It's hard to overstate how cool the Mega Man X games are -- maybe their legacy alone makes that evident. To my eyes, X4 is where the series really hits its stride aesthetically. The pixel art and frame animation are immaculate, polished and detailed to an extent that seldom few games attempt with pixels today. And all of that reflects in how GOOD these characters feel to play.

Having not played this since I was young, I was pretty taken aback by the story. It's...uh, well: it's about a fascist ethnonationalist force that gets completely manipulated by a greater evil. It's not even subtle! Although X4 is ~90% action game and 10% narrative, the bleakness of it all does manage to come across.

However, one thing that consistently threw me here: the difficulty is ALL over the place. In X's playthrough, most bosses are a complete joke, thanks to weapon-weaknesses. In Zero's playthrough, few bosses have weaknesses at all, forcing you to learn and nearly perfect your responses to all of their attacks. And there isn't much in the way of mercy-systems, either, since "sub-tanks" (health potions) fill up so slowly that they're barely any use.

I couldn't call it the best of the X series up to this point, but at the same time, I can't deny just how compelling its look & feel remains today. It's a flawed masterpiece.

Veredito: tão bom quanto eu esperava, nem mais nem menos.

Cold Shadow, o port pra Super Nintendo, tem várias mudanças pra ficar mais fácil. Joguei o Maui Mallard mesmo, o primeirão de Mega Drive. Esse foi um puta jogo importante na minha infância. Hoje a gente não gosta de admitir, mas a maioria dos jogos/filmes importantes na nossa infância não são tudo isso.

Maui Mallard é um jogo de ação-plataforma bem decente, com level design bom, direção sonora e visual legais, e chefes bacanas. Você controla um Pato Donald que alterna entre detetive (tiros e pulos precisos) e ninja (combate corpo-a-corpo e pulos diferentes... e precisos). Várias coisas envelheceram mal - principalmente o sistema de vidas, o modo de salvar e a física dos pulos - mas isso é a verdade pra quase todos os jogos da época.

E eu já sabia disso. Mesmo assim joguei, me diverti, matei a saudade e zerei. Não é excelente, mas pra mim tá de bom tamanho.

This game is really fun, I remember playing about 2 worlds of it in the past and enjoying but now having beat the game. It's great but with some flaws. Personally I do think it got kind of annoying in some later levels and I also feel like by the end they do the whole using an animal level idea a little too much but when it's great, it's really great. Someday I'll 100% the game and maybe my thoughts will change a bit but otherwise it's a great game that's worth playing. I can definitely see why this became a favorite among many people.

When I first played Prince of Persia, I loved its sense of style but wished that it handled as smoothly as it looked and ditched its 'timed mission' premise to let its more deliberate control scheme breathe. Blackthorne - with its control scheme almost entirely lifted from its spiritual predecessor - does exactly that, and has an amazing dreary oppressive dystopian-fantasy atmosphere to boot, so I feel like I should like it a lot more than I do. But the actual design of the levels themselves let the game experience down somewhat.

The gameplay loop is equal parts asskicking and exploration, and there is a slight puzzle element to the stages as you try to find the right items in order to access more and more of each level. While a bit of nonlinearity is nice in a game like this, the stages are too sprawling and you move around very sluggishly which means plenty of slow tedious backtracking through areas you've already cleared trying to find a way to progress. I also have to mention that there's a point in the third level where it's very easy to get softlocked if you descend from a platform before getting a required key item, and you have no choice but to reset the game. Thankfully there is a password system, and the game feels like it was made to be played in small bursts. Still, it felt like many of the puzzle elements were very samey and by about halfway through the game, it had already shown me everything that it had.

...well, almost everything that it had. Because the last boss came along and utterly kicked my ass inside out. I'm not sure if the final boss is a plus or a minus point; he played like a typical action-game final boss while all your moves operate on a half-second lag, which made the entire fight seem like artificial difficulty dialed up to eleven. Then again the game lets you continue straight from the beginning of the battle if you lose, and eventually I understood his attack patterns enough to beat him with one pixel of life remaining, which was really quite exhilarating. It was a moment of catharsis and 'Eureka!' that was unfortunately quite rare in this well-made but also rather bloated game.

Unique style for the SNES. Good use of setting, though some odd choices for certain enemy types. Good art and music, though main theme gets repetitive. Magic outside of heal and invisibility fairly useless and you only have a few combat options other than those. Matrix has a very dull design. Point and click interface can be awkward and unintuitive and not helped by being on the SNES. Asking most questions leads to nonsensical repeated response. A lot of grinding and backtracking. Hiring other shadowrunners to support you will lead to them leaving you after a certain amount of fights based on your charisma skills which can be awkward in a sudden fight and lead to more backtracking to go rehire them (would be nice if they asked for more money before automatically leaving).

Interesting for the time but it makes it difficult to have too much fun with. Genesis Shadowrun definitely has the edge in many ways.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1340518245191696385

Kirby's Adventure is the birth of an incredibly unique idea that would persist and evolve for years to come. Apart from the birth of the wonderful world of copy abilities, this game takes the barebones ideas of Kirby's Dream Land and explodes into a colorful and charming world that would ultimately set the iconic aesthetic style for the Kirby franchise. A lovely soundtrack backs up the cutesy and memorable level and character design to formulate the first REAL adventure for Kirby. The series certainly would need to evolve more to reach its potential but Kirby's Adventure was an important jumping off point to establish so much of what we love about Kirby today.

I don't think that there's anyone who'd be surprised if I said that this game is very similar to the last few just with a few bits and pieces added, after all, it's Mega Man, it sticks to its formula insanely close. Mega Man 5 also represents why this isn't an inherently bad thing to make a game that can feel like just more of the same, because this one is one of the better ones in the series for sure. I think a big reason for this is that the additional offensive and mobility avenues for Mega Man to take are no longer new, they've been here long enough that the level and enemy design is finally able to be better balanced around these additional moves. This is the first time in the series where the encounters don't feel unfair to compensate for the potential of increased player speed, nor simple enough to make these additional tools feel redundant, and as such it also feels insanely cohesive in how it's all put together to make for the most consistent experience in the franchise up to this point.

The game also feels way easier than anything prior, and while some people could see this as a bad thing if they're looking for a more crushingly difficult experience, I really appreciate this game's difficulty for the way that it's not only smoother, but is less full of the total unfair nonsense that the series (and NES games in general) is known for which makes for a game that can still feel challenging while eschewing the frustrating elements. That said it's not really perfect, there are definitely some moments where it felt like the game was specifically trying to get the player killed in some really stupid, cheap ways, it was just a far less common occurrence this time around and made for a good time. The level design itself is a bit all over the place for me in terms of what I think of it, as from a mechanical standpoint they often feel a bit on the barebones side, while the aesthetic and setting itself is the best it's ever been. Each area feels really fun and distinct while bringing new ideas to the table, whether it's travelling through a crystal cave, making your way through a ship and across wide expanses of the ocean, or even getting on a train and making your way through the carriages, occasionally jumping on top of them, there's just a lot of creativity that allows every stage to feel like its own little journey.

This is especially elevated by the way it shows this encroaching industrialisation to each piece of the world, having this stark juxtaposition between these beautiful organic landscapes being interspersed by these harsh, unpleasant pieces of machinery is absolutely amazing at being able to contribute that tiny bit more to a sense of storytelling, which I think is neat. The one other big thing I noticed when playing this is that I found myself even more disinterested than normal in actually playing around with all the weapons I had at my disposal, and I think that it was a twofold issue. Not only do the weapons mostly feel fairly average and very situational (which I do honestly like as opposed to a direct upgrade) with some of them being hilariously terrible and/or hard to use, but I feel like Mega Man's buster cannon is just way more powerful this time around. While on one hand I feel like

I could criticise the way this de-incentivises experimenting with the other weapons, I think that the decision to make the default weapon decently strong is actually a really good idea, with the mechanics and designs surrounding it being a more pertinent thing to change rather than the design of the weapon itself. It now actually feels good to run through the levels with the basic weapon, but it's not flawless either, due to how you can only shoot in a straight line in front of you and nothing else. Because of this, rather than your basic weapon feeling weak and something in need of changing, it now feels closer to a powerful weapon that lacks versatility and the ability to comfortably deal with certain situations. This not only improves the general feel of the game, having something powerful, but it also can actually make the player less likely to want to conserve all of their ammo for their other tools, as they know that their basic weapon could still be very easily used for the most part. It also has the benefit of making the early game way more fun when it feels like there are so many ways to start the game rather than always choosing the same 1 or 2 Robot Masters because they're the only ones it feels possible to win against at base equipment.

Overall, Mega Man 5 might be more of the same in certain regards, and in some ways it's actually pretty mediocre, especially in the music department, (like, seriously the OST in this one is by far the worst in the NES series and it's not even close) but this does a lot right and is one of the best games in the series. This and Mega Man 2 are easily the best places to start off with if you want to tackle the series yourself, both for being on the easier, more manageable side, but also for being pretty damn good for the most part.

So I never realized they made this game until kinda recently, and I think I know why. It was released for the NES even though the SNES was out, so I guess it just kinda fell by the wayside. Regardless, it fails to match the simple fun of it's predecessor by throwing in some cheap design reminiscent of the GnG games. So many enemies just kinda spawn right on top of you and it's super frustrating. The level design is messier too, less focused on mastery of your abilities, and more meant to test your twitch reflexes without being all too creative. They do away with some of the more pointless ideas from GQ like the random battles, but it fails to really add anything special. Visually I guess it's an upgrade, but that's to be expected when compared to a 1990 Gameboy release. Slowdown is another massive issue here. It happened in the original occasionally, but it absolutely plagues this game. Firebrand is a lot smaller in comparison to the amount of screen real estate available, so they made up for this by putting more enemies and projectiles on the screen, and the result is super laggy at times. The core of GQ2 is still fun, but the first half of the game is a rough experience. It isn't until you acquire the better abilities that you begin to have fun, and I just wish it were as well-paced as the original. Shame. 3/6

A passable action side scroller. Four starting planets to choose from and completing each will unlock a new crew member you can switch between. They each have a different weapon and ability, with none of them being that useful except for one who is needed at times (the game even forcing you to kill yourself if you choose the ice planet before unlocking him). The music is kind of annoying and there are some cheap sections. Not bad for the time but basically a lower quality Mega Man with less stages.