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Last Topic's Ratings:
Disney's 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue - AAAAG - 60% (5)
Gaia Seed - BAB - 17% (3)
Granstream Saga, The - AAGGG - 80% (5)
Option Tuning Car Battle - A - 50% (1)
Ten Pin Alley - ABBAG - 40% {5}
True Pinball - GAG - 83% (3)
Wow, another squiggle bracket in two topics, these are divided times in the land of GAB. Also it turns out there are actually a lot of pinball games on PS1 but apparently True Pinball is one of the better ones.
Games for this topic:
NBA In The Zone
Panzer General
Rally Cross
Rapid Reload
Suikoden
WCW vs The World
It's the release of the Playstation Classic, and we are celebrating by... not doing any of its games. Sorry, there's just only so many of them and we've done a lot already. If you still want to get the PS Classic experience you can play the PAL version of this week's games on PCSX and make sure the settings are as suboptimal as possible. Also, Rapid Reload looks very cool, I'm surprised I didn't know about this game already.
NBA In The Zone - G
ReplyDeletePanzer General - B
Rally Cross - B
Rapid Reload - G
Suikoden - A
WCW vs The World - G
People who were paying close attention to early topics might remember that I played NBA In the Zone 98 for comparison with NBA Fastbreak way back when, so I was expecting something very similar here, but I was very surprised to find that NBA In the Zone is a completely different game from 98. They actually bare almost no resemblance to each other, with 98 being a competent but fairly slow-paced sim-style game and the original being a super fast-paced Arcade-style game. In the Zone is actually one of the arcadiest basketball games ever, the court is extremely short and when you inbound the ball it goes almost all the way across the half, which shortens the length of an offensive play to a few seconds at most. Ball movement and player speed is also very fast and shooters are very accurate, which means defense is generally not strong, but like most good basketball games the key is to force turnovers here and there to gradually build a lead and this game still plays that way. Controls are also very good and presentation is solid for its time. I actually think this game might be better than 98 because it feels more unique, I don't think there's ever been another basketball game that gets to the action quite this quickly. An interesting title for sure that shouldn't be overlooked simply because it's part of a numbered franchise.
Panzer General is pretty bad. On the surface, it's almost exactly identical to Super Conflict, having very similar presentation and mechanics, though I would argue the presentation is actually somewhat worse and it's also much slower because it has to load briefly between battle animations. However, there is one thing that makes this game quite a bit worse than Super Conflict, and that's RNG. When attacking, you're shown an approximation of how battle will play out, but two factors can massively skew the battle results. One is called "Rugged Defense", which means the defenders fight far better than normal, taking almost no damage and dealing back a ludicrous amount of damage. A second possibility is that after being hit, a defending unit may retreat one space, allowing their potentially strong position to be immediately taken by an attacker. If an artillery is within range when an allied unit gets attacked, it may help out, which might break up the attack entirely, or it might not. As far as I can tell, all of these situations are complete RNG, which is far too much randomness for a game that depends very heavily on positioning and calculating how much force is needed for a particular target, and it makes the game feel unsatisfying to play. As with most similar games, you should probably just stick to Advance Wars.
As noted above, Rally Cross's camera is absolutely awful, maybe the worst in any racing game ever. It's completely impossible to see where you're going when you turn, you basically have to ignore the visuals and just use the race map. You can switch to the in car cam, though even this performs very badly, it bounces around too much, still doesn't help much when turning, and can get stuck through obstacles in various locations. The game also has Destruction Derby-esque lousy controls, but as I said before, they would not be tolerable in any other game that wasn't just about smashing stuff. The physics are kind of wacky and I think the game could have been fun with better camera work, but you can't really play a game if you can't see what you're doing to any degree.
I was not wrong to look forward to Rapid Reload, it's basically PS1's answer to Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier. The comparisons are obvious almost immediately, it's a fast-paced run and gun with huge bosses and good movement options, it even visually looks a ton like Treasure's games. Like Alien Soldier, you get 4 weapons that you can switch between at any time (and the two playable characters have totally different ones, a nice touch), though the stage design bares more resemblance to Gunstar Heroes. There is one big downside compared to Gunstar Heroes, though, which is that it's only one-player, and in general I don't think it's quite on the same level as Treasure's classics, but it's still a pretty good time and I'm surprised it isn't talked about more.
DeleteI'm going to buck the trend here and say that I think Suikoden 1 is just okay. In case you've been living under a rock, Suikoden is an RPG series where you can recruit 108 different characters, some automatically, many through various sidequests, and collecting them all has various benefits. It's a cool idea that has a lot of potential, but it doesn't feel fully realized in the first game. In most Suikoden games, the characters you recruit are divided into two types, those who can fight in your battle party, and those who provide some sort of utility to your base, like opening up shops, minigames, or other little bonuses. Unfortunately this concept just isn't utilized all that much in the first game. There are a few shopkeepers you can get, but overall your base feels much more sparse compared to later games, where it's typically the highlight of the whole experience. The other area where characters contribute to the game is the game's war battles, but these too are much more basic compared to later games and there also aren't nearly as many of them. Beyond this, the game is also fairly short, there's not much character development, and the story isn't terribly interesting (compare this game's "let's go meet the emperor" beginning to Suikoden 2's legendary intro or the 3 viewpoint system of Suikoden 3). It's not a terrible game by any means and there are some things I appreciate, like the scaled EXP system and battle animations, but there's a feeling of blandness to the overall experience that I feel is a general indicator of an average game. Honestly, I think people would generally recommend skipping it if not for the data transfer feature to Suikoden 2, which is a much better game in every possible way, though at least in this regard its short length works in its favour, if you want to play through this game just to prep your save data for Suikoden 2 at least it doesn't take very long.
WCW vs the World is a pretty solid game. What I really appreciate about this game is its focus on footsies and reading the opponent over button mashing. There is no mashing for grabs in this game, once you land a grab, the throw is automatic, the throw you'll perform is based on the directional input you press when you do the grapple, instead you generally avoid grapples with good positioning and backsteps. There are also strikes and strike counters, giving the game a kind of rock paper scissors system (grapples beat counters, counters beat strikes, strikes beat grapples) that rewards prediction. Even against the AI, you can condition them to counter with strikes, then go for grapples for big damage. The biggest downside to this game is that the characters are very similar to each other, and I'm not the biggest fan of the spirit bar, it feels like even when I'm dominating the AI's spirit bar raises way faster than mine, so I usually end up winning by pinfall long before I can use my finisher. Still, landing a good counter or backstep into a grapple is super satisfying and the game is pretty fun in general, it's a definite step in the right direction for wrestling games.