So this game is wonderful in a way I can't really explain without exhibiting my horrible gex brainworms
To begin with this little project is very cute in how gex moves, the voice lines are perfectly in character for his godawful 90s inherited media jokes that half the kids playing the gex games wouldn't even recognize except as references other media made (I always find this interesting because there's a bit of a disconnect where a lot of the references we know are ones we only know because they were referenced by media we consumed, zoomer kids today lose a lot of these because of the different media they consume), and it being seinfeld is doubly funny because if gex had been able to visit actual specific tv show locations you can bet he'd go there.
But also this vibes as a sort of vertical slice of a larger, introspective, freed-from-the-shackles-of-corporate-rules gex game that I myself would want to make if I had any sort of 3D modelling/programming skills (I'm a writer, I do visual novels, I thought about making a Gex VN but like, i think you need at least part of it be polygonal walks through pastiched cable TV for it to hit), an idea of where Gex would go in his post-mascot years. Because unlike other platformers there's a decidedly metatextual element to gex- he enters fiction and is submerged in it. The Media Dimension is a land of TV brought to life, perhaps a jungian subconscious collective or some other silly nonsense.
But gex is a part of that fiction. And that Media Dimension? It's uh, in our world's timeline it'd be decaying fast. TV has become an incoherent unwatched, uninfluential dumping ground for plotless garbage. A fragmented world where only the most memorable parts in our memory, say...the Seinfeld set, would poke out of a formless void.
Maybe one day in his thirties, we catch up with gex. He's a shut-in still, but his TV is unused, just like everyone else's. He plays genshin impact now. He has a boring life propped up by residuals from saving the world, sent to him every month in slowly decreasing installments from a skeptical pencil-pusher who has no idea who he is. His niece stops by occasionally to use his wi-fi and make sure he's not dead.
Then one day, a guy who works at the local news channel stops by. He reveals to gex that every so often he's been seeing a familiar image in the old disconnected cable TV screen. Rez is still alive in the Media Dimension. Of course, nothing Rez does in there will matter. Nobody watches TV anymore. And all Rez does is mutter incoherently.
Gex looks down at his daily login rewards and gets up off his ass. He's not tail bounced in a decade and frankly has no idea why he's doing this. But he goes back into the Media Dimension. That crumbling, depressing, shell of what it used to be, in order to find Rez, the asshole toaster-faced jerk who was the only other person in the world who truly understood the beauty of the rivalry they shared, and could understand the loss of all their shared jokes, references, celebrity name-drops and funny level titles. Maybe they could share one last moment in the ephemeral twilight of the daytime movie as everything shuts down.
That's the vibe I get from your little game, it was fun and made me think a lot about stupid things. I really appreciate it for that. https://punishedhag.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/game-thoughts-there-but-for-the-gra...
I actually wrote a blogpost about my weird interest in gex back in 2018 which feels like a long time ago now. Life is so weird.
Thanks for the cool project and keep on keepin' on!