I only played a brief demo of Rayman 1, way back when it originally released. Its beautiful art and colourful atmosphere always stuck with me, so I finally budged all these years later. The art and atmosphere have aged well; it's still as wonderful as I remember it. (Don't expect much of a story though.) It's also one of the earliest platformers where the levels feel very organic, in the sense that you can't easily tell the level is composed of tiles placed on a grid. Its gameplay mechanics are just as timeless. They still form the core moveset used in Rayman Origins & Legends. What really hasn't aged all that well is the game's pacing and balancing: it's pretty stingy with handing out Rayman's abilities. It especially takes forever before you're given the ability to run. Thankfully, this issue is resolved in Rayman Redemption, a truly impressive fan remake of the game! (Just search for it .. can't miss. Yes it's free!) It's incredibly faithful to the original game, but now you already get some of the essential moves from the start, which by itself makes the game much more fun to play. Much-much more than that though, the levels have all been tweaked and rebalanced so the game's difficulty curve makes way more sense. It starts out easier, but I'd argue it becomes harder than the original towards the end. It even adds additional worlds and bosses that all feel like they belong. Compared to this GoG release: Redemption comes with the original music; it runs natively instead of via DosBox emulation (which means much faster load times); it also provides a much more reasonable "field of view". (Everything feels too zoomed-in in the GoG release .. not sure if it was originally like that.) In short, I'd say: buy this to support the developers (Rayman is a big part of Ubisoft's history! .. similar to Mario and Nintendo) .. but play the remake to experience the game as it was intended. Have fun!
