Some people in their thirties might remember renting a game based on a cartoon they really liked only to realize almost immediately that the game was top-to-bottom dogwater. Pizza Tower feels like the licensed game we wanted - it's fast, it's fluid, it's colorful, it's a font of variety - it's a video game without pretensions to anything else.
Here's just a big list of things I love about Pizza Tower so far. I'm up to floor three, so if you want to play it and haven't, go do that and come back.
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Central to every good '90s cartoon was the screaming. No one panics like '90s cartoons panic - mouths elongate, eyes pop, backgrounds shift into multicolor vistas of terror as musical stings emphasize that someone is fucking doomed! Peppino's natural state hovers constantly on the edge of panic, and every enemy has a unique "stun state" they enter when the player approaches at maximum speed, balking in cartoonish terror as Italian Death closes in at Mach 1.
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Speaking of speed, Peppino has half a dozen different walk cycles as he accelerates. His cringing fear as he creeps around the Tower gives way to mounting anger and determination as he approaches top speed, communicating his growing confidence to the player.
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Peppino's movement emphasizes speed, but adds in more tools for the player to preserve their momentum even when travelling vertically - even if you need to come to a complete stop to move straight up, you can attack out of a super-jump (which you can enter into at any time by holding up on the stick) and retain all of your momentum.
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The boss fights at the end of every level, despite having absolutely no context behind them, feel familiar somehow - as if you've seen Peppino deal with that arrogant chucklefuck Pepperman a dozen times before, and now he's here in the Pizza Tower because of course he is!
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There's not one, but five people working on the music in Pizza Tower, and all of them have good taste. In particular (considering I am only halfway through the game):
- Starting off real strong, Post Elvis's "Pizza Deluxe" boils down every save select song you've ever heard into a kind of reduction and slathers it over your ears.
- ClascyJitto's "Yeehaw Deliveryboy" samples "Sneakman" by Hideki Naganuma, which activated all of my neurons at once.
- Mr. Sauceman's end-of-stage theme "It's Pizza Time!" samples Warioland 4's own end-of-stage music, and as someone who 100%'d Warioland 4 I can tell you plainly that the bells were enough to activate my fight-or-flight. Should the player be so bold and so foolish as to enter Lap 2 for the coveted P-rank, it segues cleanly into "The Death I Deservioli", trading in the original's rising panic for raw daring, with bold guitars taunting the very clock that tormented the player in their earlier runs. There's a moment about 20 seconds in where it fades out for a beat or two, as if Peppino took off so fast that the soundtrack needed to catch up to you!