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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
40 Winks - AAAGAAA - 57% (7)
Danger Girl - AGGGG - 90% (5)
David Beckham Soccer - AA - 50% (2)
Myst - AAGBABAA - 44% (8)
Racing - BBB - 0% (3)
Tekken - BAAAABAABA - 35% (10)
It's nice to see high turnout for obscure games like 40 Winks and Danger Girl. This project wouldn't be possible without all of your hard work.
Games for this topic:
Extra Bright
London Racer
NCAA Football 2001
Megaman X3
Tactics Ogre
Tall Infinity
I have no idea what to expect from Extra Bright, but it looks interesting at least. Also, we have a couple SNES ports here in Megaman X3 and Tactics Ogre.
Extra Bright - G
ReplyDeleteLondon Racer - B
Megaman X3 - A
NCAA Football 2001 - A
Tactics Ogre - A
Tall Infinity - A
Extra Bright is a fairly unique game. It's a rail shooter of sorts, where you drive down a track and shoot things. In addition to your main weapon, you have two sub weapons, which you can choose before each mission (for the first 5 missions, beating each mission unlocks a new one). The sub weapons drain an energy guage, to prevent you from spamming them constantly, but they're usable very often. Beyond this, you have a quick side dodge that is useful for boss fights. It's not a complex game and it can be finished in about an hour, but it's pretty fast-paced and there are branching stages, several difficulty settings, and multiple playable characters, so it has decent replay value. The game is also intersperced with anime cutscenes of fairly decent quality and just seems to have solid production values all around. I'm not sure if I'd call it a hidden gem but it's very solid.
I was a bit worried at first to try London Racer given its atrocious gamefaqs rating, but it's not really quite THAT bad. However, in a number of ways it is somewhat below average, which I think probably does pull it down to B on a system with this many racing games. For starters, the setup of the game is very basic. There's a gauntlet of races to go through, and you can buy upgrades or new cars between each race. That's it. There's no single race mode, no two player support, or anything like that. As for the actual racing, it's competent, but nothing more than that. One thing I noticed immediate was that the road terrain barely matters. When driving down a city street, you can happily drive on the median without any loss of speed, or even through dirt and grass in some areas. What you don't want to drive through is other cars, as there's car damage, and the annoying sort where any damage greatly reduces your top speed, making it nearly impossible to win. The AI doesn't suffer from this, though, and as such they'll happily ram your car from behind repeatedly when trying to pass, instantly forcing you to restart the mission. You either frontrun in this game or go home. What should be the saving grace for this game is the presentation, the concept of racing through foreign cities and taking in the sights is fairly cool, but unfortunately I feel like the PS1 is not really strong enough to pull this off. You'll see a few famous british landmarks, but I never really felt like I was in London. It just feels like a generic racing game with a few too many flaws.
Megaman X3 was an interesting ride. For starters, I thought I had A'd the SNES version, because it's clearly one of the weaker entries in the series and SNES has a lot of good 2D platformers. This brings up an interesting question of whether the same game would actually be G on PS1, a system with far fewer good 2D platformers to compete against. However, for starters, it turns out I had actually given the SNES version a low G, which should have made the G for PS1 totally guaranteed, right? Well, not exactly. It turns out the PS1 version is actually a fairly significant downgrade from the SNES version. For starters, the OST is totally butchered. In most cases there's some room for subjectivity with music, but I feel that this one is undeniable. They didn't really attempt to change the tone of the compositions, they just made them quieter and less powerful on PS1 and it really detracts from the high energy feel of the game. The sound balance is also a lot worse, with sound effects like the buster charge covering up the music much more on PS1, and the music also doesn't loop properly, because looping music on PS1 is hard guys. Beyond sound, gameplay is almost totally untouched (I thought there was an issue with the ice on Blizzard Buffalo's stage, but I went back to SNES to compare and it turns out this game's ice physics were just always awful), except for the removal of slowdown and some minor altering of boss patterns (for example, Toxic Seahorse will never throw a second goo ball while one is onscreen on PS1, but on SNES, he does this liberally), both of which are minor improvements. They also added some new FMVs on PS1, which are kind of cool, but there's nothing here as memorable as X4. Overall, it's still decent, but I feel that the big reduction in sound quality acts a constant reminder that you're playing an inferior version of the game and causes me not to recommend this version as much.
DeleteWhen I saw the EA Sports logo on NCAA Football 2001, I was expecting a near exact copy of Madden, and unsurprisingly that's exactly what we have. We've now reached the era where the Madden games no longer change between installments, and indeed, this game is about 99% the same game as Madden 99, with the only significant change being the addition of a "momentum" mechanic that barely changes the game, simply giving a bit of a bonus to a team that's recently done well. Since we haven't reviewed Madden 99 yet, I'll include my thougts on PS1-era Madden compared to 16-bit Madden. The biggest change compared to the 16-bit era besides 3D graphics is that there's now a lot more nuance to running on offense, you now have access to a variety of dekes, jumps, sprints, and other little moves to mix up your running plays. While this probably adds a bit of nuance to running, I'm kind of torn on the mechanic, as I feel that this has more place in an arcade-style game like NFL Blitz compared to the more simulation-oriented Madden, where IMO, good playcalling and clock management should overshadow good timing and reflexes, but at least it results in an experience that feels different from its 16-bit predecessors. Of course, commentary is also vastly improved, with the announcers having way more to say, though compared to actual Madden, the commentators seem much quieter in NCAA, probably because there's so many teams and players they can't really have unique things to say about each one, but it does result in a somewhat drier experience and this is one of the main reasons I prefer the mainline titles. Overall, this title is fine, but it doesn't really do much to set itself apart from other football titles on the system, especially considering we've now had several years of samey Madden titles by this point and I'd expect a bit more improvement from a mid-generation title.
Tactics Ogre is a much better SNES port than Megaman X3, but as with many tremendously innovative games, time has dulled its luster to some extent. Everyone should know that Tactics Ogre is basically the "prequel" to Final Fantasy Tactics, and while its gameplay is somewhat similar, it is more primitive in virtually every way. On SNES, the game was something of a technical marvel, and thus I rated it as G, but on PS1 there are many other similar SRPGs, besides FFT there's also Front Mission 3, Hoshigami, Saiyuki, Vandal Hearts, and a variety of others, and I'd be hard-pressed to put Tactics Ogre above any of them. The storyline is decent and it's a fairly long game, but there are a number of little polish issues that get on my nerves, like how you can't cancel movement after choosing where to move and how you have to press circle to start your turn even though X is the select button. It's not bad by any means, just a game whose time had come and gone by the time of the PSX re-release.
DeleteTall Infinity is a weird puzzle game. The goal of the game is to build up a tower by rolling cubes and trying to match the colours on their sides. There's a little bit of similarity to Cu-On-Pa (you have to get used to knowing how far you have to move a block to get a certain side to face a given direction), though due to the addition of the height mechanic (rolling up a wall cases a block to rotate twice) I found it very hard to wrap my head around it and the pacing of the game always felt a bit slow. I was eventually starting to see the combos, but in many cases just making a bunch of moves quickly and hoping for the best and then taking matches when I saw them worked just as well. Unfortunately, beyond the main game, there's not really a lot in this package, there's no 2-player or vs com mode, and the single player modes are all very similar. I know it has a Japan-only sequel, so perhaps that one will take the idea and flesh it out into something more notable.