Dark Castle is not a video game, and I repeat, not a video game. Dark Castle actually is a psychological bio-weapon created by an evil corporation to see how much mental anguish a person can take before they snap and transform into a suicidal crazy person.

The main character is one of the most laughable excuses of a protagonist I've ever seen in a video game. He moves around so sluggishly and awkwardly that you'd think he has some sort of mental
defficiency with a cactus shoved up his ass.

He can't even go down a single step without falling or getting dizzy, sometimes he'll even fall down stairs. It makes me believe he is running around with his goddamn shoelaces untied.

And sometimes when he has to make a jump, he'll just stop in mid-air and fall straight to his death. What?? Is the character just suicidal? Does he not want to be in this horrible game anymore? If so, I don't blame him. It's like that one line that Danny DeVito once said in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "Suicide is badass!"

Sometimes you have to jump and grab ropes but he doesn't grab them and again, just commits suicide.

And he runs so slowly that it's actually faster to jump around the stage, and even then, that works against the player, because again, falling from even a few inches sends your character into a dizzying frenzy.

Pretty much every time you die is because the controls fight against you. The controls are some of the worst I've ever seen in a 2D platformer. Hell, to duck you have to hold up and press B.
I-I'm sorry?? Holding UP to DUCK? Christ.

Everything you try to do, you either die or get stun locked and it's impossible to play the game with any sort of precision. Your main weapon of defense are rocks, but they don't actually kill any of the enemies, instead they just stun them for a brief moment.

Trying to hit enemies with the rocks is a pain in the ass in itself: because you have to gradually turn your arm in a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion various degrees as if you were fuckin' using Mega Man's arm cannon. Just like the movement, aiming is slow, sluggish, and unresponsive. So by the time you get a proper aim, you're already dead, and if you do hit what you needed to hit, something is already behind you about to kill you anyway. This is especially impossible when trying to hit bats that fly around, just forget about it.

The layout design is also just abysmal. Many areas just have dead ends, a lot of them look the same, and sometimes you can even fall through trap doors that take to this one dungeon cell area, meaning you have to backtrack all the way from where you fell. Which means that it's all meant to waste time along with wasting even more time because you die repeatedly because of the impossible shitty controls, but oh man, I'll get to that.

The game is not only a time waster, but it is INSANELY annoying. The soundtrack only consists of ONE song, which is that one generic Dracula's Castle organ song that everyone is familiar with. It REALLY drones on your ears.

You can shut the music off but every time you die it gets turned back on again. And if you turn off the music while there is a note playing, it bugs out and then it sounds like the organist just slammed his face into the D key and lost conciousness.

Also for some fucked up reason there is a difficulty selection but that means literally nothing, because even on Easy Mode, the game is still impossible to play.

The enemy sound effects are so gut-wrenching to listen to. It never stops, and it's just a real pain to listen to, especially the ones that go
Nah nah nah nah nah
Nah nah nah nah nah
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH

God, just shut up. It never stops, it genuinely drives me insane. Then again, it kinda makes sense, because it's like the game is trolling you.

So now for the biggest insult of this entire game:

So when you start the game there are a bunch of doors in front of you that you're supposed to go into to get items to defeat the Black Knight, the main bad guy of the game. But the truth is: You don't need any of these items. All you have to do to beat the game is to just go into the door the Black Knight is in, and when you reach him, you just pull a bunch of levers and that's it, you beat the game.

That's why there are speedruns of this game on YouTube in under 3 minutes, I'm dead serious.

Is this game for real?? So all of that masochism is completely unnecessary? You go through all of that trouble of playing through all the other stages only to realize that you can beat the game in just a few minutes?? Imagine being a kid in the 90s and you were completely unaware of this. Good God you have my condolences.

And this isn't just in the Genesis version, it's in the Mac version, the Commodore version, Atari version, it doesn't matter. And no matter what platform you are playing on, the controls are still broken, your character is still pathetic, and you can beat the game as soon as you start it.

It makes me wonder why this game was even made. Oh right, to cash in on the popularity of the resurgence of Dracula movies that came out in the late 80s and throughout the 1990s.

And if that wasn't enough, they released the game on the infamous Phillips CD-i, and oh ho ho boy, it's even WORSE than the Genesis version.

The art style is even more cartoonish, the sound effects are even more irritating, and the controls are somehow even worse, I am dead fuckin' serious. You cannot, and I mean you CANNOT control the character. It would be actually easier to control UFOs to make it easier for people to spot them.

It's incredibly difficult just to get past the first screen of the first level not just because of the horrendous controls, but you also get bombarded with bats that kill you in one hit. You also get stuck on stairs a lot, and you still have to manually aim your arm cannon to hit shit with rocks. And any little goddamn pixel you drop from, you fall over and get dizzy. This is meme-worthy.

The Genesis version is indeed horrific, but the CD-i version fucks you in the ass harder than most of 2020. The whole IP in general belongs in the deepest depths of enteral damnation and must never rise again.

1/10

This is one of the best Indie games I have played in quite a while. For the low price that it asks for, it was so worth it, since I am a sucker for WW1 and WW2 shooters. This is a PC game that has been ported to PS4 and Xbox One, however it runs and controls really well.

By default, it runs at 30 FPS, however you can unlock the frame rate in the settings. At first I didn't know this until someone told me about it, and you can also turn off Motion Blur and Depth of Field effects, thank God for that.

Tannenberg is a pretty skill heavy game. Unlike most other shooters, there is no aim assist, and pretty much any gun will kill you in one or two shots, even a pistol at medium to close range.
It's not like a casual shooter where you can just sprint everywhere and light up everything. You could do that if you wanted to, but that risks you running out of stamina and getting shot in the open. This game is designed to be played slower like more hardcore, realistic shooters like Squads or Insurgency.

You have to take your time and carefully plan out your advances and work together with your squad mates. Or you could just be one of THOSE guys and just sit on Artillery duty and spam objectives with gas, smoke, or recon (though everyone does get a gas mask).

Health regeneration is extremely slow (if you do manage to survive a bullet or a grenade explosion), reload times are very slow (hell, some guns can't be reloaded at all until you empty out the chamber), and all of the weapons in this game are single-shot, whereas Battlefield 1 mostly consist of fully-automatic guns.

Because there is no aim assist, this game requires you to have really good aim in order to succeed because again, single-shot weapons only, however there is a mechanic where you can hold your breath for a brief moment so you can get a better shot with just a push of a button, and you're gonna need to do this because the weapon sway is so bad that it's like your soldier is holding a gun for the very first time and is on the verge of getting severe PTSD.

But when you learn to hold your breath before each shot, and you take your time, you'll get used to it, in fact, this game has some of the most satisfying gunplay I've seen since Rainbow Six Siege.

When you hit those one shot kills, oh my God, it feels SO good. I just cannot describe how amazing it feels when you hit those insanely long range shots, it's like pulling off nasty trick shots in the old Modern Warfare 2 days.

This game is insanely realistic, and the developers nailed the historical accuracy. It feels authentic and it respects the source material, something that Battlefield 5 completely shits all over.

Everyone speaks in their native languages, they shout to each other and at enemies, and when they get shot they either cry, scream, or choke on their own blood before dying. It can be kinda gut wrenching to listen to. These battles feel grounded and immersive.

I also like how the loading screens have text that tells you about the battle that you are just about the enter, pictures and all.

If you want to make this game even more immersive and realistic, you can actually turn off the User Interface. Anything on the screen can be turned on or off: The scoreboard, the mini-map, the squad list, the ammo counter, the stamina bar, hell, even the hit markers.

You can also turn off the sound of the hit markers, increase or decrease the amount of blood and gore, increase the Field of View, change the Depth of Field, and turn on/off tutorials. You can make this game as accessible or hardcore as you want to, it's insane how much customization you have at your disposal, but there is a problem and it's the text size.

It's incredibly small, sometimes you might have to squint a little to see it. The kill feed is almost invisible it's so damn small. There is an option to make the text bigger, but.. it doesn't do anything. Is it a bug? I would assume so, and I would hope that this gets fixed because it can be a struggle to see things at times.

I really love the attention to detail with the weapons in this game. The Mosin Nagant, Karabiner 1888, Martini Henry, Gewehr 1898, Vetterli Vitali M1870, Pusca Romana M1893, Steyr M1912, M1911, Luger, they all have pretty sexy sound effects and reload animations. The fact that this game has a Mosin Nagant was reason alone for me to play the game. What can I say? I love Mosin Nagants.

Every team gets three Loadouts, but they vary on what country you're playing on. As you level up you get Loadout Points, which you use to unlock these Loadouts. They're incredibly easy to come by, you'll pretty much never run out of them.

Each Loadout is preset, meaning what you see is what you get. It's not like other games where you get to make your own custom classes. That may sound disappointing to you, but it makes sense from a realistic standpoint.

I mean, why would a German soldier run around with a Japanese Type 30 Arisaka rifle and an American M1911 pistol?

Each squad mate has a role to support each other like in Battlefield, and each role has perks that buff you.

However, it's very confusing... Even now, I am not really sure how it works 100%.

There's the Infantry class which has a whistle that can temporary buff your teammates stamina and decreases suppression, there's the Support class that drops ammo and grenade boxes, there's the Grenadier which have grenades by default and they can throw them faster and farther than anyone else, and then the last one, I really don't know what it is.

I say that because, the Role names are in a different language, so I can't read it, I'm only just guessing what each Role is based on the icon and the abilities. So I don't really know what it's meant for. I think it's supposed to be a class mainly for bayonet users, judging from the perks it has.

Then you got all the Squad perks on the far left and Uniforms and whatnot, it's all insanely off-putting, which also doesn't help that the text is miniscule, I'm still trying to figure out everything. It's like I'm looking inside a College Algebra textbook: off-putting and difficult to understand.

Bayonets are pretty stupid in this game. A single poke with it and your ass is fucked. There's actually an effective play style where people just rush with bayonets while inside of objectives zones, which is why I always have a sidearm out, because having to carefully aim at your target while they're running at you with a bayonet is nerve-wracking, and getting stabbed can be pretty frustrating at times.

The graphics are dated and the character models are hilariously goofy but who cares as long as the game plays well? Plus, you can't really fault the developer for that. They don't have a AAA budget, but what makes this game special is the amount of effort and respect that was put into it, something that many AAA developers take for granted, for the sake or pushing either identity politics or aggressive microtransactions.

They did the locations, weapons, and voice acting very well.
Tannenberg was developed by people who actually have a passion for war simulator games, the game is fun to play and has heart, unlike many AAA games these days, and it deserves so much more attention. Because it's an Indie game, it doesn't get enough recognition. It suffers from a very low player base. At most I saw around 100 people playing. The rest of the lobby is filled with bots.

But every time I log on there are always people playing, and as of a couple weeks ago, the game is now cross-platform with Xbox, so there are even more people playing.

The game has 9 maps, satisfying as shit gunplay, tons of iconic weapons, it's spot on with the realism and historical accuracy and immersion, it has a stat tracker if you care about shit like that, and the best part? No microtransactions. Yeah, hard to believe, you get everything the game offers when you buy it.

So when its full price is $20, how can I say no to that? But if the low player numbers put you off, then I suggest waiting for a sale. I do hope this game on console blows up some day, because I hooked all my friends into playing it with me and we're having a blast with it.

It has been months since I actually wrote a review for a game, but once I had put a good 50-60 hours into this game, I just had to talk about it, I am just baffled by how unfinished it is. This review will most likely be written like a fuckin' visual novel, but please bear with me, there's just so much wrong with this game and most of it aren't even glitches. They could be glitches, who knows.

In my playthrough I barely encountered any frame drops with both combat and driving, the patches that have been released did help a lot, and my game has only crashed a total of 3 or 4 times.

If frame drops, softlocking glitches, and crashing happened more frequently then this game would be a 3, even a 2 out of 10 in my eyes. My heart does go out to those poor bastards who encountered some of the most game breaking bugs I've ever seen in a video game.

When you get past the performance issues and onslaught of glitches no matter what platform you are playing on, when you actually get into the meat of the game, like content, mechanics, and gameplay, this is one of the most shallow Open World RPG games I have ever played.

And this isn't about not meeting the impossible expectations that us gamers had, no no no, it's about how all of us have been manipulated into spending at least $65 on a product that is clearly not completed. A game that should have had at least another year or more in the oven.

It's about the fact that this game is so outdated and unpolished that it lacks the most basic game design and Role-Playing mechanics that were in games from at least 10-20 years ago.

The marketing of this game was making it out to be like, the Grand Theft Auto VI that we have been waiting all these years for, but that couldn't be any more misleading.

[THE WORLD]
Pedestrians have no AI. They were programmed to do only one or two things at all times. They have no sense of figuring out things for themselves. There is no driving AI. All of the NPCs inside of cars are designed to go on a specific path and do not stray off of it. You could stand in front of someone in a car and they don't just drive around you. You could cause an all-time vehicle hold-up, all because you are standing in front of one guy's car, and no one knows what to do about it. Hell, they don't even honk their horns at you.

And when you shoot at someone in a car, they don't back up, they don't hit it and run your ass over, they just get out of the car and either run away or get on their knees and beg for mercy. Every. Fucking. Time.

They don't fight you either. You could pull out a gun on them, you could bump into them, you could punch them and run them over, they just don't retaliate. They just run away and nothing else.

I thought this was Night City. The trailers claimed it was the worst place to live in America, you know, skyhigh rate of violence?? Shouldn't NPCs pull out a gun on you or at least attack you if you fuck with them?

They also have only one trait outside of a car which is walk around on the sidewalk in a single path and say a couple lines of dialogue and that's it. And when you turn the camera in a 180 and then turn around again, the NPCs all disappear. This is just laughable. Other NPCs aside from ones on the street either just stand around leaning on a wall or something, or they repeat the same interactions with other NPCs over and over and over again.

Not one time can you interact with anyone in this game unless if it's someone who has a Quest for you. The reason why pedestrians are designed like this is because the game despawns them when the player moves a certain distance away from them, which saves the developers the need to give them any sort of realistic AI, with things to do during the day, each with certain day and night cycles. It's so goddamn stupid.

NPCs don't call the cops on you either when you cause a crime. And speaking of cops, my god is it a joke..

This game has without a doubt the worst implementation of a Wanted Level system I have ever seen in an Open World game. The game has a star system like in GTA, but the amount of stars you get does not affect the type of police that come after you, they just affect how many officers spawn in at once. You will ALWAYS get "pursued" by the same regular NCPD officers.

No SWAT team, no FBI, no National Guard or some sort of military, nope. And I put pursued in quotation marks because cops don't even chase you in cars. I wish I was joking about that. An Open World game with a Wanted Level System where the police don't even follow and chase you in cop cars?? What??? I have never heard of a game that is like this.

Instead, when you get a Wanted Level, the cops just spawn out of fucking thin air, either right in front of you or right in back of you, no matter where you are on the map, meaning they can just appear from nowhere and shoot you down and kill you almost instantly.

But if you do survive that initial massacre, you can lose them either by just running a block or two down the street, or just get in a car, because the cops don't seem to have the brain capacity to chase after you in their squad cars, either that or every cop in the city is a lazy fatass who can't be bothered to deal with you. No police aircraft following you either, of course not.

You wanna know a game from back then that actually had cops chase you in cop cars and also had different levels of police forces depending on your Wanted Level?

Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2...
Keep in mind, GTA1 came out in 1997. GTA2 came out two years later.

THAT WAS TWO DECADES AGO. WHAT THE FUCK.

Oh, here's another game: Driver, another PS1 game from 1999, 21 years ago. That game also had cops that chased you and attempt to pit maneuver you.

And because NPCs are designed only for one purpose, there is never a time where you do any combat while inside of a vehicle aside from a scripted Quest. That's what Night City feels like, it's just a giant script.

How did CD Projekt Red fuck up something as simple as pedestrians
and police in their multi-hundred million dollar Open World game?? All of this just makes Night City feel so lifeless. Night City itself is a beautiful place, don't get me wrong. It is one of the most detailed places I've seen in a video game, but it lacks so much depth and substance, which can kill the immersion all-together.

[GAMEPLAY/CONTENT]
The lack of content in this game is so staggeringly noticable that it just begs the question as to what the developers have been doing all of these years. Oh right, deceiving the audience with the Hype Train and giving a shitload of money to Keanu Reeves to promote it.

No disrespect to Keanu Reeves, but the only purpose he actually served to this game was advertising. I wasn't really a fan of his character in-game. A lot of his dialogue is cringy and you only play as him like twice in the entire game.
He's more playable in Fortnite for fuck sake. But I'm getting off topic here.

The character customization in this game is an absolute travesty. Seriously, I've seen much better character customization in Ubisoft's The Division franchise. Not only are the options in creating your character lacking besides the ability to give your character a dick or a vagina regardless of gender, but once you create your character and start the game, there is NO way to edit your character's appearance after this.

This is a world where people have modified their own bodies with cybernetic machinery, hence the name, CYBERPUNK 2077, and yet in-game, you can't change your hair, your body type, your tattoos, your skin color, eye color, you can't get any robotic arms or legs, NOTHING.

Once you make that character, you are stuck with it. Forever. Wow...
You can change your clothes and that's it, but you have no choice in what you want to wear.

Since the game has an RPG Armor mechanic, you are forced to wear whatever garbage clothing items the game throws at you if it means that you are able to boost your Armor. More Armor means you take less damage from enemies. If your clothes didn't change if you equipped something, then that would be different, but no, I have to make my character look like a fucking idiot just to that I can survive in gunfights. You can upgrade your character's Cybernetic abilities like giving yourself the Mantis Arms, which are these two large crab claw looking things that come out of your back that you use to stab enemies with. They're pretty cool and all, but those aren't cosmetics.

Why can't we just wear pre-determined outfits? What is the point of putting clothing stores in the game if we are forced to change clothes all the time just for that higher Armor stat number anyway?

Saints Row 3 from 2011 not only has 20 times more ways to make your main character look however you want them to be than this 2020 game, but you can edit them WHENEVER YOU WANT TO, and you are not forced to make them
look like a total clown because the game forces you to.

GTA SanAndreas and Saints Row 3 still remain the unmatched kings of character customization. I can be anything I want in those games.

Speaking of GTA SanAndreas, let's make some comparisons in terms of things you can do in the Open World. Keep in mind, GTA SanAndreas came out in 2004, 16 years ago.

In GTA SanAndreas you can:

-Participate in a Gang War City Conquest

-Gamble, play Poker, play Roulette, play Wheel of Fortune, and bet on Horse Races

-Compete in both vehicle and physical body dance-offs

-Play Pool

-Play on Arcade Machines

-Go to a Shooting Range (which also actually improves your character's gun skills)

-You can do Motorbike Obstacle Course races, street races, and Demolition Derbys

-You can do Firefighter, Paramedic, and Police Vigilante missions

-You can fly planes, helicopters, and jetpacks

-You can drive trains and boats

-You can go to a Driving or Flying School

-You can go to the Gym and affect your characters' stats and body appearance

-You can go to restaurants and eat food, which also affects your body type

-You can buy houses and businesses that can generate income

-You can buy vehicles and customize them

-You can go on dates with people and take them out to places

-Jesus, you can play basketball for god sake


Cyberpunk has NONE of this. I am not fucking joking.

The only things you can do in Cyberpunk outside of Story and Side Quests is go to a bar, buy guns and armor, upgrade your character's abilities, buy cars (but you can't modify them), pick up prostitutes and have sex with them, and kill gang members for the NCPD. All you do is go to a specific place on the map, kill gang members and that's it. Sometimes you are asked to steal something and bring it to someone but that's pretty much it. Most of what you're doing outside of partaking in conversations is just shooting at people and that's it.

Talking, shooting, talking, shooting, talking, shooting, talking, shooting, Jesus Christ, where is the variation??

I know it may sound like I am a Rockstar fanboy, but I have heavily mixed feelings about Rockstar's treatment towards GTA5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 these days, but there is no denying that even almost two decades ago, Rockstar knew how to do Open World games the right way.

And keep in mind, Rockstar has spent around $100 Million making GTA SanAndreas, CD Projekt Red spent about triple with Cyberpunk, and inflation hasn't really affected it much, so there is really no excuse for how much Cyberpunk is lacking in its world.

Hell, Saints Row 3, Watch Dogs 2, Sleeping Dogs, the Yakuza games, Persona 5, Mafia 2, all of these games do their Open Worlds so much better than what we have in 2020's Cyberpunk 2077, what in God's name happened?? There is almost no meat on Cyberpunk's bones whatsoever.

Many of the RPG mechanics in this game are so poorly implemented that it makes me wonder what the point of it was. This game has a lot, and I mean a lot of talking. You spend at least 70 percent of the main story just talking to people, which, for a game that is story-heavy, that is okay, I don't care about that, I love story-driven games.

I want to give credit where credit is due and say that the narrative itself is actually the best part about this game, but it still has striking issues.
The main issue is the fact that none of the dialogue choices you make in conversations mean anything in terms of affecting how the story progresses.

It doesn't matter what you say to people, you can be an absolute asshole to everyone but the story will always play out exactly the same. Be a dick to someone, they'll treat you like a total piece of shit, but be nice to them and they will treat you the exact same way.

There is only one part in the entire game where choosing some specific dialogue will affect how the rest of the story plays out, but that's at the very end of the game.

There are even specific dialogue choices that you can only choose if you have your character's stats at a certain level, but since the story does not alter no matter what you say, what is the point of it?? You increase your stats by spending Skill Points but why do that for the optional dialogue choices?

That's just a waste of Skill Points, it's not like you can affect the course of the story in any way. You get three classes to choose from before you start the game which only affect the dialogue choices and also your starting location on the map, but again, none of that means anything.

The narrative will always play out the exact same way, no matter what. This just hurts the replay value of the game. You can't even make your own adventure. Which means that once you have beaten the game, you have seen everything that the story has to offer. Everything in this game is scripted no matter what. From the NPCs to the story progression, from conversations with people to drive-by sequences, everything moves forward the way the game makes it. Any one person who plays this RPG game will have the exact same adventure as someone else, and this just blows hard.

The writing is great and many of the characters are likeable, and many of the Side Quests are good for additional character development, but considering the massive promised scope of this game and how it was marketed as a Role-Playing game like The Witcher 3, while also being marketed as the game that could put Rockstar in their place, this is a major disappointment nonetheless, and I wonder if great writing and characterization and yet incredibly cringy dialogue at times will be enough. I've seen Final Fantasy games on the Nintendo Entertainment System that have a bigger emphasis on Role-Playing.

So about the difficulty, it's not balanced very well.

Normal Mode is so fucking easy that a 4th grader with Asperger's Syndrome who has never played a video game before can easily breeze through it, but then Hard Mode and higher is so ridiculously hard that it's almost like you are doing it because you have a fetish for masochism.

Enemies on Hard Mode soak up so many bullets that it would be easier to just get up close and personal with melee weapons instead, and you die in only a few shots, it makes stealth almost a pure necessity.

And checkpoints are so far and in-between that it just makes combat more of an aggravating chore rather than a genuine challenge. I like hard games, but when your Hard Mode is designed more like you're stepping up two or three difficulties higher instead of one, we've got a problem.

There doesn't seem to be a good balance between difficulties. Most of the time I die it would be because of a game breaking glitch or something bullshit like getting hit by an explosive barrel that I didn't see and dying instantly.

And the game gives you so many healing items that again, the game is just pitifully easy, but it does get pretty obnoxious having to use inhalers like a fucking drug addict every time you lose health.

The loot in this game is just a joke. There are plenty of weapon types but some gun types are clearly better than others. Every gun in this game is the exact same as another one just with a higher DPS stat, which means that melee weapons and revolvers are mainly king since they get the best Skills and the typically have the highest DPS. Why hack enemies when you can just easily take them down in a couple seconds with a katana?

The Skill Trees only just further makes them overpowered and the game becomes an even easier joke than what it already is, which just defeats the purpose of Crafting. A lot of the Skills are pretty boring as well, most of them are just increasing percentages which is fucking pointless because I could just pick up a weapon that give me those percentage increases anyway.

You can craft guns but what is the point when enemies drop so many weapons anyway? By the time you reach the end of the game, which keep in mind, this game is around 30 hours long, you will already have some of the best weapons in the game.

The aiming in this game is some of the worst I've ever experienced in a shooter game in recent memory. It is so oversensitive and clunky that I struggle just to aim at enemies, and I've played console shooter games my whole life.

I'm a guy who plays Rainbow Six Siege competitively on Console for Christ sake. No matter what I mess around with in my settings, I can never find an optimal way to aim and shoot at enemies, so I have to rely on Auto-Aim because the Free Aim is that bad.

I have to repeatedly tap the ADS button so that my aim will snap back onto the enemy since many of the guns have insane recoil and I have to reorient my aim.

The driving in this game is also meme-worthy. The traction of the vehicles are all fucked up. You can't use the handbrake and make a turn without the car swiveling in a 180. It also takes like 5 years for the car to come to a complete stop even when using the handbrake.

All of the cars control this way, and it just feels awful to do, which is probably why there are Fast Travel stations at like every street corner. Even the motorcycles control like they're driving on ice, there are just way to many times where you can just oversteer where you want to go, it's giving me flashbacks of Ride to Hell Retribution's motorcycle physics, and I wish I was over exaggerating. I even flew myself off the highway a couple times on a motorcycle because it wouldn't brake fast enough.

When you get into a vehicle, the mini-map barely zooms out, which means that when you are following a waypoint, since you're gonna need it because Night City is insanely complex in its verticality and road design, you're not gonna be able to anticipate when you need to make a turn, which means that you're gonna miss the the turn and then you gotta turn your ass around.

Which sounds like a minor complaint but I can't tell you how many times I had to turn my car around because the waypoint wants me to make a turn but I end up missing it because the mini-map isn't zoomed out enough so I can see it coming, which also doesn't help that the driving physics are total shit on top of it. It's the worst when you're on the highway, it's just really frustrating.

A lot of the music in this game is very hit and miss for me. Some songs are pretty good but others sounds like if someone walked into a nightclub and forcefully took control of the DJ audio system, or if you just taught your 14 year old child how to make techno music for the first time.

[FINAL THOUGHTS]
This may be the last game that I will ever get hyped for again. Ghost of Tsushima surprised the shit out of me with it's incredible story and world, but here I was, thinking that Cyberpunk would top it and goddamn was I wrong. I defended this game for the longest time up until it's launch and wow do I feel played. I was blown away, and not in a good way. I honestly wish that this game never came out.

I could excuse a good amount of the bugs and performance issues because I am just used to shit like that in AAA games these days, I mean, I've played DayZ on PS4 a lot for fuck sake, but when you take a step back and look at the bigger picture here, you realize that the issues Cyberpunk have go so much farther than just bugs and performance problems, but the bugs and bad performance only just adds onto the embarrassment and horrific mismanagement that this game has been subjected to.

Patches are not going to be able to save the embarrassing state that the game is currently in right now. There needs to be some drastic overhaul. Because even if the game ran well across all platforms and it didn't have as many bugs as it does, it would not fix the overall unfinished nature of the game's core mechanics and gameplay.

It just gets shat on by other games in this genre. I doubt we will see any huge, significant changes to the game for at least another 1 or 2 years. We have to wait just for the game to be in a more playable state before we actually get something worthwhile, and that's just sad.

What a cruel year for gaming indeed, I can honestly feel the heartbreak in many people who thought that this was going to be the game of the generation, the game that would stand up to other games like GTA5 and it's incredibly aggressive microtransaction fueled Online mode, and many of the Open World dribble that Ubisoft shits out all the time.

All of the many years of goodwill of CD Projekt Red thrown down the toilet, they have become the very thing that they have promised us gamers that they would be fighting against.

For shame, CD Projekt Red. For shame.

But hey, at least copies of the game come with 30 day Free Trials to HBO Max, so that's gotta count for something, right...?

Uh no, just get a refund on the game. It's not worth the spending money considering all the other much better thought-out games that cost only a fraction of it.

3/10

This game marked both the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. It's the last single digit entry in the main series, it's the last main entry on the original PlayStation, and it was the last game to be conceived and written by series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. But damn does he go out with a bang with this game.

While Final Fantasy VII and VIII had adopted sci-fi steampunk worlds, Final Fantasy IX goes back to form with a medival fantasy setting. If you've played Final Fantasy I-VI, FFIX will make you feel right at home, as it's the ideal view of what Final Fantasy truly is. Not only does it stay consistent with the tone of the FF games from the NES and SNES era, but it's hand-fisted with references to those past games, which are a real pleasure to see.

[STORY]
Do not let those cutesy character designs fool you. This is one of the darkest games in the series, and it portrays some of the greatest character development the series has to offer. This results in a cast of characters that feel like real, relatable people despite having such mythical and rather silly designs, which is a testament to how much care was put into them. I absolutely love this cast, one of the best in this franchise.

Kuja (the main villain) is one of the most realized characters, but seriously, WTF is he wearing?? Is it a man thong? Is it some sort of medival sports bra? I have no idea, but damn is he a badass villain. And by the end of the game I actually felt sympathetic towards him.

The themes of this game mostly revolve around death and coming to terms with your identity, the cycle of life. It's a moving story about one's existence and their purpose in life, something that everyone in the party has pondered about at least once in their lives, and how their mortality is of great importance.

Why am I here?
What does death feel like? Where do we go after we die?
What reasons do we have to live on the planet? And where do I belong?

These are the questions the game dives into, and while this sounds very dated by today's standards, remember that this game came out 20 years ago. I still think it holds up strongly today. More people die in this game than any other FF game I've played, except Final Fantasy VI. Again, this game is pretty dark despite the characters looking so weird. Death is a recurring theme, it's what brings the story from beginning to end.

There's also a central game mechanic called Active Time, where when Zidane is split up from other characters, you get to see what they are up to at certain times for even more character development.

Of course for the first time, you won't fully understand the story without doing some research, but when you do, you'll realize just how complex the story really is.

Vivi, more than anyone else in this game, is the character that resonates with this theme the most, and I'm sure many others will agree with that. His character arc and his growth throughout, going from a weak and fearful child who hated the very thought of death, to a confident, determined young man who lives his life to the fullest and with purpose, makes him not only my favorite character in FFIX, but my favorite character in ALL of Final Fantasy. I was only 13 when I played this game for the first time, but damn, watching Vivi's resolution at the end of the game made me cry my ass off.

This isn't to say the game is entirely bleak. It does have a lot of light-hearted, wholesome, and funny moments. The sense of humor in this game is so damn charming and memorable. This game made me both laugh and cry. It has a perfect balance between its humor and character-driven moments.

This is one of those games that you come back to mainly because of how timeless it is, not just because of gameplay, but because of one very important thing: Characterization. It's very clear that Square wanted to create believable people that you really want to care about and root for. Character development is one of the biggest factors to this game, it's not Final Fantasy VI levels of developed, but it's pretty close.

[PRESENTATION]
Even today, this game's presentation holds up really well. It's the best looking FF game on the PS1, in fact, it's one of the best looking PS1 games, period. The FMV cutscenes are beautiful and hold up even to this day. The character designs are definitely the most odd looking ones in the series, but that's what makes the game stand out. The attention to detail is exquisite and the world is very colorful. And the pre-rendered backgrounds are among the best on the PS1.

[MUSIC]
I honestly can't stress it enough, the soundtrack to this game is in a master class of its own, some of the greatest music ever produced in video games. FFIX's soundtrack is my 2nd favorite in the FF series, my first being FFVI. This is some of Nobuo Uematsu's greatest work.

There are so few composers in this industry whose music have left as much of an impact as his did. The lack of voice acting in FFIX meant that not only the dialogue, but the music was used to define the tone and characters in the game and it works wonders.

The music is what adds the most amount of spirit in these older FF games. Some of my favorite songs in all of gaming are in this game. I can't think of a single track that I actually dislike. It adds to the charm, uniqueness, and personality of the game. Nearly every melody is memorable, and the instrumentals used makes the soundtrack truly brilliant. I also can't tell you just how many times I listened to the battle theme and You're Not Alone religiously. So much so that it would be embarrassing to admit. FFIX has the best battle theme in the series, in fact, it might be my favorite battle theme in all of gaming. Melodies of Life is also my all time favorite vocal performance in the FF series.

Orchestra, and the use of piano, flute, kazoo, dulcimer, castanets, drums, bass, as well as motifs from older Final Fantasy games, makes the soundtrack an absolutely nostalgic masterpiece. The music defines at least half of Final Fantasy IX.

[GAMEPLAY]
While I really like Junctions from FFVIII in how complex it is, FFIX's simplicity in its mechanics are still enjoyable. Like with the story, FFIX goes back to form with its gameplay; Four character battles, characters with class specific roles, with traditional equipment and abilities.

Final Fantasy VII and VIII had this problem where everyone is able to learn the same magic spells and abilities, which can make them all feel the same, the only differences between each other being their Limit Breaks. Not to mention there were too many easy ways to get out of fights. But in Final Fantasy IX, each character have specific roles and the difficulty of battles have been ramped up.

Vivi being a Black Mage, the only party member who can cast Black Magic, Zidane being a Thief who can steal items, Eiko and Garnet being both White Mages/Summoners, Freya who is a Dragoon, Quina who...eats enemies to learn Blue Magic, yeah don't ask. Also is it a he or a she? Does no one to this day still not know??

And Steiner, oh my god, Steiner, a Knight that can use Sword skills and team up with Vivi to unleash sword spell attacks that deal massive damage. He also does like five times more damage while in Trance. Did they test Steiner during development? Because he is simply overpowered. He is incredible, easily one of the party members to have in battle.

On the other hand, Amarant can stay the hell out of my party. Seriously, have any of you ever used Amarant other than in key points in the game? Goddamn is he almost useless. All of his attacks are really weak compared to others.

This game does get challenging. FFIX isn't a hard game, but FFVII and VIII had battles that were just too easy. FFIX has much more panic inducing, tense moments in the battles, and has a much stronger emphasis on strategy, which is a very welcome change.

In this game, equipment is what teaches the characters their abilities, which is further complimented by the balance of battles. Ozma, the superboss of the game, is hands down the hardest optional superboss in the series. And the final boss Necron is no pushover either. I'd say Necron is one of the toughest final bosses. And the music that plays during that fight freaked me out when I was a teenager.

Typically in past games, you would sell equipment that you didn't need anymore because you got new equipment with higher stats. But in this game, almost every piece of equipment is important, because elemental properties play a much larger role. So even if you have equipment that have "lower stats", it's still important to hold onto it if it's capable of boosting your elemental offense and defense. The benefits of elemental defense boosting far outweigh the benefits of a higher Defense or Magic Defense stat. Also, you can get exclusive weapons and armor at Synthesis Shops, which require previously obtained equipment, so again, hold onto equipment even if you don't use it anymore.

All of this combined is what makes battling in FFIX so fun and rewarding. Battles feel fresh because of this. A sense of challenge that hadn't been felt since Final Fantasy VI. Though I still do have a couple gripes.

One thing I don't like about the battles is how slow they are. Even if I turn the ATB speed all the way up, it's soooooo slooooow, easily the slowest out of all the other games. And while you can get an ability that boosts the speed of the ATB gauge, you don't get that until at least halfway into the game, and it's missable during one part in Disc 2. You won't get it again until Disc 3 or 4. So early on in the game the battles can really drag.

I also don't like the Trance mechanic. Trances are basically Limit Breaks in FFIX but with a twist. Taking damage will fill up a red bar, when it's full, characters can go into Trance. Instead of it being a one use attack like in FFVII and VIII, instead it boosts the characters stats for several turns and the characters can use exclusive attacks that replace certain battle commands.

However what ruins the potential of it is when the bar is full, the Trance activates automatically. This makes it incredibly difficult to use them strategically. They can't be saved from one battle to the next, the transformation takes a while, and it can't be skipped. All of this makes Trance more of a pain in the ass than something game changing and useful. Luckily the balance of the battles make up for this.

So about side content, it's very hit and miss for me. I've heard a ton of people complain about the card game tournament in Treno. Yeah, I don't like Tetra Master either, and I still think that it's bullshit that the developers took something that was originally a minigame and made it mandatory to progress through the story.

Even to this day, I still don't understand how Tetra Master works. Even if you have a card that is technically stronger than your opponent's, it's still possible to lose, so it's completely random. That is total bullshit. Even so, I didn't have as much of a hard time as what others were saying about the card tournament. All I do is just select random cards and mash buttons until I do win. It's definitely not impossible.

If I lost too many times I would just reset. And after I win one round I just go to a moogle and save my game. This is important because the third and final round only gives you one chance to win. And if you do win, you get the Rebirth Ring which teaches every character the Auto-Life ability. This is the earliest point in the game you can obtain it.

Final Fantasy VIII's Triple Triad is way better designed, it's completely optional, and you get some amazing rewards for playing it. But Tetra Master? It sucks ass through a bendy straw.

Now that I think about it, pretty much every piece of side content relies on RNG. The Chocobo side quest is better but it can still be tedious because it relies on RNG to give rewards to the player. And if you wanna fight Ozma, you have to turn your chocobo into a golden one, by finding Chocographs. Chocographs are items that are used to find treasures containing exclusive loot.

You get these by playing a minigame called Chocobo Hot and Cold. There is no skill involved, you just mash the Square button to dig into the ground in certain areas until you find the item that you're looking for, which is just repetitive and it drags a lot. This type of randomness plagues a lot of RPGs, but if this doesn't bother you, then all the power to you. However the rewards you get for obtaining the Chocographs and finding the treasures are amazing, some of the best in the game, like Zidane's and Garnet + Eiko's ultimate weapons.

The Mognet side quest is also hit and miss because it involves delivering mail from one moogle to the next. It's actually possible to miss certain moogles which will prevent you from fully completing the side quest. I've never completed it myself and frankly I never cared about completing it anyway, the payoff is nowhere near as good as Chocobo treasure hunting. The letters themselves though are fun to read and it's something that's cool to look out for as you're journeying through the game.

[BEST VERSION]
My favorite version of FFIX is the PS1 version. The easiest way to get it is either on Amazon or downloading off the PlayStation Network on the PS3 or the PS Vita, it's very cheap.

They re-released the game on PS4 with both pros and cons.

(PROS)
For starters the game has a fast forward button, which makes the side quests and grinding go by so much quicker. It also makes going for the Excalibur II side quest so much easier. The Excalibur II is Steiner's ultimate weapon, and can only be obtained by reaching the final dungeon in less than 12 hours. You can also skip the FMV cutscenes which is cool.

There is also a No Encounters Button, a button that gives the characters God Mode with infinite Trance, a button that lets you do 9999 damage, a cheat that gives you max money, and a cheat that lets you auto-learn abilities as soon as you equip a piece of equipment. But why in the hell would you use all of this shit?? That just sucks all the fun out of the game.

(CONS)
The game has gotten enhanced textures and they changed the font of the menus to try to give it a much cleaner look, but personally, I absolutely hate it. The menus now look so bubbly and messy, it's disgusting to look at. The font they chose is shit, the font from the PS1 version is a million times better.

This "enhanced" remastered version released on mobile first, so someone thought that it would be a good idea to port this version to PS4 and Steam. The PS4 had to get a patch that shrunk down the menu size because half of the battle screen was taken up by the cell phone menu graphics. WTF is up with that nonsense?? But the Steam version? They didn't get any fixes for this. The only way to remedy this is with mods.

There is also an issue with the audio sampling. The sound effects don't sound the same like the PS1 version. Again, you can fix this with mods, but the PS4 version has not gotten a fix for this.

There was also a problem where the music after a battle would loop back to the beginning, which was not present in the PS1 version. They did fix this in the PS4 version but I don't know about the Steam release.

The menus also have an insanely noticable amount of lag. There is a delay between button presses, which makes trying to speed through the menus impossible. This is very annoying, especially considering that the PS1 version had menus that ran at a stable 60 FPS. The battle menus also had very smooth transitions, but the remastered version's battle menus are static, which is also noticable and distracting. These may seem like nitpicks, but if you played the PS1 version and wanted to play it on a newer system, all of these issues may put you off.

The game's frame rate while on the World Wap is god awful. Again, why did they decide to port the mobile version? This is just fuckin' lazy.

I've never played the Xbox One or the Switch versions so I'm not sure if these issues were resolved or not with those versions.

Damn, I've said version a lot haven't I?

Now do you see why I think the PS1 version is the better version? Yes the PS4 and Steam versions has fast forward and all that, but that all comes at the expense of the game's asthetics. The PS1 has much longer load times but I'd rather deal with that than have my eyes be assaulted by those horrible menus and my ears disappointed by the sound effect problem. Finally, the textures also look muddier, like if someone smeared vaseline all over my TV screen, it's just ugly to look at.

[FINAL THOUGHTS]

Final Fantasy IX is a must play, it's such an amazing game. A grand, watershed reflection of what had come before. This is the longest review I've ever wrote, but you'd be surprised by just how many people have still never played this game. If I'm so passionate about it, you'd think this is my favorite FF game right? Well actually, this game is a tie for 2nd place. My all time favorite FF game is VI, then again, FFVI is my favorite video game, period. But for a close 2nd, I just don't know which FF game I love more, this game or Final Fantasy X. I grew up with both FFIX and X. The sheer impact they have left on me as a gamer is unprecedented, it's just something that I will never forget. I've played this game so much along with FFX that it's baffling, it just never gets old. And that makes it worthy of a masterfully crafted experience.

If I were to speak from an objective standpoint, then yes, it is the best representation of Final Fantasy. It's no wonder it's Hironobu Sakaguchi's personal favorite.

10/10

When you think of the 90s, you think of the Console Wars and lots of gross-out humor in entertainment, even more so than nowadays.

This game is not only gross but it's a tech-demo made for the Genesis in 2004... a whole 7 seven years after the console was discontinued.

The demo was created in Venezuela. That would mean that this is the definitive Venezuelan bus simulator.

What makes this game so astounding is that there are literally three things you can do: you can drive forwards and honk your horn, BUT, you can also drive backwards. Yeah, eat your heart out, Desert Bus.

And if that wasn't enough, just listen to this amazing title screen music!

https://youtu.be/sC0cvwnG0Ik

This is one of the worst PS4 games I have ever played, it's simply dreadful. I am baffled how this game even released. I borrowed this game from a friend and I still feel like I've been ripped off.

For starters the game is atrociously optimized. Frame drops galore, the world taking up to 30 seconds to load in, insane amounts of lag, random crashes and disconnects, awkward menu controls that are really awful if you are in the heat of combat (hell it can take at least 30 seconds just to reload your gun if you don't have more than one magazine), and the bugs, my god, the bugs. There is a barrage of glitches, like not being able to pick up items, falling through the map, getting stuck on doors, buggy melee combat, getting stuck on zombies, broken hit registration, and inventory bugs.

Even if you get past most of these issues, the game is still practically impossible to play anyway because every server has been looted to high hell. I can't tell you just how many times my character has died of hunger because there is never any food, or any other supplies to help me get anywhere. How does the game expect you to make any progress when you can't get the supplies you need to survive? It's hard just trying to survive for more than 20 minutes because of this and it is just aggravating.

You drop into a server, there's no loot anywhere, so then you just run around for 20-30 minutes not finding a goddamn thing and then you'll die of starvation, the game just turns into a walking simulator. Unless if you partner up with someone to help you, but considering how valuable loot is in this game and the nature of the game itself, everyone just kills each other on sight. There is no such thing as teamwork unless if you play with friends. I've went into at least 30 different servers and I'm always in the same scenario.

And speaking of playing with friends, there is no map screen to help you navigate. I understand this is supposed to be a survival game, but if you are a new player, how in the holy mother of shit are you supposed to know where you are at all times? Especially since the map is incredibly big, too big for its own good. You'll just be wandering around aimlessly like a cockroach without its head. I get that learning the map might seem appealing, but without such basic gameplay features to help you navigate, how are you supposed to meet up with your friends?? Playing with friends is the only reason why I even picked up the game in the first place. How about some friend markers? How about a compass on the screen at all times? Nothing?? God, this game just punishes new players and discourages working with others. Oh right, I have to download a goddamn mobile app that gives me a real life map when it could have just been provided in the game itself, and I also need it because all of the text is in Russian and I can't read it, rather than just having English text pop up on screen in when I reach a town. Joyful..

There are PvP Community servers that you can play in, but it's very rare to find a server that has decent loot refreshes. There have also been at least three instances where my game crashes while I'm standing next to a zombie, and since it takes up to 15 seconds for your character to actually disappear from the server, the zombie kills me and I lose all of my loot. The last time it happened I literally screamed and dropped the game completely. So even when I play in PvP servers, the only time that I actually have fun in the game, the game is like "fuck your fun, now die."

And the Official servers take up to 45 days to refresh the loot drops, which is WAY too long. By the time it's been a week or two, all the servers will have been looted and nothing can ever be found aside from clothing items. Rinse and repeat.

You can rent your own private Community servers for a monthly fee, I believe it's $18. So players are expected to pay more money on top of a game they already payed $50 for just so they can actually PLAY the game?? Go to hell.

So overall this game is the equivalent of highway robbery. Why Sony approved of the sale of this game on their store is one thing, but the fact that it's a port of a PC game from 6 years ago that's being sold for $50 when it's clearly not finished is just insulting. It is truly disgusting and thinking about it makes me nauseous. The game has a great concept but is executed in the worst ways possible. I have better chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse in real life and spotting a group of UFOs in the process. It is awe inspiring just how poorly programmed and incompetently designed this game is, it's giving me Fallout 76 deja vu.

One of the most hilarious games I have ever played. The opening is one of the most epic and absurd intros to any video game in history. Who could hate this? It's hysterical.

Bill Clinton is hands down history's greatest Chinese leader.

"Chin, I saw you in the bathhouse and I knew that you were the man for the job!"