This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Final Fantasy - AAAGGAGGAA - 70% (10)
Ford Racing - AAGA - 63% (4)
Jumping Flash - AGGGGGAGGGGGG - 92% (13)(1 SR)
Koutetsu Reiiki: Steeldom - AAB - 33% (3)
Pool Hustler - BABB - 13% (4)
Swagman - AAAAG - 60% (5)
A pretty solid topic overall. Ford Racing is one of my favourite discoveries of PS1 GAB so far, I may have to try the PS2 games. FF1 just barely squeaked into the high range.
Games for this topic:
Dangan
Descent
Fox Sports Golf '99
Jet Moto
Super Bubble Pop
Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat
I remember playing Descent a bunch of times on PC through demo discs, but I've never played the full game until now. Also, this will be the first time I've ever touched anything related to Warhammer.
Dangan - B
ReplyDeleteDescent - G
Fox Sports Golf '99 - B
Jet Moto - B
Super Bubble Pop - B
Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat - B
Dangan is a very basic action game. It's viewed from a top down perspective, and you can shoot guns, do melee attacks, and you have a dodge move. The core formula is decent, but the game has, by far, the most obnoxious enemy respawn rate of all time. The second you kill anyone, they will be instantly replaced by another enemy, and you can't move while shooting or attacking, so the clear choice is to just dodge your way through everything, but by the third level or so they're now constantly putting obstructions in your way that you have to shoot a bunch of times to move on and it just becomes insanely frustrating, particularly because you flinch if you get hit by anything. It's sort of close to A, but I feel it's so frustrating and unfun to play while not offering anything noteworthy that it's actually B.
Okay, so apparently I actually never played Descent or I really don't remember it. In any case, it's basically like Doom except you're a plane. The full freedom of movement + visible enemy projectiles means you can dodge enemy fire, which is cool, though many areas in the game are very narrow corridors where this is hardly possible, the handful of large, open areas you get to fight in are definitely my favourite parts of the game. I don't have the aforementioned issue of getting turned around in combat (in fact, I feel that this game's combat is generally easy), the main issue I have is getting lost in the mazelike levels. The game provides a 3D automap, which is essential for progress, but unfortunately it's limited to the pause screen, so you'll often have to pause to check the map every few seconds to find that last door you haven't been to, or when trying to escape after blowing up the core. I feel like this game would have been vastly improved if there could be a "your objective is in this direction" arrow or something. Still, it's pretty neat for its time and some occasional slowdown aside this is a competent port, so it probably barely scrapes out a G.
The thing that stands out most about Fox Sports Golf 99 is the UI. It's absolutely hideous in every regard. The menu screen is a cluttered mess of options and poorly placed buttons, and this clutter and lack of organization extends to the main game as well, where doing things like selecting clubs, judging shot power, and changing cameras is a disorienting mess. The swing meter is also frustratingly fast, similar to a few other very old golf games. When compared to something like Mario Golf (which will come out almost exactly a year later), you can tell just how massively dated this is, it's just such a cleaner and more well-refined package in every way.
Like Wipeout, Jet Moto hasn't quite established its identity yet. The first game just basically feels like "bad wave race". The game is fairly slow, there's a lot of focus on wave mechanics although they are very primitive and cut out at weird times, the grapple mechanic often doesn't work properly and doesn't really seem necessary with the slow speed of the game, and the collision detection is also a bit wonky, often causing unpredictable collisions with walls, floors, and other racers that cost you a lot of time for no real reason. The second game will remedy most of these issues by basically doubling the speed of the game, which, while in some cases making the game almost uncontrollable definitely gives it a more unique identity, and it also brings back all 10 courses from the first game, making owning the original almost totally pointless unless you prefer its physics engine, and I don't see how anyone could.
Super Bubble Pop is a fairly basic puzzle game. It's got some style to it and the idea of having different characters each have different special powers is interesting, but there's one major problem that prevents me from giving the game a good rating. There's a significant degree of delay on your movements, when you press a direction to move to a different column it takes your character a while to actually do the move, and if you press the fire button too early, you'll actually shoot your bubble in the column you're leaving, rather than the column you're moving to. This results in a ton of incorrectly placed shots if you try to play the game with any degree of speed, which is obviously completely terrible for an action puzzler. There's a reason absolutely every other puzzle game of this type has you move between columns instantly, being able to place pieces quickly and accurately is completely essential for the game to be played with any degree of skill.
DeleteI had fears about how an RTS game would control on PS1, but Warhammer is more like an RTS-lite, with you controlling squads of units that act as a whole rather than individual units. Unfortunately, while this should make for a relatively easy time, they still manage to completely screw up the controls here. Even something as simple as selecting a unit and moving them to a location 3 button taps, one to select them, one to confirm that you want to select them, then one to issue the movement order, and even worse, the moment you confirm your selection, your pointer jumps to that unit, so if you want to order 2 units to go to the same place, you have to scroll back to that location after selecting the second unit, which is unforgivable (a strategy game should NEVER move your mouse pointer for you). The cumbersome interface and lack of precision is compounded by the fact that the game is really hard and needs extremely precise unit positioning that the system simply doesn't provide, basically forcing you to memorize the spawn positions of all the enemies and move your units into position ahead of time. The overly tight focus on unit movement and positioning combined with the complete lack of unit creation or base building makes it feel much more like an action game than a strategy one, but it's simply not very fun. It's too bad, because there's clearly been a fair amount of effort put into the lore and there's abundant voice acting and such, but with such a weak game underneath I can't really recommend it.