Um jogo de puzzle que sabe misturar o confortável com o instigante. Achar os padrões é muito legal e faz a gente se sentir esperta quando consegue. São poucas fases que posso citar que achei meio ruins.

No geral uma experiência muito aconchegante e foi ótimo abrir ele de vez em quando no final do dia de trabalho pra desestressar.

Nunca deixarei de admirar a ironia em que eu sou terrível organizando as minhas próprias coisas e sempre é um pesadelo pra mim esse tipo de atividade e ai eu achei esse jogo tão delicinha e usei ele pra relaxar.

Zork Zero is the real Zork Two. It's the size of the original mainframe Zork, which was essentially Zork 1, 2, and 3 combined. It has fancy border graphics to reflect advancement, and more visual puzzles given the new capabilities of the hardware. It's loyal to the original systems and formula of Zork, unlike Beyond Zork which is far more of a departure. It's fine. If you like the first three, you'll like Zero. If you don't, then you won't. It's consistent in quality with the rest, and there really isn't much more to say.

So, it’s been a while, huh? The last review I posted on this website was my Owl House: Witch’s Apprentice review over a week ago, and since then, I kinda fell out of playing and reviewing games, especially since continuously attempting and failing HaraHara in Puyo Pop Fever over and over again was kind of starting to wear on my mental health. So I decided to take a brief break from playing games and worrying so much about making another review. However, on a whim, I decided I wanted to get back into making these reviews and knocking games off my backlog, so what better game to do so than with a really short one? As you can already tell, that game is none other than Mega Man IV… uh, no, not the NES one, the Game Boy one. Yeah, so all of the Mega Man games on Game Boy have abhorrently bad names in the US, so for the sake of not making it too confusing (especially since I’m going to be mentioning Mega Man 4 on NES a few times in this review), I’m going to refer to this game as Mega Man World 4 (or MMW4 for short) from here on. I remember getting Mega Man World 4 on the 3DS eShop after hearing that it was one of the better Gameboy Mega Man games (alongside Mega Man World 5), but I never really got to sit down and play it until recently. And after finally finishing it, I gotta say, for a Gameboy Mega Man game that remixes levels from the NES ones, it still manages to hold its own identity and plays really well, even if it has some strange flaws.

The first part of this game I’d like to discuss is the level design, possibly one of the most important aspects in making Classic Mega Man so good. But before I do, I’d like to really quickly discuss the gist of the Mega Man World games, as this’ll be pretty important when discussing Mega Man World 4’s levels. For those who don’t know, until Mega Man World 5, the Gameboy Mega Man games used remixed levels from the NES Mega Man games, usually with an original boss character near the very end. For example, Mega Man World 4 uses remixed levels from Mega Man 4 and 5 for its main levels, and after you beat all of them, you get to face Ballade before taking on the Wily stage. I often see people mention this as a detriment towards the Game Boy Mega Man games, but I personally didn’t mind this, as (at least for Mega Man World 4), the levels still feel really unique from their NES counterparts. I can’t comment much on the Mega Man 5 levels as I actually have yet to play that game, but as someone who’s played Mega Man 4 a billion times, the levels from those games still felt really fresh and new to me. Part of this comes from the fact that these levels usually opt for new gimmicks to be added to the stages, such as rising platforms for Bright Man’s stage, platforms you can shoot in Crystal Man’s stage, etc. But even with the levels that don’t introduce new gimmicks, they still feel unique because they’re using these familiar level concepts in completely new ways. It also helps that these levels are really fun as well. Hell, I prefer some of these Mega Man 4 levels over their NES counterparts, mainly Pharaoh Man and Toad Man’s stages in particular. A lot of the Mega Man 5 levels also feature branching paths, which is an inclusion I always enjoy from classic Mega Man and makes these levels all the more replayable. Overall, these levels are just generally really fun and well-designed, however, there are quite a few cheap sections that kind of plague the levels. These range from minor but annoying things like cheap enemy placements, to pretty deplorable game design decisions like not knowing to hold left before jumping down and then falling into a pit of spikes. The game also tends to suffer from pretty heavy lag, especially when you’re using a weapon like Pharaoh Shot or Rain Flush. Thankfully, the lag never caused any of my controller inputs to be dropped like in Mega Man 3, but the slowdown can still happen quite often. These issues can get pretty annoying, but they’re few and far between and they’re nowhere near enough to ruin the otherwise really fun level designs and creative concepts of the levels. My favorite was probably Napalm Man’s stage, not only due to the clever use of the gimmicks already present in that stage, but also for its cool original setpieces like the disappearing block paths and the fires that you can put out with Rain Flush. Environmental interaction before Mega Man 7? See, this is one of the many examples of how creative these levels can get. While none of these levels are like, super mind blowing or anything, they’re still really fun and feel really refreshing for a Gameboy game consisting of remixed NES stages. Alongside the original Wily stages and bosses, you can tell that this was the entry in the series where Minakuchi Engineering really wanted to make something original for themselves, as shown by the fact that a year later, they’d cook with Mega Man World 5, one of the most unique entries in the entire series to this day. All-in-all, the levels in Mega Man World 4 were just a really solid time all around and still felt new, even with the reused enemies and setpieces.

I mentioned how the new level gimmicks and the creative enemy uses made the levels feel more unique, but there are two more things that the developers added that made this entry feel fresh. One of which was the introduction of the P-chip system, which is sort of like a predecessor to the bolts seen in later games like Mega 9 and 10, where you collect them throughout your adventure and can spend them at the shop in between stages. Unfortunately, like in Mega Man 9 and 10, this system kind of leaves a lot to be desired. They suffer from the same problem as the bolts in those games where, aside from the Energy Balancer, you really only have E-tanks and Extra Lives left to buy, so if you’re like me and don’t really use E-Tanks, you don’t have much of a reason to come back to the shop or collect any more P-chips. Thankfully, Mega Man World 5 fixed this by adding a lot more cool stuff in the shop you could buy, like upgrades for your Mega Arm. As it stands though, Mega Man World 4’s P-chips are a cool idea in concept (hence why they’d be used again in later entries), but in execution, they could’ve been fleshed out a little bit more. Another element that Mega Man World 4 had that made it feel more unique is the collectibles. Well, I say it makes it feel more unique, but this idea was re-used from Mega Man 5, but in a slightly different way. In the Mega Man 4 levels, you can collect letters spelling “MEGA”, and just like in Mega Man 5, your reward for collecting these is the robot bird Beat, which I never used. Meanwhile, throughout the Mega Man 5 levels, you can collect letters that spell Wily, which… allow you access to Ballade and the Wily stages? I don’t know, that feels like kind of a weird requirement to be able to progress through the game, don’t you think? Eh, at least they aren’t too out of the way, so it’s easy to collect them all on your first try, but it’s still pretty weird to have some of your collectibles be required. Though, despite what it sounds like, I still very much appreciate the addition of these two features to the game, and they help even further in giving Mega Man World 4 an identity of its own.

Another thing that helps make classic Mega Man so good is its selection of special weapons. Mega Man World 4 has a pretty great weapon roster, though, part of that is kind of expected as half of its weapons come from Mega Man 4. Mega Man 4 genuinely has one of the best weapon selections I’ve seen in any game. Nearly all of them manage to be useful in some fashion and genuinely really add to the stages too. Likewise, the Mega Man 4 weapons brought over into this game are just as amazing as ever, with my personal favorites being Pharaoh Shot and Flash Stopper. Ring Boomerang kiiind of got nerfed as it can no longer pierce through shields, but the ability to pick up items from far away more than makes up for it. Even the Mega Man 5 weapons brought into this game are pretty decent, and the excellent Ballade Cracker is the icing on the cake. It’s an exploding weapon that travels fast, and can be fired in 7 directions, yet still manages to be more balanced than the Metal Blade. This weapon roster is just really solid overall. While not as good as base Mega Man 4’s roster, I still felt like the stages were very well built around the game’s weapon roster and they were pretty fun to use. Unfortunately though, as much as I’ve praised the Mega Man World 4’s levels and weapons so far, I really can’t do the same for the game’s main robot masters.

The bosses are another one of the three key factors in making classic Mega Man so great. I mean, they’re what stand between you and the special weapons you get to use, so they’ve got to put up a formidable yet fair fight. However, most of the time, NES Mega Man bosses tend to be… not great? A lot of the time, they typically don’t have much of a discernible pattern, typically relying on the player’s location or inputs (like most of the Mega Man 4 robot masters), and having insanely hard attacks to actually dodge, so the fight just kind of boils down to, “who can outlast the damage race”, rather than actually learning the bosses’ pattern. Other times, it’s WAY too easy, and their pattern is so easy to cheese that you can basically get out of the fight scot-free. From my experience, this felt like the case with a lot of Robot Masters in NES era Mega Man, and it wouldn’t be until Mega Man 7 onwards where Robot Masters and their patterns started to reach their full potential in my opinion. Sadly, the Robot Master fights in this game feel a lot more like the former than the latter, which I guess isn’t really the developers’ fault as they did have to port over these fights. They did change up a few fights from the NES ones a little bit, such as Ring Man firing his rings towards you, making the fight play out almost completely differently from NES Ring Man. I really wish they did this for a lot more of the Robot Master fights in this game, because a lot of these battles just never felt all that challenging or satisfying to me. They’re made even worse by the fact that the screen is so small. Mega Man World 5’s Robot Masters felt pretty well designed around this, but here it just makes the fights feel a lot more cramped than anything. Honestly, if I had to change anything about this game, these fights would certainly be it, because if they tweaked these fights a bit like they did with Ring Man’s fight, I think they could’ve been a lot more fun. However, there’s a lot of room for improvement with these fights, and this is especially true for the game’s special robot master, Ballade.

Look, I love Ballade as much as the next guy. He’s one of the coolest motherfuckers that classic Mega Man has ever introduced! But MAN, this fight just does not feel good to play against. If you’ve played Mega Man 10’s 3rd time attack stage like I have, it’s seemingly a lot like the fight in that stage, and in essence, it’s the same idea. Ballade lays down a bomb to watch out for, jumps towards your location around 1-4 times, runs towards your location, and throws a Ballade Cracker, rinse and repeat. It’s actually a good idea, and has been done quite well in Mega Man 10, but unfortunately, we’re not reviewing that game. We’re reviewing Mega Man World 4, where this seemingly pretty simple fight is butchered by a pretty terrible execution. I have a few problems with this. One of which is that Ballade will stop dead in his tracks whenever he reaches your location, which doesn’t sound too bad, but trust me, jumping over him when he does this is a hell of a lot harder than it looks. He’ll usually stop as you’re making a jump, so you end up just crashing into him and taking a shit ton of damage. Mega Man 10 mitigated this issue by having him run to the end of the screen instead of at your location, so you won’t get blindsided by him just suddenly stopping in his tracks. Speaking of which, another thing that Mega Man 10 has going for it is that Ballade’s fight just feels more natural in that game. There, you didn’t have to worry too much about the amount of jumps he did just because you could react to it quickly enough, But in a game where the screen is shrunken down and the physics are a lot more floaty, it feels like it just doesn’t work. Put all this together, and you’re once again left with a fight that feels like it just boils down to “win the damage race”, which sucks, because in concept and design, Ballade is incredibly cool, but his fight definitely needed some more time in the oven before coming out. After you do inevitably win the damage race, you can move on to the endgame, but before we do, I’d quickly like to discuss the section that comes directly after this. After beating Ballade and getting the Ballade Cracker, you’re then thrust into a chase sequence. The ground behind you is breaking apart and you need to get past a ton of exploding missiles before you fall to your doom, preferably by using Ballade Cracker. However, because you’re so focused on moving as much as you can, and the missiles are basically clustered together, you’ll often end up taking damage from the blast radius. Plus, the layout of the room and the missiles are just really awkward to work with. Your best bet is typically switching between Pharaoh Shot, Ballade Cracker, and the buster, as those are your three best tools to work with when dealing with them. Still, this section really isn’t that fun to go through, and most importantly, just doesn’t feel necessary in the first place. Why even have a chase sequence here? Honestly, if there was one section I’d cut from the game, it’d probably be this. Thankfully, it is pretty short, and after all that’s said and done, we can finally move on to Mega Man World 4’s endgame.

I don’t have too much to say about Mega Man World 4’s endgame since it is pretty short, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Barring the two terrible Met cannon minibosses at the start, the Wily stages felt like what classic Mega Man end game stages should feel like. A gauntlet of everything you’ve learned so far, putting your weapon skills and reflexes to the test before finally facing off against the main man himself, Wily. Like I said, this endgame stage is pretty short, so you won’t have much time to test out your newly acquired Ballade Cracker (and no, the chase sequence does NOT mitigate this). I would’ve added a bit more to this stage, but other than that, it’s a pretty well done endgame stage, even if I don’t have much to say about it. After getting through the obligatory robot master rematches, you can finally reach Dr. Wily himself, and face off against one of the coolest Wily fights in the series. See, rather than just using your standard Wily machine, Wily decided to bring out the big guns, and you’re left facing a huge ass robot, which is just one of the coolest concepts for a Wily boss I’ve ever seen. The fight itself is also pretty fun too. The first phase, where you fight the robot’s chest, can kinda catch you off guard with how fast its hands come out, but once you start to get mentally prepared for when they come, you’ll be able to overcome it. Next up, you face off against the head, and it’s quite a bit easier than the chest phase, but it’s still pretty fun and creative, requiring that you shoot him while his mouth sucks you in. After you’ve beaten that, now it’s time for the final phase. You follow Wily into another room- aaand it’s just another Wily capsule. This is probably the lamest of the three forms, plus it requires you to use a special weapon to beat it, which I’m never too keen on. I don’t dislike it at all, but it’s pretty easy, especially if you use Pharaoh Shot to beat it. After you do, you get a cutscene escaping Wily’s fortress, Ballade sacrifices himself to save you, and then the game’s over. You just beat Mega Man World 4!

Man, I had a lot more to say about this Game Boy Mega Man game than I initially thought. I guess I just really like talking about classic Mega Man, so I guess in a way, this was probably the perfect game to get me back into Backloggd reviews. I had a really fun time with this one. It’s not anything super special, and yeah, it has a ton of strange flaws, but not only is it pretty well-designed, but it’s also quite creative for what they had to work with. You can really tell there was a strong desire to make something more original out of these Game Boy Mega Man games, and that would show when they’d release Mega Man World 5 soon after. And even though I’d typically recommend that game if you were to only ever play a single Game Boy Mega Man, I still wouldn’t overlook this Game Boy gem either. Even if you’ve played Mega Man 4 or 5 a lot, I can still say there’d probably be something here that you’d enjoy. (7/10)

I always do my best to finish the games I review, and while there are some that I may have taken the easy way out, very few are entries that I have given up on. Echoic Memory is not one of those games. I really wanted to finish this game, as it's a somewhat interesting concept for a game and the visuals are genuinely really well done. However, this game is an absolute slog to play. It's an auditory matching game. The game plays a several second-long audio clip, and you need to identify which of the four to sixteen samples matches it. Many of these tracks only vary slightly from each other, making the choice difficult. If the game had stopped there, this would've been an enjoyable, if routine game. What makes this game awful is that the audio tracks are all... shifted? corrupted? altered? in some way. By turning the crank, these changes are undone and you can try and "tune into" the actual audio. This mechanic simply does not work. It's very unclear, at least to a musical layperson, what turning the crank is actually doing, so I have no idea how far or which way the crank should actually be turned to restore the audio to its clean state. There are some entire levels that no matter what I did, I didn't end up with anywhere close to the clean audio tracks, which makes distinguishing the differences between them an exercise in futility. The game only gives you three mistakes per level and, even worse, there's a time limit. I really strove to finish this one, but got to the point where I was dreading playing it so much that I was avoiding my Playdate altogether. In fairness to the other games then, I will throw in the towel on this one and move on with my life. It's a shame too, this is one of the better looking Playdate games, and there's a fairly interesting story about a new worker attempting to fix these machines who are clearly growing in sentience. My guess is that there's ghosts in the shell, but I guess I'll never find out.

The game is pretty bad. It doesn't give the vibe you might expect, has a tedious way of maneuvering and their idea of "hardcore" is just unwieldy insta-death gameplay with no clear route. Mainly it's an avenue for tiddies, and while I can respect that, there's much better ways to execute and get a horny game that doesnt feel shitty to play. I will look into 2 when it comes along to see if anything is better about it, as there was maybe one or two fun parts to this.

Edit 2024: yeah I'm probably not going to check out Haydee 2 lmao