Ant Man

Ants in the '90s were hit or miss. Sometimes they were a blast, sometimes a dud. Ant Man from 1995 falls more into the latter category, though it has moments where its existence is justified.

It's a classic platformer where you navigate through terrain as a tiny creator — formally or literally an ant, details, details. The goal is straightforward as a rainbow: collect things, jump over obstacles, avoid enemies, reach the end of the level. Visually, nothing to write home about — simple sprites, enlarged pixels, terrain that sometimes looks like a rough draft. But that's how it was back then, and in some spots it works well enough.

The controls are straightforward, as they should be. Jumps are springy, movement is responsive, dealing with enemies is simple. But that's where the problem starts — the game bores you more than it stresses you. Levels are designed without sharp logic, as if someone doodled them in a notebook without thinking much about how to make them even mildly interesting. Sometimes a element pops up that makes you think, but then you're trudging through a tunnel, collecting tickets or whatever they are, and moving on. The game doesn't pressure you, but it doesn't entertain you either.

The audio is thin, like it came from some capsule peripheral — beeps, clicks, nothing that sticks in your head. The music, if you can call it that, is more background drone. The graphics stick to their simplicity without pretense, but that very simplicity makes it sometimes painfully dull to look at.

You can play Ant Man today if you've got 45 minutes and nothing more demanding on your mind. It runs in a browser without issues, you'll pick up the controls in a second. It's not a catastrophic failure, but it's not a game you'll remember a year from now either. What you'll take from it is an understanding of how a platformer can exist without any effort to be refined or memorable — and that's enough to understand why games like this got lost in the thousands upon thousands of '90s titles.