It's not a library. Either buy it or put it back please sir.

You stole with your eyes.

I can download it for you m8 then send you the tags.

Nice.

Kid Cool is the NES game in the series. I've played them all but I've never completed any of them. Really should rectify that.

3. Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Bursts Loose! (SNES) - 1hr 30mins

Completed the MD counterpart to this a few months back and this version is pretty much exactly how I remembered it. It’s a much more visually pleasing game than the MD one, and captures the spirit of the show much better. It definitely feels like this was the lead title and the MD one was a bit of a run-of-the-mill cash in.

This game excels in that respect, each level has its own gimmick and no two really feel alike, but therein lies this games main issue. You will more than likely die and run out of lives before you figure out what you have to do, it just feels like your first attempt at every new idea the game throws at you is doomed to fail in cheap deaths. Once it clicks it becomes very easy, but unfortunately not with a sense of achievement.

Like I said in my MD review, that game plays it safe and is a decent if underwhelming platformer. This game is much more interesting and polished, it aims higher but doesn’t quite hit the mark, because of that it just edges it in a head-to-head for me, but at the end of the day they’re both just ok.

6/10

My list

The MD game was kinda ahead of the pack from a Sega only POV but I can see how this makes sense.  Would be the ultimate 'borrowed it' game.

A primo retro revisit for sure

21. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games 2020 - Switch (4hrs)

I've been itching to do my own tier list for a while and no decent opportunity arose so here's one for the events in this.  Please pretend it looks like it's supposed to, with tiny thumbnails tidily bunched up in each tier:

SS. (I was watching a roguelikes Tier list on Youtube recently which had an SS tier, so I'm having one)

S.

A. Archery

B. Football, Javelin, Sport Climbing, Retro Shooting

C. Rugby, 110m Hurdles, Triple Jump, Retro Long Jump, 4x100m Relay, Badminton, Canoe Doubles, Gynmastics, Surfing, Retro 10m Platform Diving, Retro 400m Hurdles.

D. Equestrian, Skateboarding, Fencing, Karate, Swimming, Retro Kayak, Retro 100m.

E. Boxing, 100m, Discus, Table Tennis, Retro Vault, Retro Marathon

F. Retro Judo, Retro Volleyball

...which should tell you roughly what you need to know without a lengthy review tbh, but here I go anyway.  Although there are pockets of enjoyment to be found here and there, for the most part the entre package appears to have been phoned in from one-off-the-wrist land.  It absolutely reeks of 'that'll do', which is a huge bugbear of mine in games that deserve more.  NB: This is the first Mario & Sonic effort I've played, having deliberately avoided the others as I assumed they'd be pretty much what this is.  The Olympic genre is limited for sure, but there's no reason why a modern effort should spin the wheel quite so randomly when it comes to quality.  Athlete Kings and International Track & Field on the 32-bits were world class mp offerings; this falls well short of such greats.  The 2D stages are a neat gimmick, but we've come a long way since the 80s.  Retro inspired titles tend to get more things right than their inspiration imho, which is why I love the damn things so very much, but the pixel art stages somehow manage to feel like they were actually made - in a rush and with very little care with regards to quality, I might add - in the late 80s.  I remember borrowing Summer Games on Master System from a neighbour in my sister's year as a kid (Leanne Brisley - she ran away from home four times, and she really meant it the third time!!) and being hugely relieved I owned California Games instead.  The retro levels here are more Summer than California.  The judo stage, JFC.  Why create a retro event in 2020 that would've had kids groaning louder than a broken TV during wet break in 1987?

The story mode attempts to tie the modern/retro nonsense together, but it does so with the panache of a mid-tier Wii game.  It also commits the cardinal sin/ultimate troll for an Olympic game with poor cut scenes as it doesn't allow you to button mash through the inane dialogue.  So you have to skim read characters saying things like 'are you sure about this cockamamy plan of yours?' in text form while 3D models utter irritating audio soundbites, almost like a spoof JRPG (or possibly like an actual JRPG - I haven't played one for years).  Picture a four minute stretch of hammering the A button to speed up slow text while the speakers intermittently chirp sounds like 'ah!', 'oh!' 'tee-hee!' 'woah!', 'aha!' 'uh-huh', 'uh-uhh', 'oops!' or the seemingly ever-present 'hmmm'.  Wank.  During one event my wife (who was WFH while I was supposedly WFH) politely asked if I was playing 'some sort of porn game'  as she'd been treated to three rounds of recycled grunts from the TV.  I considered saying yes to mitigate the embarrassment but opted to admit I was playing a boxing match as Luigi, which she chose to ignore.

Anyone who's ever played this sort of game knows you need a minimum of two buttons to alternate between to make your character run faster, so I can only assume none of the devs with any clout had any experience with the genre whatsoever as the track events have A ONE BUTTON INPUT for running.  The only thing a lighter would be handy for here would be to set the game on fire.

Am I being too harsh on it?  Not really.  Every now and then it threatens to be better than average (the ultra simplistic archery is good, the football isn't terrible) but the story mode felt like watching the actual Olympics, which ranks lower on my excitement tier list than watching paint dry.  There are half a dozen cheap & dodgy looking track & field type games on the EShop, I'd bet a chalice at least two of them are better than this. We bought it for Tilly but she'd had enough of the campaign by the time the 2D graphics kicked in, so I played the rest solo to avoid sticking another unplayed Switch game in the cupboard to sit next to Smash Bros and the two Poekmon games she bounced off.  Possibly worth the current £20 asking price just to see how bad some of the non-event retro minigames are (Mario sneaking around a museum is primo crapola). [5]

FUCKIN FUMING M8!  Went in expecting a nice call out, sold down the effing river I was.  Unbelievable scenes.

Hang on. Lumines is Luminezz not Lumeens?? WTF.

9. Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (4hrs)

Fairly recent Game Pass addition by the team responsible for the excellent Touhou Luna Nights, which I played when it hit GP a couple of years ago.  The hook for this one is the dual status mechanic that can be flipped between to avoid taking damage from certain hazards/must be used to hit certain foes (think Ikaruga or Outland).  Unfortunately it promises more than it ever actually delivers and never feels like anything other than a lazily executed gimmick.  It's all very easy on the eye (some lovely sprite/background work for sure) but it feels pretty clunky to play.  Sometimes the basic platform hack 'n slashing works well, sometimes it's hugely irritating.  Mostly it feels somewhere in the middle, which isn't good enough considering the wealth of great modern Metroidvania alternatives.  There's very little in the way of exploration on offer either, given that areas will be ticked off in a prescribed order as you unlock different coloured doors.  It's short, which I knew in advance, but that's not really a redeeming feature as it just means there's less average adventuring to suffer.  The bosses saved it - there are plenty of them and they're mostly fun - but even so it only scrapes a [6].

I got my first clear on Hades today.

That's 3 so far for the year.
Go me.

That's the only way I've ever heard it said, though a quick look online fails to find anyone from the company saying the name.

Still doesn't tell me how to finish Three's mind.