You know shit hit the fan when you unlocked the poop emoji.

buzzing sound of LAUGH sign echoing through the theather, a single cough is heard in the audience

I had a modicum amount of fun? playing this travesty back in 2016 when a friend of mine was unironically pumping hundreds of hours on this game, just to stop right as I started playing. Huhhh checks notes you could be playing worse, I guess.

frantically reads through the script Is that it?

paper noise

The objective like many .io games is to get as many collectibles avoiding your bigger opponents whom may just eat you alive the second they touch the flashing orb. So this is like Pacman, but playing with other players? turns over the piece of paper Look there's only an hint to make a poop joke here, I don't even know if you're actually playing with other people. This game came out just as emoji were starting to trend, but did they? I mean, unironically? I remember people howling when the emoji movie came out and it got mocked to death, but sigh at this point this farce of a review doesn't really make any sense. So yeah, emoj.io. Cool name throws away notes that's it, alright cool, see you next time at petro_sino sham reviews, where I'm your host, always a click away from a serotonine hit. Ciao ciao.

mic drop

APPLAUSE sign flickers

It's incredible how as soon as the Super Nintendo was hitting the shelves, so many good games would come out. Actraiser is the most original experience of them all, mixing city management and platforming, as a God nonetheless. It's got soul and love poured into it like very few games and you can see it from its spritework, its music, its tight design and gameplay.

My only sour note is that the controls can feel stiff and it can get exhausting in the end when you've got to fight all bosses one after the other. Yet, Actraiser is able to sow a plotline like no other through gameplay alone, somber and inspiring; it always feels good to start the game, hear the first notes of Fillmore and getting back to business.

Final Fantasy Tactics is dearly beloved for a lot of reasons by many, still subject to modding and new character builds every so often. It's simply good, from the flow of combat to the great storyline and character development. It ticks many boxes, from customizing your team to actually giving you the means to break the game - and be broken. The game is unfair at times, but I can't really hold it against it since it's very open about it. Not only that, but the game is beautiful, the sprites are colorful and detailed, stages and cutscenes look incredible and thanks to great sound, both soundtrack and design, immersion is guaranteed. What I can tell you that I don't like is the uneven difficulty curve, the way progression is handled (looking at you, Wiegraf) and random encounters not being fair, but it's small things I reckon.

Simply put, I love this game, it came to me as a revelation, it made me realize that videogames could tell stories, good ones at that. They could mean something more than simple entertainment. I don't recommend the PSP port for several nitpicky reasons, but if you can you should get The Lion War and other mods from the boys, gals and meteor chugging chocobos at ffhacktics dot com.

I love and hate this game, for what it was, back when I used to play on community servers, for what it will be, thanks to a predatory monetary system, for the experience, from the extremely deep movement strats to its special fanbase ... I've lived a big chunk of my life playing this game, at times religiously, at times every so often, but always willing to "get in a pub". It's a lifestyle, at a certain point.

I've met friends, I've made unforgettable memories and it will always be that comfort game where, if I ever lost the will to play videogames, will remind me what experiencing joy while gaming means.

Then to be killed from half the map away from a bot, that's another story for another time.

Cute platformer that takes a lot of lessons from the older games of the series compared to its most successful 3D iterations, The Fallen King is able to add some context to the story of PoP 2008 (how many times has Ubisoft rebooted Prince of Persia? We'll never know).

Presentation aside which is fair but not stellar, sometimes the game looks ugly as well, yet the atmosphere and the gameplay add a lot of tension and weight to the game. Sadly, there is no replayability, once the game is cleared there is no reason to get back to it.

Played a lot of it when I was a kid, I wasn't left as impressed as I thought I would've been. You have to be a fan of PoP 2008, 2D platformers and DS jank games to enjoy this.

Cel shading makes this game a prime example of how good design thriumps over graphics, it's been fifteen years and this game looks incredible as the first day I've played it back in the day.

Prince of Persia didn't look so good after Assassin's Creed took its spot as Ubisoft's breadwinner worldwide, so they had to reinvent themselves. If Two Thrones was a witty and fun game, 2008 had to be something else.

Cinematic experience, baybee

Despite half of the game playing itself and no game over, it looks incredible. That's about it? It's short, sweet and looks and feels incredible to play, but at the heart of it, there's no real substance. I love the idea of playing this game, solving its puzzles and platforming, which are rewarding, mind you. Simply put, a somewhat repetitive combat laced with QTEs and an asinine ending, locked behind a DLC, ruined the enjoyment for me.

Despite that, Prince of Persia 2008 was a success. What gives that it was abandoned? Ubisoft failed to use its success and it was left then and there, letting the sands fall where they may. A movie, rebooting the saga? Forgotten Sands, rebooting again the saga? At a certain point, it was enough and it seems like Ubisoft doesn't want to use this IP anymore.

Played a long time ago with my brother back in summer, despite feeling nostalgic about Battles of Prince of Persia, the game is at best a different take on the Prince of Persia sweep that took place in the 00s, at worst it's a simple rock-paper-scissors card game with tactical implications.

The game can be fun and the card system is interesting, especially for the time it came out. Not only that, but not only we have a weapons triangle system (Fire Emblem? In my GAMES??? How dare they), we also have a size triangle system: as bows beat lances and lances beat swords, middle sized units (cavalry) beat small sized units (infantry) which in turn beat huge sized units (giants, elephants). It creates a fun dynamic where a unit of small swordsmen can overcome a huge pain in the butt in the form of a giant (archer unit) for the cavalry (middle sized lance units).

It is harder to explain than to try out, but if you like Prince of Persia and tactical games, it's something check out. Definitely different.

Played this for years up until I was able to beat it, just for the HD collection to drop. The game is old, yes, but it's one of the best and most straight-foward dungeon crawler games out there. I am probably its only fan in a 100km radius and that's fine, the game is not for everyone, yet its art and narrative-free story kept me hooked, curiosity (which definitely killed the cat more than a couple of times) leading the way.

Is it hard? Yes, but it's fair.
Everytime you'll die, you'll figure it was something you hadn't planned for, your resources weren't managed carefully, sometimes it's just dumb luck saving or dooming your party. That's why you always take two Ariadne Threads with you! One for usage, the other just in case you forgot to replace the other you bought. It can be obtuse at times and the other games have a lot of things to offer, but I still come back to the first game's soul.

With all due respect, pulling characters was already mind-numbingly tedious, but then they had to put natures like in Pokémon. Yeah, it's tedious in those games, but here it's probably worse. Some fun builds here and there and I could finally mix and match my teams, but it's grindy to a fault. Good set pieces aside, I don't love the story since it's always fallen into the "Oh no new enemy, we can't beat it, oh snap there's a fundamentally weak point we can exploit, we exploited it! Hooray!" category, which is too close for comfort to the Awakening experience. I am done.

Wow I hated this. I mean I loved how petty this DLC was designed and I wish to never play something as diabolical and evil again. I never felt as moronic as playing Hell Loop, maybe topped only by Baba is you.

Some challenges require you to be pixel precise with your controls, some require heavy amounts of backtracking, others require heavy micromanaging, most require all three to beat; at a certain point I was asking myself if I really wanted to put myself through it. Recommended only if you love this game and you really want to be tested.

One of the only saving graces and reasons to get a Wii U, Mario Kart 8 is a serviceable MK with a good roster and a competent tracklist, nothing culturally ground breaking like DS, Wii or Double Dash. I'll get back to MK 8 in the Deluxe review, since it blows it out of the water, rightfully so, when 8 became the quintessential MK experience (I don't agree with the statement, I just know they milked it three years after porting it to Switch to sell the mobile game but it backfired and now 8 has many more players, weird move but ok).

Let's just say that, for the time, it was an incredibly good looking and fun, yet niche game because of existing on the platform no one bought. Maps are serviceable and the new antigravity theme is an alright gimmick used sparingly in the base game compared to now.

The first booster tracks look very bad though and battle mode is unfinished. This review is also a joke, more of a canvas for the massive Deluxe deluge coming right after.

I have mixed feelings for Vanaris Tactics. On one hand, I respect any developer able to do the Final Fantasy Tactics formula justice, since the tactical part of the game is easily its most successful part. On the other hand there are some small blemishes that make me unsure to recommend the game. I'll list a few:

- the game is dominated by green, grey and brown tones. The spritework is nice, but the colors don't give it any love.
- the UI takes a lot of space and the action is very zoomed in, at the same time you cannot move the camera without using the movement keys on your keyboard, defeating the purpose of having a cursor sensitivity. Just stick to controller or keyboard.
- the music does its job, some tracks are quite nice. Special effects are noisy so I recommend tuning them down in the options.
- the story, one of the pillars of its marketing, has an interesting premise and its characters are colorful, yet in its 4-8 hours of runtime, it struggles to give reason for much of what's happening, making sense just at the beginning and then at the end. Half of the time battles are initiated because you happened to walk on someone stealing cookies in a jar and now they want you dead.

Anyways I feel like the game has a lot of soul and would've been perfectly viable if not for small issues like these; it apparently crashes a lot, but in my case it only happened twice, so remember to save your game! The gameplay alone is solid enough for me to recommend the game to any (and maybe only to) SRPG fans.