This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Black Bass with Blue Marlin - BBAB - 13% (4)
Disney's Hercules - ABABBBBAB - 17% (9)
Echo Night - AGGGG - 90% (5)
Eggs of Steel - AAA - 50% (3)
Magic Carpet - GAGAA - 70% (5)
Test Drive 4 - ABBAAAB - 29% (7)
I was a bit worried at the beginning, but the ratings for this one really came on towards the end.
Games for this topic:
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes
Blast Chamber
Dengeki Construction
Jeremy McGrath Supercross 98
Wild Arms
WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game
I've never played any of the Army Men games, but apparently there's a thousand of them. See the Gamefaqs thread for a bit more about Dengeki Construction.
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes - A
ReplyDeleteBlast Chamber - B
Dengeki Construction - A
Jeremy McGrath Supercross 98 - B
Wild Arms - G
WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game - G
Sarge's Heroes is actually much better than I expected. The gameplay is generally decent, the story is charming and funny, and the overall production values are fairly solid. The game does have a few flaws though. For starters, the draw distance is atrocious. This is kind of accepted in most early 3D games but it's particularly problematic here because the effective firing range is larger than you can actually see, I would often have shootouts with enemies or even tanks that were offscreen. Secondly, the game is overall pretty simple. Even though the game does have mission objectives most of them are almost totally linear, except for the escort missions which can be annoying due to the suicidal AI. You do have the option for manual aim and prone, but these are useless, the optimal way to play is just to strafe back and forth and let the autoaim hit enemies for you, which almost makes it feel more like an action game than a shooter. Still, it was actually decently fun to play for the most part and the levels that take place in the "real world" are a particular highlight.
On the contrary, I feel like Blast Chamber is actually much less good than I expected. The game is divided into two modes, a puzzle mode and a versus mode, though both fundamentally rely on the same gimmick of rotating the stage to get the crystal into a reactor before you explode. The biggest problem with the game in both modes is that the rotation mechanic is so simple that their ability to craft interesting puzzles is very limited, so the game quickly starts to rely on obnoxious hazards that require excellent timing to pass. These usually instantly kill you, thus trivializing the timer aspect of the game, even in multiplayer if you touch a hazard you're eliminated instantly, making it more a game of avoiding the hazards than anything else. The multiplayer mode is also overly simple, you mainly just spam the punch to knock people down and hope you don't get knocked down, there's not really any depth to it.
Despite having a somewhat similar interface, Dengeki Construction is actually quite a bit different from RPG Maker and Dezaemon. Compared to those tools, it's way easier to use, which is good, but unfortunately it's also much less powerful. Basically, with this game you're going to be making variants of Puyo Puyo or Columns and that's about it. It's not possible to make Tetris (because you can't have blocks of different shapes), let alone something like Tetris Attack or Magical Drop. I feel like this is especially problematic since puzzle games don't really have a lot of focus on story or art, it's pretty much exclusively the mechanics that defines a puzzle game, and Puyo Puyo already lets you change the number of pieces needed for a match. Even back when this game was released, I was already making my own little puzzle games in Visual Basic, and these days Unity is a far superior tool to any game maker, but I did still have a little bit of fun playing around with it and playing the games that I made. I suppose worst case the fact that you're basically getting Puyo Puyo and a couple other simple puzzle games in one package means it can't be that terrible as far as value is concerned.
Jeremy McGrath Supercross has 2 major problems that pretty much instantly cement it as B. First, the physics are really bad. They've borrowed Formula 1's collision physics where even getting close to someone slows you down, including when they approach from behind, and this is totally obnoxious when combined with the severe rubber banding. There's also the fact that no matter how well you land from a jump, you lose a ton of speed, so this game makes you want to avoid air as much as possible, which is the opposite of how a motocross game should be. Secondly, the game has only 3 tracks. There is a track editor, which is decent, but it's not enough to redeem the rest of the game.
DeleteWild Arms is a very solid game. It reminds me very heavily of Lufia 2. Like that game, it features puzzles in its dungeons (though they tend to be a bit simpler) and it also has a pseudo limit break system (though it's more prominent than it was in that game). The story is also well-written (some people might see the fact that there are only 3 main characters as a flaw, but actually I like the fact that this gives them more time to develop those characters) and the soundtrack is very good. The only downside is the graphics, which are just okay. The Lufia 2 comparison works here too, because the game basically looks like a SNES game, except for its 3D battles which are functional but ugly. Still, if you like older RPGs it's a very competent and charming game. That should really be enough said about it, but I'm sure someone is going to say "but how does it compare to FF7?" because due to the close proximity of its release date this question has always been unavoidable. The answer is that while Wild Arms was a competent and fun game, it wasn't really a huge step forward for RPGs the way FF7 was. Compared to sprite-based games, FF7's prerendered backgrounds allowed for much greater detail, giving areas a level of personality and character that wasn't possible before. FF7 is also more cinematic and its customization is probably a bit better. Despite this, Wild Arms is still one of the better PS1 RPGs. If it was a SNES game, it would have been one of the best SNES RPGs.
I always liked Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, but for a lot of years I couldn't remember what game it actually was, I had found the SNES version but I knew it had 8 characters so I didn't think it was that, it didn't occur to me that the version I played was actually the PS1 version. Anyway, this is a great game, it's somewhat closer to a fighting game, with motion activated specials and combos, similar to Saturday Night Slam Masters, though it's even faster and crazier compared to that game. Compared to the 32X version, this version is a bit more zoomed out, which lets you see more of the field but tends to obscure a bit of the detail, and there's also short loading times, but otherwise they're very comparable.