Garfield
My Collection
Figures
Happy Meal Figures
The complete happy meal set, with vehicles
I think this toy line is really cute! I love the cool flower shirt that the skateboarding Garfield wears, and I like that the poses of all the figures work even without the vehicles (which is great, since I don't have most of the vehicles!).
Miscellaneous
Mugs
Zine
Games
Garfield Kart
Garfield Kart is not only my most played Garfield game, but at 70 hours it's in my top 20 most played games ever.
For a good while a few years ago, I was trying to speedrun the game. My best recorded run was a measly 5th-place on one track. I did briefly hold the world record in one category, but only because I happened to already be online with the game running when the category opened! I submitted maybe the second or third run - so my record lasted less than 90 seconds.
Garfield Kart: Furious Racing
I held off on playing Furious Racing for a long time. I played a bit when it first came out, but was so disappointed by the lack of content and atrocious physics that I ended up refunding it after twenty minutes. But recently, when a friend and I went to go play multiplayer on the first game, we realized we couldn't connect to the servers anymore, so we finally gave in and bought Furious Racing.
Honestly, in some ways it's not as bad as I thought. I don't care about graphics at all, but I do think there are some nice quality-of-life improvements over the first game. Proper controller support on the menus, some better level-select UI, and a clearer sense of what you need to complete to unlock which item is all nice. Plus, I like the addition of the countdown boost at the start of every race, like in Mario Kart, and the minor changes to the UFO item.
These small changes are all fine - but I happen to really dislike most of the bigger changes. For one, nearly every shortcut or alternate path from the first game has been removed. I don't really understand why this was done - the tracks are otherwise completely unchanged, even when they could have actually used some tweaks. The result is that any sense of exploration or progression, of being rewarded for learning the tracks and finding ways to stay ahead, is gone. And, even worse, without any places to split up the racers a little bit, almost every race consists of one big pack of karts, everyone bunched in together, churning through items and unable to break ahead.
Maybe even worse are the changes to the game's physics. This was obviously never a strong point in the first game, and the new physics engine improves on some areas while making others way worse. In the first game, if you bumped into another kart you would often lose all your momentum - but, if you got caught on a wall or a bit of the terrain, you could usually bounce off unscathed. In Furious Racing, the opposite is true. Bumping into another kart usually isn't terrible (although you can sometimes get your wheels locked with the cart in front of you, and be forced off the track), but if you even graze a fence on the side of the track, or any obstacle with collision, you get ground to a halt and even sometimes turned around.
