Title: Double Dragon Revive
Platform: PS5

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps5/474238-double-dragon-revive/data

Honestly, I love it. I got tired of my choices being (sometimes bad) photorealism, anime, and pixel. Worse is stock imagery used in a lot of first-person horror games on Steam. It just makes a game feel soulless.

"The game features an art style that has become all the craze lately with horror games: 32-bit aesthetic."

Understandable, and I am glad they are trying this, considering how miserably unrealistic and ugly the "realism" provided by the most advanced graphics in our day can be.

thank you :-)

I'm not much of a talker on this website these days, I'm more focused on writing reviews than anything else. However, welcome to the site! Hope you enjoy your stay.

Good review!

Using sex to sell retro 2D platformers isn't all that new, actually -- the Shantae series does it, starting with the first game back in 2002. Those are actually good games, though.

One day, I probably will...

and i want to feel welcomed - welcome me fellow writers and lets go to the pub together (^-^)

Rusty, you say? It sounds like you need to review Rusty Lake Hotel, Joe!

I struggled to get one, too. My tagline game has gotten rusty.

Thank you! One day, I will actually play The Cat Lady. One day. I keep getting up the desire to do so, then losing it.

10/10 tagline.

Maybe if I finally play Dragon's Revenge I'll have two at a time.

You make a good point. However, mushroom power-ups could be carried between levels if you could avoid getting hit, which wasn't true in SMB2. I'd actually forgotten that it wasn't possible to carry it between levels.

Thank you.

"This marks the first time that it is possible to miss beneficial upgrades in a Mario series title."

I'm not quite sure what you mean there. The mushrooms only upgrade your life meter until the end of the current stage. The coins let you get extra lives in the mini-game, but that's not unusual. Neither represents a significant diversion from what came before. In the first game, you could miss all sorts of power-ups if you didn't hit the right blocks. You also couldn't scroll the screen back to the left, so exploration was more linear and items were even more likely to get missed.

Do you have the balls to-- well, no. Just the one at a time.

Good tagline - I understood that reference.

Before berating you for still not having played Cat Lady after I've championed it for a decade, I'll talk about Downfall. I played the original game of this a little after my first run though Cat Lady and, honestly, I prefer that version to this one. It's a lot more raw and scratchy and isn't trying to retroactively fit itself into a trilogy it wasn't originally designed for. It also sidesteps the voice acting which is... often not great. I'd say go back and give it a go once this game has faded from memory a bit, but I can't even convince you to play the best indie game on the market, so what chance I?

It's a very good review. Thank you for writing it so I feel less bad about never doing so after covering the rest of the series.

It never even comes close to reaching Top Gear, but I don't think the chief reason it the bumper car effect. The challenge in the SNES precursors (only the first of those three was a game worth playing, however) is mollified and stultified, clearly from a view of the average player (or buyer!) like that of LLMs opening every answer they give with "Your question is a brilliant one" and "learning apps" showing a flashy writing on screen that "You are doing great. Very well!" after every not-too-wrong answer you give.

Except if the player commits not to end within the first 3, it is very hard not to end a race in the first three. I am so annoyed at this game being much worse than it could easily have been only due to deliberate design choices that I may write a full review over it.

The problem with all this releases and products is that they very seldom match, let alone out-do, their older models, except for people of this age who call every earnestness and respect of the player on the part of a game as a "QoL lack", "frustrating" and the like names.

I got *Horizon Chase* days ago, and it falls short of its source material, *Top Gear*/*Top Racer*, and mostly it does due to intentional design, such as the adopted imperative to make sure any player will rank in the first three in every race, except if they deliberate to park their car till a race's end, and other more infantilizing "incentives to play".

I haven't tried this specific *Castlevania*, nor I am going to, but all new instalments in old glory franchises over the at least last 10 years, together with remakes, and "upgrades", have simplified, toned down, and done that betraying the rich soul of the originals, or they have been plainly uninspired, and when you try 10 of them and encounter no exception to this rule, you may decide to stop giving them a chance (after all, who can claim to have played, for real, all the old ones? This leaves adoption of new-old releases as a fashion-following exercise, and nothing more than that, in my view. New is the best option for really new IP and games, and only those).

What was intended as a comment turned into a short blog post, left in the comments, lol.

Thanks; that will work even better for me because now, there's no chance it will be placed under Mafia III: Definitive Edition!