AFTER BURNER (NES): At times, it almost feels like you're playing After Burner, for the rest of the time you'll almost feel bad for your NES that despite all the effort, this is the best it could do. The graphics are choppy, when you're not using the afterburner it feels sluggish, and half the time the rush of evading a missile is in the fact you have no idea how you did it.

WORD TRIP (PLAYDATE): It's an insanely engaging word game with a slick, minimalist look. In the same way Inman's previous Playdate game, Ratcheteer, is getting a deluxe port to other platforms (which I think everyone needs to check out), I hope Word Trip is brought to more platforms just so more people get the chance to experience it. Specifically, it would really shine on mobile, given how simple the game would be to play on a touch-screen, and how perfect it would be to pick up and play.

STAMPEDE (ATARI 2600): An inventive spin on the standard space shooter that dominates the 2600 library, where you have to lasso cows that are stampeding through a field. Cows run away from you at varying paces, with some being stationary, and if they fall behind you, you lose a life. The trick to playing well is that each lane of cows can only contain one kind at a time, and since you can push them back to the front if they get too close to you, you can fill most of the lanes with faster cows that take longer to get to the back of the screen, freeing you up to handle the higher priority (and higher point value) cows in a couple lanes at a time. Brilliant design from Bob Whitehead, and some of the most charming visuals I've seen on the system.

JAK AND DAXTER: THE PRECURSOR LEGACY (PS2): It's a little thin on the ground, since I think both the platforming and the action feel a little rough, but I can see what they were going for. This roughness, combined with it's brevity, early release date for the PS2, and heavy focus on a lot of technically impressive effects (there's so many parts of the game that are trying to impress you with variable lighting, such as the day/night cycles, the light up crystals with directional shadows, etc) give it the feel of a very charming tech demo. Given the direction the series ends up going in later, I'm curious if this is the final game Naughty Dog wanted to ship, and what they could've done with more time to make it.

DONKEY KONG BANANZA (SWITCH 2): The game approaches greatness, but it doesn't quite get there mainly because it gives the player too much freedom for it's own good. The same button collects all the little gold pieces around you and scans for bananas near you, and since you can almost always dig through the entire layer you're on, you can just dig to that banana and ignore whatever fun challenge you were meant to beat or small detail you were meant to notice, robbing the game of so many little moments of discovery or accomplishment. Similarly, many parts of the game become more fun if you intentionally ignore your bananza abilities and use DK's base moveset to beat challenges instead. Tellingly, one of my favorite fights in the game disables your bananza abilities entirely and becomes ten times more interesting in the process. Besides all that though, the rest of the game is beautiful, filled with creativity, and has a pretty decent story led by a fully voice acted young Pauline, who provides really charming commentary at all the rest points in the game. I think some small tweaks like a hard mode that alters the areas where they're necessary and otherwise just fully disables bananza abilities, turning off the scan, and the addition of harder boss fights would have made it just that much better.

CRASH BANDICOOT (PS1): Crash Bandicoot is a somewhat frustrating, flat experience, but it’s aesthetics are charming enough to make you forgive it, just a little bit. As such an early 3D platformer, it’s gameplay tends to be designed around movement through just a single axis, into or out of the screen, or left and right, with few moments that deviate from it. However, by being so limited, Naughty Dog were able to control exactly what the player was able to see, letting them pack as much detail as possible into every stage. This, in addition to all the other technical achievements (such as the vertex animation that let them make Crash and all the other characters so expressive, and the optimizations that went as far as packing the data for each level closer to itself on the disc so it could continuously load everything) make it a real stunner.

It’s a shame then, that the gameplay doesn’t quite compare. Levels are often very restrictive, with only one possible set of inputs that will get you to the end, and the controls are too stiff and Crash’s moveset is too limited to make the process of finding it much fun. There are a few levels that I thought were really good, like the bridge ones, since the time pressure put on by the falling planks made them somewhat exhilerating, but a lot of the other ones felt very by the book.

There’s a lot about Crash Bandicoot to like, but there’s just as much to dislike. Even with all my complaints about how it played, I still wanted to keep going with it, but I can’t pretend that when I played Mario 64 or Nights immediately after I didn’t go “Oh my god, a game that’s actually fun to play!”.

BASEBALL (GAMEBOY): You can say that it's sparce, you can say that it's slow, but if you say it's an altogether bad baseball game you're wrong. The key to understanding it is that the fielders actually move automatically to catch the ball, which is a thoughtful design decision in balancing the singleplayer experience of the game. After you understand this, the game makes sense. I wouldn't go as far as to call it great, I'd rather the fielding be good on it's own so I don't have to rely on it fielding for me, and I'd prefer it to be a bit faster overall, but it's not as bad as people think it is.

GALAGA (ARCADE): In my opinion, it's one of the best classic arcade games ever made. The level of depth in the mechanics, the variety in enemies as you progress, the pacing all feel incredible and addictive. I love how the different scoring mechanics on boss galaga change your priorities on who and how much to shoot when they fly in, and the ship capture mechanic is textbook, perfected, risk vs reward design.