Discover Top Posts Tagged with #apollo chungus

Bubsy 4D

The universe is full of many weird and wonderful things, such as Bubsy the Bobcat coming back for a second time. After the largely piddling pair of The Woolies Strike Back and Paws on Fire! in the late 2010s, Atari SA acquired the rights to Bubsy in 2023 and immediately sought to do something more serious with him. This started with 2025’s Purrfect Collection, which gathered all of his original games complete with a mind-boggling amount of bonus material that showed a greater reverence for the character. However, it would soon be followed by a surprise announcement of a new 3D platformer, created by Fabraz of Demon Turf/Demon Tides fame! It’s easy to assume this would be a quick reskin of the developer’s best known work like Bubsy’s previous comeback attempts, laced with cynical ironic jokes about Bubsy’s infamy. But Bubsy 4D manages to do its own thing, resulting in a solid (if perhaps too short and easy) adventure that manages to be charmingly funny and one of Bubsy’s better games.

Spyro 2: Season of Flame

Work began on Spyro‘s second GBA adventure not too long after Season of Ice‘s completion, with plans to make numerous improvements based on the developers’ and fans’ feedback, and even to make it more akin to an RPG. However, a tighter production schedule and staff forced the folks at Digital Eclipse to create a more traditional sequel. But this also allowed Season of Flame to retain much of its predecessor’s appeal while fixing many issues, resulting in a considerably improved platformer.

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

While Insomniac Games went off to create the Ratchet & Clank series, Universal Interactive kept the rights to Spyro and handed the next console game off to fledgling studios Check Six Studios (who would handle programming and design) and Equinoxe Digital Entertainment (who would handle the art). This was their first big project, and it would unfortunately be their last due to a protracted development cycle full of issues, disagreements with Universal who frequently flip-flopped on the game’s direction, and weeks of unpaid crunch.

Spyro: Season of Ice

While Spyro struggled to follow up the original trilogy on consoles, a series of side games were developed for the Game Boy Advance throughout the early 00s. Considering Spyro was conceived as a fully 3D freeform series, it wouldn’t be as easy to adapt to a system that normally didn’t do 3D. But Digital Eclipse stepped up to the plate and managed it with a trio of solid isometric platformers, starting with the decent if sometimes frustrating Season of Ice.

Hop Top

There have been many games over the years that, in their sound, look or feel, tried to recapture the spirit of early 80s arcade classics. Plenty have pulled this off to some degree, but one that does a particularly good job is Miracle’s adorably challenging jumping shooter HOP TOP.

Marble It Up!

Back in the mid-2000s, GarageGames gained a dedicated cult following for their Marble Blast games, in which you moved a marble through intricate 3D environments with intuitively designed physics and easy to learn but hard to master gameplay that made them excellent for quick bursts (perfect for the very early days of Xbox Live Arcade via the Gold and Ultra instalments). Despite the series’ popularity, it mostly disappeared due to Garage somehow losing the rights in a baffling string of events involving the studio shutting down, relaunching and being acquired by larger companies. However, Marble Blast has lived on through the efforts of the fan community keeping the series alive through custom map packs and mods, and more recently a team made up of former GarageGames members and fans now called The Marble Collective. The latter released a spiritual successor in 2018 called Marble It Up!, which reprises a lot of Marble Blast‘s mechanics, power-ups, presentation and its level of quality to make for a great marble roller worth checking out.

Willy Wombat

While Westone are best known for their Wonder Boy/Monster World series of action-RPG platformers, they’ve dabbled in plenty other genres over the years. One of these was Willy Wombat, an isometric 3D action game originally conceived for the SNES before moving to the Saturn. It was made specifically as a Sonic-esque game for Hudson Soft to release in North America, but ended up coming out exclusively in Japan. That’s a shame, since it’s a solid adventure containing some interesting ideas mixed with frustrating issues.

Power Piggs of the Dark Age

Released in the latter years of the Super Nintendo, Power Piggs of the Dark Age looks for all the world to be a licensed title based on some forgotten “band of radical animals” cartoon, with its toony artstyle and somewhat fluidly animated characters. It isn’t, instead seeming to be an original concept by ideas studio Barr Entertainment (also responsible for conceptualizing Sküljagger: Revolt of the Westicans) that was then contracted to Radical Entertainment. That might be the second most interesting thing about Power Piggs, which is otherwise a drably mediocre platformer that’s hard to recommend.

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