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Last Topic's Ratings:
Apocalypse - AGAGAA - 67% (6)
Cool Boarders - BBBAABA - 21% (7)
Formula 1 - GGAAAG - 75% (6)
G Darius - GGGGGAGGGGG - 95% (11) (3 SR)
Gun Shooting, The - AA - 50% (2)
Ore no Ryouri - GG - 100% (2) (1 SR)
I'm glad to see the Japanese games continuing to get at least a few votes, but I really think more people should try out Ore no Ryouri when they have time. To me, this is the kind of game that these topics exist to find. Cool to see the turnout for G Darius as well.
Games for this topic:
Black Bass with Blue Marlin
Disney's Hercules
Echo Night
Eggs of Steel
Magic Carpet
Test Drive 4
Disney's Hercules is sometimes called "Disney's Hercules Action Game". As far as I can tell, they are identical and the game was simply released under two different names. Beyond that, I'm curious to see how Test Drive 4 compares to NFS1, as I recall there being something of a rivalry between the two franchises in the old days.
Black Bass with Blue Marlin - B
ReplyDeleteDisney's Hercules - A
Echo Night - G
Eggs of Steel - A
Magic Carpet - A
Test Drive 4 - B
I disagree with Bloodpump's assessment of Black Bass with Blue Marlin - I do like Fishing games and I still think this game sucks. The main problem here (as with the NES games this is based on) is that landing a fish takes forever. In the Black Bass mode, you'll play Lure fishing, but your lure has to be like 2 inches away from a fish for them to even notice, and even then they're very picky about biting. The Blue Marlin mode is a little easier, here you just troll around in your boat and sometimes fish will bite, but even then it takes a while. When you finally do land a fish, the fishing is competent but not too exciting, it's very similar to River King / Nushi Tsuri where you have line tension and you can reel, the goal is just not to reel when the fish is running. More modern fishing games have realized that the key to making fishing fun is to simplify the act of actually landing a fish, and they really blow these earlier games away in terms of playability. The River King series seemed to be about the only one that got it right in the old days.
Hercules has a fantastic sense of style to it, even now it's probably one of the best-looking 2D platformers I've ever seen. The animations are great, not just for characters but for the backgrounds as well, which have a neat sense of depth to them, enemies sometimes pop in and out of the foreground layers and you can sometimes move between them as well. There's also great use of colour and voice work, the whole game just pops very nicely. Even the password screen is quite elaborate and has a lot more detail than you'd usually expect. Unfortunately, the one thing that brings the game down to some degree is the controls. There just seems to be a little bit of slowness or delay to most actions in the game, which results in a lot of cheap hits. Luckily, our man Herc has quite a few of them to give, and he also has access to special actions that you can use to wipe the screen with relative safety, but the core swordplay is kind of subpar. It might still be worth playing through it once anyway because it's quite a visual treat.
I was looking forward to trying out Echo Night, and for the most part it doesn't disappoint. It's a sort of light horror adventure game, you'll be exploring various areas from a first person perspective to solve puzzles and unravel the mystery of your father's disappearance. The controls are a bit sluggish and the areas are a bit claustrophobic, but I feel this actually works to the game's advantage to some degree as it helps create a feeling of tension (I wonder if old horror games deliberately had somewhat clunky controls to make you feel panicky during action segments, ala the old "can't get the key in the door" trope). Besides solving puzzles, your other main objective is not to get murdered by ghosts as you explore the areas in the game. This game really makes you hate dark areas, because whenever it's dark, ghosts can attack you. This can usually be remedied by turning on the lights, but in many cases the light switches will either be far away or inoperable until some puzzle is solved. The game has some legitimately tense moments in dark areas, but once the lights are successfully turned on there is generally little danger, which is why I'd tend to call this a "light horror" game. There were many situations where I was expecting to get a jump scare, like after crawling to the end of a dark tunnel or after picking up a key item, but the game is surprisingly reserved in that regard, so if you find regular horror games to be too stressful you might be able to stomach this one. It's not a terribly long game and the plot can be a little convoluted at times, but it's still an interesting game to play. I'm surprised this doesn't get talked about more.
Eggs of Steel is a weird game. By far the most notable thing about it is that it has a TON of cutscenes. Besides the lengthy intro cutscene, there's also a cutscene inbetween every level segment (in fact, it seems to use these scenes to hide load times, as you have to wait for the game to load if you skip them, which is an interesting idea). The game itself is less remarkable though. It's a 3D platformer viewed from a fixed perspective, similar to that Hugo game we looked at, but the perspective never shifts and frequently makes it hard to gauge jumps here. As we know from Crash Bandicoot, judging the exact position of a platform floating over a black void is often impossible, and you'll be doing that a fair bit in this game. At least you have lots of lives and for the most part checkpoints are plentiful.
DeleteMagic Carpet definitely isn't what I expected. I thought it was going to be a flying game, like Starfox, but it's actually a hybrid of that plus a strategy game. The goal of the game is mainly to shoot enemies, flag the little balls that come out, and build up a castle to store that energy, but there's a fair bit of nuance to it. You get a lot of different spells and there are rival wizards who are attempting to achieve the same goal, so you'll have to act fast. It's a pretty unique concept, the only real issue is the controls. You have to switch spells almost constantly in this game, but it's assigned to a fairly cumbersome action of using L1 to pull up a menu, then selecting the spell you want with the dpad (time does not stop while doing this). On the PC version, you can use 0-9, which is clearly way easier. The PC version also has multiplayer, which this version doesn't, but it's otherwise a very serviceable port. I just wish they had put a little more thought into assigning spells, for example some kind of system using the right stick to select them (perhaps using a wheel interface) might have gone a long way.
Test Drive 4 is not terrible, in particular it's a huge step up from NFS1, it looks vastly better and also has much better controls, but unfortunately, as BarbaricAvatar pointed out, it came out after NFS2, not NFS1, and it has a much harder time with that comparison. While its graphics hold up, its handling definitely doesn't, being a bit stiff and having very questionable powerslide mechanics, and I also feel that there's a fair bit too much traffic, which when combined with the somewhat spotty handling can make for a frustrating experience. In some sense, Test Drive 4 basically feels like the last of the early 3D Racing games, it took a little while for some of them to find their footing (besides NFS1, Wipeout 1 and the original Ridge Racer also have somewhat questionable controls), however this period was very short and by late 1997 we were starting to see a number of very solid racing games coming out that provide very tough competition for this game. I wavered between A and B on this title as it is still mostly playable, but I think the issue is that there's so many good racing games this gen (seriously, there's tons) that it gets pushed down into B. It's sort of like how some perfectly playable shmups on Genesis ended up with B simply because the competition there was so strong.