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Last Topic's Ratings:
Charlie Blast's Territory - AAABAGB - 43% (7)
F1 Pole Position 64 - ABBBA - 20% (5)
International Superstar Soccer 64 - GBGGGGAGG - 83% (9)
Mortal Kombat Trilogy - ABAGGGAAGABAA - 58% (13)
Pilotwings 64 - GAGAAAAGGGGGGBGA - 75% (16)
Super Mario 64 - GGGGGGGAGGGGGGGAGGGGGGGA - 94% (24) (7 SR)
Look at those vote totals! I think Mario 64 has instantly become our most voted game ever here at GAB. Even Pilotwings would be quite high up on the list too. I'm so happy to see such great turnout right off the bat, even if it did make tabulating the scores much more time-consuming.
Games for this topic:
Cruis'n USA
Doreamon
Hexen
NHL 99
WCW vs. nWo: World Tour
Wetrix
Cruis'n USA was my jam back in the day, I think I actually played it even more than Mario 64 at launch, but unlike Mario 64 I haven't played it at all since it was new, so I'm curious to see how it holds up. Also, we have our first import here in Doraemon, which oddly I've never played even though I like both Doraemon and 3D Platformers. Note that there are 3 Doraemon games for N64, this is the first one.
Cruis'n USA - G
ReplyDeleteDoreamon - A
Hexen - G
NHL 99 - A
WCW vs. nWo: World Tour - A
Wetrix - A
Revisiting Cruis'n USA was even more of an eye-opening experience than I expected. For starters, this game highlights the potential dangers of rating N64 games using emulators. I was initially playing this game on an emulator, and it runs like greased lightning there, with a rock solid framerate and also some really crisp visuals. However, I thought it seemed a fair bit better than I remembered it, so I dug out the original cartridge, and it's not quite as slick there, with both a fair number of frame drops and also the visuals looking somewhat muddier. This is the first time we've really had to deal with this issue, the emulators for previous systems generally focus on being very accurate with at best a little bit of filtering on the graphics, but here the emulator is a drastic improvement. In some sense, I feel like obviously, you should rate based on the original, but realistically, an emulator is probably how many people would play the game these days, and there have also been games in the past that I've said play much better on emulators (generally because they benefit heavily from speedup). I suppose for now we'll just say that the emulator experience is clearly better and you might want to play it that way if it's an option and move on to the rest of the game, since that remains the same regardless of how you play it. For starters, the game controls quite well, and I feel it has pretty good pacing, most races are about 90-120 seconds long, which feels like a good length for this type of game. I also really like the concept behind the game, obviously the idea of a cross-country race is not new, but I feel this game sells it much more convincingly than past attempts at it because the visuals have a lot more detail. I also think the system whereby you unlock faster cars by clearing the main mode is a good way to add replay value and I actually think the track design in this game is quite good too, even though I haven't played this game in well over a decade many tracks were instantly familiar, like Death Valley, Redwood Forest, Iowa, Chicago, and Washington DC. Besides the visuals when playing on a real N64, my only real beefs are the soundtrack, which is fairly poor, having too few songs and the songs themselves looping much too quickly, and the fact that there basically just aren't any courses covering the central US, you kind of just warp from California to the north. Still, overall I feel like this is fairly solid, just play it on an emulator if you can.
The first N64 Doraemon game bares a lot of resemblance to the first SNES Doraemon game, which perhaps isn't too surprising considering they were both developed by Epoch. The basic gameplay loop remains the same, you'll explore a hub area to find various action stages, which contain various gadgets that are needed to open up other stages, giving the game a bit of an adventure feel to it. It worked on SNES and it still works here, though the action stages themselves are obviously pretty different now since the game has become a 3D Platformer. This is where I feel the game loses the most compared to the SNES, the 3D platforming action is serviceable, but simply isn't as tight or exciting as the 2D gameplay. There are relatively few enemies and you can take absurdly many hits, so most of the gameplay just revolves around jumping across various platforms (usually with no danger other than having to climb back up if you fall). There is a decent variety of stages here, with a bunch of water levels and even a racing minigame, and the entire Doraemon cast is playable and have unique abilities (at least, once you find their weapons so they can actually attack), but it never really feels terribly inspired. A decent first attempt, but it needs a little bit more seasoning.
Hexen is pretty solid. For starters, this isn't quite your typical FPS game. From the get-go, you have 3 characters to choose from, and while the Wizard may play like a somewhat typical FPS game, the Warrior and Cleric boast a much more significant focus on melee combat, which feels unique for a game of this type even if it does mostly consist of pressing forward, attacking, then holding back to dodge and trying not to get trapped in a corner. Each character also uses consumable items a bit differently, which is a nice touch and helps make the three of them feel unique. The game's levels are pretty impressively varied, too, though there's a bit more reliance on room traps than I'd normally like (at least many aren't instant kills). There's even some adventure elements where you have to revisit some stages after triggering things in other stages. Throw in co-op and a deathmatch mode and have everything run fairly well and you've got a pretty decent early FPS title for N64.
DeleteNHL 99 is a tough one to rate. Obviously, it's one of the earlier games in the "modern" NHL series, but they got a fair bit right even early on. I've played NHL '14 pretty extensively, and I was initially impressed by how close NHL '99 comes to it in some ways despite being 15 years older. Most notably, the basic player control still feels pretty similar, I was fairly impressed at the overall "smoothness" of the game, though the more I played this version, the more a few little things started to bother me. The first thing is the passing. I noticed in a lot of situations, I would hold in the direction of a player on my team and press pass and it still wouldn't go to them, despite the fact that it works every time in the more modern games. I get that they allow you to pass in any direction so you can do dump ins and such, but it feels like it's too picky, if my stick is held mostly in the direction of a teammate, obviously that's where I want it to go, and the later games seem to have figured this out. The other main controls for shooting and hitting generally felt good, though, as does using the hustle move (I was surprised to find out it's been in the series this long), though I feel this game has the same issue that a number of games in the series do where the goalies are somewhat too good. When your beautiful one timers and rebounds get robbed a few too many times the game starts to feel like it's just mostly RNG. Another thing that kind of bothered me was the commentary, which I feel just doesn't seem to fit the game, the commentator seems to be trying way too hard, for a game like this I prefer more realistic commentary. Beyond that, the game has a somewhat decent selection of modes, though it's obviously nowhere near as expansive as it is in '14 (ie, no create a player or anything like that). In fact, that sort of generally sums up my opinion on the game. Everything this game does, NHL '14 does way better. Obviously this is kind of an unfair comparison, and maybe '14 is just too damn good to be used as a reference point (I could make a decent case for it being the best sports game I've ever played), but when it comes to games like this that tend to get a little better every year, unless a particular entry does something really special they tend to get left by the wayside when a new one comes out. I could see people rating this G, though for me, I don't think it would have been quite polished enough yet to grab me back in the day.
WCW vs nWo: World Tour is clearly a step in the right direction for Wrestling games as a whole. We're finally moving away from the mashy wrestling games of the past towards more positioning-based Wrestling games of the present day, and the improvement is immediately obvious. Having grapples execute based on who actually lands the grapple rather than who mashes the hardest feels worlds better. I do think there's still some work to be done with general controls, though. I'm not really a fan of using the dpad rather than the stick for basic movement (say goodbye to moving in anything beyond the 8 cardinal directions), and I feel like some of the button choices are a little weird. Having pin and run on the same button caused me to miss pins a fair number of times, for example. It also has the same issue that most games with a ton of wrestlers do, the selection of names is great but they all feel a bit samey, though obviously many other games also have this issue. All in all, I feel that it's a very good start to the series, though obviously it will improve quite significantly in the following releases.
DeleteMy thoughts on Wetrix are probably going to sound exactly the same as everyone else who played it. The core idea behind the game is solid, but there's just not much game here. It probably seems like there's a lot of modes to the game at first, but actually most of them are basically just simple variants on each other, for example the pro mode is just the classic mode but it starts on a higher level. I feel like it'd be nice to have some kind of stage clear mode and it'd be nice if you could play the versus mode against the AI. As for the main game, it's an interesting idea, though I do feel it's a little heavy on RNG, sometimes you get a ton of pieces in a row with no uppers and if you have some leaks you need to plug you're basically screwed. It's a cool idea for sure, it just needs some more expansion.