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Gamefaqs Link
Games for this topic:
Battle Arena Toshinden
NBA Jam TE
Nekketsu Oyako
Raiden Project, The
Rayman
Wipeout
Playstation begins! For the start of GAB About Games for PS1, I figured we'd take a look at some of Playstation's launch titles. One thing you'll notice is that we've got some of the games from the Japanese and European launches as well. We'll be covering games from all regions wherever possible (generally, when either a translation exists or the Japanese knowledge needed to play the game isn't significant). Since Playstation has a LOT of import games, it makes sense to get started on them right away. If you're new to GAB and need any more information on how the process works, you can post your questions here, I'm sure myself or one of the other posters can help you out.
Battle Arena Toshinden - A
ReplyDeleteNBA Jam TE - G
Nekketsu Oyako - G
Raiden Project, The - G
Rayman - G
Wipeout - A
Battle Arena Toshinden is a basic but functional 3D fighter. Probably the thing that stands out the most about it is that it's very floaty, which also makes it feel a bit stiff. Other than this though it's generally competent, cancelling from normals to specials works as you'd expect (though the motions for many of the games super and secret moves are obnoxious), and the side roll move works pretty well. Of particular note is the music, which is excellent. I suspected the game had the same composer as Choro Q (one of my favourite PS1 games) as it was also developed by Tamsoft, so I checked out that game's credits and indeed, Yasuhiro Nakano does the music for both games. Obviously this shows its age compared to modern fighters, but it would have done its job well enough at launch.
NBA Jam TE is very similar to most other versions of the game. Compared to SNES and Genesis, the most obvious change is increased visual fidelity. The digitized faces of the players are much clearer here, which is very obvious whenever they're looking towards the camera, which arguably gives the game a slightly goofier look. There are also additional sound effects, commentator quotes, and music (compared to the no-music SNES version). The main drawback here is that there's some load times, though they're not too terrible. Overall, this game is still as hilarious and instantly engaging as it is on the other platforms, and is definitely worth picking up if you don't have any other version of the game.
I was actually quite surprised by Nekketsu Oyako. It's basically a Streets of Rage-style beat-em-up, and graphically it looks almost no different from them apart from a couple nifty sprite scaling effects, but IMO the gameplay is actually somewhat better than the SoR games. Like SoR, it has motion-activated special moves, but this game is fairly unique in terms of how much freedom you're given with them, as they can be activated at almost any time, including using them to cancel other moves. The game is also very lenient with grabs, which can lead to a lot of fun setups. For example, with the first character, you can perform the forward forward square dash attack, then cancel the second hit into his rushing uppercut with QCF + Square, then catch the enemy in midair for a piledriver with good positioning. It's a fairly basic game overall (it only has one attack button, for starters), but it's pretty fun and I felt it didn't get repetitive as quickly as some similar games do.
There's not really a ton to say about The Raiden Project. It's basically an arcade-perfect conversion of Raiden 1 and 2. The Raiden games are fairly basic vertical shmups with a simple weapon system and 2P-S, but I've always enjoyed the series. It's nothing revolutionary but it's a solid game with a stable framerate and good clean visuals. It's kind of borderline between A and G, but the fact that there's no other console port of Raiden 2 pushes me a bit more towards G.
DeleteRayman is a gorgeous game, even all these years later it's still very visually impressive. Apart from the lack of HD, I think this can stand up against pretty much any platformer ever made in the graphics department. Obviously the main stage visuals are amazing, but it also has excellent animation and character design as well, for example I like how everything is alive in the band stages. There's just a lot of nice little touches that make the game very pleasing to look at. Gameplay-wise it's competent, there's a decent variety in stage design and Rayman controls well, which is good because the game is quite hard, often requiring near pixel-perfect precision on jumps. Probably the biggest issue is load times, the stages are broken up into small little pieces, and it has to load between each one, which does get annoying after a while, especially while trying to hunt down electoons, which are often very well hidden. I always used to think the sequel was the better game, I'm curious to see if my opinion will remain that way when I play it again.
It's funny, in a certain sense I feel like Wipeout is probably the most impressive of the games in this topic, but it's also the one I'm giving the lowest score. Wipeout is impressively fast and has a solid volume of content, especially for a launch title. However, at the same time, parts of it feel a little rough. Cornering is a little wonky, the ships bounce around too much, there's no energy meter yet, and rivals hit by weapons don't yet shunt off to the side the way they do in later games so I usually end up rear-ending them. It's a solid first effort and I'm kind of impressed at how much was there even at the start, but Wipeout XL is such a massive improvement that I can't give it a G in good conscience, even though I would have recommended it at launch.