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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Army Men: Air Attack - AAGGGGA - 79% (7) (1 SR)
Batman and Robin - BBABA - 20% (5)
Bust A Groove - AGGBGAAGG - 72% (9)
Gunpey - AGA - 67% (3)
Ultimate Fighting Championship - BBBBB - 0% (5)
VR Sports Powerboat Racing - BBBB - 0% (4)
Army Men continues to be a pretty surprisingly good franchise, but I'm sure it'll earn its reputation for trash eventually. Also, I still have the Bust-A-Groove music stuck in my head.
Games for this topic:
Action Bass
Cosmic Race
Crossroad Crisis
Earthworm Jim 2
Paradise Casino
Theme Park
You might recall that we covered Sim Theme Park a while back, due to my not understanding it was actually a sequel to the original Theme Park, so today we correct that oversight. Fear not, this is not a similar mistake on Earthworm Jim, there's no port of the original game to PS1.
Action Bass - B
ReplyDeleteCosmic Race - B
Crossroad Crisis - A
Earthworm Jim 2 - G
Paradise Casino - B
Theme Park - B
Even though it probably seems like I hate video fishing games, every time we play one I'm always a bit excited because I know at some point we're going to reach the point where they figure it out and fishing games start getting good, and Action Bass is a huge step in the right direction, it's just still not quite there yet. The secret to making a good fishing game is that actually fighting and catching the fish is the most interesting part of fishing, so a good fishing game should simplify the act of finding a place to fish and finding a fish to hook so that you spend more time doing the fun stuff, and Action Bass does somewhat get this concept, featuring relatively small fishing holes (only a single screen, no putting around aimlessly hoping there are fish nearby) that are filled with fish. Hooking fish is not so great, though, it features a simple lure system, which could be okay but the camera for this section is hilariously terrible, making it impossible to ever see if there's a fish nearby that might be interested, eventually I just settled for using a popper and popping it back and forth, which does attract fish's attention eventually. The actual fish fighting isn't much better, you simply hold X and let go before the tension meter gets too high. It's a little similar to River King 64, but there's not nearly as much depth, watching the fish's actions is almost unnecessary since there's little penalty for pulling at the wrong time. It still would have been close to an A ranking, were it not for the fact that the game imposes an idiotically short 3 minute time limit on your fishing, which doesn't even pause when a fish is landed, meaning that you will frequently be forced to give up your fish because you're out of time, and catching even a single small fish (there's seemingly no way to tell fish apart when they're in the water) or even casting to a part of the lake that has no fish spells doom. Nevertheless, it's still promising to some degree, I have hope for fishing games on PS1 yet.
Cosmic Race is one of the most wack games I have ever played. It is the future, so we race in the air, not on the ground. Ground racing is lame. However, we must stay close to the ground to go fast because hovering? Electromagnetism? Who knows, either way, the concept of the game is that you want to fly as close as possible to, but not touching the ground. The track will fly past various scenery, so you might think "aha, the idea is that you want to fly low for speed but then you run the risk of hitting things like trees or what not", except no, trees don't matter in the future, you can just fly right through them. If something isn't clearly a huge landmass you can just fly right through it as though it wasn't there. Sometimes the grey track that you're supposed to follow decides you must fly up into the air, or it dips a lot, and you must follow, or lose all your speed, so the game is really just about following the grey no matter what else your eyes may tell you. Oh, and at the end, there's a goal marker, that you must specifically hit, simply flying past it is not good enough in the future! Seriously, what the hell am I playing? Even when I'm winning I feel like I'm doing something wrong. This was clearly the Big Rigs of its day.
If you've ever played the bonus game in Buster Busts Loose where you have to guide Hampton to the various apples on a map by moving tiles around, Crossroad Crisis is basically that made into a full game. The goal here is to help the chick erase enough tiles to get the exit to appear, which is accomplished by either having the chick step on multiple successive tiles of the same colour, or step on the same tile twice (using the same colour is preferred as it generates a lot of bonus points). Strangely, this means that having the chick cross through a loop piece actually loses points, which seems nonsensical, but otherwise it's fairly fun, if a bit simple and repetitive. The chick really gets motoring as he clears more tiles, so you'll have to move and rotate tiles quickly to stop him from drowning. It's decently fun for a little while but apart from a 2P versus mode it doesn't really have a lot to keep you going.
DeleteHaving played Earthworm Jim 2 extensively on the 16-bit consoles I expected the PS1 version would be a serviceable but somewhat redundant update, but to my surprise, it's actually a fairly major step up from the other versions. For starters, the viewing area is greatly improved, which obviously improves the game in pretty much every way, making it much easier to see threats before they get you and also to find secrets and line up snot swings. The PS1 version also features a pretty rockin orchestrated soundtrack and better backgrounds to boot. Puppy Love definitely seems harder on PS1 for some reason, though, I swear the dogs fall faster. In any case, a surprisingly solid update to an already good game, too bad they didn't also do the first one.
Paradise Casino is an extremely basic Casino game. There are only four games, slots, black jack, roulette, and poker, which means it has even less variety than Vegas Stakes or Super Ceasar's Palace, the draw here is supposed to be that it's an ecchi game, where you can earn various pictures of the hostess girls by winning, but they're so ludicrously tame that I have a hard time believing anyone would ever care about them, and the amount of save scumming you'd have to do to earn them would take days. Definitely not worth anyone's time.
Some people consider the original Theme Park to be superior to Sim Theme Park, but I'm definitely not one of them, in fact, I'd say the original is inferior in every possible way. Obviously it looks way worse, with rides and attractions having far less detail, the 3D mode being a joke, and lacking the themed settings of Sim Theme Park, and there's also no music and only very limited sound (be prepared to hearing barfing for 90% of the game) but I'd be willing to give it a bit of a pass in this regard if the gameplay was as good or better, but Sim Theme Park is also vastly better in this regard. One of the worst things about the original Theme Park is its UI. Everything in the original game is performed using either the L1 or R1 menus, which feels poorly adapted to PS1 and results in you having to access a bunch of menus to do anything, which is made doubly annoying by the fact that the menus are too small and aren't well labelled (many important options like research are buried under icons in submenus), and that opening pretty much any menu page incurs a bit of load time, which you'll be doing constantly. The sequel much more wisely implements a context-sensitive menu where the actions that each button will perform are displayed on screen at all times, which feels vastly better to use. You can set up a much more complex park in the sequel in much less time simply because the UI is so much better. The sequel also has a much better progression system and coaster creator. I can sort of appreciate that this game served an important role in history, but Sim Theme Park and Rollercoaster Tycoon are so much better that it feels impossible to go back.