosmic Invasion
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