1995 Ranked
Such a weird time for games. The early 3D push/late 2D era made for some ugly stuff.
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I think Dark Forces is generally remembered as a very good Star Wars shooter, but in truth it innovated on Doom's formula in some neat (even important) ways. It's not quite a fully 3D shooter, but it captured Doom's snappy FPS gameplay while allowing for a wider scope of navigational tools. It suffers in level design, especially towards the middle - too many incomprehensible labyrinths to really explore the Star Wars adventure vibe - but it's a great game in its own right regardless.
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I know this isn't unique to Kirby's Dream Land 2, but I vividly recall the first time playing this game as a kid that I could simply have Kirby float through entire stages, blissfully breezing past enemies and platforming challenges alike. That's kinda busted!
The big gimmick in this one was Kirby's animal buddies, who consisted of an enormous owl, a gigantic bipedal hamster and a sickening vore fish, who would suckle on Kirby's body for entire levels. I like those buddies, but the idea that I had to ride in that fish's gaping mouth creeped me the fuck out. Really weird. He's got a fin up top right there! Why the mouth??
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Mortal Kombat 3 is an 'event' game whose new features, stages and characters are as flashy as possible. I've always found MK3 to be just a tad doofier and less fun than MK2, thanks to that terrible run button and the wildly incoherent new character designs. I will never forget playing as Stryker, a riot cop whose fighting style is shooting his opponent with a handgun, for the first time. Really, really stupid stuff.
MK3 marks the start of the MK mythos, in a way. Most other fighting franchises refine or bolster the formula with greater technical complexity. MK3, by contrast, ups the stakes of its fan-favorite spectacles. More grotesque fatalities, wilder stages, a weirder plot and tons of buried secrets - these are the secret to Mortal Kombat's success, and even if I prefer MK2, Midway's hard swings towards the series' wildest elements in MK3 is the reason the franchise is as popular as it is today.
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KOF '95 is probably one of the least memorable titles in the series overall, but it's also the first that lets you build a team from the full roster rather than select pre-made teams. The stage designs are nice and grimy, too. Not a ton of differences in the primary feel of '94 vs. '95, but it's a solidly built KOF game.
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Comix Zone is extremely tough and much too short, but I love what it tries to do. I love early titles like this and Ecco the Dolphin in which the aesthetics of the game are as important or more important than the pure functions of the gameplay. For all of the ways I'd argue Comix Zone drops the ball with its brawler mechanics, the pure exuberance of its level design and its pure, flashy visual design makes it a much more fun revisit than other, arguably more mechanically competent titles.
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Easy to use software that, thanks to the paintbrush tool, enabled my cousins and I to make rudimentary animated videos in which Spider-Man pissed on guys as he swung around. And then those guys would go 'noooo aaauuuuughghh I hate piiiissss." A+.
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This is one of those 'did this game exist or was my childhood haunted?' titles. I barely got anywhere in it because it scarred the shit out of me. I don't know how or why I came to own it. The game begins with you entering this huge, empty corporate office building with some generic sci fi aesthetics, underscored by this sinister dirge of a synth track. You stumble across a few computer terminals alerting employees from the building to evacuate due to a Defcon 5 incident. There's a crosshair, so FPS combat must exist in it.
I got to whatever the requisite floor was, heard a crunchy PS1 monster noise and was killed by something offscreen. I was 7 or 8 so I nope-d outta there pretty quick.
This might not even be a horror game! It's entirely possible I was just too young to understand what was going on. Would love to find a copy and try it again some day. The copy I had seems to have been lost, which is weird considering I don't remember why I had it in the first place. Shit's haunted, man.
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I like the overall look of Ristar, but the game's got a weird focus on Ristar's hands...? There's a lot of grappling and climbing. You'd think with a character design like that the focus would be on his dash move, or maybe it would give him a lot of space-y, vertical moves. But, no...lots of climbing and grappling,
It's not a crappy game by any stretch, but in most any capacity fails to stand out from any other similar platformer.
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I've always considered Vectorman to be the apex example of '90s western 'ugly, but functional!' game design. This man is a bunch of circles. He attacks by shooting more circles out of those circles. Not exactly iconic design.
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There's a lot of shriek-y Youtubers who play video games on the internet and go on and on about what torture it is to be doing so. That's all bullshit, but the one place I think gaming could get really punishing would be to be forced, without brakes, to play like 20 low-tier beat 'em ups like this game to completion.
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Toy Story is an abysmal platformer. It makes heavy use of pre-rendered Donkey Kong Country-style graphics, which makes it pretty fuckin' hard to look at, and also tasks the player with a completely different style of objective in every level, which makes it pretty fuckin' hard to play, too.
I was reading an article about Space Giraffe, Jeff Minter's absurd and obscure Xbox Live Arcade title. The article praised Space Giraffe's insistence on tasking the player to complete nonspecific objectives which change from level-to-level, referring to the game as an intentional subversion of what we might call 'traditional' conceits of contemporary game design (those conceits being, I suppose, a clarity of purpose for the player). It's funny - that kind of subversion feels different in a game like Space Giraffe than in a game like Toy Story. Both are garish, both are obscure, both are underdiscussed and both are frustratingly coy about what, exactly, *any single one of their mechanics does.* Either way, on a fundamental level, Space Giraffe and Toy Story could both be placed on the 'experimental' pedestal. I suppose that's the thing, though - only one of them feels like it landed there on purpose.
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Area 51 was a lightgun shooter that made an appearance in practically every arcade in my part of the world. No matter how limited the variety available, no one's first choice was ever Area 51. It's got the style of a kitchy live action lightgun game with none of the charm.
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