Gex 3D: Enter the Gecko

The heyday of the N64 was a time unlike any other in gaming for me, and not just because I was an easily impressed little kid. Predictably, I played this when I was very young, and undeniably developed some nostalgia for it, though not nearly as much as plenty of other games at the time. What was special about this time and these games was that the games market was a lot more ambiguous than it is now, popular genres only half-developed and the differences between major and 3rd party titles pretty much irrelevant; fewer games were actually made, but the games that were blurred into seemingly endless hauls from garage sales and resale shops, encouraging me to stay up on long summer nights digging into them one by one.

First person shooters were still pre-Halo, and "open world adventures" consisted of pushing hardware to the limits to make small polygonal rooms feel like immersive worlds brimming with secrets (even though they often weren't). My default experience at that point came to be defined mainly by weird platformers, subject to the monotonous "collector" criticism of modern gamers, yes, but experimenting with other genres and gameplay styles that at least kept me surprised and intrigued every time I fired one up. Gex was not Banjo-Kazooie, and it wasn't Rayman, but it was about as different from everything else as they were at the time.

I have fired it back up several times over the many, many years since in order to penetrate through any nostalgia blinders, and contrary to what many say, it holds up. Having all these years of modern games behind me actually helps me appreciate the oddness of these early gems even more. To be more specific, the movie themed levels and eerily ruinous overworld gave the developers a wealth of seemingly incompatible ideas to play with, and they took the variety to extremes that make the whole thing feel just as unpredictable and unexpectedly engaging now as it did back then. Modern games with their more sophisticated hubs and open worlds often move through environments in predictable sequences: forests, towns, icey northern climates, hot deserts to the south, lava-filled underworlds... but Gex doesn't do any of those things. One minute you're in a horror movie, the next in prehistoric times; you're climbing the sinking titanic (in one of the most admittedly frustrating examples of clunky early 3D platforming), but then you're bouncing around circuit boards in the distant future. It's just wild. If one part sucks, the next will make you forget all about it as you're concentrating on shooting cannons at a Chinese paper dragon or fighting godzilla in a mech suit.

Few of the eclectic moments in the game are perfectly polished and easily playable - some are frustrating for the wrong reasons, of course - but that only adds to the enthusiastic wackiness of the experience. And the attention to detail in making each situation you're thrown into feel like its own unique moment is often impressive. You don't even have time to dwell on the awkwardness of the pop culture allusions regularly tossed into the ether, most of which I didn't understand as a kid and now recognize as weirdly irrelevant even for their time. That doesn't really matter to me now, just like it didn't then. It's genuinely odd to me how many people find that stuff so irritating that it ruins the game for them. It's just ambient silliness - silly like video games were once expected to be.

And if the platforming could be awkward, at least it was consistently interesting, bouncing, rocketing over gaps, teleporting, or finding barely visible climbable walls for shortcuts and secrets. Each level manages to pack several hidden objectives into it which actually take some effort to uncover and accomplish, and which feel genuinely rewarding as they lead you to radically different environments. Progression feels legitimately rewarding because of surprisingly intricate design like this, with many routes to goals that branch off to the point of feeling non-linear in spite of the run-based goal orientation of each section.

This is one of those games for me whose flaws only add to the charm, not because of nostalgia but because of developer ambition and eccentricity shining at every moment. I'll put it this way - if contemporary indie games with retro flair were more like this and less like tours through stock environments and superficial "classic gaming" tropes, I would play them all the time. If my love for Gex is rooted in nostalgia, it's a good kind of nostalgia, one that recognizes and appreciates not only the markers of the time but also the countless ways this game manipulated and mangled the burgeoning expectations and norms of an era already far more "wild west" than our own. I love pigeons, but I hate a pigeonhole. If only the experiences that sold the most were also the most ambitious...

Mario-lite, with a reptilian protagonist whose attitude sits somewhere between that of the plumber and Conker 2001. Like Mario 64, Gex features a hub connected to various themed worlds, just on a much smaller and less impressive scale.

The themes of these worlds seem to be based on pop culture or television; I might have a better idea if the N64 version actually had any cut scenes or story. Regardless, they haven't aged well, nor has the rest of the game's references or Gex's one-liners. It all feels very 90's, but not in a good way, and I get the impression it wasn't even that fresh on release.

Beyond its unimpressive design, Gex's real downfall is its atrocious handling and camera, by far the worst to this point on the console. Gex is floaty and imprecise, and judging object distances is more difficult than it should be. The camera is so uncooperative that you'll soon not bother to adjust it manually, instead allowing it to swing wildly and clip into scenery. It's all so unacceptably poor juxtaposed against the game's competition.

I remember playing this a bit as a kid, actually from when I was about 6 or 7 years old until I was maybe 11, it was probably one of my most played games. Of course as a kid I didn't understand most of Gex's references and just thought he was sprouting nonsense. To be honest I'm surprised my parents let me play this, they were really strict when I was a kid and this game had some mature things for a kid. Overall, its about a pretty standard platformer, it has some frustrating levels that are really badly designed, the boss fights are pretty standard, and the music is pretty typical. As a kid I may have played this a lot, but I think its more the fact that this along with the Crash Bandicoot games were the only real games I owned until I got a PS2. Even as a kid, I really only liked this game for Rez, because I hated Gex's guts and found him to be super annoying and unfunny.

Just another mascot-led platformer with an entirely unappealing lead character - there were quite a few of those around in the '90s, weren't there? The gimmick of moving through different kinds of TV shows as you progress through the levels is mildly amusing, at least, although it's cancelled out somewhat by the "shocking" twist ending, which literally made me facepalm when I first saw it. The gameplay, meanwhile, is perfectly mediocre; it's a long way from being a Bubsy 3D-esque monstrosity, but it falls a long way short of the best the genre has to offer. Also, isn't the very notion of the heart of this game's creation - that gamers will automatically identify with a character that does literally nothing but watch TV - a little patronizing? In a world where games have been a truly mainstream concern for a very long time and the number of people that don't accept gaming as a legitimate adult hobby are dwindling year on year, the character of Gex has dated horribly.