QCF: Toki

n somewhat of an ironic twist, one of the fondest memories I have with video games from my childhood isn’t a video game that I played on my television, but a show that I watched on my television about video games. As the 16-bit boom kicked off the nineties, Nickelodeon debuted Nick Arcade—a new game show that embraced the gimmickry of its video aesthetic with the grace of cat walking along a floor made of bubble-wrap.

While the show has only gotten hokier with age, it was vital for a Challenge segment that showcased some of the hottest new games in action on my television screen, something no issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly or GamePro could ever do, and one of those games was Toki: Going Ape Spit.

In a climate that was undeniably overwhelmed with action-platformers, Toki managed to stand out from all of the other classics that were lined up for the show with its bizarrely unattractive, yet colorfully sharp visuals, and surprisingly delicate balance of action and strategy for an arcade shooter. Decades later, the lumbering primate has suddenly slouched his way back into 2018 with a remastered remake of the arcade classic that mostly considered to be vaporware at this point, until the development of it was taken over, and then released by a French developer and publisher Microïds.

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