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Last Topic's Ratings:
Croc - BAAAAA - 42% (6)
Destrega - GGGG - 100% (4)
Engacho - AA - 50% (2)
Hot Wheels Turbo Racing - AABAAB - 33% (6)
Last Report, The - BB - 0% (2)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 4 - B - 0% (1)
It's funny how it's almost always the case that the game I'm looking forward to trying out doesn't end up being very good, and the game I think won't be very good ends up being a hidden gem. That's why playing every game is the only way to know for sure.
Games for this topic:
Alien Trilogy
Cindy's Caribbean Holiday
IHRA Drag Racing
Kirikou
Strikers 1945 2
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
Kirikou looks like an interesting title. Also, obviously, we have one of the most iconic PS1 franchises here in THPS.
Alien Trilogy - A
ReplyDeleteCindy's Caribbean Holiday - B
IHRA Drag Racing - B
Kirikou - G (SR)
Strikers 1945 2 - G
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater - G
As noted by others, Alien Trilogy is basically Alien-flavoured Doom. I sort of get why they did it, but the main thing that sticks out about this game to me is that it's way too damn dark. It'd be one thing if you had a flashlight or something, but it's kind of absurd when 90% of the gameplay involves trying to distinguish one shade of black from another. Beyond that what's here is fairly decent, in particular the music is quite well done and the automapper is handy, just make sure you turn the gamma way up.
Unsurprisingly, Cindy's Caribbean Holiday is extremely bad. It's basically an extremely basic minigame collection, there are 5 vaguely beach-themed minigames, but really there's only 3 different ones, a hidden object hunt, a visual customization game, and a falling fruit catcher. I was able to complete all of them in like 10 minutes (a lot of which was load time), and suffice it to say that none of them are fun or have any replay value. Beyond this, the music and voice acting are also terrible. All 3 girls have the exact same voice, just pitched slightly differently, and there's also basically only one music track which is used for everything. To some extent it almost starts to approach funny bad (the minigame-won cutscenes are kind of hilarious, particularly how Cindy's voice actor seems to have an aversion to punctuation), but it still in no way justifies playing this game. It's embarrassing how something like Barbie Super Model is far better in every possible respect.
It's funny how after Cindy, IHRA Drag Racing almost seems tolerable, at least it is a proper game, albeit, a very basic one. As you'd probably expect, this is a pure drag racing game, so pretty much the entire game is hitting the gas at the right time and maintaining control of your car. Every time you win races, you get money that you can use to buy better parts, so there is a bit of progression here, but it seems the game matches you up with rivals completely at random, so a lot of the time you'll just get your doors blown off, especially early on. It's playable, but grinding single races over and over until you either get a slow rival or they DQ themselves doesn't really stay interesting for too long.
I was right to be looking forward to Kirikou, it's a hidden gem for sure. For starters, this game has style for days. It's based on a french film about african folk tales, and it's clearly quite faithful to it, not only including some clips from the movie but also completely nailing the visual and musical style, which are both very unique. Like Kirby 64, the environments have depth and the character frequently moves into and out of the foreground or around objects, and there are tons of branching paths and hidden secrets that take advantage of this. But in case you thought it was just a fairly routine platformer with great presentation, it's actually also a surprisingly deep game, with many moves for the protagonist to learn and rewards for finding all of the secrets in each stage. This should definitely be discussed whenever people are talking about PS1's top platformers, if you're a fan of the genre you should definitely check this out. I might end up taking the SR away from this eventually (there's just so many PS1 games that making an SR list is almost impossible) but it's definitely one of my favourite PS1 GAB discoveries so far.
DeleteAs others have noted, the game called "Strikers 1945" in North America is actually "Strikers 1945 2". How confusing. My intention was actually to do the first game, but it looks like most people are reviewing the sequel so I guess we'll do that one this time and the first one another time. Either way, Strikers 1945 2 is a very solid bullet hell shmup. You can really see the improvements the next generation of consoles has brought to this genre, there's tons of stuff going on onscreen, huge bosses, and often hundreds of bullets, but there's no slowdown or flicker any where to be found. There's also a bunch of different planes to use, a charge shot mechanic, and 2P-S. Very solid overall, kind of reminds me of Mars Matrix.
I know some people are saying THPS1 is dated, but I'm not really seeing it, it's still very fun. I really love the design of this game, where you have multiple challenges to attempt in a limited timeframe. If you had infinite time or could only attempt one challenge at a time, the game would be vastly less fun, but the ability to do whatever challenges you can in a single run actually gives it a lot of replay value, as you get better at the game you can accomplish more challenges per run and thus clear the game faster. I'll admit, I actually didn't recognize many of the skateparks here, it seems I was mostly remembering the parks from the second game, but they were still fun and varied. I wish they still made games like this.