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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Blood Lines - AGG - 83% (3)
Destruction Derby - AABABA - 33% (6)
Fighting Force - AGGGAG - 83% (6) (1 SR)
NHL Breakaway 98 - AA - 50% (2)
Rox - BA - 25% (2)
X-Men: Mutant Academy - BAGGA - 60% {5}
X-Men Mutant Academy is the first game in quite a while to get the squiggle bracket, as a reminder that means that there was a large variation in the votes (at least 20% voted for all 3 scores). Also, surprisingly strong scores for both Blood Lines and Fighting Force.
Games for this topic:
Disney's 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue
Gaia Seed
Granstream Saga, The
Option Tuning Car Battle
Ten Pin Alley
True Pinball
I'm actually quite looking forward to Option Tuning Car Battle, it looks cool. Also, we have two games about using a ball to hit things. As a random trivia note, very few pinball games on PS1 were released in the US for some reason, this seems to be one of the only ones.
Disney's 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue - A
ReplyDeleteGaia Seed - B
Granstream Saga, The - G
Option Tuning Car Battle - A
Ten Pin Alley - B
True Pinball - G
102 Dalmations basically feels like discount Spyro. The mechanics behind the game are almost identical, you'll travel through various worlds, talk to helper characters at certain points, collect bones (gems), free puppies (dragons), you even have a short range bark attack (fire breath) and a rolling attack (charge). The production values are decent, but everything feels a little bit more cheap compared to Spyro, especially the physics, which are definitely a bit on the weird side. It's still not bad, and it's actually got some surprisingly decent minigames tucked away as rewards for playing through the game, so you could definitely do worse.
I wavered back and forth for a while between A and B for Gaia Seed, but in the end I think it's B. For starters, it's an extremely basic shmup, with only 2 weapon types and 2 subweapons. The main thing that sets it apart from other games in the genre is that you have a health bar (which regenerates), and also a regenerating bomb. You'd think this would make the game absurdly easy, but it quickly turns into a bullet-hell type game so the regenerating health barely matters. The biggest problem with the game, and the one that for me pushes it down into B, is that your ship has an absolutely massive hitbox, and both the player and bosses / enemies take up a ton of space on the screen, so dodging many of the attacks that are sent at you feels unreasonable, particularly because they often simply appear from various parts of the screen (which is also often cluttered up with busy backgrounds and the UI takes up a ton of space as well, you can actually fly behind the UI, but this makes it impossible to see and you can be attacked from there). You have a lot of health and lives, so you can afford to tank a ton of hits, but it doesn't really feel rewarding to play this way. It's not a long game, but I was already getting quite tired of it as I started to approach the end, and there was no way I was doing a second playthrough. Probably one of the worst shmups on PS1 overall. Oh, and the intro is also legendarily bad, on par with Zero Wing.
The Granstream Saga is a pretty unique RPG. By far the most notable thing about it is its battle system, which is very different from other RPGs on the system. When you enter battle, you'll take direct control of Eon, moving him around the battlefield, swinging your sword, and using your shield to block. Enemies have unique and very varied movements and attacks as well, and learning the timing and weakpoints in an enemy's attack pattern is crucial to success. You can also change weapons on the fly and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. It almost reminds me a little of Dark Souls in a way, it's got that same kind of fighting-game esque vibe to it. As for the rpg side of the game, the game is fairly simple and linear, you actually don't even level up through battle, you level up solely through story events. Speaking of which, the game has an unusually high number of cutscenes for a PS1 game, which are presented in an anime style and are generally decent, which helps keep the plot moving along, and the game definitely has some charm to it as well. It's not without its flaws, fighting the same enemies repeatedly can get repetitive, particularly because battles can take long, and the dungeon areas are often bland and easy to get lost in (watch your compass!), but it's an interesting game nonetheless for RPG fans looking for something a bit different.
Option: Tuning Car Battle is not bad, but it's not quite as good as I'd hoped. As you can probably guess, it's a street racing game where you do races to get money and upgrade your car, much akin to many modern racing games. However, a key area of difference is that while in most games the other street racers are all jerks, apparently street racers in Japan are super nice because they give you some money even if you lose (in fact, this is kind of essential because you'll be too weak to beat anyone off the bat). I feel that this results in a pretty unrewarding progression experience, though, you can never rematch anyone once you win (they disappear forever), so you spend a lot of time losing races to build money (at least drag racing makes this quick), then you upgrade your car into a beast and crush everyone before restarting the process against the next set of opponents, which really just isn't terribly satisfying. The core racing mechanics are competent, but not exceptional, turning feels a little stiff and collisions between cars are weird, you just kind of bounce off and lose a little speed. Still, I feel like there's a potentially solid foundation here, so it'll be interesting to see how the sequels fare.
DeleteI'm very conflicted on Ten Pin Alley, to the extent that I'm hesitant to rate it. The game has a decent amount of options and some funny animations, but the physics feel very off. I played for quite a while, tried a bunch of different things, and even looked up videos of the game, but I was never able to have any consistent idea of where I would throw the ball based on where I stopped the meter. You would think hitting the gold area dead center on both meters would throw a fairly straight shot, but it still seems to throw an extreme curve towards the right. I was able to adjust for this by aiming far to the left on each shot, but even then it wasn't consistent, sometimes I would hit what I thought was a totally perfect shot and the ball would just fly off to the side. I note that the players have an accuracy stat, so perhaps there's just some degree of random waiver in how they throw the ball (this would be extremely lame if so) or perhaps there are emulation issues with this game (though I tried several different emulators and found no noticeable difference). I'm curious to hear from others to see if I'm doing something wrong, but at the very least the gameplay is extremely unintuitive.
True Pinball is a pretty solid pinball game. One of the things I particularly appreciate here is that it has a very well-fleshed out options menu that gives you a lot of control over your experience. You can change the viewing angle, number of balls, controls are fully remappable, etc. I found the game quite difficult to enjoy with the default viewing angle and controls but after switching to my preferred flipper buttons and the "top" viewing angle it became vastly more playable. There are only 4 tables here, but they're all pretty good, with a decent selection of special events and nice music and sounds to go along with each one. I'm not usually the biggest fan of pinball but this was a good time.