Many of the games included in Neopets: Mega Mini-Games Collection – The Neopian Arcade Odyssey are deeply unoriginal. They're clunky. Awkward to play. Also, I absolutely love them. Playing through this curated collection of revived Adobe Flash '00s classics in small bursts has made for some extremely pleasant evenings, the space between the janky gameplay opening up to swallow me into a delightful, warm nostalgia hole.
Like many, I was obsessed with Neopets as a child. Creating my account around 2004, I was a few years late to the party but joined when it was in full swing – there for the Neopian hey-day. Raising little pictures of colorful friendly creatures (I will always have a place in my heart for my Korbat), I'd be there daily for the free slice of omelet, to get my jelly, and, of course, to claim some exchange scores to collect Neopoints from the arcade of Flash games.
Neo problem
Neopets: Mega Mini-Games Collection pulls together 26 of these (many of which have also been restored online for free via Ruffle, by the way). Most of them were vital parts of not just my childhood, but markers of growing up online. It's not that I can't look at these games without rose-tinted glasses, it's that I choose not to. It's just awesome to sit down on my sofa and play these again and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
Playing old games in a modern context can always be odd. How much does it matter if a classic game is actually good compared to the value of simply preserving it? I'd never go to bat for Jurassic Park Classic Games Collections' line-ups being legendary must-plays, but the ease with which it allows me to return to my beloved Mega Drive games offers a value beyond whether something is simply good or bad. It's not even about preserving games of historic importance, either, as the canon can also be deeply subjective. Every game is important to someone, and it's why it's such a shame that the licensed deluge of games in the '90s creates so many problems with re-releases today.
Neopets, in many ways, defies preservation. Somehow still active today, the pet-raising website has gone through a complex and strange series of evolutions that mean that it'll never be truly what it was. That era is just over. Likewise, the structure of the internet itself has moved on from viably supporting destination websites like this where kids would just spend their time. Fan-servers for games like this can exist, but can be impractical (Club Penguin, for instance, is maintained by fans in this way).
Which means that while Neopets: Mega Mini-Games Collection isn't a fully preserved version of Neopets as a whole, assembling just these small nuggets of gameplay is enough to nevertheless transport me back in time.
Many of these games are colorful Neopet reskins of simple pre-existing game formulas. Meerca Chase is just Snake, Snowmuncher is like Mr. Driller, Kass Basher is a version of that baseball bat whacking game that was on every free games website ever. I'd never hand Neopets: Mega Mini-Games Collection off to a new player and expect them to have fun. But the Neopets skins and the context in which I first played them does actually transform this experience into something more than the sum of its parts, and that's just true.
The 26 games in Neopets: Mega Mini-Games Collection have been remastered, but I'm not quite sure what that entails. Games like Usuki Frenzy that has me rushing around a tile-based house to collect dress-up doll parts, or the dairy-dodging Ice Cream Machine still feel as janky and ancient as ever. Which makes sense, as Usuki Frenzy alone dates back to 2002. Something as simple as widescreen can make a big difference. Others, like Turmac Roll, or Extreme Herder, feel much easier than their originals, but that might be simply due to playing on a much bigger screen with controller in hand. It is nice to be able to move around arrow key controls and finally get some more fine-tuned movement in some of these games that I have a long history of prawn-moding over the family computer to play.
A story mode takes you through each game in sequence, which is very barebones. I initially found it a bit annoying as you have to play this before jumping into Arcade mode, but I do appreciate the encouragement to try out all of the included games beyond my favorites.
I still wouldn't say any of the games included in Neopets: Mega Mini-Games Collection are good. Far from it. But, as a lapsed resident of Neopia, I love that I'm able to return to them. With many more games available on the website throughout Neopets' history, there are some disappointing omissions – Escape from Meridell Castle in particular – but what's here is more than enough to keep me entertained when I was to kick back and remember the good old days when omelets were freely available. We have to go back.
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