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Last Topic's Ratings:
C3 Racing - BG - 50% (2)
Fantastic Four - BBBAA - 20% (5)
Gex - AABABGAAGG - 55% {10}
Starblade Alpha - GBAA - 50% {4}
Warcraft 2 - AAAAAG - 58% (6)
Wonder Trek - A - 50% (1)
Two squiggle bracket games in one topic! And C3 Racing easily could have been another one if it had got more votes. It's like Orcs vs Humans out here, which ironically was the least divisive game in this lot.
Games for this topic:
Agent Armstrong
Ayrton Senna Kart Duel
Baldies
Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown
Marvel Super Heroes
Tripuzz
This week we have the game that got me into fighting games all those years ago. I'm curious to see how it stands up to my memories of it since I haven't played it in a long time.
Agent Armstrong - G
ReplyDeleteAyrton Senna Kart Duel - A
Baldies - B
Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown - G
Marvel Super Heroes - A
Tripuzz - B
3D conversions of 2D Run and Gun games like Contra tend not to work too well, but Agent Armstrong manages to be an exception. There's not a ton of depth to the environments, with the stages always being much longer than deep (think of it as similar to Double Dragon's gameplay where you can move into and out of the foreground), which is probably why the third dimension never really causes problems when aiming. There's a bit more depth here than you'd sometimes find in games like this, with each mission having specific objectives that you must complete, but it's still a pretty fast-paced game for the most part. Better than I expected for sure, definitely goes to show how far solid control and mechanics can take you even in the PS1 era.
Aryton Senna's Kart Duel is a simple but decent racer. Like Formula Karts, this is a more sim-style take on Kart Racing, however it's better than that game in every way, with far more workable controls and physics. The only real downside to this game is that there's not really a lot to it. The core campaign mode is just 9 races, and beyond that you have Time Trials and not much else. Still, it's a decent foundation that later games in the series might be able to build upon.
Baldies is a simple strategy game that bares a lot of resemblace to Tyrants: Fight Through Time / Megalomania from the previous generation. Like in that game, the basic gameplay involves assigning your workers to various tasks, namely construction, combat, or research (or leaving them idle, which is also how you generate new workers), and the key to victory lies in figuring out a good balance of each for any given situation. Where the game differs from Tyrants is that whereas in that game the map was divided into sectors and you simply chose sectors to attack, here there are more standard maps that you can interact with in a vaguely Populous-esque way. That being said, I'm not a fan of this approach, most of the appeal of Tyrants is how simple it is, putting a fair bit of the focus on micro skill like moving your characters around to avoid traps, deleting terrain to attack enemy workers, blocking houses so your workers will bomb them and so on feels like it distracts from the strategy of the game. It also just feels fairly slow in general during the part of the stage where you build up your forces, the lack of the "speedup" mechanic from Tyrants definitely hurts here (as does the fact that you're not told specifically when things will be done). Overall this one just isn't very fun, and I kind of feel that the time for overly simple strategy games for this has passed (this came out in 2003, long after Starcraft).
I was originally going to post about how impressed I was with how well Duke Nukem 3D is ported to PS1, particularly in terms of its visuals and frame rate, though apparently emulators don't emulate the slowdown from the original game quite right and thus give a somewhat false impression of how well it runs, so maybe it's not quite as impressive of a technical achievement as it seems (though I did look up videos captured on original hardware and it doesn't seem drastically worse). Either way though, the levels from the original game are all intact, and there's actually even new levels, and they are still as meticulously detailed as ever, crammed with secrets and little details that really help this game feel alive. The Duke is great too, all of his voice lines seem to be intact (unlike in the N64 version where some of them were replaced) and his over-the-top machismo is hard not to love. The one thing that does suck though is that the multiplayer requires a link cable (and even then it's only for 2 players) and aiming up and down with the shoulder buttons is ass. There's a second stick right there! Why did it take companies so long to figure out what it should be used for? Still a pretty solid effort in any case, we've definitely come a long way from the crappy FPS ports of the 16-bit consoles.
DeleteGoing back to Marvel Super Heroes was more jarring than I expected. In most ways it's extremely similar to Marvel vs Capcom, which seems to make the areas where it differs stick out that much more. For example, this game has no flying screen, so you can get more hits on the way down from an air combo, which feels incredibly bizarre. Moves also seem to push back further than they do in later games (for example, Captain America can never combo cLK cMK cHP in this game, which works just fine in MvsC1, he has to do just cLK cHP), and the damage scaling feels a bit off, in particular raw hard buttons or specials just do a truckload of damage, almost making combos feel irrelevant. Still, the graphics and music are undeniably fantastic and the gem system gives it a bit of a unique feel, even if it is somewhat overshadowed by its successors. I feel like whether this is A or G depends on how much leniency you're willing to give it for releasing earlier, though personally I feel like the fact that this series got so many games in such a short time diminishes the early release advantage to some degree.
Tripuzz reminds me of Twinkle Star Sprites in that it's trying a bit too hard to be unique, except unlike TSS in this case I don't think the resulting product is really any fun at all. At its core, Tripuzz is basically Puyo Puyo, except instead of round blobs, the pieces are triangles, and the sides of the triangles have to touch for it to count as a match. I was eventually able to wrap my head around this, but it makes the game play much more slowly compared to PP, and for some reason the game basically refuses to let you deal with more than 2 colours at once, which makes setting up chains bigger than 3 almost impossible. This one is super forgettable.