PS1/PS2 summer

In May I set out on a journey to play through PS1 games I've never finished, or to finish sequels I have never even started... but this humble goal has turned into what I can merely call "I Play Games (Mainly Shovelware)". Many games have indeed been played and I want to write about some of them, alphabetically!

Disney's 102 Dalmatians - Puppies to the Rescue

Out of all the cheap and low effort licensed games, this one stands out. First of all, I played the shit out of this game as a kid, because you play as AN ANIMAL. I loved existing as a 4 legged being in games. I loved this game so much so that I think it's one of the rare collectathon type games I bothered 100%-ing. The voice acting, the level design, and the small easter eggs made it really special. Every level has an NPC welcoming you at the start and some of them are incredibly precious, like the lonely piggy Priscilla at the barn that is celebrating her birthday but doesn't have many friends aww. I also liked the bongo drum jazz mole... The platforming is not half bad and animations don't feel cheap either. The comedy is pretty decent too considering it's a children's game, a lot of the stuff flew over my head when I first played it. It's got 20 levels in total, which is a fair amount. You play as two puppies, Odball and Domino, and you can swap between them at will by just pressing the select button at any time. Domino is voiced by Frankie Muniz and I loved that I could recognize this even as a child that hardly spoke English, I was clearly obsessed with Malcolm in the Middle... Despite that I would always play as Odball because I always preferred to play as the girl character wherever I had the chance.

I love the sniffing mechanic, even though it easily guides you to all of the bones you need to collect, I think it makes so much sense... You're a dog after all! Fun fact, this game was developed by Toys For Bob, a dev studio that went on to make the beloved Spyro remakes! I usually don't pay attention to dev studios much, but I found this to be a funny coincidence as I had just finished all of the og Spyro games before starting this one. It would be hard to choose my favourite level, I think level design in this game is pretty good and no level was a complete bore or too hard besides "The Hedge Maze" when I was like 10... I think I got stuck on it for a couple of YEARS until I came back to it. The environments from this game still commonly show up in my dreams for some reason, specifically from "The Underground" level... curious!

Disney's Donald Duck - Quack Attack

This game is called Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers in the US and I think that's beautiful. I received this game from a distant relative on my dad's side of the family. I wonder what this guy is up to today, honestly, I don't even know his name. When I was a kid, I could NEVER get past level 2 or 3. Now that I gave it a proper try, I don't know what I struggled with. Maybe it's my ingrained hate for side scrolling platformers. Let me be 3D, god damnit!!! The platforming in this game isn't really super crisp and amazing, but I've played worse. Something about the sound design in this game always made it feel too chaotic and intense lol. I found this game to be a bit repetitive and not all that amazing... but not horrible either.

Disney's The Lion King: Simba's Mighty Adventure

I'm reviewing these alphabetically and just noticing now I played quite a few Disney games. The Lion King is quite literally the first PS1 game I have ever played in my life. I received my PS1 when I was 3 and obviously my parents didn't get me any games for it just yet because I was so little... Luckily for me, my dad did a balkan male thing and he started a side hustle of burning and selling game CDs and this game was one of them. I saw him and mom playing this game to test the CDs and I beeeeegged them to pass me the controller. And thus, this is the first game I ever played, I'm pretty sure! I replayed this game a lot, to the point the sound effects activated me like a sleeper agent when I booted it up now. Sadly, I do not recall the platforming in this game sucking SO badly. Like the animations are kind of bad, and you're just sliding all over the place... Since the muscle memory kicked in so hard I didn't struggle with platforming at all luckily, but if this was my first time playing I would probably have gotten pissed lmao. It's also just an incredibly short game, I think I finished it in under an hour or something stupid like that. Something interesting about this game is that there's a level in which you're chasing Nala as she attacks Pumba, and if you're running extremely fast through the level, I'm talking skipping the collection of everything and just beelining for the end of the level, at split moments when the camera pans around you can actually briefly spot Nala, visible in the screenshot I added here, all the way at the top. I always thought it was a weird addition because the game is so low effort one must wonder why they bothered adding an additional lion model in the level when it would hardly ever be seen, like she's really visible for a millisecond, I had to abuse save states to capture this screenshot at the right moment. Maybe she was meant to be a bit slower... Another funny thing is that this game has three difficulties, and if you finish the whole game and collect everything in a single difficulty it will only count for 33% of the game.

Hugo - The Quest for Sunstones

I don't remember how this game found itself in my collection, but it was one of those games I never finished. I didn't even finish it now! This time around though, I actually progressed much, much further. When I initially played it, I would continually get filtered at the beginning of level 2, where you're being chased by a fire. The game isn't hard now that I replayed it, however the hitboxes are so infuriatingly atrocious and inaccurate that it got annoying without abusing save states so I have shelved it for now. The platforming isn't really good either, it's probably the worst out of all of the games so far.

Looney Tunes - Sheep Raider

Just like Hugo, this game mysteriously showed up in my game collection one day, with a caveat - THE DISK DIDN'T WORK! If I was lucky the tutorial would work but only partially, so partially that you couldn't really tell what the premise of the game is about. Therefore this game really had my imagination go into overdrive. I didn't know the title of the game because I couldn't really read english, and at times I thought I hallucinated the game up. I had no idea until now that this was actually a puzzle game, one of the most creative and fun puzzle games I ever played in fact. It's a puzzle game that relies on CARTOON PHYSICS, how cool is that? The graphics are amazing, they managed to translate the Looney Tunes art direction into a 3D PS1 game perfectly, so the game aged incredibly well. The puzzles are HAAAAAARD (take this with a grain of salt I suck at puzzle games), I probably wouldn't have been able to clear them as a child, in fact I had to use a guide for one or two levels now...... The humor and voice acting in the game are top notch and I'd say very not kid appropriate (not dirty humor, just not something kids would understand, like jokes about the entertainment industry), the music is fantastic too, a jazzy drum n bass mix and the whole vibe of the game fits the soundtrack so well. The one thing that sucks is the camera, but you get used to it. Sucky cameras are just the PS1 experience. It's also a bit buggy, but I haven't encountered anything game breaking and the bugs can sometimes be used to your advantage... to cheese certain mechanics! I did it unknowingly in the level with the train. Also, there's multiple ways to solve the levels sometimes which is also kind of crazy and a testament to how fun and creative this game is. After each level clear I'd go and read guides/watch playthroughs to see if I missed something and I learned I could've done things a bit differently.

Parasite Eve

I never owned this game, but I always wanted to play it. I didn't finish it but I went way past the halfway point in the story. I got kind of exhausted by it when I went online to look up something about the weapons system only to find out that you can access the true final dungeon and ending only in new game plus... When a story heavy game demands new game+ for the true ending I just tune out omg. This stuff triggers the shit out of me because it makes no sense from a diegetic standpoint. I can only see it making sense if there's some multiple universes bullshit excuse but you know what fuck that it's a copout especially if the game doesn't lean into this angle early enough... EXTRA content is fine, but not something main story related?? It's funny because when I love a game I'll replay it 10+ times unironically, but if I'm narratively forced to do it, it's burned in my book LOL. The combat system stood out to me positively though, it's a unique blend of action and turn based combat and it does it really well and this is coming from a final fantasy 12 combat hater. The story was pretty good too, the art direction is mega cool and I loved how the environment was designed. I'll likely come back to this game in the future. Also, I just realized this is the first game on this list where you play as a human.

Scooby Doo and the Cyber Chase

Oh boy this game... Probably the lowest budget game so far, it's incredibly janky on every level. And yet I have a soft spot for it. It made me sweat in multiple places because of the horrible jankiness that really shines in the parts where platforming is a bit tougher. Not to mention the horrible hitboxes... For whatever reason this game was a HIT whenever my family had guests over. All children wanted to play was this game lmao

Stuart Little 2

Stuart Little 2 is what I received as my first game ever, along with the PS1 Harry Potter games, from my uncle! I still remember him handing me the games in grandma's living room, the games were contained in those thin CD plastic slips with a badly printed cover being stuck to the front. I didn't actually own a "real" game until 2011, all of them were pirated or bought on the flea market for 10kn/1.5$ (also pirated xd...). First game I probably ever completed, and I remember my mom helping me with some of the basic tasks like discharging golden fishies into the cat food bowl, she took me to kindergarten one morning and then played through the game herself to explain me how to do certain things lmao. Ok ENOUGH reminiscing, when I replayed this I got the same feeling as when I replayed Lion King, really unpolished and a bit janky albeit not on Lion King's jank level. Despite this, I really like this game's level design. The levels are pretty expansive for what it is, usually all of the areas are interconnected in a fun way with a few exceptions and the puzzles are easy but not completely retard level. I also love the concept of playing as a mouse in a regular family home and some other random outside areas. If you loved Ventus' level in Cinderella's world in KH:bbs, this game is pretty much that all of the time. One thing that stood out is how you can't actually kill enemies, you "kill" them and they respawn in under 10 seconds, idk why that's a thing! And the sound design kinda sucks in this game.

Xena - Warrior Princess

Ok move over every game so far, PEAK is here. I cannot describe how much I like this game. Unlike most of the games on this list, Xena is not a collectathon 3d platformer, it's more of a hack and slash. She has multiple types of physical attacks, slashes and kicks and they can be combined with quite a few combos to create spins of a few types. Her best attack in my opinion is the roll while running, because not only is it kind of a dodge, it also does a ton of damage and staggers. She also has her chakram that you can throw as far as the level lets you, a lot of fun was had with that chakram. At the beginning of every level I'd usually chakram as much as possible and kill enemies ahead of time if they were spawned in, I'd also use it to explore areas. The level design is nothing crazy, but something about it just feels right. Every now and then there's a hidden area, a little easter egg (quite a few actually) that makes you glad you lingered a little while longer or read every sign. The humor from the show carries into the game quite well, with stupid and silly signs being scattered everywhere. If you linger around the area where a catapult is targeting you, every once in a while a cow will get thrown and you probably won't even see it because it appears for a split second, but you'll definitely hear it as you're fighting enemies... I'm a sucker for this lolsorandumb humor in games, nothing hits quite like it especially if it catches you by surprise. My favourite thing in this game (that I talked about before on my old video games page) is the secret room in the labyrinth that I discovered by pure accident when running away from the centaur lmao. It's a whole office with a computer, a pack of water bottles that make a sound when slashed, a poster of Xena and Gabrielle from the show and a board that says "Xena Bug List" with a long, long paper stuck to it. It's so sovlful!!! I also love the stat report when you finish the game, along with the very silly disclaimer. It's so silly!!

Open for pic spam

And that's it for now, in part 2 I'll cover all of the Harry Potter games I played!!