Mento

@bigsocrates: You're probably right. I'm seven hours in with about 3-5 left to go, if I had to guess. I suppose I just kept rounding that runtime figure up as I was writing.

Knowing the wackiness never really picks up is disappointing. The upgrade tree has some wild transformations on it and the game is dropping hints about possible Cthulhus and such (the tenth bounty hunter was involved in "the Battle of Innsmouth"), but I guess they might be saving all that for DLC/sequels.

I'm still inclined to say 2017 was the (recent) peak, since it's the only year where I have a top 100 instead of a top 10 or 20, but I think upon review (and enough time to catch up with everything) 2023 will end up pretty close. Sadly, unlike in 2017, we didn't get a Ys this year (at least not in the west).

I only have GOTY lists from when the site started, maybe I should try some retrospective ones later. Can never have enough lists on here.

@wollywoo: Probably better than my back-up title, "La Sus Dork".

@broshmosh: Only biggie is remembering to hit the screenshot button when something interesting happens. Maybe I'll snap one of the strange visual glitches that occur in pre-boss fight cutscenes.

@manburger: I kinda feel bad for seeing so many of those red crabs now that I know how rare they are in regular playthroughs. Those missile barrages really do hurt though. (They don't drop any Twin Humanities either, but the rats often do.)

@sombre: I was planning to stop but they keep releasing more Indie games. I figure I can outlast them though.

@ford_dent: Not at all, thanks for the extra info. I really should've stuck with the game a bit longer, but it took enough time to complete 1-1 without dying that I sort of lost all motivation when 1-2 was basically the same but worse. I guess when your game has four worlds total you really need to stretch out that runtime.

I'm definitely going to have to watch more of the classic Dirty Pair. It's just too much fun.

@jeffrud: Nah. I like playing mahjong in short bursts, so I find it's best suited as a mini-game in an open-world affair full of other distractions. If I play longer than an hour or so it soon dawns on me that I don't know more than a handful of yaku and don't care enough to learn. By that point I'm ready to bail and go play some koi-koi instead, until I remember that I don't know how that game works either.

The absolute last thing I want to do is play against other humans by way of something like a Mahjong Soul; that sounds stressful as hell. Just making folks impatient by dithering over my next turn because I'm trying to recall which kanji was roku and which was hachi.

@zombiepie: I wouldn't even know where to start. The original hentai VN? I imagine the size that franchise has grown into, there's probably a cleaner alternative entry point these days.

Also it's a game-to-anime property not an anime-to-game, so it's outside the purview of Game OVA. I have been strongly considering going the inverse route with the next series though, especially as I keep digging up stuff like the official Power Stone anime. (Would that be anime TANG? TANGime?)

@arbitrarywater: All right, so, I kinda already knew there was a different Gex voice actor for the UK release. For those unaware, for the UK version of the game instead of comedian Dana Gould the VA for Gex was British actor Leslie Phillips (who, fittingly, was 64 when this game came out in Europe) who is known for a slightly camp upper-class delivery that's not dissimilar to how Bond used to talk, hence the choice to use him here since there's a super spy angle.

However, for some reason it didn't occur to me that they would've had to change all the references to something even more cringe-ingly close to home.

In the interest of science, and unprecedented for this feature, I added another 16 minutes to the timer (what is this, 64 in 80? Damn you Gex) to investigate. Here are my findings:

80 Minutes In

So they took out almost all the references and replaced them with some general and anodyne one-liners, like "That's not all, folks" for the Looney Tunes world and "I hate these low budget B-levels" for the haunted mansion. Maybe the idea was that this was meant to be sold across Europe too, so there wouldn't have been much point filling it with Britishisms if the goal was a less confusing localization. (For the record, I recognized all the American version's jokes; they didn't make them super esoteric or anything. "This Old House" was probably as underground as they got.) Bizarrely, the "Boy George's pants" goof was still in there (he is British, I suppose), and I identified exactly one line that was a reference to a British quiz show I'm sure no-one outside this sceptred isle would know. The science, then, is inconclusive. What I will say is that Mr. Phillips sounded half asleep with most of these deliveries, and supplying the voice for a wisecracking polygonal lizard was probably not the highlight of that particular month.

Gotta say, I'm fascinated to hear more of the Japanese dub now. Too bad Gex 64 never had a Japan release, only the PS1 version did.

@jeffrud: Yeah, I'll concede that. According to my notes back from when I was covering the other systems, they had about 40 SNES/SFC games to Genesis/MD's ~20 and ~25 for TG16/PCE, which isn't really displaying any clear favoritism (given how popular the SFC was). I misremembered them popping up way more often.

What's surprising is that they had barely any involvement with the Mega CD and apparently none whatsoever with the PC Engine CD. I guess they weren't impressed with scratchy anime FMV either. (Also, only three N64 games? Doesn't look like I'll be talking about them too much in that other cursed feature I have.)

@manburger: Hah. I see you got your hands on some rare official merch. I tried checking eBay myself, but they jack on the prices too much.