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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
NBA In The Zone - GG - 100% (2)
Panzer General - BBB - 0% (3)
Rally Cross - ABBBBB - 8% (6)
Rapid Reload - GGGGA - 90% (5)
Suikoden - GGGAGGA - 86% (7) (1 SR)
WCW vs The World - GG - 100% (2)
Although I expected more votes for Suikoden, this was still a very highly-rated topic overall. It's always nice to find good games you don't expect.
Games for this topic:
Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack's Revenge
Circuit Breakers
Mortal Kombat 2
Ski Air Mix
Star Sweep
Strike Point
Surprisingly, the PS1 version of Mortal Kombat 2 is JP-only, yet Star Sweep has a US-release? PS1 is a weird console. Also, due to the holidays, this topic will go one week longer than normal.
Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack's Revenge - B
ReplyDeleteCircuit Breakers - B
Mortal Kombat 2 - B
Ski Air Mix - A
Star Sweep - A
Strike Point - B
The original Alone in the Dark is a deeply flawed game with a cumbersome inventory system, awful controls, and terrible combat, but it remains somewhat compelling thanks to its interesting plot and setting. Alone in the Dark 2 retains everything that was bad about the first game while tossing out the interesting bits and focusing much more on combat (which is even worse now as the camera angles have somehow gotten worse and the enemies have guns now), and the end result is probably one of the worst games of all time. As if this wasn't enough, the game also runs terribly on PS1, with constant slowdown and long load times every few seconds. It's almost impossible to say enough bad things about this game, this game is so bad it makes Home Improvement from the SNES topic seem like a G quality game. A strong contender for the title of worst PS1 game.
Circuit Breakers is not nearly as bad as Alone in the Dark 2, but it's clearly still bad. It's kind of trying to be Micro Machines, but its controls and camera are both lousy. You can barely see 3 car lengths in front of your car most of the time, making track memorization an absolute necessity, and turning just feels off, as though the cars don't have proper weight to them. Most unforgivable is that this is actually a very late PS1 title, releasing in 1998, by which time an actual Micro Machines game (V3) had already been released on PS1, and it is vastly better in every way. The competition in this genre on PS1 is far too high for a game like this to be worth your time.
Mortal Kombat 2 is a good port of a crappy game. Graphics are nice, sound is solid, short load times, everything is arcade perfect. However, the game is not actually fun. Characters all have the same normals and few special moves, the physics and frame data are trash, and there's still a dedicated block button. I'd much rather be playing a bad port of a decent game like KOF 95 than this, because at least after you sit through all the load times the core gameplay is fun. Even if you like MK you might as well at least wait for the sequel, which is quite significantly expanded in every way and has a US release.
Thank god, Ski Air Mix is decent. The core skiing gameplay is actually quite good, with a good sense of speed and great controls, and it also runs at a good framerate and has a surprisingly good soundtrack. The only real problem with the game is that there isn't really a lot to it. There's only 5 mountains available, and there's only slopestyle races available on them, so even though the game plays well it doesn't last very long. I think this was probably a budget title, which it too bad because I feel this engine easily could have been extended into a G-level game, but as it stands there's not enough here to recommend this over, say, MTV Sports Snowboarding, but it's a decent time while it lasts.
DeleteStar Sweep is a puzzle game that had potential but is held back by a few major flaws. At its core, it focuses around making matches and creating combos, not dissimilar to games like Puyo Puyo and Dr Mario, but its pieces are very limited in how they can match (two stars of the same colour must connect to match) and the field size is very small, which severely limits your ability to build up or make combos, you basically just have to take the combos that appear naturally and maybe slightly extend them, which significantly limits the replay value. It's too bad too, because I feel like the core gameplay is fairly fun, if they increased the size of the field and toned down the power of attacks this would be a very solid title.
I debated a while on A vs B for Strike Point, but I think it's actually B. Despite the non-affiliation with the Strike series, this game bares some resemblance to it, being a helicopter game where you have an assortment of missions on each stage to complete before you run out of weapons and armor, but everything about the game is much worse compared to the strike games. For starters, there's no map once you start a mission, or even a reminder of what missions are still outstanding or how many targets are left, there's only the radar and its coloured dots, so you'll spend a lot of time just flying around and hoping you find something. This wouldn't be too bad if not for the fact that every mission has an extremely tight time limit, which is really the only threat, you'll never even come close to running out of choppers before the time runs out. Somewhat similar to Air Cavalry on SNES, this quickly becomes frustrating because the game wants you to be efficient without giving you the tools to do so (namely, some kind of map and a better UI that updates you on mission progress). The controls and such are fine, but there's really not much reason to play this when so many better games are available.