Maybe not "bad", per se, but "knight who bounces on top of obstacles and enemies using a shovel like it's a pogo stick" is still a pretty silly idea. The result though, is _Shovel Knight_ (apt name, plain and simple), which is a pretty awesome game, lemme tell ya.
I'll always have fond memories of Billy Hatcher. My sister and I first played it on a demo disc during Christmas shopping. We loved it so much that Mom and Dad got it for us on Christmas. Multiplayer was the best. Though it was a competition mode, we just had fun playing with it as if it was a sandbox. We loved hatching eggs to get favorite animals buddies and play with them. Sis loved the purple seal that had porcupine quills, the purple gazelle, and this green duck that had floppy rabbit ears for wings. My favorite was the Penguin. I remember there was a whale you could ride on and a circus hat that allowed you to walk on eggs. But the eggs everyone remembers are the Sonic Team Eggs which hatched Sega characters like Sonic or NiGHTS. We never did beat the game. Though my sis got as far as the Sand Kingdom? Circus Park Act 1 was always a gameplay stopper. There's a segment where you need to put the golden egg on a rail and catch it on the other side of this wall. Because the rail is poorly coded, it will always fall unless you perform a specific technique. Thanks for reading if you read this far. I hope I stirred up fond memories of gaming within you.
This unlocked a memory for me. In the late 90's my mom let my older brother and I each pick an N64 game to rent. I picked Snowboard Kids, and he picked Mischief Makers. We played Mischief Makers every minute of the next week, while eating ju-ju-b's candies that had gone stale by day 3. It was amazing. My brother died in 2019, and this is the first time in two decades that I've thought about that week. Thank you for mentioning the game and reminding me that this happened. I did not expect to be crying so much when I clicked on this video.
Same man mischief makers was my aunts game and unlocked maybe my new earliest memory she died recently thinking about it makes me tear up who knew this would unlock so many memories.
@Bobby Frost Can we be honest though? It was a fun game but imagine having to explain the game to your friends who probably had a PlayStation 2 or Xbox at the time in 2003 and played titles like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Halo 2. They probably would’ve thought that you had a weird addiction to chickens. Sega and their crazy ideas when they are not milking Sonic lol
Finally, the first proof I have that I didn't imagine the entirety of Billy Hatcher! It was sort of like Sega's answer to a 3D Mario platformer, with the multiple open (ish) maps and the weird traversal mechanics. Also you could hatch Sonic characters from the eggs and that was funny too.
My friends and I used to play that game back in 6th grade multiplayer was fun with the sonic characters especially sonic and the penguin from phantasy star
the username i use for most sites has 'recky' as the last half from the billy hatcher animal lol somehow that usernames stuck with me two decades later.....
Oh man this game was wild. The sense of accomplishment when you get your head around the physics and start snaking your way through everything is phenomenal!
My family's always been fond of Klonoa, the 2.5D platformer franchise about a cat? Rabbit? Saving dream worlds from a literal manifestation of darkness and nightmares, and the king of Sorrow as a concept, by grabbing enemies with a magic ring and solving puzzles with their bodies. Clearly the marketers thought it was weird too because they refused to advertise it properly.
If you haven't, I highly recommend that you check out the Klonoa 2 stream on JoCat's streaming side channel from spring 2020. It's incredibly wholesome and soothing company. (it's also his birthday stream, and we share birthdays, so I might be a tiny bit biased)
Kinda sad that most of these are old by now. Makes me feel like there are less weird experiments with games today. I'm glad I played Glover in the day :)
@@Badartist888 But imagine if the experimenters still had the AAA resources they had a couple decades ago before AAA companies reduced everything down to be so formulaic. Indies pretty often have fuck all for resources since it's usually out of pocket and/or revshare with no guarantee for return on investment, which leaves them free to work at their own pace, but at the cost of a severely limited final product by comparison if they ever want a shot at shipping something.
I played Billy Hatcher growing up 😢 put a lot of hours into it and I do agree it's pretty great. The controls and combat are really satisfying. Luke failed to mention that when the eggs hatch you get little pokémon-like allies to fight along side you which gives it a bit more depth.
I played allot of these when I was young that being billy hatcher mischief maker and even the ball one Save to say my mother back then has bought some wierd games edit glover too and ape escape
OH MY GLOVER!! I loved that game! I got it as a freebie with something else and, despite the fact I completed it several times, I often wondered if I had somehow imagined the whole thing since no-one else in the world apparently knew about it.
Tomba - "pink dreadlocked Tarzan-esque child climbing on and subseuently throwing pigs to retrieve his grandfather's bracelet" - if that isnt a lead balloon of a sales pitch, idk what it is but it's got such cult following!
5 year old me BEGGED my parents to get me Ape Escape "when it comes out", because this was back in the glory days of demo discs and I must have put something like 30 hours into those few demo levels. Still amazes me that the only janky part of the entire thing was the rowboat that you only use once
@@ArcheWhatzitGonnaB3 iirc I saved up for it, we'd get ~£10 in small change every time we went to see our great grandparents and I always saved my share for PlayStation stuff. You can tell I was young because I prioritised the controller over a memory card 😂
@@alexthorold3496 Looks like we're living in a world of absolutes as I did the exact same but for memory cards. Just didn't see the point in the analogue sticks as they weren't needed for too many games, I think Tony Hawk 2 was the only other game I had access to or access to that needed the sticks. There were plenty of games still using codes back then to keep track of progress though so I could see the argument for getting a better controller over a memory card.
I never played the first Ape Escape, but I did play 2 and 3. We also had a few discs that had a bunch of demos on them in my house. 1 had the demo for Okami, another one had the demo for Battle Engine Aquila, another demo disc that I can’t remember the name of had the demo for MediEvil, and we also a couple of Jampack volumes.
Catherine is pretty weird just as a dating sim. But adding a puzzle platformer of pushing and pulling blocks to make a staircase while demons try to kill you takes the craziness to 13.
The main thing I love about the indie renaissance is the return of these weird ideas that people just make work somehow. I mean, I just recently bought a metroidvania about a raccoon who stowed away on a spaceship and is trying to get to the trash compartment
Glover was one of the first games I owned on the N64, and I absolutely adored that game. I could barely make heads or tails of most of it, and I needed cheats to progress in the game- but I would LOVE to play it again. I always kind of felt like Billy hatcher was a successor to the idea- but I feel like glover would be an amazing title to remaster.
When I think of platforms with crazy gimmicks my favorite has to be “Space Station Silicon Valley” for the N64. Being able to control robotic animals to solve puzzles and platforms is just genius. Not to mention it had one of the best N64 soundtracks.
@@miraveta was that also in space station silicon Valley? Cause there was a rocket shooting dog in mischief makers, and that was the only level I couldn't get a perfect score on
Ya know, when you say "Stealth Platformer", you might think "That could never work", and yet Sly Cooper (which was called Sly Raccoon in your home country of England) did it pretty okay. Sly 2 and 3 really ran with it. And Sly 4 is neat too but we really want a Sly 5.
I remember playing Ape Escape in a store as a kid and can confirm, the time I spent playing it was a blast. Especially thanks to the impressive array of tools you acquire over the course of the game.
I remember playing it at my friend Noah’s house growing up. I only played it a handful of times, and always at his house, but it has always stuck with me even after 20 years of not playing it.
I'm genuinely surprised that Katamari didn't make this list. Also, I wonder who came up with the idea for Human Fall Flat, and how. "It's like a regular 3D platformer, except you're a drunk ragdoll who is being dragged around by your hands."
With Cruis'n USA, Iggy's reckin balls and Demon's Souls weird apostrophes, you only have to find 4 more and you've got a list on "crazy video game titles you have to read twice to understand"
I thought blinx the timesweeper was pretty good, despite the premise being that you are a time traveling janitor who is also a cat, who uses any garbage lying around to kill monsters that have sprung up because a gang of biker pigs stole a princess
@@lionocyborg6030yeah it was actually a few years for me before I completed the first, I had fun with what I got to play of the second, but my copy was too beat up to play very long, and I haven't seen another since
Speaking of platformers with interesting gimmicks in October of 2017 A Hat in Time was released. Players control a character called Hat Kid she starts the game with just a top hat that shows where her next objective is and can acquire more hats by collecting balls of yarn.
Vectorman and Ape Escape are some of my childhood favorites, along with Croc and Tomba. I spent so much time playing and replaying these games its ridiculous.
i remember it and im convinced on how the backstory in the manual was stuctured plus how the game pogresses that the story is based on someones dnd game lol
I remember that game and played the shit out of that with my Brother back in the days. Did you end up playing Pandemonium 2 by any chance? I need to check it out one of these days.
Did you know that Wall-E actually did have a game of his own? And while I can confirm that even with his laser, he couldn't take on that thing without a source of sunlight to recharge his battery. Eve would just have to do the work for him.
I think a variant on a video like this could be a video about bizarre murder mystery games. I just really want to hear Luke attempt to explain Paradise Killer.
Janitor in a food processing plant must escape militarized cyborg slugs and defeat a cartel to save his people. Also elkcentaur bounty hunter, uses literal live ammo, such as annoying squirrels, spiders and bees, to collect money for a life saving operation. Two games in the same world, both brilliant, both hard sell daft concepts.
Also: Chibi Robo. I need more people to know about this game. You're a inch tall butler robot in a Japanese family's house. You spend your days jumping around to find things to clean, and your nights helping talking toys....
Nintendo needs to get a Switch remaster made with some quality of life improvements ( less frustrating spaceship minigame, make the dialogue skippable and speed it up in general, maybe add in some new content ). I love the series as a whole but nothing has measured up to the original. Every sequel is just missing that special something...and I don't just mean the perfect adventure platformer feel it has either.
What was really odd was that the sequel, Chibi Robo: Park Patrol, was exclusively released at Walmart in the US. I mean, there's console exclusive games, but retailer exclusive? It also received another sequel on the DS where Robo cleans and explores the house of a grown up Jenny, the daughter from the first game. It was never released outside of Japan, although there is an unofficial English translation. Chibi is also one of the best and well made Amiibo figures out there. Too bad it was launched alongside such a piss poor game.
@@jardex2275 the worst part about the WalMart bs is that Nintendo NEVER said anything about it until like a week before release. I remember pre-ordering it at Gamestop, and when I went to pay it off they found my $5 deposit but no mention of the game....then it popped up in the next WalMart flyer. also, don't forget Japan also got the original ported to Wii through the New Play Control line...it's the only one of those ports that never got localized
What about Pandemonium (PS1)? "You play as Fargus, an unpopular jester with a stick puppet called Sid, who are both seeking a new career. You also play as Niki, an acrobat who wants to become a wizard." 🤷♂️ I do remember enjoying it.
my younger brother and I used to have so much on wasting time on billy hatcher, using it pvp levels instead for make believe like you would in your backyard the game holds a place in my heart for that reason
An idea that always felt kinda weird to me is the premise of Hollow Knight. I mean...making a delightful game with charming characters despite them all being bugs, the least charming and delightful of all creatures.
It's weird that a game with this style and lore can even be so charming. Like it's Bugs meets Darks Souls and somehow you want to hug them and have a good time.
@@Howitchewstofeel5gum there's actually a much less graphically impressive souls like 2D game that is closer to the dark souls experience: Salt and Sanctuary
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I remember playing Vectorman a long time ago and judging by how happy I felt seeing it I think I agree that it was a good game.
It's so weird to see other people talking about Billy Hatcher. I remember playing that on the GameCube demo disk. I actually liked it so much i eventually bought the full game
You unlocked a core memory for me with Billy Hatcher. I remember playing it so much in elementary school but I just wrote the whole thing off as a fever dream
Iggy's Reckin Balls was amazing! My sisters and I played so much of this game as kids - the local multiplayer was so much fun! It even had crazy multiplayer chaos items (including one that switches your location with an opponent, one that lets you go through metal, and one that flies you up the stage a short distance)
That game was absolutely hit and unfortunately it's legacy is marred by it's creator being an asshat. It's ashame: The game holds up quite well, just not enough for it's creator (Phil Fish) to get away with saying "modern Japan sucks at making videogames and need to get their act together."
I remember renting Mischief Makers back when I was a kid and my brother and I having pretty much no idea how to play it. I'm not sure if we even made it past the first level or not.
I remember Balance: a game where you play a ball whose objective is going to space I guess? And probably being abducted? But the fun part is that you changed between steel, paper and wood to complete the levels...
This brings back memories! What a great game, although as a little kid who's not good at games it was so frustrating. Also I thought the heavy ball was stone? Also also, this is more like no premise at all rather than a bad one. You're a ball. That's it.
What about OxBox TickTocks - where the brave Ellen has to use platforming skills to collect the magic clocks from all of the high shelves that the villainous Tall Luke has put them on? Or was that just in my fever-dreams?
Harald Hårdtand: kampen om de rene tænder. Or in English: Harald Hardtooth: The battle for clean teeth. You are a tooth batteling bacteria inside a mouth. It sounds weird but was actually really fun.
oh man being from a small town where we had one tiny game and movie store (before we got a blockbuster which then went out of business like 3-5 years later) i recognized 4 of these games. My and my sisters fave back then (it was a multiplayer platformer i think) was one called Tak: the great juju challenge and tak 2
I mean, imagine you're a funky little green alien with a long snout and a jetpack strapped to your back, and you're doomed to move only left or right in a neverending sea of platforms that break when you step on them... That's doodle jump for you, and while it sounds ridiculous, it was engaging enough to become a classic "platformer".
Speaking of balls...I remember Kula World, I played the heck out of the demo as a youngster! I also remember trying to explain the premise to the youth of today...
Space Station: Silicon Valley for N64, where you play a tiny robot that looks like a microchip and you have to platform your way across worlds, jumping into the bodies of robot animals to solve puzzles and find broken parts of your spaceship.
I remember playing Mischief Makers and having a blast as a kid. I stayed in the amusement park section for SOOO long just having fun pretending to be a regular customer doing the rides..
Uniracers (or Unirally in Pal regions) for SNES was a platform racer that was pretty good, even though it was a bunch of sentient unicycles racing through what looked like some rando's fever dream.
Oh wow that unlocked a memory! Me and my brother used to play that so much. Particularly, I remember one time we raced against each other and ended up finishing at exactly the same time! XD
Kudos to Luke for his delivery of the "Vectorman looks like a TMNT partially dissolved in acid." 😂 And to whoever wrote the Joke, I suspect it was Ellen. A hilarious visual observation that's absolutely spot on.👍
....that wasn't accurate or even remotely funny. Maybe if he said "A rejected character from Ballz 3D". That would have been funny. But what he actually said was nonsensical and not funny at all. Get your sense of humor checked.
1:23 maybe not avengers membership luke, but what about av-hen-gers membership? 👀 Edit: that Ape Escape soundtrack brought back an absolute truckload of nostalgic preshmems 🥺
Nobody ever talks about Uniracers and I think we should all start talking about Uniracers. Racing and doing stunts on a unicycle? Pretty bizarre if you ask me. And a totally kick ass SNES game, too.
I'd posit Kula World as another example of a game that fits this description. Surprisingly fun for what amounts to a game where you play as a beachball that rolls around on giant floating tetris-looking blocks collecting fruit and keys.
Kula World was a weird but surprisingly good puzzle platformer for the PS1 where you played a beach ball that rolled around 3D levels suspended in the air, looking for keys and loudly eating fruit.
I forget which one in the franchise it was, but toe jam and earl was pretty wacky where you threw jars at humans to catch them. Ristar was also an acid trip of a game. play as a star with super long arms? why not. as was rocket knight. a jet pack owning possum? makes sense. Maybe game developers in the 90s just had really good dr*gs?
I absolutely loved Mischief Makers and still say “Shake Shake” in the tone of Marina. It is amazing how much weird stuff dev’s could get away with back then. Earthworm Jim also comes to mind.
Ape Escape was my favourite PS1 game and one of my favourite games of all time. I never even knew it had sequels until many years later long after the series had disappeared from the Western world :[
"You are a mole mailman battling a pirate turtle" that's the premise of "Mail Mole" it's a current platformer on Nintendo switch and is actually quite good. The graphics are quite outdated cause it was created by a team as a final degree project but the level design is great, and the mechanic's work perfectly. Also you can dress up the mole. And it's super cute.
Vectorman was the first game I bought when I got the Genesis. I still play it occasionally on Steam, I think it was like $2 for the original and the sequel. Still fun.
Mischief Makers was my favorite game as a kid. I never made it past the Olympics level though as my math skills weren't great and I didn't know you could spam dash. Would love to pick it up again.
I got stuck there for the same reasons. But once I figured math out and discovered the proper spam button I finally passed it and completed it about 7-8 years ago. It's still one of my favorite games to this day
"Voodoo Vince" had some great ideas, even if it did end up being a bit of a letdown. The powers were fun to use and it had some neat environments with unique puzzles. It even got a remastered version for modern audiences.
For unique platformers, a classic is Bionic Commando. A platformer where you can't jump, but have to grapple around was really interesting, albeit really, really difficult.
Ape Escape's weirdness also extended to its voice acting - for some reason, the US and UK versions had completely different casts, to the point that some of the characters even had their names changed. also, British Specter is better than American Specter i will fight you on this come at me i dare you
You're correct. US Specter sounded like a whiny teen, while UK Specter was a full camp British villain, there's no real contest who the winner is there. Rest of the UK cast were lacking though imo
Super Mario Bros can probably go on this list as well. I doubt anyone alive at the time would have believed a game about an Italian plumber on drugs would evolve into one of the most successful franchises of all time.
"Hey, what if we took a decent platformer concept and filled it with as many tedious collectible bonuses as we can possibly devise?" And Yoshi's Island was born
Rodea: the Sky Soldier comes to mind with the flying robot mechanic. The Wii version was in particular quirky as Rodea would fly in arcs between targets. I found it pretty satisfying
Not sure this one will count, but the pitch meeting for Jak 2 had to have been pretty rough. "Let's destroy the beautiful world we created, replace them with future looking buildings that also look run down, remove most of the platformer aspects, make it an open world game, torture the protagonist to make them a super powered murderer, and give him a bunch of guns. The kids are gonna love it"
Here’s some you missed albeit they aren’t bad at all, though they are weird. Starting from the best but in no particular order: 1. Blinx the Time Sweeper & Blinx 2: Battle of Time & Space Made by one of Sonic’s original creators for Xbox, you play as a cat who works as a debugging crew/janitor for a factory that manufactures time. When time glitches, it becomes crystals. Left alone too long, the crystals combine and become monsters. It’s Blinx’s job to sweep up those crystals with a portable hoover before they do. You could say he’s part of the time factory’s Quantum Assurance team. After pig space pirates crash Earth’s time completely and turn it into crystals to sell on the black market, many of them turn into time monsters which grow so powerful they threaten to explode and destroy the world completely. Blinx rushes off to kill all the monsters and rescue a human princess he fell in love with whom the pirates have taken as a hostage. Gameplay revolves around jumping on things, killing every time monster you find and using time controls years before Prince of Persia, Timeshift & Singularity did it and then some. You could not only pause, rewind, slow or fast forward time but you also used Sands of Time’s version of rewind as a lives system and could even record a minute or so of gameplay and play it back while you do something else, either to distract enemies or solve puzzles that need two people. The first game is awesome but has clunky feeling jump controls, terrible auto aim and it’s Rockman hard. You aren’t a real man or woman until you can 100% this game without the level skip cheat. (Using a walkthrough to find all the secrets is allowed) The sequel did away with the extermination mechanic, difficulty and 10 minute time limit in favour of a more straightforward platformer without dumbing down the time controls and their puzzles, if not expanding them. You sadly couldn’t play as Blinx though, in favour of a rookie avatar and his sweeper team. It also did the Halo 2 Arbiter thing and had you play as the Space Pirates too, with stealth gameplay ala Splinter Cell or Metal Gear with space controls instead of time controls (except for grenades that gave you Pause controls). 2. A Hat in Time. This game is to Super Mario Sunshine & both Mario Galaxy games what Commander Keen was to Super Mario Bros 3 & Super Mario World on Famicom & Super Famicom respectively. You play as a young time travelling explorer who gets stranded on a planet (possibly not Earth, or is it?) by a cartoon Mafia, requiring her to track down the hourglasses full of ground up time crystals she uses as time drive fuel for her ship that got lost. Locations include Mafia Town on a very Dolphic Island/Isle Delfino sort of island, a movie studio for birds where you help two directors face off against each other to win an Oscar, a spooky forest named after the dream dimension in Doki Doki Panic whose resident evil is the phantom of a dead lawyer Prince (spoilers!) and a titanic mountain range on the edge of space that plays like a love letter to Mario Galaxy if you replaced the sling stars with ziplines. The DLC has a seal crewed cruise ship and a Japan themed subway/Cappadocia underground city hybrid full of anthropomorphic cats and their own Mafia, the Nyakuza. There’s even secret levels themed on those in Mario Sunshine and special secret levels whose main purpose is to gather pieces of Psychonauts memory vaults, filling in the backstory of each zone. 3. Mirror’s Edge A traceur postwoman for the resistance and citizens in a totalitarian metropolis. 4. Dying Light It’s like if Mirror’s Edge, Assassins Creed and Left 4 Dead had a baby. Emphasis on the Left 4 Dead & Mirror’s Edge parts especially: it’s a zombie apocalypse with parkour as a major focus and co-op as a major feature. 5. Hot Lava It’s a literal version of The Floor is Lava. You play as a nameless, faceless kid who imagines himself as his favourite character from his favourite Saturday morning cartoon jumping around volcanic hellscapes in places he goes to play with his sister. It gets surprisingly creepy in the (so far) final act. No spoilers. Just imagine Max Payne’s valkyr sequence in first person. 6. Super Meat Boy Skinless cubic human boy is in love with a girl made of bandages. She’s kidnapped by a cartoonishly evil fetus in a jar wearing a tuxedo & top hat. Run and jump your way through places themed around where meat and/or blood can be found to save her. 7. Puddle You “control” various types of liquid from water, to lava, to technetium to irradiated molten sodium, guiding it to the end of an obstacle course. The whole game is a massive Rube Goldberg machine that ends with a nuclear plant melting down, like an extreme Final Destination. 8. Psychonauts. A summer camp for psychics, training them to be military black ops agents. We have a plot about stealing brains to power an army of drone tanks and the sequel is themed around trying to stop a hydrokinetic terrorist from resurfacing (no pun intended). 9. Jazz Jackrabbit. A 2D Shadow the Hedgehog & Rise of the Triad clone best described as “The Tortoise & the Hare IN SPACE!”
@@kaldo_kaldo Yes, despite knowing the opposite is more likely specifically because I played Shadow first as a kid and had never even heard of Jazz until the mid 2010s thanks to LGR. Even then the first pre-Shadow game I played was Rise of the Triad 2013, a much more fitting Shadow clone (even though the original Dark War and EROTT still predates it)
Vectorman could seriously use a reboot. The issue with the game is that the camera is too close up, so while you're moving things will hit you before you have a chance to react. Pull the camera out an inch or 2, clean it up a bit and rerelease it. I always loved the style and smooth gameplay, I just find it impossible to play like a regular game since you can't see where your going or what's coming at you.
Ape Escape is amazing!! One of my best memory playing PS2. The unique mechanics, varied stages, funny ape behaviors, interesting gacha collectibles. Man, such an amazing game.
Ape escape was great but the crossover between mgs3 and ape escape with big boss chasing the titular apes with a banana gun was outstanding. Such a great callback.
Thank you for reminding me of my childhood! Vectorman was a game I would always ask to play when I visited one of my friends’ house, and we tried so hard to get past the first level. As young as we were, though, we never made it past the Warplane boss (which I have to assume was just the first). Very good times.
"Billy Hatcher" had an awesome demo. The problem was, by the time I got a Game Cube in '04, you only ever saw the demo in the stores and not the game...
Oh and Thomas Was Alone. Quite magnificent platformer where you play as the Titular Square Thomas and his varying rectangular chums. Utterly genius, charming and bizarrely touching x
As soon as I read the title, I knew Ape Escape would be on the list. Its one of my favorite PS1 games of all time. The sequels are pretty good as well, with 3 being the best of the 2. I noticed y'all failed to mention the dope af DnB music. Soichi Terada is a music god.
Hearing the title "Glover" was the major thing I was thinking of, that game was just tough enough for kid me to be challenging yet not frustrating. Super glad that "Mischief Makers" made the list too. Shake Shake!
One awesome and unique Platform/puzzle game I loved was Morph for the Amiga. You played a kid who got turned into his component atoms after a transporter accident and had to get the parts to fix the machine. The gimmick was you could transform into one of four forms (Liquid, Gas, Solid and Rubber ball.) But you only had a limited number of transformations. So you had to plan when you used them and if there was environmental things you could use. It was really cool and unique.
My two favourite stories of real-life ape escapes: The chimps who worked together to use a tree to vault out of their enclosure, only to be lured back into that same enclosure with nuts the orangutan who was honorarily inducted into the American locksmith association post-mortem, because he'd figured out how to use tools to pick locks. He'd creatively hie stashes of his tools, including in his gums, to keep the contraband hidden from the keepers. He also taught this skill to other orangutans,
Monsters Inc Scare Island Monsters Inc but a platformer doesn't exactly sound great at the outset, particularly withhow bad some movie tie-in games can be, but it follows in the footsteps of the Toy Story 2 video game and manages to be an exceptionally good platformer. Also honourable mention to the Pacman World series, particularly Pacman World 2, Pacman but a platformer also just sounds crazy but it works really well. One other honourable mention I'd like to give is to the Ty the Tasmainian Tiger series, but really the premise more just sounds weird than bad, you're an orphan tasmainian tiger and you have to beat lizards with your boomerangs in order to stop an evil cassowary mixed in with plenty of Australian culture along the way.
Maybe not "bad", per se, but "knight who bounces on top of obstacles and enemies using a shovel like it's a pogo stick" is still a pretty silly idea. The result though, is _Shovel Knight_ (apt name, plain and simple), which is a pretty awesome game, lemme tell ya.
Shame duck tales did the concept first...
@@dyingstar24
Not with a shovel it didn't. Also _Zelda 2_ did the "bouncing on your enemies with your weapon" thing first. With a sword.
@@jason4443 true
Don't forget to add 'make it in the style of a 30 year old system'
this just screams "commenter edition" also the titular knight is guided by the 'code of shovelry' a daft but kinda brilliant pun.
Also, it's been pointed out that "Rocket: Robot on Wheels" is only true a small amount of the playtime. The rest of the time, he's only on A wheel.
What if he changes with spare tires everytime he's done with something? Would the previously used wheels count towards the "on wheelS" statement?
I'll always have fond memories of Billy Hatcher. My sister and I first played it on a demo disc during Christmas shopping. We loved it so much that Mom and Dad got it for us on Christmas. Multiplayer was the best. Though it was a competition mode, we just had fun playing with it as if it was a sandbox. We loved hatching eggs to get favorite animals buddies and play with them.
Sis loved the purple seal that had porcupine quills, the purple gazelle, and this green duck that had floppy rabbit ears for wings. My favorite was the Penguin. I remember there was a whale you could ride on and a circus hat that allowed you to walk on eggs. But the eggs everyone remembers are the Sonic Team Eggs which hatched Sega characters like Sonic or NiGHTS.
We never did beat the game. Though my sis got as far as the Sand Kingdom? Circus Park Act 1 was always a gameplay stopper. There's a segment where you need to put the golden egg on a rail and catch it on the other side of this wall. Because the rail is poorly coded, it will always fall unless you perform a specific technique. Thanks for reading if you read this far. I hope I stirred up fond memories of gaming within you.
This unlocked a memory for me. In the late 90's my mom let my older brother and I each pick an N64 game to rent. I picked Snowboard Kids, and he picked Mischief Makers. We played Mischief Makers every minute of the next week, while eating ju-ju-b's candies that had gone stale by day 3. It was amazing.
My brother died in 2019, and this is the first time in two decades that I've thought about that week. Thank you for mentioning the game and reminding me that this happened.
I did not expect to be crying so much when I clicked on this video.
Same man mischief makers was my aunts game and unlocked maybe my new earliest memory she died recently thinking about it makes me tear up who knew this would unlock so many memories.
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg was a great game, definitely a memorable part of my GameCube experience !
@Bobby Frost Can we be honest though? It was a fun game but imagine having to explain the game to your friends who probably had a PlayStation 2 or Xbox at the time in 2003 and played titles like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Halo 2. They probably would’ve thought that you had a weird addiction to chickens. Sega and their crazy ideas when they are not milking Sonic lol
@@Tdull-tv1ds The multiplayer was fun so I could away with it, gameplay on the couch somehow trumps weird poultry fetish I guess x).
Wow! I remember this game!
Billy egg Hatcher was the shit
criminally underrated, i loved it as a kid
Finally, the first proof I have that I didn't imagine the entirety of Billy Hatcher! It was sort of like Sega's answer to a 3D Mario platformer, with the multiple open (ish) maps and the weird traversal mechanics. Also you could hatch Sonic characters from the eggs and that was funny too.
No, you're not the only one who remembers this game.
@@SKsuprakirby That's me told
I had that game for my Gamecube.
My friends and I used to play that game back in 6th grade multiplayer was fun with the sonic characters especially sonic and the penguin from phantasy star
the username i use for most sites has 'recky' as the last half from the billy hatcher animal lol
somehow that usernames stuck with me two decades later.....
I always loved Snake Pass, the platformer where you can't jump and have to slither and climb up things as an adorable snake 🐍
Oh man this game was wild. The sense of accomplishment when you get your head around the physics and start snaking your way through everything is phenomenal!
@@ichijofestival2576 Yes. And the water levels are actually (arguably) _more fun_ than the rest of the game.
Could you imagine living in a timeline where people say, "Dude, there's a new Glover coming out soon," the way they would with a Kirby game?
the best timeline
And Kirby would still be popular
@@Jabbahabba it is tho
I want to live there
@@discordlexia2429 and can fly
My family's always been fond of Klonoa, the 2.5D platformer franchise about a cat? Rabbit? Saving dream worlds from a literal manifestation of darkness and nightmares, and the king of Sorrow as a concept, by grabbing enemies with a magic ring and solving puzzles with their bodies.
Clearly the marketers thought it was weird too because they refused to advertise it properly.
If you haven't, I highly recommend that you check out the Klonoa 2 stream on JoCat's streaming side channel from spring 2020. It's incredibly wholesome and soothing company. (it's also his birthday stream, and we share birthdays, so I might be a tiny bit biased)
Klonoa! I’m thinking of a game with an odd, long floppy-eared animal-y character.
@@1Holbytla That's the one!
They referenced it in tales of Symphonia
Lo and behold, Klonoa is being revived!
Kinda sad that most of these are old by now. Makes me feel like there are less weird experiments with games today. I'm glad I played Glover in the day :)
There are lots just in indy games.
@@Badartist888 But imagine if the experimenters still had the AAA resources they had a couple decades ago before AAA companies reduced everything down to be so formulaic.
Indies pretty often have fuck all for resources since it's usually out of pocket and/or revshare with no guarantee for return on investment, which leaves them free to work at their own pace, but at the cost of a severely limited final product by comparison if they ever want a shot at shipping something.
I totally forgot about it.
Nitro Rad, while slow due to tackling variety things, does highlight several of them.
I played Billy Hatcher growing up 😢 put a lot of hours into it and I do agree it's pretty great. The controls and combat are really satisfying. Luke failed to mention that when the eggs hatch you get little pokémon-like allies to fight along side you which gives it a bit more depth.
The best tactic is using the eggs like bowling balls to mow down the enemies from a distance
I played allot of these when I was young that being billy hatcher mischief maker and even the ball one
Save to say my mother back then has bought some wierd games
edit glover too and ape escape
OH MY GLOVER!! I loved that game! I got it as a freebie with something else and, despite the fact I completed it several times, I often wondered if I had somehow imagined the whole thing since no-one else in the world apparently knew about it.
Tomba - "pink dreadlocked Tarzan-esque child climbing on and subseuently throwing pigs to retrieve his grandfather's bracelet" - if that isnt a lead balloon of a sales pitch, idk what it is but it's got such cult following!
5 year old me BEGGED my parents to get me Ape Escape "when it comes out", because this was back in the glory days of demo discs and I must have put something like 30 hours into those few demo levels. Still amazes me that the only janky part of the entire thing was the rowboat that you only use once
5 year old you was lucky enough to have a controller with analogue sticks.
@@ArcheWhatzitGonnaB3 iirc I saved up for it, we'd get ~£10 in small change every time we went to see our great grandparents and I always saved my share for PlayStation stuff. You can tell I was young because I prioritised the controller over a memory card 😂
@@alexthorold3496 Looks like we're living in a world of absolutes as I did the exact same but for memory cards. Just didn't see the point in the analogue sticks as they weren't needed for too many games, I think Tony Hawk 2 was the only other game I had access to or access to that needed the sticks.
There were plenty of games still using codes back then to keep track of progress though so I could see the argument for getting a better controller over a memory card.
Yes, but that rowboat was terrible 😂. Great game though
I never played the first Ape Escape, but I did play 2 and 3. We also had a few discs that had a bunch of demos on them in my house. 1 had the demo for Okami, another one had the demo for Battle Engine Aquila, another demo disc that I can’t remember the name of had the demo for MediEvil, and we also a couple of Jampack volumes.
Catherine is pretty weird just as a dating sim. But adding a puzzle platformer of pushing and pulling blocks to make a staircase while demons try to kill you takes the craziness to 13.
The main thing I love about the indie renaissance is the return of these weird ideas that people just make work somehow. I mean, I just recently bought a metroidvania about a raccoon who stowed away on a spaceship and is trying to get to the trash compartment
Okay, now I have to know the name of this game.
@@Cerebrum123 Pretty sure it's Trash Quest! Bought it recently myself but didn't get a chance to play it yet.
@@bunnylizard2717 Thanks. I'll check it out.
@@Cerebrum123 Yeah, they're right, it's Trash Quest. Short and sweet, pretty darn fun.
@@devinspencer1678 Sounds cool, I've already added it to my very bloated Steam wishlist.
Glover was one of the first games I owned on the N64, and I absolutely adored that game. I could barely make heads or tails of most of it, and I needed cheats to progress in the game- but I would LOVE to play it again. I always kind of felt like Billy hatcher was a successor to the idea- but I feel like glover would be an amazing title to remaster.
Oh yeah, I absolutely remember the Glover commercials. those were hilarious!
When I think of platforms with crazy gimmicks my favorite has to be “Space Station Silicon Valley” for the N64. Being able to control robotic animals to solve puzzles and platforms is just genius. Not to mention it had one of the best N64 soundtracks.
OMG I loooooved space station silicon valley!!!
The rocket shooting dog was my favorite.
@@miraveta was that also in space station silicon Valley? Cause there was a rocket shooting dog in mischief makers, and that was the only level I couldn't get a perfect score on
The fact Rockstar will never ever make a game like this again really freaking sucks.
Yes, the dog was in Space Station: Silicon Valley.
Ya know, when you say "Stealth Platformer", you might think "That could never work", and yet Sly Cooper (which was called Sly Raccoon in your home country of England) did it pretty okay. Sly 2 and 3 really ran with it. And Sly 4 is neat too but we really want a Sly 5.
Whoever told you that about Sly Cooper and the UK was having you on
@@alexthorold3496
Caddicarus really seems like he knows something though.
ironically they neglected to mention Sly Cooper when talking about Rocket's developer being Sucker Punch....
@@alexthorold3496 But it is called Sly Raccoon in the UK. The first game is anyway. As for the sequels, the names were the same as the US
@@burgermike92 I don't get why they didn't just stick with the US name the whole way through.
I remember playing Ape Escape in a store as a kid and can confirm, the time I spent playing it was a blast. Especially thanks to the impressive array of tools you acquire over the course of the game.
I remember playing it at my friend Noah’s house growing up. I only played it a handful of times, and always at his house, but it has always stuck with me even after 20 years of not playing it.
Same
I'm genuinely surprised that Katamari didn't make this list.
Also, I wonder who came up with the idea for Human Fall Flat, and how. "It's like a regular 3D platformer, except you're a drunk ragdoll who is being dragged around by your hands."
These are games that are supposed to sound like they would be terrible. That's why Katamari doesn't qualify.
@@maninthemists2299 It's also not a platformer
I bet a real human once fell flat
With Cruis'n USA, Iggy's reckin balls and Demon's Souls weird apostrophes, you only have to find 4 more and you've got a list on "crazy video game titles you have to read twice to understand"
how about semicolon usage on all of the Science Adventure series and all Neptunia games
"crazy video game titles you have twice to understand"
You accidentally a word or two there.
Diddy's Kong Quest
May not have an apostrophe but balan wonderland. Even typing it I fight the urge to say wonderworld
I thought blinx the timesweeper was pretty good, despite the premise being that you are a time traveling janitor who is also a cat, who uses any garbage lying around to kill monsters that have sprung up because a gang of biker pigs stole a princess
Both games are lit as hell, though the first is Castlevania hard, with Blinx 2 only getting harder around Round 4 or many of the shop challenges.
@@lionocyborg6030yeah it was actually a few years for me before I completed the first,
I had fun with what I got to play of the second, but my copy was too beat up to play very long, and I haven't seen another since
Speaking of platformers with interesting gimmicks in October of 2017 A Hat in Time was released. Players control a character called Hat Kid she starts the game with just a top hat that shows where her next objective is and can acquire more hats by collecting balls of yarn.
Equipping different items/clothes that enable you to use certain abilities is not a new idea.
It was such an interesting gimmick. I loved that game!! They nailed the movement controls
Ape escape 2 was a big part of my childhood. Hearing Ash and Misty was just so funny for me
Ape escape was just awesome. The spinny wheely sprinty thing destroyed countless controllers but it was definitely worth it
The dash hoop, that almost never left my equip buttons.
The dash hoop? I had a similar thing with the sky flyer
Seriously, it was nowhere near the Japan Studio's next venture, the greatest game of the millennium, the true Mastapiece Knack 2 BABYY!!!
Vectorman and Ape Escape are some of my childhood favorites, along with Croc and Tomba. I spent so much time playing and replaying these games its ridiculous.
Anyone remember Pandemonium? It wasn't so much a coherently 'terrible idea' but playing it felt like a fever dream.
"Seek a boon from the wishing engine!"
i remember it and im convinced on how the backstory in the manual was stuctured plus how the game pogresses that the story is based on someones dnd game lol
I remember that game and played the shit out of that with my Brother back in the days. Did you end up playing Pandemonium 2 by any chance? I need to check it out one of these days.
I absolutely LOVED Vectorman! You didn't even get around to mentioning that he can shapeshift after you've gained certain items.
Played the heck out of both Vectorman games. Great titles.
Vectorman had amazing soundtract
Both VectorMan games are fantastic! I still make sure to play through them every now and then :)
Did you know that Wall-E actually did have a game of his own? And while I can confirm that even with his laser, he couldn't take on that thing without a source of sunlight to recharge his battery. Eve would just have to do the work for him.
I think a variant on a video like this could be a video about bizarre murder mystery games. I just really want to hear Luke attempt to explain Paradise Killer.
Janitor in a food processing plant must escape militarized cyborg slugs and defeat a cartel to save his people.
Also elkcentaur bounty hunter, uses literal live ammo, such as annoying squirrels, spiders and bees, to collect money for a life saving operation.
Two games in the same world, both brilliant, both hard sell daft concepts.
Also: Chibi Robo. I need more people to know about this game. You're a inch tall butler robot in a Japanese family's house. You spend your days jumping around to find things to clean, and your nights helping talking toys....
Nintendo needs to get a Switch remaster made with some quality of life improvements ( less frustrating spaceship minigame, make the dialogue skippable and speed it up in general, maybe add in some new content ). I love the series as a whole but nothing has measured up to the original. Every sequel is just missing that special something...and I don't just mean the perfect adventure platformer feel it has either.
What was really odd was that the sequel, Chibi Robo: Park Patrol, was exclusively released at Walmart in the US. I mean, there's console exclusive games, but retailer exclusive?
It also received another sequel on the DS where Robo cleans and explores the house of a grown up Jenny, the daughter from the first game. It was never released outside of Japan, although there is an unofficial English translation.
Chibi is also one of the best and well made Amiibo figures out there. Too bad it was launched alongside such a piss poor game.
@@jardex2275 the worst part about the WalMart bs is that Nintendo NEVER said anything about it until like a week before release. I remember pre-ordering it at Gamestop, and when I went to pay it off they found my $5 deposit but no mention of the game....then it popped up in the next WalMart flyer. also, don't forget Japan also got the original ported to Wii through the New Play Control line...it's the only one of those ports that never got localized
Luke's Zookeeper War scenario sounds like a real nightmare, but oddly funny when he says it lol
Isn't he just explaining the plot of the new planet of apes movie series?
@@insaincaldo When you put it that way that explains why I liked it
What about Pandemonium (PS1)?
"You play as Fargus, an unpopular jester with a stick puppet called Sid, who are both seeking a new career. You also play as Niki, an acrobat who wants to become a wizard." 🤷♂️
I do remember enjoying it.
I loved Ape escape as a kid.
One platformer I always thought was weird Super Monkey Ball
my younger brother and I used to have so much on wasting time on billy hatcher, using it pvp levels instead for make believe like you would in your backyard
the game holds a place in my heart for that reason
An idea that always felt kinda weird to me is the premise of Hollow Knight. I mean...making a delightful game with charming characters despite them all being bugs, the least charming and delightful of all creatures.
It's weird that a game with this style and lore can even be so charming.
Like it's Bugs meets Darks Souls and somehow you want to hug them and have a good time.
and then the whole dark and mysterious storyline with a mature theme of loss caused by time and sickness... all centered around cute bugs. XD
And constant sense of dread and awe at the same time, probably inspiring thousands of people to become game developers.
On a superficial level, yeah. On a gameplay level, it's a Metroidvania with Dark Souls influences and that doesn't really sound weird or terrible.
@@Howitchewstofeel5gum there's actually a much less graphically impressive souls like 2D game that is closer to the dark souls experience: Salt and Sanctuary
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I remember playing Vectorman a long time ago and judging by how happy I felt seeing it I think I agree that it was a good game.
Same, man. I know my mom’s friend back in the USA had a Genesis I’d play all the time, and this must’ve been one of my favourites on it.
It's so weird to see other people talking about Billy Hatcher. I remember playing that on the GameCube demo disk. I actually liked it so much i eventually bought the full game
You unlocked a core memory for me with Billy Hatcher. I remember playing it so much in elementary school but I just wrote the whole thing off as a fever dream
Iggy's Reckin Balls was amazing! My sisters and I played so much of this game as kids - the local multiplayer was so much fun! It even had crazy multiplayer chaos items (including one that switches your location with an opponent, one that lets you go through metal, and one that flies you up the stage a short distance)
Not so much “bad” as just “out there” but I thought about Fez. You’re a 2D character operating in a 3D platformer. Definitely unusual.
That game was absolutely hit and unfortunately it's legacy is marred by it's creator being an asshat.
It's ashame: The game holds up quite well, just not enough for it's creator (Phil Fish) to get away with saying "modern Japan sucks at making videogames and need to get their act together."
I remember renting Mischief Makers back when I was a kid and my brother and I having pretty much no idea how to play it. I'm not sure if we even made it past the first level or not.
I remember Balance: a game where you play a ball whose objective is going to space I guess? And probably being abducted? But the fun part is that you changed between steel, paper and wood to complete the levels...
This brings back memories! What a great game, although as a little kid who's not good at games it was so frustrating. Also I thought the heavy ball was stone? Also also, this is more like no premise at all rather than a bad one. You're a ball. That's it.
What about OxBox TickTocks - where the brave Ellen has to use platforming skills to collect the magic clocks from all of the high shelves that the villainous Tall Luke has put them on? Or was that just in my fever-dreams?
I know that Tall Luke is only meant to imply Short Ellen, but I feel like it also implies a separate, shorter Luke as well.
Billy Hatcher was the first game I ever played on the GameCube. I still to this day think its the best 3D platformer of the era
Harald Hårdtand: kampen om de rene tænder. Or in English: Harald Hardtooth: The battle for clean teeth.
You are a tooth batteling bacteria inside a mouth. It sounds weird but was actually really fun.
oh man being from a small town where we had one tiny game and movie store (before we got a blockbuster which then went out of business like 3-5 years later) i recognized 4 of these games. My and my sisters fave back then (it was a multiplayer platformer i think) was one called Tak: the great juju challenge and tak 2
I mean, imagine you're a funky little green alien with a long snout and a jetpack strapped to your back, and you're doomed to move only left or right in a neverending sea of platforms that break when you step on them... That's doodle jump for you, and while it sounds ridiculous, it was engaging enough to become a classic "platformer".
Speaking of balls...I remember Kula World, I played the heck out of the demo as a youngster! I also remember trying to explain the premise to the youth of today...
Space Station: Silicon Valley for N64, where you play a tiny robot that looks like a microchip and you have to platform your way across worlds, jumping into the bodies of robot animals to solve puzzles and find broken parts of your spaceship.
All while your boss plays smooth jazz on the radio and makes unreasonable requests of you. Mustn’t forget Danger Dan.
I remember playing Mischief Makers and having a blast as a kid. I stayed in the amusement park section for SOOO long just having fun pretending to be a regular customer doing the rides..
I always yell "shake shake" when I'm using my shake weight.
11:45
Ellen:"....Sucker Punch; best known these days for Ghost of Tusume and the Infamous series."
*Ehm*
Uniracers (or Unirally in Pal regions) for SNES was a platform racer that was pretty good, even though it was a bunch of sentient unicycles racing through what looked like some rando's fever dream.
Oh wow that unlocked a memory! Me and my brother used to play that so much. Particularly, I remember one time we raced against each other and ended up finishing at exactly the same time! XD
Ape Escape was an amazing game at the time. It used every single button on the PS1 controller while being intuitive to control and fun!
It even used R3 and L3! In situations where it didn't feel insane to ask us to use it! It's definitely a great memory from my PS1 days.
Kudos to Luke for his delivery of the "Vectorman looks like a TMNT partially dissolved in acid." 😂
And to whoever wrote the Joke, I suspect it was Ellen. A hilarious visual observation that's absolutely spot on.👍
....that wasn't accurate or even remotely funny. Maybe if he said "A rejected character from Ballz 3D". That would have been funny. But what he actually said was nonsensical and not funny at all. Get your sense of humor checked.
@@the-NightStar who urinated in your cereal that morning
Katamari Damacy should be the King of all Cosmos of this list and you know it.
1:23 maybe not avengers membership luke, but what about av-hen-gers membership? 👀
Edit: that Ape Escape soundtrack brought back an absolute truckload of nostalgic preshmems 🥺
I feel I speak for Tony Stark when I say, "What the cluck...."
Nobody ever talks about Uniracers and I think we should all start talking about Uniracers. Racing and doing stunts on a unicycle? Pretty bizarre if you ask me. And a totally kick ass SNES game, too.
I rented mischief makers as a child, and the memory existed in the back of my head, until last year when I saw a speedrun
I'd posit Kula World as another example of a game that fits this description. Surprisingly fun for what amounts to a game where you play as a beachball that rolls around on giant floating tetris-looking blocks collecting fruit and keys.
Firstly, wow what a lot of N64 games. Really had to work in the limits back then.
Secondly, Ellen, you said "Robot: Rocket on Wheels."
Kula World was a weird but surprisingly good puzzle platformer for the PS1 where you played a beach ball that rolled around 3D levels suspended in the air, looking for keys and loudly eating fruit.
Tombi/tomba?
I forget which one in the franchise it was, but toe jam and earl was pretty wacky where you threw jars at humans to catch them.
Ristar was also an acid trip of a game. play as a star with super long arms? why not.
as was rocket knight. a jet pack owning possum? makes sense.
Maybe game developers in the 90s just had really good dr*gs?
I absolutely loved Mischief Makers and still say “Shake Shake” in the tone of Marina. It is amazing how much weird stuff dev’s could get away with back then. Earthworm Jim also comes to mind.
Ape Escape was my favourite PS1 game and one of my favourite games of all time. I never even knew it had sequels until many years later long after the series had disappeared from the Western world :[
"You are a mole mailman battling a pirate turtle" that's the premise of "Mail Mole" it's a current platformer on Nintendo switch and is actually quite good.
The graphics are quite outdated cause it was created by a team as a final degree project but the level design is great, and the mechanic's work perfectly. Also you can dress up the mole. And it's super cute.
Vectorman was the first game I bought when I got the Genesis. I still play it occasionally on Steam, I think it was like $2 for the original and the sequel. Still fun.
Mischief Makers was my favorite game as a kid. I never made it past the Olympics level though as my math skills weren't great and I didn't know you could spam dash. Would love to pick it up again.
I got stuck there for the same reasons. But once I figured math out and discovered the proper spam button I finally passed it and completed it about 7-8 years ago.
It's still one of my favorite games to this day
"Voodoo Vince" had some great ideas, even if it did end up being a bit of a letdown. The powers were fun to use and it had some neat environments with unique puzzles. It even got a remastered version for modern audiences.
my husband got it on steam for me after i told him i use to play the demo over and over years ago. not a 100% game but definitely a good time
I played Mischief Makers. Was on rental, so no instructions booked; a nightmare to play for me as a new casual player, but colourful and intriguing.
Always nice to know that Vectorman was not some strange fever dream. It still may have been, now that I think about it…I certainly hope Boogerman was
Boogerman sadly was not a fever dream.
There's also Tomba!, a game where you play a caveman who maneuvers around by jumping on pigs' backs and biting them.
"7 bad ideas that actually worked" thought this was gonna be an oxventure video 😂
For unique platformers, a classic is Bionic Commando. A platformer where you can't jump, but have to grapple around was really interesting, albeit really, really difficult.
Ape Escape's weirdness also extended to its voice acting - for some reason, the US and UK versions had completely different casts, to the point that some of the characters even had their names changed.
also, British Specter is better than American Specter i will fight you on this come at me i dare you
You're correct. US Specter sounded like a whiny teen, while UK Specter was a full camp British villain, there's no real contest who the winner is there. Rest of the UK cast were lacking though imo
You guys earned a like just because of Luke's commentary on the Vectorman entry. Top notch.
Super Mario Bros can probably go on this list as well. I doubt anyone alive at the time would have believed a game about an Italian plumber on drugs would evolve into one of the most successful franchises of all time.
Shame on you for not including the clearly superior British dub of Ape Escape.
"Hey, what if we took a decent platformer concept and filled it with as many tedious collectible bonuses as we can possibly devise?"
And Yoshi's Island was born
Rodea: the Sky Soldier comes to mind with the flying robot mechanic. The Wii version was in particular quirky as Rodea would fly in arcs between targets. I found it pretty satisfying
Not sure this one will count, but the pitch meeting for Jak 2 had to have been pretty rough. "Let's destroy the beautiful world we created, replace them with future looking buildings that also look run down, remove most of the platformer aspects, make it an open world game, torture the protagonist to make them a super powered murderer, and give him a bunch of guns. The kids are gonna love it"
Here’s some you missed albeit they aren’t bad at all, though they are weird. Starting from the best but in no particular order:
1. Blinx the Time Sweeper & Blinx 2: Battle of Time & Space
Made by one of Sonic’s original creators for Xbox, you play as a cat who works as a debugging crew/janitor for a factory that manufactures time. When time glitches, it becomes crystals. Left alone too long, the crystals combine and become monsters. It’s Blinx’s job to sweep up those crystals with a portable hoover before they do. You could say he’s part of the time factory’s Quantum Assurance team. After pig space pirates crash Earth’s time completely and turn it into crystals to sell on the black market, many of them turn into time monsters which grow so powerful they threaten to explode and destroy the world completely. Blinx rushes off to kill all the monsters and rescue a human princess he fell in love with whom the pirates have taken as a hostage.
Gameplay revolves around jumping on things, killing every time monster you find and using time controls years before Prince of Persia, Timeshift & Singularity did it and then some. You could not only pause, rewind, slow or fast forward time but you also used Sands of Time’s version of rewind as a lives system and could even record a minute or so of gameplay and play it back while you do something else, either to distract enemies or solve puzzles that need two people. The first game is awesome but has clunky feeling jump controls, terrible auto aim and it’s Rockman hard. You aren’t a real man or woman until you can 100% this game without the level skip cheat. (Using a walkthrough to find all the secrets is allowed)
The sequel did away with the extermination mechanic, difficulty and 10 minute time limit in favour of a more straightforward platformer without dumbing down the time controls and their puzzles, if not expanding them. You sadly couldn’t play as Blinx though, in favour of a rookie avatar and his sweeper team. It also did the Halo 2 Arbiter thing and had you play as the Space Pirates too, with stealth gameplay ala Splinter Cell or Metal Gear with space controls instead of time controls (except for grenades that gave you Pause controls).
2. A Hat in Time.
This game is to Super Mario Sunshine & both Mario Galaxy games what Commander Keen was to Super Mario Bros 3 & Super Mario World on Famicom & Super Famicom respectively. You play as a young time travelling explorer who gets stranded on a planet (possibly not Earth, or is it?) by a cartoon Mafia, requiring her to track down the hourglasses full of ground up time crystals she uses as time drive fuel for her ship that got lost. Locations include Mafia Town on a very Dolphic Island/Isle Delfino sort of island, a movie studio for birds where you help two directors face off against each other to win an Oscar, a spooky forest named after the dream dimension in Doki Doki Panic whose resident evil is the phantom of a dead lawyer Prince (spoilers!) and a titanic mountain range on the edge of space that plays like a love letter to Mario Galaxy if you replaced the sling stars with ziplines. The DLC has a seal crewed cruise ship and a Japan themed subway/Cappadocia underground city hybrid full of anthropomorphic cats and their own Mafia, the Nyakuza. There’s even secret levels themed on those in Mario Sunshine and special secret levels whose main purpose is to gather pieces of Psychonauts memory vaults, filling in the backstory of each zone.
3. Mirror’s Edge
A traceur postwoman for the resistance and citizens in a totalitarian metropolis.
4. Dying Light
It’s like if Mirror’s Edge, Assassins Creed and Left 4 Dead had a baby. Emphasis on the Left 4 Dead & Mirror’s Edge parts especially: it’s a zombie apocalypse with parkour as a major focus and co-op as a major feature.
5. Hot Lava
It’s a literal version of The Floor is Lava. You play as a nameless, faceless kid who imagines himself as his favourite character from his favourite Saturday morning cartoon jumping around volcanic hellscapes in places he goes to play with his sister. It gets surprisingly creepy in the (so far) final act. No spoilers. Just imagine Max Payne’s valkyr sequence in first person.
6. Super Meat Boy
Skinless cubic human boy is in love with a girl made of bandages. She’s kidnapped by a cartoonishly evil fetus in a jar wearing a tuxedo & top hat. Run and jump your way through places themed around where meat and/or blood can be found to save her.
7. Puddle
You “control” various types of liquid from water, to lava, to technetium to irradiated molten sodium, guiding it to the end of an obstacle course. The whole game is a massive Rube Goldberg machine that ends with a nuclear plant melting down, like an extreme Final Destination.
8. Psychonauts.
A summer camp for psychics, training them to be military black ops agents. We have a plot about stealing brains to power an army of drone tanks and the sequel is themed around trying to stop a hydrokinetic terrorist from resurfacing (no pun intended).
9. Jazz Jackrabbit.
A 2D Shadow the Hedgehog & Rise of the Triad clone best described as “The Tortoise & the Hare IN SPACE!”
Did you just call Jazz Jackrabbit, a game from the early 90s, a clone of Shadow the Hedgehog, a game that came out more than 10 years later?
@@kaldo_kaldo Yes, despite knowing the opposite is more likely specifically because I played Shadow first as a kid and had never even heard of Jazz until the mid 2010s thanks to LGR. Even then the first pre-Shadow game I played was Rise of the Triad 2013, a much more fitting Shadow clone (even though the original Dark War and EROTT still predates it)
Lukes delivery of "... because I'd the apes escape you DO NOT want to be taken alive" is the perfect summary of why I love this channels humor
To this day I'm impressed at how good Vectorman is from a visual and audio perspective. Beautiful
What!? No Psychonauts?? Everyone I knew looked at me like I was crazy when I told them about that game. Which I mean seems fitting I suppose 😂
After hundreds of Seven Things videos (and seven times that many items) you guys still deliver! Respect. And yeah, SHAKE SHAKE!!!
Vectorman could seriously use a reboot. The issue with the game is that the camera is too close up, so while you're moving things will hit you before you have a chance to react. Pull the camera out an inch or 2, clean it up a bit and rerelease it. I always loved the style and smooth gameplay, I just find it impossible to play like a regular game since you can't see where your going or what's coming at you.
Ape Escape is amazing!! One of my best memory playing PS2. The unique mechanics, varied stages, funny ape behaviors, interesting gacha collectibles. Man, such an amazing game.
Ape escape was great but the crossover between mgs3 and ape escape with big boss chasing the titular apes with a banana gun was outstanding. Such a great callback.
Thank you for reminding me of my childhood! Vectorman was a game I would always ask to play when I visited one of my friends’ house, and we tried so hard to get past the first level. As young as we were, though, we never made it past the Warplane boss (which I have to assume was just the first). Very good times.
Mischief Makers was one of my favorite platformers on the N64. As for Glover,I got frustrated every time in each level when I was a kid.
"Billy Hatcher" had an awesome demo. The problem was, by the time I got a Game Cube in '04, you only ever saw the demo in the stores and not the game...
Oh and Thomas Was Alone. Quite magnificent platformer where you play as the Titular Square Thomas and his varying rectangular chums. Utterly genius, charming and bizarrely touching x
As soon as I read the title, I knew Ape Escape would be on the list. Its one of my favorite PS1 games of all time. The sequels are pretty good as well, with 3 being the best of the 2. I noticed y'all failed to mention the dope af DnB music. Soichi Terada is a music god.
Hearing the title "Glover" was the major thing I was thinking of, that game was just tough enough for kid me to be challenging yet not frustrating. Super glad that "Mischief Makers" made the list too. Shake Shake!
One awesome and unique Platform/puzzle game I loved was Morph for the Amiga.
You played a kid who got turned into his component atoms after a transporter accident and had to get the parts to fix the machine.
The gimmick was you could transform into one of four forms (Liquid, Gas, Solid and Rubber ball.) But you only had a limited number of transformations. So you had to plan when you used them and if there was environmental things you could use. It was really cool and unique.
My two favourite stories of real-life ape escapes:
The chimps who worked together to use a tree to vault out of their enclosure, only to be lured back into that same enclosure with nuts
the orangutan who was honorarily inducted into the American locksmith association post-mortem, because he'd figured out how to use tools to pick locks. He'd creatively hie stashes of his tools, including in his gums, to keep the contraband hidden from the keepers. He also taught this skill to other orangutans,
Monsters Inc Scare Island
Monsters Inc but a platformer doesn't exactly sound great at the outset, particularly withhow bad some movie tie-in games can be, but it follows in the footsteps of the Toy Story 2 video game and manages to be an exceptionally good platformer.
Also honourable mention to the Pacman World series, particularly Pacman World 2, Pacman but a platformer also just sounds crazy but it works really well.
One other honourable mention I'd like to give is to the Ty the Tasmainian Tiger series, but really the premise more just sounds weird than bad, you're an orphan tasmainian tiger and you have to beat lizards with your boomerangs in order to stop an evil cassowary mixed in with plenty of Australian culture along the way.