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Last Topic's Ratings:
Extra Bright - G - 100% (1)
London Racer - B - 0% (1)
NCAA Football 2001 - GA - 75% (2)
Megaman X3 - ABAABBAGG - 44% (9) (1 SR)
Tactics Ogre - GGAA - 75% (4)
Tall Infinity - AGA - 67% (3)
I certainly wouldn't have guessed going in that Megaman X3 would be the second-lowest rated game of that topic. GAB is always full of surprises.
Games for this topic:
ATV Racers
Dora the Explorer: Barnyard Buddies
Guardian of Darkness, The
King of Fighters 95, The
MLB 98
Soviet Strike
Doing GAB has given me a little bit more respect for professional game reviewers. Sure, anyone can rate King of Fighters or MLB 98, but it's a taller order to rate something like Cindy's Caribbean Holiday or Dora the Explorer. Still, there's always the possibility that any game could be a hidden gem, I remember the very cutesy Crystal's Pony Tale on Genesis being met with general acclaim.
ATV Racers - B
ReplyDeleteDora the Explorer: Barnyard Buddies - A
Guardian of Darkness, The - B
King of Fighters 95, The - A
MLB 98 - A
Soviet Strike - G
ATV Racers is a fairly poor game, but it doesn't strike me as being legendarily bad or anything, it's just below average in pretty much every way. For starters, the ATVs are purely for show, this is a kart racer, not an off-road racing game, in fact, you can't go off-road even if you wanted to, even when the track appears to be wide, there are invisible walls preventing you from going off the little path they've set. The handling is also very loose and the weapons are among the least punchy in any game, both having very little effect (the turbo does almost nothing, for example), and also having some of the softest sound-effects you'll hear anywhere. I guess they didn't want to cover up the audio, which is okay, but it's about the only part of the game that is. There are a decent number of tracks I suppose, but they're very short and kind of samey. It's not completely atrocious, but on a system with a ton of good racers there's not much reason to muddle through this.
I expected Dora was going to be a minigame collection, but it's actually the world's simplest 3D platformer. There are no real enemies or obstacles to avoid or even puzzles to solve, pretty much the only gameplay consists of picking up stars. Eat your heart out, Kirby's Epic Yarn, someone out-easied you. That said, I have to praise the game's authenticity to the show. The show is already sort of set up like a video game, and the game follows that setup to the letter, with Dora being set off on an adventure, having to consult the map, going on a journey that involves multiple destinations, and always stopping to prompt you the viewer to see if you remember what's going on along the way. When I got through the first world to find the duck and she said "do you see the duck?" I actually laughed. This game certainly skews REAL young, possibly intended to be the first time some children would ever hold a controller, but it would probably keep them entertained for a while. I doubt it has much replay value though, considering it almost plays itself and the structure of the game is pretty repetitive.
The Guardian of Darkness is interesting, but it's probably a bit too ambitious for its own good. Its an adventure game with a fairly unique premise, you play as a monk dealing with supernatural phenomena, but it just doesn't seem to have made the transition to PS1 very gracefully. The basic gameplay is simple enough, you can interact with objects, pick things up, talk to people, and use spells, but it all feels a little bit clunky. Sometimes the game doesn't properly register that you want to pick up a nearby item and drops something instead, and the spells also autotarget, except when they don't, which is kind of a problem because you have limited energy and health. The biggest issue though is the camera work, which is some of the worst you'll find on the platform. The areas are generally small and crammed with objects, and the camera gets stuck constantly, often obscuring your view of the action and making the game hard to navigate. There's also slowdown in bigger rooms, and it seems like a fair number of NPC interactions have been cut out of the PS1 version compared to the PC version, which makes some puzzles a fair bit more difficult to solve (the PC version also looks quite a bit better, so if you're going to play the game, you should probably play that version). There are definitely some interesting ideas here and it's a fairly ambitious game in some ways, it just seems like they didn't quite have the technical know-how to realize all of them, at least not on playstation.
Despite being one of the older KOF titles, KOF 95 still has a ton of content and really solid gameplay (though I miss the roll move, that doesn't appear till 96). There's a ton of characters here and it doesn't look like anything has been lost from the arcade, they've all got all their moves and even all the animations seem to be intact. Such faithfulness does come at a price, though, which is load times. There's a very long load before every fight, followed by short loads after every fighter is defeated, which is lame. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they're ever able to solve this on PS1 (all of the later games in the series do this too), so you might want to pick this up on PS2 or digitally if you're looking to play it these days.
DeleteMLB 98 changes up quite a few things compared to earlier baseball games. First, and most obviously, the graphics are 3D. This is fantastically useful for batting, as reading pitches now feels far more intuitive than it did with 2D graphics. However, the game also implements a much more complex pitching system than you'd see in older games, where a batting box is displayed and you can throw to precise locations (when playing on the more complex rules, the batter also has to aim their bat). I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, because IMO it takes a lot of the skill out of reading the pitch (you can see an indicator showing roughly where the ball wil go), and turns it more into guesswork as the pitcher can slightly adjust the pitch location after throwing it and you have to be dead on to hit the ball. There is an arcade mode that removes this pitching box concept entirely, and this is generally my preferred way to play, which is unfortunate because it doesn't seem like it comes back in later entries (or they've hidden it somewhere where I couldn't find it). Compared to some other sports games on the platform (ie, Madden), the announcer is pretty low-key here, he announces batters and the like but don't expect a lot of colour commentary or anything. I feel like this one is average.
I was actually expecting Soviet Strike to be a more significant departure from the previous games, but instead it actually plays very similarly to the Genesis titles (which were already pretty good), just with a host of improvements coming from the new hardware that make it a generally better game. For starters, the game has much more detail now and the camera angles allow you to see much more of what's around you, generally resulting in a faster-paced game that feels like it rewards skill more. The great map system from the other games returns, complete with more mission detail and voice acting this time, and I like the new system where you can rescue people to get repairs for your chopper. The other major addition is the voice acting and cutscenes, which I'm not terribly big on. It kinda felt like they were trying to hard to be cool and I really just wanted to get the gameplay, but the production values are decent in any case. A very solid title overall.