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Last Topic's Ratings:
Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack's Revenge - BBBBBB - 0% (6)
Circuit Breakers - GABAAA - 50% (6)
Mortal Kombat 2 - ABBBA - 20% (5)
Ski Air Mix - AB - 25% (2)
Star Sweep - AAA - 50% (3)
Strike Point - BBB - 0% (3)
Apparently this set of games was kind of like a lump of coal for the holidays. Well, I'm sure we've all had gifts like that in the past. I kind of feel like the clueless aunt or uncle who is getting people games they know nothing about.
Games for this topic:
Gale Gunner
Moorhuhn 2
Power Spike Pro Beach Volleyball
Tales of Destiny
Test Drive: Off-Road
Tiny Toon Adventures: The Great Beanstalk
Crazy Chicken 2 is also known as Moorhuhn 2, if you're having trouble finding it. Apparently it's a German exclusive. We also have Tales of Destiny here, which was at one time one of my favourite PS1 games but I haven't played it in over a decade. I'm curious to see how it holds up.
Crazy Chicken 2 - B
ReplyDeleteGale Gunner - G
Power Spike Pro Beach Volleyball - A
Tales of Destiny - A
Test Drive: Off-Road - B
Tiny Toon Adventures: The Great Beanstalk - A
As I suspected, Moorhuhn 2 is a hunting game of a sort, albeit an extremely cartoonish one that is more similar to Duck Hunt than anything else. The core gameplay is tolerable, but it's extremely light on content, consisting predominantly of a handful of 1-screen challenges where you shoot fairly slow moving targets with a time limit and that's about it. If there were more stages and variety in the targets to shoot there might be some potential here but as it stands I can't really imagine anyone playing this for more than an hour.
Gale Gunner is a 1 on 1 mech fighting game that plays kind of like a very simple version of Mechwarrior. In each level, you'll fight an enemy mech, and if you win you get their mech and weapon. From a technical standpoint, it runs impressively well, its framerate seems perfectly locked despite the size of the arenas, and it has some decent in-engine cutscenes that show the pilots of the mechs as well. The biggest annoyance is that some of the arenas are unreasonably large for 1v1 battles, so you may spend a lot of time simply trying to reach your target (especially on the more vertical maps where you may fall down to the bottom and have to climb back up) rather than actually fighting them. On the more sensible maps the game is pretty fun, with some potential for interesting mech setups, though I wish you got to equip one more weapon or could swap out your mech's primary. Kind of a low G, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Power Spike is a fairly decent Volleyball game. In terms of gameplay, the controls are simple and pretty much everything works as you'd want it to, it feels very similar to the Volleyball mode from Mario Sports Mix, even complete with the "charging" mechanic that lets you set up a strong spike. The biggest issue I have with the game is that playing a single match takes ages, due to the high number of points needed to win and the fact that you can only score when you're serving and the receiver has the advantage (Mario Sports Mix wisely nixes this rule, though this is not an option here). The presentation also feels a bit dry, with no in-game music or announcer, and every character of the same gender seeming to share the same voice clips. It's a decent attempt at the sport, but I feel it needs a bit more flair to stay interesting for a long time.
Like its terrain, Test-Drive Off-Road is kind of rough. While certainly much better than Rally Cross, the game's handling just feels off, and the strict checkpoint system really limits your freedom to go offroad. The draw distance is also unusually lousy for a racing game, which further worsen's the game's already poor handling. There's obviously potential here but we'll have to see how they're able to refine the formula in the sequels.
DeleteTime has not been terribly kind to Tales of Destiny. Playing through it again, I was surprised to learn how many key features were added in Tales of Phantasia remake that are missing in this game, despite using the same engine. Three major ones are that you can't change the first player's character, you can't assign spells to button shortcuts, and you only get a single normal attack cancelled into one arte (in Phantasia PSX, you have a 2 hit normal sequence that chains into a base, and then ougi arte). Between these issues, the lack of mastering artes (which is in almost every other Tales game), and the generally low level of difficulty I found battles became tedious much quicker than in other games in the series. It's still a big improvement over Phantasia SNES for the addition of multiplayer and fixing the encounter rate, but it's a lot more dated than I expected. Like Phantasia, this is a game that needed a remake, and if we could play the PS2 version in English I don't think anyone would ever bother with this version anymore. With how long GAB PS1 is going to take, there's a good chance an english patch for the PS2 version will finally be out by the time these topics end, but even if not it's probably still worth muddling through that game in Japanese over playing the original version, or just playing Phantasia PSX instead, both are much better games overall.
The Great Beanstalk is an extremely weird game. I guess it's basically a scavenger hunt at its core. The game is divided into a number of sets based on various fairytales and such, which are separated by action rooms on the beanstalk where you have to dodge hazards. Babs will give you an object to find, which will be in one of the sets, and you have to click on it to get a piece of the key and the next object to locate. Clicking on any other object triggers a humorous animation (of which there are tons) but isn't directly useful. The clues rarely give you a good idea as to which set you have to check, so to prevent you from just having to click randomly, Buster will guide you to the correct set, which basically changes the game to "follow buster through the action portions, click on the right object, repeat 9 times". Unfortunately, while the animation and voice acting is top notch, the action sequences are very lame, and having Buster tell you exactly where to go takes all of the challenge out of it (though having to wander around aimlessly through all of the sets would be very annoying too with how much the action areas suck. I feel like this one probably needed a redesign, possibly to eliminate the action sequences entirely and maybe put you on a simple timer to find the object or something. It's still kind of cool for fans of the series for all the references and gags, but it's hard to recommend it otherwise.