Ape Escape 3

Specter's plan this time is television. Monkey-run channels beaming rot into human brains, which is a joke about broadcast culture that a 2005 platformer had no obligation to make, and the game commits to it hard enough to structure whole levels around studio sets and genre pastiche. Kei and Yumi chase the signal across a world built out of bad TV. It is the silliest premise the series ever ran with and, oddly, the most coherent one.

The net still works the way it always has. Gadgets map to the right stick, so catching a monkey means flicking the analogue in a direction rather than pressing a button, and that single decision is why these games never felt like anything else on the console. Sneak up, read which way the thing is going to bolt, swing. The Stun Club, the Water Net, the RC Car all inherit the same input language. Sony Japan Studio understood that the right stick as a physical tool, not a camera, was the franchise's one unrepeatable idea, and they left it alone.

What is new is the Morph Gear. Six transformations — a knight, a gunslinger, a ninja, a cyber-swordsman, a dancer, a kung fu fighter — each with their own attacks, meters and traversal quirks, triggered from a costume change that plays out as a full magical-girl style sequence. In practice they turn stretches of the game into a light brawler, and that is a genuine tension: the Morphs are more powerful and more immediately fun than the net, so the careful stalking the series was built on sometimes gets shoved aside for crowd clearing. The design mostly manages it by gating monkey captures behind gadget work, but you can feel the game pulling in two directions.

Then there is Mesal Gear Solid: Snake Escape, an unlockable parody with codec calls, cardboard boxes and a simian Solid Snake, made with enough affection and detail that it embarrasses most bonus modes of the era. Small thing. Hard to forget.

It arrived in North America in 2006, months from the end of the PS2's front-line life, into a market that had stopped looking at colourful mascot platformers. The art is bright and clean, the levels are dense with hiding places, and the monkeys still have that unrepeatable panic in their eyes when the net comes down. The series would drift into party games and handheld spin-offs afterward, which makes this the last time anyone built the whole idea out properly.