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Last Topic's Ratings:
3D Baseball - GG - 100% (2)
Advanced VG - GA - 75% (2)
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee - GGGGBGAAG - 78% (9) (1 SR)
Point Blank - BAAGGGG - 71% (7) (1 SR)
Rush Hour - BAA - 33% (3)
Sokoban Basic - GG - 100% (2)
A very highly rated topic, with 5/6 games in the high rating range. I'm also always happy any time every game gets at least 2 votes. Let's keep it rolling!
Games for this topic:
Grand Theft Auto
International Track and Field
NickToons Racing
Nyan to Wonderful
Space Griffon VF-9
Wing Commander 3
I have somewhat mixed opinions about whether or not GTA: London 1969 should count as part of the original GTA. I'm pretty sure it's actually a totally standalone game and only uses the original as a disc check, but you do technically have to own the original and they did come bundled together at some point so I'm leaning towards just counting it under this game. In other news, I'm curious to see how Track and Field made the jump to PS1 and I really hope Nyan to Wonderful doesn't require too much Japanese knowledge because it looks adorable.
Grand Theft Auto - G
ReplyDeleteInternational Track and Field - A
NickToons Racing - A
Nyan to Wonderful - B
Space Griffon VF-9 - G
Wing Commander 3 - A
I'm going to shock the world and give Grand Theft Auto a G, even though I'm generally not a fan of the series or of sandbox games in general. Despite this, I played a fair bit of GTA when I was younger (long before GTA3 made the series popular), and I liked it quite a bit then, and honestly it's still pretty fun even now. I think the key difference with this game is that compared to the later GTA games, this one is a lot more arcadey. There's not really a significant storyline or anything like that, the focus is largely just on getting points, which gives the game a fair amount of freedom while still presenting you with a clear goal and giving measurable progress towards it, which is key for me to be invested in this type of game. I also like how it's often the case that towards the end of the mission, you'll have a ton of cops after you, but if you complete the mission, your heat rating is eliminated, so it feels tense without being unfair. There are a few issues for sure, the driving controls are a little wonky, sometimes mission objectives are really far apart and driving all that way can feel a bit tedious, and the game really could have used a minimap, but it's still a pretty fun game and a major innovator as well. As for the PS1 port, I've heard people complaining about framerate problems but for the most part it seemed fine and comparable to how I remember it on PC.
I was wondering how Track and Field would be adapted for PS1, and the answer is besides graphics, it's almost totally unchanged since NES. In a certain sense it's kind of a nostalgic throwback to the original, though the button mashing gameplay to run does feel kind of dated, I feel a reasonable update would have been to replace the mashing with a system where pressing the buttons to a slower but more precise rhythm yields speed, particularly considering the DPad now does nothing and you have to mash exclusively with your fingers on the face buttons.
The appeal of Nicktoons Racing is immediately apparent, the game has an all-star cast of cartoon superstars, with the likes of the Rugrats, Hey Arnold, Spongebob, Ren and Stimpy, and Catdog, to name a few. Some of the 3D models don't look fantastic and I'm not convinced it has all of the original voice actors, but there's no question it's a strong lineup. The game itself is serviceable for the most part, with a somewhat unique turbo system serving as the game's replacement for coins (you pick up energy on the track that you can use for a turbo), but its major flaw is that weapon hits stun you for an obnoxiously long time, making the game feel very heavily luck based, if you take a weapon hit near the end of the track, you're getting last, regardless of how well you've raced to that point. I feel like it would have been an interesting mechanic if you could use some turbo energy to recover faster, this would create an interesting risk / reward system between using the energy now and saving it to protect yourself later (because it also decays slowly if you don't use it), but alas, no such luck. It is cool to see all of these characters in one place though.
Well, I had no real reason to worry about Nyan to Wonderful being too hard to understand, instead it really has the opposite problem of being too simple. Nyan to Wonderful is really only barely a game, unlike most virtual pets you don't really have to worry about how you raise your animal (both dogs and cats are available), there's no real management about how often you feed your pet or how you play with them or anything, you basically just watch a cute little kitty or puppy run around and occasionally make them do something. You can have multiple animals and you can eventually pair them up (which requires you to wait ages for them to age), but there's really not much game here. I was expecting cute and it is definitely cute, but once the novelty of seeing a digital kitten meow at you wears off there's not a lot else to do.
DeleteSpace Griffon VF-9 is an almost absurdly ambitious game for its time. At its core, it is a Mech-based FPS, where much of your time will be spent strafing around and blasting various types of enemy robots. This is a bit more nuanced than it sounds because the mech can shift into various modes, which vary in terms of their speed and firepower, and you can also switch in and out of battle mode, which affects whether or not you can see the map and pick up items. For the most part, you'll probably be in the fast, non-battle mode for most of the game, then switch to one of the two slower combat modes when you see enemies on your radar. This is relatively quick and intuitive and generally offers a good compromise between making the levels feel reasonable to explore and letting you battle enemies effectively. There are also some light RPG elements to the game, as you level up after blasting enough enemies, have a limited supply of repair kits and energy kits, and can sometimes find new weapons to replace your depleted or broken ones. The game also has a significant story focus, as your squadmates will contact you constantly to offer insight about the battle station and their current progress at exploring it (as you might imagine, something nefarious is going on here). There's full voice acting and the story is relatively decent, but my biggest complaint is that they interrupt you very frequently and you can't skip their dialogue (it also freezes the game when it occurs). Often I'm waltzing up to some enemies, ready to destroy them, only for a call to show up: "Kid! There's enemies ahead! Get ready to blast them!" "Okay, I'll blast them!". Then there's another short pause and I have control again. If they could have played the audio in the background as you were playing and maybe put the character portraits in the top right or something when they called you, this game would be almost perfect, but alas it's just kind of an annoyance you have to put up with. The graphics of the game are also definitely showing their age, with environments looking very samey and enemy models having very few polygons, but it remains pretty interesting nonetheless and I'm shocked that something like this came out in 95. This game was also remade for DC with prettier graphics, but sadly still no background conversations (this version also wasn't localized).
Wing Commander 3's production values are nothing short of incredible, with over 2 hours of full motion video prepared to a surprisingly high quality standard. I'll admit, before playing this I didn't know Wing Commander wasn't directly affiliated with Star Wars, but you could certainly be forgiven for thinking so from the cinema scenes (and the fact that it stars Mark Hamill). These scenes are not limited to just intros and between missions, either, there is also a substantial component to the game where you can walk around the flagship and communicate with your crew (which has impact to both the story and the gameplay) and these also feature full motion video sequences. In some ways it reminds me a lot of the way Starcraft 2's story mode is presented, though obviously that's full CG. Unfortunately, I'm not quite as big a fan of the actual flying gameplay as I am of the presentation. For all of the buildup, the flying missions are often fairly basic, often as simple as jumping to a couple waypoints, blasting a few baddies with rockets, and then jumping back home. Despite the general simplicity of the gameplay, the controls are, without doubt, the most hellishly overcomplicated mess ever put into a console game. Thank god I had access to the instruction manual, because it takes NINE PAGES to list all the controls, most of which involve an unholy combination of multiple shoulder buttons plus face buttons or select + various buttons. There are so many controls that I doubt anyone could ever memorize them all, you basically have to keep the booklet out while playing. Many of the choices are totally insane, too, like for example, the aforementioned "jump to waypoint" function, which you need to do constantly, is mapped to L1L2R1R2. This is a clear case where they should have streamlined the game a bit for the console release. It's too bad, too, if this game could have borrowed the gameplay of the Rogue Squadron series the way they borrowed most of Star Wars' presentation and general plot, this would have been an absolutely incredible game, as it stands it's a great movie but one I'd probably rather watch than play.
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