Don't buy the Crash N-Sane Trilogy you stupid mothers of fuck

God why do they even make games that are this broken? And why do game reviewers feel like it's okay to equivocate to a middling score of 7 or 8 in the face of such fundamental flaws?

To get straight to the point, Crash N-Sano is a shot-for-shot remake of the original three Crash Bandicoot games for Playstation. It is a graphical update that preserves the exact level layouts of the original recreated in a new engine capable of rendering 1080p 30fps motion-blur visuals with gruesome lighting effects. Despite making no modifications to the level layouts, the developers have changed the height of Crash's jump* (accidentally or intentionally, who's to say). Crash, perhaps tired from years of overwork, simply can't hit the heights he once did, and now jumps a few pixels shorter than in the equivalent PlayStation titles. To retiterate, this is without any modifications to the level layouts to accommodate.

Now, if you're not recoiling in abject horror that a developer could modify a platforming character's jump height without expecting any repercussions on the experience, Crash Bandicoot may not be the series for you. See, the entire pleasure of the Crash games, very much like the Donkey Kong Country titles that clearly inspired them, is the rhythm and flow of platforming. It's the gradual accumulation of that melody for each stage, the building of muscle memory such that however hard each stage, it will feel perfectly natural by the time the player has mastered every jump. There are no stutters, no shimmies, no need for visual alignment or minor tweaks - it's all timing and technicality, hitting the right inputs without needing to think. This isn't every platformer, mind, just this specific subgroup that more or less boils down to Bit.Trip Runner. So when you change the properties of a particular move, it's like altering the time signature of a composition. The whole fucking thing changes. Though this doesn't necessarily ruin the song, if every note and break has been perfectly configured to sound right at its original time signature, you can't simply expect equivalent results after altering that. And, more importantly, you shouldn't tell someone they're getting the original when you've made that swap.

What bugs me nearly as much as the audacity of the developers and publishers in letting this slip through is the cavalcade of reviews that note that Crash's controls or mechanics 'feel off', but can't be bothered to investigate further than that. Many of them note that this may be because of the mapping from digital D-pad Playstation controls to an analog stick on Switch/PS4, and others observe oddities with hitboxes. Yet no one (that I saw published on Metacritic - surely some dude on Youtube has made this his life's purpose) sat down with a PS1 copy of Crash 2 and a handheld Switch and did a side-by-side comparison to root out the specific issue, something that took me far less time than it did to compose this screed.

*alternately, Crash's entire hitbox may have been shrunken, such that his head doesn't reach as high at the peak of a jump and his feet don't reach as far at the length. The effect is the same: overhead boxes that could previously be bonked with a normal jump are now out of reach, and ordinary gaps that could previously be spanned with a normal holding-forward jump now require a slide jump.

People hate Raiden V, right?

Picked up Raiden V: DX for a pretty good sale price at $13, gave it a spin just to see how it would run on my new PC. Lightning fast, you might say, although I've never played nor imagined a game so dedicated to the furiously denounced flaws of the widely derided Sine Mora. Can you say BLOOM LIGHTING EFFECTS? And while Sine Mora was able to light the shmup world on fire with just optional screen shake and two bullet colors (orange and blue), Sine Mora 2: Raiden V has individual enemy volleys that can mix as many as five colors (red, blue, green, yellow, pink!), not to mention any other enemies on screen and the player's two hues of their own (blue and your choice of red, blue, or purple). It even has a camera that will zoom in and out mid-combat! Boy there's nothing I love more than watching the playing area shrink to half scale (and double size) while an approaching bullet pattern become so small and orange that it's completely obscured by the sun glare blooming off the orange buildings in the orange desert and the whole game becomes a gleaming white blob.

Seriously it's a nightmare. It's also baffling that anyone called this game "burdensomely latched to hoary conventions of shmups yore", when it's in fact so modern that it barely feels like a Raiden game at all (unless this is what the Fighters subseries is like). It has a long-form story mode with incessant voiceover during gameplay (you may say - hey, isn't that a Star Fox thing? but only Sine Mora and Raiden V are smart enough to pair it with subtitles covering part of the gameplay area), save points, branching paths, three ships with different stats and fully customizable weapons loadouts (three choices each for red, blue, and purple, for a total of 81 different profiles!), achievements, and a goofy-ass networked parallel-play power-up system. Like, Raiden III and IV are 90% the same game, IV is a loose remake of II, and the original Raiden has like eight variations and ports. This is a series about on par with Mega Man for variation, so continuing from IV to V feels like going from Mega Man 4 straight to ZX Advent without the 15 years of connective tissue explaining how you got there.

Did I mention the lifebar!!!

Okay I just hit up YT and WP and yeah looks like most of the new weapons and the branching paths are just carryover from Fighters. Why not now, nearly 20 years after the final entry?

A review of Ponyo in the format of Jeopardy

Boy, that screenplay left me with more questions than ANNIHILATION. Although, one lingering issue there - why does Lena Kane refer to her husband only as Kane, even in private? Seems very strange. Which leads me to my first question on PONYO...

Why does Sosuke call his parents by their first names? Was this supposed to be a trick, or tell us something about their relationship? They seem kinda childish in their own right, and there's the seeds of an interesting conflict in Lisa's tantrum over her absent husband, but it never goes anywhere.

Why does Fujimoto want to destroy humans, and is he still planning that? He doesn't need a backstory, but he doesn't even learn to like humans in the end. He's just suddenly nice. And we're not going to address that Ponyo's mother abandoned her to be imprisoned, yet they're all fine in the end? Are they going to go through this crisis 175 more times as all her sisters grow up? Why is Ponyo's real name Brunhilde, and never brought up again? Her father should be calling her that the whole movie! Just a throwaway opera reference?

What's with the ship graveyard? It's a cool visual, but did Sosuke's father just turn around and head the other way? Because they said they were lost. Why bother setting up Koichi at sea if the tsunami was harmless and he just sails safely home? Shouldn't Ponyo or Fujimoto have had to use their magic to help Sosuke rescue him, after the "trial of love"? The engine magically going out and being restored in a single scene doesn't really count. And why is Ponyo falling asleep? Is that a ticking clock a la Cinderella or did Fujimoto put a spell on her (a la Sleeping Beauty)? He has a line of dialogue that kind of hints the latter, but why is it so ambiguous? I don't know how to respond emotionally when I'm this confused.

Why is the moon falling?

And how flat is that climax? "Do you love her as a fish"? They fell in love and loudly proclaimed their love at the very beginning, when she was a fish! There's no development there at all. There's not even a conflict by that point - every single character wants Ponyo and Sosuke to reach the senior center and be in love. The scene where Mad Granny catches the kids as they run from Fujimoto makes no sense, it is a moment of completely forged emotion. She was wrong - the other old ladies weren't being tricked. (also, TWILIGHT ZONE reference).

All of these reek of the same core problem, that the movie sets up conflicts and simply erases them at the end, like it would have been too mean to let anything come to a head. It's a bit ironic - Miyazaki movies are known as incredibly forgiving, yet Ponyo skips right to the forgetting, leaving an almost sinister aftertaste. Did they live happily ever after, or did Koichi die at sea, Lisa become an angry shrew who envies Ponyo's beauty and beats her at night, and the kids fall out of love by middle school, ultimately to be drowned out of existence when Fujimoto collected another few gallons of Ooze? This goes hand in hand with the overabundance of cutesy crap. It's a kids' movie, I can't criticize that too much, but I was cringing pretty hard through some of the ogling preciousness, like either of the scenes with soup. The characters are perfectly lovable without that stuff - the moment they bonk heads waking up is the perfect medium.

All that said, I did like the movie, and it was certainly never boring. The character designs are great (I loved everything with Fujimoto riding his sub), the sea adventure through the Devonian era is exciting for all 10 minutes that it lasts, the action is inventive, and the soft colored pencil backgrounds are sleepily comforting. And I'll take a story that makes no sense via omission over one that makes no sense via overcrowding, as is the case with HOWL'S MC.