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Last Topic's Ratings:
Agent Armstrong - GG - 100% (2)
Ayrton Senna Kart Duel - A - 50% (1)
Baldies - BB - 0% (2)
Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown - AGGGAG - 83% (6)
Marvel Super Heroes - GGGABG - 75% (6)
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This was a pretty all-or-nothing topic, though that can happen when several games get few votes.
Games for this topic:
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars
Fuuun Gokuu Ninden
King's Field 1
Tennis
TNN Hardcore 4x4
Zoop
I'm kind of nervous to try out King's Field after all this time, I really have almost no idea what to expect from it. For the game just called "Tennis", it's the Simple 1500 one (which is also called "All-Star Tennis"), in case you're having trouble identifying the correct game.
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - G
ReplyDeleteFuuun Gokuu Ninden - A
King's Field (JP) - A
Tennis - B
TNN Hardcore 4x4 - B
Zoop - A
Broken Sword is a fairly famous adventure game, but for the uninitiated, it's a globe-trotting mystery featuring great hand-drawn visuals and animation and full-voice acting. Compared to the Lucasarts games or Discworld, it's a bit less comedic, but there's still a kind of dry wit to the game to keep things from being too dark. The puzzle design of the game is generally good, definitely more sensible than Discworld, though you can die in this game so you'll want to remember to save periodically. The real question of course is going to be how well it fares in the port to PS1. For the most part, it does pretty well, there are some load times, but only between scenes and they're not too long, and it seems like the resolution is slightly worse on PC, but the animations otherwise appear to be fully intact. The interface also works serviceably on PS1 and controlling the pointer with the dpad doesn't feel overly slow or tedious. It might be best to play it on PC if you have the option, but this certainly isn't a bad way to experience a classic game.
I've often heard King's Field brought up when people mention Dark Souls (since they have the same developer), but honestly they aren't much alike apart from some superficial aesthetic similarities. King's Field is generally a much more straightforward first-person dungeon crawler RPG compared to Dark Souls' more Castlevania-ish gameplay, and the game is generally much more basic in almost all respects. The graphics are obviously very dated due to its age, with the game generally looking and somewhat controlling like an early FPS like Doom, and like TNN Hardcore 4x4 this game also has some truly atrocious texture work, though at least you move slowly enough that it doesn't hurt the eyes that badly. By far this game's weakest point is its combat, which suffers from some absurd limitations. The main combat consists of a simple sword swing, which works well enough, though its range is somewhat hard to gauge properly, and enemies having similar swings of their own, but the enemy AI is so absurdly easy to exploit that the combat has almost no challenge to it. Enemies all have a kind of invisible bubble around their spawn point that defines how far they're allowed to move, and it's often extremely small, allowing you to just watch them from a few feet away as they refuse to come after you, which makes it trivially easy to kite them and generally removes all challenge from the combat system. Even coming up to a group of enemies is never a threat since they don't pursue you and thus there's no real risk of being overwhelmed. Even against the handful of enemies who have been given some space to move around their pathing is nonexistent so if any kind of obstacle exists in the room it's trivially simple to get them stuck behind it. Coupled with the abundance of healing items and the surprising speed at which you level up I never felt like I was in any danger as I explored the various areas. Speaking of which, there's a lot of wandering around in this game, the areas look very samey due to the simple textures and lack of landmarks, so you'll probably want to use a guide to know where to go. Beyond that, there's really not a lot more to say about this game. You mostly just wander around, find items, and kill easy enemies. I feel it might just barely be A based on how old it is, but I don't think it's really notable even for its time.
Fuuun Gokuu Ninden is a 2D platformer that reminds me a bit of the Goemon series. It's a fairly simple game, with only four main buttons (jump, attack, run, super), whose standout feature is that you can throw enemies and other objects by getting close to them, which is admittedly pretty fun. You can also collect power up orbs that fuel a super attack that is useful for defeating bosses. There's 3 playable characters, though they're all very similar, differing only in terms of the amount of HP they have, their super attack, and their speed, but they also serve as your lives, Ninja Turtles-style, so you'll likely end up using all of them. It's a fairly forgiving game, you have a lot of health and even falling off the stage just bounces you back up and takes a little health away, so it's easy to play through in that regard, though I didn't find it to be quite noteworthy enough for G.
DeleteSimple 1500 Tennis is a pretty bad Tennis game. There's a decent number of players and modes, but the actual Tennis physics are absurdly basic and the hit detection feels off, sometimes your character will just miss the ball for seemingly no reason. Serving is annoying too, with it being far too easy to fault. The one thing I enjoy about this game is the AI, which will sometimes just sit there and not bother to chase a ball at all, but I certainly wouldn't recommend this game to any degree, particularly since it came out in 2000, by which time far better Tennis games were available.
TNN Hardcore 4x4 is another lousy early PS1 racer. For starters, it's an absurdly ugly game, featuring arguably the worst texture work I've ever seen in a 3D game. Besides the textures just looking hideous in every possible way, they're also laid out in completely nonsensical ways, with textures running along the ground and up the walls, like they were stitched together to make a quilt, which makes it extremely hard to tell what's track and what's wall when going fast, and despite being an off-road game you walls stop you dead in this game, there's no negotiating between what's track and what's not. The trucks also bounce all over the place constantly for no real reason, and combined with the awful graphics this quickly starts to give me a headache. The only decent thing about this game is the camera work, which is better than some other early games, but it's not going to salvage a game that's this painful to play.
I have very lukewarm feelings towards Zoop. Its tagline of "America's largest killer of time" is actually a shocking example of truth in advertising, because I feel that billing the game as a "time killer" is quite accurate. When I play this game, time does pass. I don't think I'd describe it as fun or addictive, even when it gets fast it's never terribly engaging, but it's a kind of vapid, low-commitment experience that you could probably use to kill a few minutes if you had to. I could explain more about how to play this game, but it feels unnecessary, it's so simple that you figure it out in 5 seconds and that's really all there is to say about Zoop, watch pretty colours, listen to jazz, click on matching colours. Maybe this game was just ahead of its time, this type of simple gameplay would obviously later go on to dominate mobile devices, but it feels very limited for a console game.