Is a child’s imagination powerful enough to make everyday toys like Hot Wheels cars, model airplanes and Army men spring to life, igniting a civil war that slowly tears a house apart? Of course not, but Dreamcast classic Toy Commander captured that same sense of wonderment on a godless, soulless disc. As long as you stay away from the racing levels, you’ll feel like a kid again, joyously reliving plastic-coated fantasies from decades long since past.
Hop in kid-friendly vehicles and stare in wide-eyed amazement at household items suddenly made astonishing:
Kitchen counters made of individually separated Rubik’s cube pieces!
Boring, boring bookshelves in the living room!
That sparsely decorated room with chairs no one uses!
A cat that really wishes you’d play something else!
Most embarrassing tiny thing that kills you:
Of all the toe-sized opponents you’ll face, nothing is as degrading as a loss dealt by Chuck, a bunny-suit-wearing Godzilla toy. Sure he can breathe fire and is, for all intents and purposes, the same size as Godzilla, but c’mon... he’s wearing abunny suit.
Not ready to leave the confines of your own home? Take control of Chibi Robo and engage in the endless cleaning of a home 50 times your size. And you thought tidying up one room was bad...
There’s hardly a series more beloved than The Legend of Zelda... but even iconic franchises need to mix things up now and again. That’s where Minish Cap comes in – Link, with the aid of talking hat Ezlo, can shrink to microscopic size and investigate/infiltrate areas that even child Link could never enter. These size-based puzzles added a welcome new layer to the rich brainteaser history Zelda already enjoys.
Thanks to this new perspective, you’re able to gawk slack-jawed at environments you’d normally pass right on by:
Fungus-infested tree trunks!
Creaky rafters overrun with Minish mice!
Watery old boots!
Lilly pads and floating flowers!
See it all in action here!
Most embarrassing small thing that kills you:
Battling these poisonous globs of goo is usually no big thing for Link, but when he’s tinier than a peck on the cheek from Princess Zelda, one is large enough to qualify as a boss. Please, don’t let Link fall to such an overly cuddly enemy.
The terminally ignored Psychonauts never strays from the bizarre, even dabbling in size-shifting just enough to make the also-ran list. Protag Raz (in the red circle) enters the mind of an unsurprisingly crazy coot who thinks he’s Napoleon, and once inside has to shrink onto a hex-based board populated with soldiers, buildings and random discarded items.
