A gaudy relic from a bygone age, ToeJam & Earl still has lots to offer, particularly when played with a friend. It’s an example of the game’s weird, inventive sense of humor, which extends to an ingenious two-player mode where the screen only splits in half when players head off in different directions. Obstacles include ice-cream vans and violent chickens, while the aliens’ only available response is to knock them out with tomatoes. Essentially a top-down dungeon crawler, it sees a pair of ungainly aliens (the ToeJam and Earl of the title) hunting a surreal landscape for the missing parts of their spaceship. Quite possibly the most ’90s game ever made, with its backward hats, chunky sneakers, and other period fashion accessories, ToeJam & Earlremains a delightful curio. The range of power-ups and things to collect keeps things interesting (the crocodile hero appears to have a worrying addiction to fruit machines), and some of the monsters are endearingly strange. While the single-screen, trap-the-monsters action may have seemed old hat at a time when Sonic was tearing through levels like lightning, Wani Wani World has aged quite well. At any rate, the resulting game is a bright, breezy bit of fun.

Was Kaneko inspired by the success of Sonic the Hedgehogand intent on creating an “animal with attitude” character of its own? Quite possibly. Later ported to the Sega Game Gear by Kaneko itself, Berlin Wall was mysteriously altered for the Genesis, where it was given a new title and an entirely different central character – a crocodile (“wani” being the Japanese word for crocodile). In 1991, Japanese studio Kaneko created an arcade game called The Berlin Wall – a revival of the old Space Panicgame with better graphics, end-of-world bosses, and lots of power-ups.

If you’re into collecting things, the box looks great, too. El Viento may desperately want to be a Castlevaniabeater, but it’s more akin to a ’90s straight-to-video movie, which oddly enough, is actually a recommendation.

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