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Last Topic's Ratings:
Gale Gunner - GG - 100% (2)
Moorhuhn 2 - BBBB - 0% (4)
Power Spike Pro Beach Volleyball - A - 50% (1)
Tales of Destiny - GGABA - 60% {5}
Test Drive: Off-Road - B - 0% (1)
Tiny Toon Adventures: The Great Beanstalk - AB - 25% (2)
I think there's an interesting comparison to be made here between the way this board rated Tales of Destiny and how the SNES board rated Secret of Mana, since they're both key early action RPGs, yet Mana was rated much higher. Is it nostalgia? The lack of modern entries in the franchise that better the formula? Destiny being relatively more obscure? Some combination of all of them? Who knows.
Games for this topic:
Adidas Power Soccer 98
Bloody Roar
Hooters Road Trip
Marby Baby Story
Shake Kids
Tenchu
A long time ago I was trying to find one of the rarer Choro Q games on ebay and I kept finding a million copies of Hooters Road Trip instead (Road Trip is one of the many names Choro Q has been localized under). It'd be hilarious if it turned out that it was actually a quality game.
Addidas Power Soccer 98 - A
ReplyDeleteBloody Roar - G
Hooters Road Trip - B
Marby Baby Story - A
Shake Kids - A
Tenchu - B
Addidas Power Soccer 98 is a decent soccer game. Obviously, the comparison to Fifa is unavoidable, and the game does little to discourage it, having a very similar general setup, near identical gameplay, and even very similar presentation, though I feel like in almost every way, FIFA is just a little bit ahead. FIFA's commentary is better, generally being more relevant to the onscreen action and being more varied, FIFA seems to do a better job of knowing which player I want to switch to, FIFA's camera work generally does a better job of framing the action, and the player AI also seems a bit better (on a number of occasions, I passed the ball to someone in Addidas only for them to simply watch the ball go by unless I forcibly switched to them and made them chase it, FIFA never does this). Addidas does have a few minor pluses, such as a slightly better on field UI, but I think it's clear that FIFA is ahead in terms of general playability. One thing that I find regrettable about Addidas Power Soccer is that it doesn't do much with the Addidas license. Before each match, you're shown a cutscene which is actually a commercial for Addidas (in FIFA, this is instead a football cutscene). These ads showcase the supposed special abilities of the shoes and one shows the players playing in a padded stadium and performing really cool moves. I feel like having the option to play in that walled stadium (no out of bounds, the ball just bounces off) and maybe even having some kind of mode where you could upgrade your players with special shoes would be a fun side mode. As it stands, the game is still decent, but it's basically just lesser FIFA and does little to differentiate itself.
Bloody Roar is actually a really cool game. In general, it's a pretty fast-paced 3D fighter that's kind of comparable to Tekken 3, though I feel its movesets feel a bit more intuitive compared to the Tekken series, but the main mechanic that sets it apart is the ability for each character to transform into a second form where they become a creature of some sort, which most of the strategy in the game revolves around. You can transform into your beast form at any time (as long as your beast gauge is sufficiently full) and there are a lot of benefits to doing so, you recover recoverable health, get access to a new attack button, generally combo better, and so on, but there are also some advantages to not transforming at the earliest opportunity. The transformation itself acts as a kind of burst action that blows the opponent away, which can be used to escape pressure, if your gauge is more full you can stay in beast form longer, and there's also a custom combo-like system called Rave that is much more dangerous if your beast gauge is high. It adds an interesting twist to an already solid game and makes it feel unique. Also, if you finish off your opponent with a wall smacking move in beast mode, you can knock them out of the arena, which is hilarious. I'm surprised we don't talk about this one more.
Sadly, Hooters' Road Trip is not secretly a good game. It actually has surprisingly good production values and decent graphics and sound, but the control of the game is terrible and that's really what matters to a racing game. The cars are all way too twitchy and collisions feel very mushy, and the general gameplay generally just feels lame. I did sort of adjust to the handling after a while and selecting a car with "poor" handling helps, but the main gameplay isn't ever really fun and the busty girls at the end of each track just aren't enough to justify playing it (though I must admit, putting sexy babes on your loading screens is a novel idea). If only this had Cruis'n USA's gameplay or something it might be worth talking about.
Marby Baby Story is a fairly basic puzzle game that has some similarities to Sokoban. The goal of each stage is to move blocks around to get access to the star, then make your way to the exit, though you have enemies to contend with and a few special tools you can use to help you along the way. Bombs can be used to destroy blocks if you've made a mistake and trapped yourself, and you can also use your hammer to push blocks quickly / stun enemies / break certain blocks. It's all right, but the presentation is pretty bland and I feel nothing about it really stands out.
DeleteShake Kids is such an extremely bizarre game that I can barely describe it. I guess it's kind of a platformer of sorts, though you can also move into and out of the foreground in "lanes" like a beat-em-up, and you fight by throwing your shaker at enemies and block by turning around repeatedly, which is almost normal compared to the rest of the game. Once you've stunned enemies, you can then suck them into your shaker to perform a weird minigame where you purify them (or something) by doing shake moves with the L and R buttons, with certain patterns, like L1L2R1R2 (which makes and "N" shape) being worth extra points. Also there's a bizarre storyline involving a talking shaker and an evil wizard or something. This description really doesn't do it justice. It's functional enough I suppose, but having to stop every few seconds to play the shake minigame and mash more LR buttons gets tedious pretty fast. There's some novelty here but just being weird isn't quite enough to make a good game.
I'm pretty much in line with SBNetopir on Tenchu. I feel like it was a decent first try at the open-ended stealth genre but a couple major issues prevent it from succeeding at its goal. The first, and by far the biggest issue is the draw distance. A key component of stealth games is observation, learning the guard positions and figuring out the best ways to overcome them, which is literally impossible in this game because you can only see a few feet in front of your face. Like Sarge's Heroes, the distance you can see is actually less than the enemy's detection range, meaning that enemies can frequently spot you before you can see them. The game provides a lame workaround in terms of your "sense" meter which warns you if a guard is close, but this is in no way a substitute for being able to see properly. They definitely should have put more work into achieving a workable draw distance, games like Spyro show us that it is possible on PS1 with a little cleverness. Secondly, for a stealth game, it's extremely heavily scripted. After sneaking up on a target, one might expect I could shuriken him and make a sneaky getaway, but nope, you have to walk right up to them, trigger a cutscene, then do a boss fight in plain view of everyone, which in no way feels like being an assassin. In general, there's little penalty for being spotted or killing everyone in sight beyond to your score, which again makes the stealth part of the game feel superflous. If you want to play samurai you can just pack a ton of health packs and slash your way through everyone, which might actually work better given the draw distance. There are a few good things about the game, like the ability to choose your loadout for the mission and the grappling hook, which generally works well, but I feel that this game fails on such a fundamental level that I can't even justify giving it an A. I'm sure the later games in the series are able to resolve some of these issues but the first title is pretty rough.