This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Air Hockey - BBA - 17% (3)
Arcade's Greatest Hits: Atari Collection 1 - GAA - 67% (3)
Kyuin - A - 50% (1)
Legend of Dragoon - GGGGGGGG - 100% (8)
Moto Racer - AGAAA - 60% (5)
Shockwave Assault - AAG - 67% (3)
It's funny how even after being shortened down, Arcade's Greatest Hits is still a mouthful. I was also a bit surprised to see Legend of Dragoon get a perfect score, it makes me want to see how many of the other big names will stack up (though we may be waiting quite a while for that).
Games for this topic:
40 Winks
Danger Girl
David Beckham Soccer
Myst
Racing
Tekken
I've actually never played Myst before. We also have another game in the always creatively named Simple 1500 series here, though this one was actually released in US with an equally generic title.
40 Winks - G
ReplyDeleteDanger Girl - G
David Beckham Soccer - A
Myst - B
Racing - B
Tekken - B
40 Winks and Swagman may be thematically very similar (so much so that the first thing I checked was if they had the same developer, they don't), but the gameplay is quite different. Where Swagman played kind of like a 2D Rez Evil, 40 Winks is much more in line with Mario 64. While it is clearly not quite on that level, it's still a pretty solid game, with an impressively large number of detailed and varied levels and generally solid production values all around. I actually didn't have much of a problem with this game's controls, I agree that the movement is a little slippery but I adjusted to it fairly fast, there's not a ton of precision platforming required and the attacking hitboxes are pretty generous so it rarely caused me issues. I also greatly appreciated the fact that this game has proper right stick camera control, which is a rarity for this era, that alone gives this game a leg up on many of its competitors. The one beef I have with the game is that it doesn't save your mid-level progress. If you complete a stage but don't collect all the dreamkeys, don't expect the game to remember that the level is complete when you come back, you'll have to recollect all the cogs rather than just being able to walk right through. The same holds true if you go game over, any progress you've made in that stage will be lost. Still, once I knew this was the case I made sure to search each level thoroughly before I left and I didn't generally have many other issues.
Ever wondered what would happen if instead of having James Bond pick up a bunch of hot girls, we just cut out the middleman and made him a hot girl? That's basically the premise behind Danger Girl. It's a third person shooter, but the setup is still very similar to Goldeneye. The game is broken up into distinct missions, where you'll have a some varied mission objectives to complete, generally requiring you to find targets and use various inventory items. You'll also find a ton of different weapons to use, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Auto-aim is available, similar to Sarge's Heroes, though you can also manually aim with triangle and since you have limited health and ammo, landing headshots on unsuspecting enemies is well-rewarded (as is the time-honoured Goldeneye trick of standing behind a door and luring enemies into the room). Some annoyances from Goldeneye also persist, most namely that some of the missions are long and if you die you're starting over from the beginning, but that was pretty much par for the course during this era, shooters didn't hold your hand nearly as much as they do now. One other thing I appreciate is that the game has a pretty good sense of style to it, I enjoy the comic-book esque loading screens and some of the cutscenes and banter are decently funny. I'm really not sure why this one got savaged by reviewers, I guess it was probably just too hard for them.
David Beckham Soccer is a decent game. The presentation is good and it has quite a wealth of options, one I think is particularly interesting is you can play out some famous matches from soccer history. I'm not particularly familiar with them, but it's a neat idea and one I think other sports games could incorporate. Gameplay-wise, comparisons to FIFA are inevitable, and I think FIFA generally wins out. For example, passing control is clearly not as good here. FIFA has a knack for always knowing who you want to pass to, not quite as much so here. They give you an indicator to denote who you'll pass the ball to when you press the button, which is still helpful, but it still feels like I have less control. Speaking of which, one area where the control is particularly weak is on defense. The game switches control between defenders automatically, and while it usually does a good job, it sometimes takes control away from you at odd moments, for example I might be chasing down an opponent with one player, only for the game to suddenly switch me to another player and suddenly find myself running in the wrong direction. I looked quite extensively through the options to see if this can be turned off, but if it can I haven't found it. Overall, it's decent enough, but I think there are better options.
DeletePlaying Myst for the first time, I can definitely see some of the appeal, but I feel that it hasn't aged well.. The art design of the various worlds remains strong, and the lore behind the game is still intriguing and unique, but the method by which you explore it has become very dated. By far the biggest issue with the game is that any time you do anything, be it moving from one scene to another or interacting with almost any element, the game has to load for 0.5-4 seconds. It doesn't sound like much, but it very quickly adds up, especially considering how many screens there are in the game (do we really need like 6 scenes to descend a flight of stairs?). I feel that this is especially bad for a game like this because the constant loading made exploration feel like a chore and made me immediately want to look up puzzle solutions just to cut down on backtracking, which pretty much defeats the point of the game and prevents me from recommending this version on any level. Loading issues aside, while playing this game I'm unable to escape how lame it feels to be restricted to just a handful of still images rather than being able to explore the world with full camera control. Myst may have been groundbreaking for its time, but it's been endlessly duplicated since then, and similar games where you have full 3D movement are commonplace now, in fact there's even a remake called RealMyst that works this way, and it's clearly just a thousand times better to play (you can even opt to play it with the original, screen-based navigation, and everything moves instantly with no annoying load time!). This is clearly an important piece of history, but I can't see any reason why you'd want to play this version anymore, in fact I'd actually recommend avoiding it for new players so you can play the remake without having the puzzle solutions spoiled.
Racing immediately caught my attention because it has the same developer and uses the same engine as the Choro Q series, which I'm very fond of. Since this is clearly much more primitive than Choro Q, my first thought was that this was a kind of lost prequel to the series, that they later massively expanded to make Choro Q, but it turns out it's actually the reverse, this game came out long after even Choro Q3, as a super stripped-down budget release. Obviously, the elephant in the room here is the complete lack of content in the game. Not only is there no car upgrading, but there's only really 2 courses (I did unlock the third course, it's just the 2nd course mirrored, it's not even backwards). For a while, I was considering A, because I feel like there's a good game under here, there's just not enough of it, but in the end it was the speed classes that pushed me down to B. The Amateur class is way too slow, and the Extreme Class can't control for crap (I suspect it has the equivalent of the Devil Engine from Q2 and the first set of tires, so it spins out constantly), which basically leaves the Pro class as the only fun one, which just isn't enough. Just get Choro Q instead, it's so much better in every way. Incidentally, SBNetopir mentioned weird collision issues, I bet this game is reusing Choro Q's collision detection, which would explain why the front and back of your car seems to be intangible - the Choro Qs are much shorter than the cars in this game.
DeleteTekken is very borderline between A and B but due to the abundance of good fighters on PS1 I feel it probably slips into B. The fighting is very sluggish, inputs don't register all that accurately, many combos only link from extremely specific ranges if at all, and there's very little content in the game, with only 8 fighters and basically no other modes to speak of besides 1P and Vs. It might have been somewhat tolerable in its time but with how quickly and dramatically the franchise evolved I can't really see any reason to go back to the first entry.