My first metroidvania.

I have never been a fan of platformers and I still think this is not really my kind of game, regardless of that I have been able to enjoy it.

It is hard to believe that this game is 30 years old, the ambience is unbelievably well achieved thanks to the visuals which make each area iconic and is supported by an outstanding sound design.

The level design is remarkable, but I will say I didn't enjoy when the game forces you to backtrack. Arriving at an area that you have already explored earlier with a newly revealed shortcut and having to go all the way there just by backtracking are two completely different things. Super Metroid sometimes manages to make interesting shortcuts with it's upgrade system, but forgets to do so in some scenarios, forcing you to go all the way back where you came from (not just a few rooms away) a copious amount of times.

Some rooms where platforming was needed seemed to drag for too long, specially when provided with some foes and proyectiles along the way for increased anxiety.

The movement was smoother than I expected overall, but I struggled with the jump, specially with wall-jumping and using the space suit roll jump.

Despite all that, the exploration of new zones always feels fresh, and the upgrade system not only provides with a sense of progression of Samus's power level but also providing a variety of tools to delve deeper into each area and progress towards the next one.

Many of the upgrades seemed very advanced for the time where this game came out, for example , the grappling hook feels surprisingly smooth. By the end of the game Samus's arsenal has changed so much that it almost feels like another game, also making dealing with enemies much easier and satisfactory. I had one huge issue with the arsenal tho, and it's swapping between weapons, which felt incredibly clunky probably because the console lacked enough buttons or maybe because I played this with an Xbox controller.

I have also tried practicing some techniques like bomb jumping and wall jumping, although they were useful to me in a small number of situations as I'm not any kind of speedrunner, I can begin to see and appreciate how this game influenced the world of speedrunning and how the developers took care in making it possible.

My favorite part of the game were the first few zones, I feel this is where I enjoyed the exploration and ambience the most, every area felt unique and I really like the abandoned and hostile planet it helped to picture, I enjoyed the wrecked ship as well. The ending was pretty cool and the areas were visually impressive but having to backtrack and getting stuck not knowing how to progress kind of worsened my overall experience (I probably should be more patient with this kind of games, can't help it tho it's my first metroidvania). I have the feeling that I will appreciate this game much more when I come back to it in the future after tackling some other games of the same genre. With my platforming skills honed and the patience required to tackle the genre ( I was looking foward to other titles that I mean to play in the following days, which stressed me to finish this one faster).

Overall this game surprised me and helped understand how ahead of it's time it truly was, I will surely come back to it in the future.

Rocket League is a good example of a game. It’s car soccer, and it doesn’t get much deeper than that. It’s fun. It’s frustrating. It has a wide range of skilled players and the match making is good. Again, it’s car soccer.

What stands out to me isn’t specifically Rocket League in general, but the idea that something can be a polished version of something simple, a good-not-great game, and yet have me playing it monthly for nearly a decade. Sometimes you just want to play car soccer, you know? And that’s alright. That’s why games like rocket league exist.

My partner has managed to rescue this gem for the PS3 and be able to try it on an emulator

As rocket players, entering this game puts to the test our muscle memory gained in RL (no rotation button, double jump in the air...) it is very fun, we had a few laughs, the camera is horrible but no one can take away the good time from us

It's been a good 33 minutes

From the first minutes of the game I could already understand why this one was everyone’s favourite. Palpable atmosphere, and I finally got the people complaining about zero mission and am2r missing that “isolating, lonely, cold” atmosphere of the originals. This is what they were talking about. It's a pretty substantial tone shift, from the station to going back to Zebes. Everything is darker, more terrifying, lonely, and hopeless. Almost like Peace Walker to Ground Zeroes, raiders to temple of doom, or high school to university. It adds so much to the depowering at the beginning of the game, and the contrast to eventually tearing shit up everywhere feels like such a cool progression. You become more comfortable and less scared, and now you're back on your grind!! The main path is more like a corn maze where all the dead ends had corn for you to eat. I never felt like going off the beaten path just got me random power bomb increases, they could be whole ass optional upgrades. It's nice knowing that no matter how much I cheese out the order, I will never get softlocked. I always think I am, but super metroid has me covered. I eventually learned to leave it all to god's plan and explore without worry. The bosses were so cinematic too, seeming so well balanced that I was always reasonably challenged no matter how much e tanks or super missiles I got. I also wanna talk about the dash in this game, and how much I cheesed with it. The dash, the wall jump, the space jump, I did stuff out of order and I LIKED IT. The charge beam was the last upgrade I got because FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY!!!!!! and tell me how the ending made me emotional despite the fact that no one in this series has spoken a word? I love this game a lot, I'm giving it 5 stars, and I'm gonna play metroid fusion next.

Welcome to Totally Not PowerWash Simulator!

Let's see where I start, if you like PWS (powerwash simulator) you won't dislike this game, it's like playing a large DLC with more content.
It is the Chinese copy that is "copied" that even borders on plagiarism, that is, the sounds are the same as those of the powerwash (when you complete a cleaning) the Kärcher is quite similar, they only change a couple of details, the water nozzle, exactly the same, the way to clean, the same (let's see, it's a simulator for cleaning things, so not much can change)
On the other hand, they add a small robot that only bothers you when you are cleaning, but you quickly scare it away if you spray a little water on it.
It is much more enjoyable than the PWS, that is, it does not force you to clean everything 100%, rather when the cleaning bar is completed, even if you have more than half dirty, the machine automatically completes it by cleaning everything (in some levels is welcome, but in others it breaks my concentration rhythm a bit)
Unlike this one, the pure control is with a keyboard and mouse, but you can manually put the controller as a command by assigning the same commands as in the PWS and it is as if you were playing this one.

I'm not going to recommended it, but if you've finished the powerwash and need more, this is a good option.
The animal DLC is not bad, but it gets repetitive.

The good thing about the PWS is that behind it it has a small story, in this what is missing, in the long run it becomes boring and is a constant of "pfff let's see when I have left to finish this...."

On the other hand, I am going to highlight that I like it a lot and I give them my approval, it is in the way of indicating what you have left to clean, they show it to you in a striking and clear way and you don't have to be with a magnifying glass in case you have left a small pixel hidden between layers.

I would say it's not bad, but I don't recommend it either because it gets very repetitive and tiring.

Full video review: https://youtu.be/g-douiTlGcw

We finally have Astro's Playroom on PC. Or rather, as close as we can get. It is called Boti: Byteland Overclocked and it aims to fill that very specific 3D platforming inside a computer niche.

Gameplay
Boti is a competent 3D platformer that tackles the basics and nothing more. It’s got a bit of platforming, a bit of a puzzle touch to that platforming, and the devs really did a good job with the actual variety of the gameplay. You’ll go from one of those platforming segments, to an area with a puzzle or two, to a giant slide that reminds me of the ones from Battle for Bikini Bottom, and then there’s swinging, cannons, and even some vehicle segments.

It’s all basic stuff, but it’s spread out in such a way that the gameplay never really becomes tedious. The collectibles and bonus objectives add to this too, encouraging you to explore further and occasionally solve the extra puzzle or two.

That said, don’t expect any real challenge here. The boss fights are laughable at best, but when you take into account the target audience here, it’s hard to fault the game for that. It is very forgiving with its checkpoints too. Not a difficult game by any means.

Length and Story
I completed Boti in just over 3 hours, but you could probably squeeze double the time out of it if you go the completionist route. I don’t feel like it was too short either, the gameplay pacing was steady throughout and didn’t feel like it was rushing.

The story is hardly notable because of how little it matters here. It’s more so just a means to link together the different levels and felt like an afterthought if anything. Not that the game needs something more than that though.

Graphics
The aesthetic, for the most part, is pretty good. It makes good use of lighting, coloring, and overall just has a nice vibrant look to it. This is while running on Unreal Engine 5, which shows in some ways - such as the ray tracing - but I cannot deny I was a bit surprised to learn that given that this could have easily passed as a last generation game. Not that that is a bad thing, just that when you look at the big picture, the backgrounds are blocky, the textures are not all that high-res, and the overall geometry is on the simpler side.

Performance / Optimization
This is unfortunately not a really well-optimized game. I am running on an RTX 3080 Ti and was unable to play the game natively at 4k with ray tracing OFF without dips to well below 60 fps. I figured - okay, I will just enable dynamic image scaling to hopefully fix that. And while that did raise my fps to above 100, it was not stable and some areas and scenes still caused dips to below 60fps. Which again, is surprising to see given that the game does not have the graphical fidelity to warrant using 100% of my GPU. So while it is not the worst performance I have seen, it could definitely use a bit more optimization.

Bugs / Lack of Polish
I hate to say it, but in its current state, Boti should not be released and I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone with the amount of technical issues I ran into. Whether that be audio randomly cutting out in cutscenes, cutscene dialogue just disappearing outright, character models getting stuck in the wrong direction, button prompts getting mixed up and displaying keyboard, Xbox, and PlayStation all at once, objects not loading in when they should, physics going out the window at times, and even soft locks on top of that.

Several times while playing I had to reload the level just to get the game to work correctly. And that is before I even mention the crashes - which I unfortunately also had a couple of. Keep in mind, all of the issues I mentioned here are the ones that WERE NOT already included on the “known issues” list I was provided by the devs.

The game even acknowledges its own lack of polish in a way. There is straight-up an “unstuck” button on the pause menu that you can press to move your character out of terrain when they get stuck. I unfortunately had to make heavy use of this button, especially when playing online co-op. And that co-op is a separate issue entirely. My boyfriend and I managed to get through the first level playing online co-op, but I had to play through the rest of the game by myself because we just kept running into issues, including this weird flickering when standing on certain objects and some areas where the game progresses for one player, but traps the other - forcing a reload.

Overall
Boti is far too buggy to be worth a play in its current state. Numerous soft locks, collision issues, broken co-op, and even crashes prevent the otherwise competent gameplay from being anything more than that. Maybe in the future it will be worth a look, but as of now, I cannot recommend it.

Los que jugaron al RPG de 'Medabots' en GBA quizá no sepan que en realidad, era un remake camuflado del segundo 'Medarot' en Game Boy. Así pues, la jugabilidad que presenta el primer juego es muy familiar a la que conocemos por estas lindes, aunque mucho menos pulida y accesible de lo que sería deseable.

'Medarot' es otro recolector de monstruos que salieron tras el éxito de la primera generación de 'Pokémon', pero se distingue del resto por su capacidad de personalizar los robots y sus cuatro partes, en pos de obtener el modelo de combate definitivo. Sin embargo, encontrar un equilibrio entre las distintas piezas y la medalla que controla la logística del Tin-Pet (el esqueleto del robot) requiere de mucha paciencia y dobles lecturas que hacer conforme vemos los resultados de nuestras acciones. Sí, hay puntos de experiencia y niveles, pero apenas tienen incidencia en los parámetros que aparecen en pantalla. Para aprender a jugar a 'Medarot' hay que echar cábalas, hacerse preguntas mientras observamos sus combates 3vs3, intuir si la acción que hemos visualizado mejora o no a lo que tenemos. ¿Se ha desplazado el robot más rápido a la línea de combate usando esta pieza? ¿Esta arma es más efectiva contra Medarots con ruedines? ¿A qué enemigo apunta esta otra ¿Tiene sentido usar esto? ¿Lo tiene?

Hoy en día, es posible que haya en Internet alguna guía que explique la matemática detrás de los combates y la progresión de tus Medarots, pero si nos ceñimos exclusivamente a lo que dicta el videojuego cuando salió, hay muy poca información que te diga exactamente lo que tienes que hacer. Cero tutoriales, cero lore que ponga en contexto el mundo de 'Medarot', menús tediosos para acceder a la información deseada, y muy poco equilibrio en general entre el catálogo de piezas disponibles. Pero hay cierta magia en esto de jugar a la vieja usanza, y ver que nuestras órdenes no tienen el peso disciplinario que en otros juegos de monstruitos. Si 'Pokémon' laza un vínculo entre el jugador y sus criaturas por el tiempo que pasamos con ellas dentro y fuera del combate, 'Medarot' es algo más frío y calculador. El vínculo está en el enigma que compone su existencia como arma de destrucción masiva (no tan masiva), consciente de que su única función en la vida es luchar entre ellos sin entender del bien o el mal. Es ver los numeritos de daño, las piezas que se rompen llegado un punto de colapso, verlos moribundos cuando sólo queda el esqueleto y siguen luchando. Son una paradoja de la vida, un contraste con la realidad aparente, una cosa rara de cuidao. Quizá por ello entrañables.

El juego en sí no es gran cosa. Controlamos al típico niño que no tenía Medarots mientras todos sus amigos juegan con los suyos, hasta que el azar le ofreció la posibilidad de tener su propio Medarot súper-ultra-exclusivo y ligeramente superior a los demás. A partir de ahí comienza una aventura que le lleva a través de la ciudad, la playa y las montañas, pero sin un nexo en común que una los puntos. Los personajes vienen, se van, contribuyen muy poco a entender nuestro cometido en la vida, lo único que sabemos es que la banda RoboRobo es muy mala malosa y hay que pararles los pies lo antes posible. Pero nada de lo que sucede resulta muy espectacular o épico siquiera, no hay una gran sensación de peligro, no hay un evento que resulte impactante, todos los problemas se resuelven de la manera más escueta posible. Hay bugs incluso a puntapala, ríete tú de aquellos que les encanta decir lo "bugeados" que estaban Rojo/Azul siendo la primera generación de 'Pokémon'. Sin el apego emocional que pueda tenerse con esta saga (sobre todo viniendo de GBA y el anime que salió en TV), sería algo totalmente prescindible en el catálogo de la pobre Game Boy, menospreciada desde tiempos inmemoriales.

Pero los Medabots molan, así que debe de estar bien. Probablemente mejor en las muchas secuelas que recibió a posteriori, aunque quizá la única que conocemos, en aquel remake protagonizado por Metabee (Kabuto) y Rokusho (Kuwagata), fuese realmente su mayor grado de expresión y su entrega más pulida. Muy difícil de recomendar esta vuelta a los orígenes, más allá de la curiosidad y el carácter histórico de esta primera generación.