You ever have those moments where you played a game for a little while and then when you grew up you suddenly forgot everything about it? Well, the games on this list are pretty much exactly that. Whether I still own them or not, I can safely say that these games confused the hell out of me, and attempting to look back on them further clouds my memory. Here's a list of some Odd Games That I Faintly Remember, and Some of my Experiences With Them.
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Oddly enough, I actually have this game in my possession, but unfortunately, my old Xbox has drawn its last breath a while back, and I fear that the disc might give my Xbox 360 cancer if I put it in. Okay, well, it's not THAT bad. Actually, to be strictly honest, it's a pretty decent Mario Party clone. You take turns playing as one of (I think) 6 characters from the first Shrek film by dropping a ball onto a latticed grid with numbers on each square, which correspond to how far you move. The main goal of the game is to end up with the most drops of bug juice at the end (yuck), and you get bug juice by landing on certain spaces, winning minigames, and swapping out your bugs for another players'. At the start of the game, you start by running around town collecting these bugs. Their worth is estimated by their size, with green beetles being worth the lowest and giant blue stag beetles being the best. Each time you win a minigame, you get the choice of swapping out either one, two, or three bugs (depending on how you placed) with another player. It's an intriguing twist on the Mario Party formula, and a decent licensed game by its own merit. The only thing that disturbs me is the fact that everyone is just a bobblehead mannequin version of their character from the movie, and they don't actually say anything. Kinda creepy.
God, this game was just a massive drug trip. I guess the easiest way to describe it would be F-Zero on Tron cycles. The only things I remember are the times where me and my brother would dick around in battle mode and the multiple times I failed to complete any of the story-based races. I really sucked at games back then.
Speaking of Shrek, I distinctly remember playing this game a whole lot. It was a game that came with optional co-op, and to be honest, I liked it a lot, too. For what they were, the Shrek games weren't really that bad at all. Instead of being a party game like the one mentioned above, however, this one features a top-down perspective, pretty much exactly like Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. It was a standard beat-em up for the most part, but it also required you to complete a bunch of side objectives to gain a slew of extra stuff as well. The levels were pretty neat and varied, and while I'm not sure if all of them fit to the locations in the actual movie, they were very diverse and luscious. Then there were the "Hero Time" segments where one of the characters was given his or her own moment to shine, usually in some sort of minigame or obstacle course. My favorite in particular was the wolf, and since he didn't have a particularly lasting impact on the movie's plot, his Hero Time moment was just him climbing a flight of stairs. Man, that was priceless.
I sort of remember the prequel, too. I guess it controlled the same, but I haven't the faintest clue about what the levels were like. I think there was one where you were running around a castle hall, and another where you were in the depths of the dark woods. That's the extent of what I remember from this game, though. Jeez, what the hell is up with me and all these Shrek games?
This was the only Genesis game I have ever genuinely played besides Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures (and everyone should already know how much I loathe that turd of a game), and I honestly didn't get past level 2. It was fun to play, but the enemies were just too frequent and the mission objectives were too confusing for me to understand as a 7-year-old child. Given the chance, I'd like to go back and play through this game some more on an old Genesis. I feel like I need to see the rest.
I also barely remember the 3D sequel, which, by God, this game was so awesome. You played as Buzz Lightyear, and you went around through levels like Andy's House and the Backyards in search of (I think) tokens so you could advance to the next stage. I never got past the backyard levels, but this game really stands out to me as an excellent example of a good licensed title, with large environments and tight gameplay.
No, it wasn't the Gameboy Advance version. There was another one on the PS1 that I distinctly remember wanting to play every time I went over to my cousin's house. This one wasn't all that bad, either. I guess it was somewhat generic, but I was 6 at the time, and I had grown up exclusively with 3D platformers, so it fit like a good pair of socks to me. I remember that you could tail whip, there was a backyard and a kitchen level, and even a level on a steam boat at one point. You talked to the bird chick from the movie who would help you out with certain parts of the stage. There was even a sewer level, and yes, it was as bad as it sounds. Stupid toxic waste...
This was a game I played at my friend's house before I stopped going there as often due to the fact that he would often bug the crap out of me about visiting or going over to my house. We played this, and this game... well... I guess it's kind of like Power Stone, in a sense, but the controls were kind of screwy and there was a VERY limited amount of superheroes and villains to play as, some of whom I didn't even know were Marvel characters at all (Seriously, who the fuck is Paragon?). It did have finishing moves and ragdoll physics, though, and those were things I was really big into at the time. It was okay, but the controls kinda sucked.
If I'm not mistaken, I played the Nintendo 64 version of this game. In fact, I played a lot of versions of Nintendo 64 games as a kid, but this one sticks out for some reason. I think there was an option to play through the game on something called "Kid Mode," which makes the game painfully easy, but I can't remember whether I used that or not. In any case, the most vivid parts of the game that I can remember are the assortment of wacky skins you could unlock for Spider-Man and the stupid water stages. Even on the easy difficulty, navigating those parts was intensely difficult. I think on Kid Mode, at one point, you run away from Doctor Octopus, but he goes so slow and the distance that you have to run is very small compared to a higher difficulty. Or at least I think that was how it worked, anyways. Speaking of Spider-Man...
This was the game that was released as a tie-in with the first Spider-Man movie starring Tobey Maguire. I think the one thing that stood out in this game was that it was much more similar to the PlayStation iteration than the following movie tie-in games, with linear level design (with a few more hidden secrets, of course) and the way web mechanics worked. I think some of the levels required stealth, as some of the guards had guns, and there was one boss fight where you fought against The Vulture (who, oddly enough, never appeared as a villain in any of the movies) and chased him through a clock tower and it was painfully long and annoying.