Mento

@jeffrud: Nah. I like playing mahjong in short bursts, so I find it's best suited as a mini-game in an open-world affair full of other distractions. If I play longer than an hour or so it soon dawns on me that I don't know more than a handful of yaku and don't care enough to learn. By that point I'm ready to bail and go play some koi-koi instead, until I remember that I don't know how that game works either.

The absolute last thing I want to do is play against other humans by way of something like a Mahjong Soul; that sounds stressful as hell. Just making folks impatient by dithering over my next turn because I'm trying to recall which kanji was roku and which was hachi.

@zombiepie: I wouldn't even know where to start. The original hentai VN? I imagine the size that franchise has grown into, there's probably a cleaner alternative entry point these days.

Also it's a game-to-anime property not an anime-to-game, so it's outside the purview of Game OVA. I have been strongly considering going the inverse route with the next series though, especially as I keep digging up stuff like the official Power Stone anime. (Would that be anime TANG? TANGime?)

@arbitrarywater: All right, so, I kinda already knew there was a different Gex voice actor for the UK release. For those unaware, for the UK version of the game instead of comedian Dana Gould the VA for Gex was British actor Leslie Phillips (who, fittingly, was 64 when this game came out in Europe) who is known for a slightly camp upper-class delivery that's not dissimilar to how Bond used to talk, hence the choice to use him here since there's a super spy angle.

However, for some reason it didn't occur to me that they would've had to change all the references to something even more cringe-ingly close to home.

In the interest of science, and unprecedented for this feature, I added another 16 minutes to the timer (what is this, 64 in 80? Damn you Gex) to investigate. Here are my findings:

80 Minutes In

So they took out almost all the references and replaced them with some general and anodyne one-liners, like "That's not all, folks" for the Looney Tunes world and "I hate these low budget B-levels" for the haunted mansion. Maybe the idea was that this was meant to be sold across Europe too, so there wouldn't have been much point filling it with Britishisms if the goal was a less confusing localization. (For the record, I recognized all the American version's jokes; they didn't make them super esoteric or anything. "This Old House" was probably as underground as they got.) Bizarrely, the "Boy George's pants" goof was still in there (he is British, I suppose), and I identified exactly one line that was a reference to a British quiz show I'm sure no-one outside this sceptred isle would know. The science, then, is inconclusive. What I will say is that Mr. Phillips sounded half asleep with most of these deliveries, and supplying the voice for a wisecracking polygonal lizard was probably not the highlight of that particular month.

Gotta say, I'm fascinated to hear more of the Japanese dub now. Too bad Gex 64 never had a Japan release, only the PS1 version did.

@jeffrud: Yeah, I'll concede that. According to my notes back from when I was covering the other systems, they had about 40 SNES/SFC games to Genesis/MD's ~20 and ~25 for TG16/PCE, which isn't really displaying any clear favoritism (given how popular the SFC was). I misremembered them popping up way more often.

What's surprising is that they had barely any involvement with the Mega CD and apparently none whatsoever with the PC Engine CD. I guess they weren't impressed with scratchy anime FMV either. (Also, only three N64 games? Doesn't look like I'll be talking about them too much in that other cursed feature I have.)

@manburger: Hah. I see you got your hands on some rare official merch. I tried checking eBay myself, but they jack on the prices too much.

@ben_h: A relief to read this. Whenever I trash a sports game on here I'm never quite sure if I had a bad time because the game is bad or because I just didn't get it. If it's the latter, there's a chance its dedicated fans will throw full beer cans at me as I walk down the street.

@chamurai: Thanks! Not sure what to go for next, but I was eyeing one of the Zeldas like Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time. The SM64 achievement set was often fun because it really dug deep into mechanics and secrets I was never versed in despite having played the game a bunch. The next one of these should ideally offer a similarly deep dive (though perhaps not nearly as tough).

@tcarr: Totally with you on the timing puzzles, though thankfully you were limited in what you could do during those parts so that helped narrow down a solution. Being told that accelerating on the scooter does nothing and then having it be the final step of the puzzle anyway was kinda screwy.

@chamurai: Thanks! I'm hoping Tiny-Huge Island was the hump, but there's some tough final hurdles ahead.

I'm half tempted to do all this again with another game I've played to death, like Link to the Past (one of its RAs is to beat the game without bottles, which sounds like an interesting challenge).

@tolkoto: @manburger: Thanks for the support and kind words. Next part's going to be a bloodbath. Tiny-Huge Island has 191 coins, apparently?!