with mods highest difficulty and playing without save/load this is ultimate sigma africa survival videogame. after some relaxing driving with a nice view of nigilistic but beautiful Africa sound of enemy cars pumps adrenalin through your system, AI give you panic time after time, guns just breaks and malaria... all systems just create so juicey sigma gameplay I don't even want to nagging about strange voice acting.

it's a gem. suprisingly it got many similarities with STALKER series about how just work gameplay loop and the openworld and maybe... in alternate universe far cry had turned on that path.

Ubisoft's latest open-world series puts players in the role of a hacker fighting crime as a vigilante in a city where everyone and everything is connected by technology. With the help of your trusty cellphone the world becomes your playground, allowing you to interact with various parts of the environment around you in new ways. You can do some nifty stuff, but unfortunately Ubisoft Montreal failed to come up with any new, inventive scenarios to capitalize on this. At the end of the day the game just boils down to another open-world experience filled with tailing missions and bland side-activities.

There's a lot of content here. However, I found none of it to be very interesting. The side-activities are dull and the story missions are the same chase and infiltration challenges we've seen time and time again. To make matters worse they rarely make good use of your cool hacking abilities. I do appreciate how outside of a few mandatory stealth levels you are given the freedom to approach objectives however you would like. Both the sneaky and guns blazing approaches feel great. Choosing to go all stealthy is where the hacker theme really shines. Systematically taking out enemies by hacking cameras from a distance and screwing with the environments is a lot of fun and encourages smart thinking and creativity. It's a lot like the Batman: Arkham games. Combat is smooth and even features a bullet time ability that feels ripped right from Max Payne.

This sort of brings me into my next point. You'll notice that Watch Dogs is borrowing from a lot of better games. You can feel traces of Grand Theft Auto in the world and even Ubisoft's own Assassin's Creed series in the very structure and activity design. This all leads to a sense of déjà vu and over familiarity that keeps Watch Dogs from ever really taking off. You've seen a lot of this before and it was better there. Especially since the game gets a lot of little things wrong. For example, driving is loose, awkward, and imprecise making chases and tail missions a pain. Getting chased by the police is a much too aggravating experience due to how annoyingly persistent they are and how long it takes to for them to loose interest once you finally due manage to slip out of their view. Oddly enough, there's also a reputation system that seems to serve no purpose at all. It's inclusion is a mystery that only seems to be in place because other open-world games have had them. Despite high production values and excellent work from the voice actors, the story is bland and uninteresting.

To go with the always connected theme the game carries, you have the ability to jump into multiplayer content at any time while playing. You can access this stuff from your phone or stumble upon it randomly while exploring. Like the rest of the side-content I gave it a try but just wasn't compelled to actually do any of it. That's the game's real problem. There's nothing that actually hooks you.

Ubisoft Montreal chose to stick to the standard open-world tropes. There are some good ideas here and fun moments, but the majority of my enjoyment came from just randomly walking around the incredibly detailed and well-made city and hacking people's implants for free stuff. The actual missions and challenges left me wanting as they usually failed to take advantage of the hacking abilities the game gifts to players. A shame, because when you are using them Watch Dogs can be pretty fun because that's when it's at it's most original. As it stands, this is an overly familiar experience that gives you cool hacking abilities and largely fails to make them feel special at all. It's not bad, but you simply have a lot of better options out there.

6/10

For better or (mainly) worse, Hotshot Racing goes all in on the aesthetic and looks just like an early 90s arcade racer. Unfortunately there isn't much else on offer - bland track layouts, seriously underwhelming game modes and some very dodgy stereotypes for most of the characters are obvious blemishes, but the rubber-banded AI is probably the worst part of the package.

I don't mind a game keeping things semi-interesting in a race against the computer but the AI just does not let you escape which would be okay if it weren't for the fact that they slow down so hard if you fall even slightly behind.

I get why Castlevania games of this era could be frustrating to newcomers but let me tell you as someone who is brutally bad at these games, save states will save your ass and you still need to experience this. Typically amazing soundtrack and level design but especially neat how they take advantage of the Genesis hardware to do things that aren't at all what you'd expect. Also genuinely like how muscle memory really does make this more of a handle as it goes on.

Eric Lecarde's spear feels fantastic, gang.

No I don't like games where you have to backtravel to warp points to get to the one of two recovery locations in the game no sir.
Or games that have spells that level you down (in a game where levels matter quite a lot).
Or games that disorient me way too fucking often.
Or games that constantly stunlock my entire party.
Or games where I feel like my stat distribution means jack shit because the two primary protagonists do almost nothing compared to demons.
Or games with the wimpiest spells I've ever seen. I swear to christ I maxed out Yumiko's wisdom straightaway and any spell she cast did jack shit.
I'll admit the first hour/dungeon were pretty neat and mechanically this is pretty impressive for the famicom of all things, but by Mizurka path I was pretty fed up. Hoping the Super Famicom version is better but im not keeping my hopes up entirely.
By the time i finished the second dungeon I had seen that playing it as though you explored every nook and cranny as though you were completing the maps on your own would help with your levels. Yet even after doing so, in the next dungeon (Valhalla Corridor) I finished that area fine (by the by, boss exp drops in this are the most flaccid thing, i know boss fights in this are generally pretty easy but god the exp/money drop is so flaccid you make about as much exp going through 3 mook fights than some of the big bads) about 8 levels behind what the recommended level range was which i guess means a lot in Mizurka since my party members got rinsed constantly and bombarded by stoning the one party member with a portable status healing move (which she only gets after 25+ levels of this fucking game) on top of enemies that constantly wanted to drop my already low levels multiple times in one fight. To be quite honest I'd rather not spend another hour or so just running back and forth between the same two doors to spawn enemies that'll give me somewhere between a 1/20th to 1/40th of the exp i need to my next level depending on what rng.
Even with as rough as a game Dragon Warrior is on the original NES I at least feel like its simplicity led to more digestible experience that sated my curiosity on what was my first game ever and the progenitor of an entire type of RPG. Here it feels less like im playing the roots of the Megami Tensei franchise and more like I'm playing some weird demake of a megaten game and while I think SHIN Megami Tensei 1 is rough at points I can see where that game becomes more than just another 3D dungeon crawler, with a pretty cool scenario, good environment/world and a simple yet intriguing alignment system with demon/character designs that have stylistically held up fairly well.
This game doesn't have Jack Frost though so, like, it's pretty much less of a megaten game than Tokyo Mirage Session tbh.

poucos jogos equilibram seus elementos nostálgicos e uma potencialização tão precisa.
homenageia a formula original aumentando os seus elementos ao extremo a frenesi encorpada com um ritmo de jogo maravilhoso, a trilha e sua linda mistura de melodias nostálgicas, o visual impressionante de sublime e fiel, isso é o que define o jogo uma fidelidade incrível a experiência clássica, mas ao mesmo tempo desafiadora se em space invader vários aspectos de jogo foram criados na versão extreme eles são refinados em uma viajem inovadora, ritmada e em poucas palavras pra definir o quão encaixado a formula é sublime.