This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Pachinko 365 Nichi - AA - 50% (2)
Paperboy - ABBAAGGG - 56% {8}
Snowboard Kids - AGGGGG - 92% (6)
Waialae Country Club - BABBB - 10% (5)
WCW/nWo Revenge - GGGAGGGGGGG - 95% (11)
Yoshi's Story - AGAGAAAAAAAAGAAA - 59% (16)
An interesting back and forth on Paperboy in the last topic. Also, I wanted to say that Pachinko 365 Nichi was the first Pachinko game to ever escape the low range, but it turns out it's actually not, it is the highest rated one we've done if you count vote totals though.
Games for this topic:
Bug's Life, A
Deadly Arts
Doom 64
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Top Gear Rally
Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey
Since I know a lot of people are going to be busy over the next few weeks here's a very easy one for most people. Not for me, though, as I feel I need to go back and play it again before I can post my thoughts.
Bug's Life, A - A
ReplyDeleteDeadly Arts - B
Doom 64 - G
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - A
Top Gear Rally - A
Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey - A
A Bug's Life is a pretty typical 3D platformer. Its most interesting mechanic is that throughout the world you find various seeds which you can grow into different types of plants to help you progress and gather secrets. By collecting various medallions, you can power up the plants you can grow, allowing you to access different areas, and due to the fact that some seeds can be moved around there are occasionally some clever puzzles to be had. However, such moments are generally few and far between and the rest of the game generally feels very by the numbers. The combat is especially weak, you have a ground pound attack, but you can also throw berries, which are unlimited and have some homing capacity, so you'll likely just mash the throw berry button the entire game. There is some voice acting, but it is generally unremarkable, as are the visuals. Much like the movie of the same name, this one is serviceable but it's not surprising no one really remembers it.
Deadly Arts is another awful 3D fighting game. Besides having lousy frame data (pretty much all attacks are way too fast and safe), boring character designs, and little combo potential, it also has a few unique features that somehow make it even worse. For starters, it's a 3D fighter, but unlike most games in the genre, its stages aren't just flat boxes, they can have obstacles, walls, and even different rooms. This sounds great, except for the fact that the camera is atrocious and will constantly and instantly change angles, often flipping which side you're on and generally making it almost impossible to see what's going on during many crucial moments. The timer in each match is also very short, and when it runs out, the game decides who wins not just based on health left, but based on an obscure scoring system that basically makes it impossible to know who will win. Oh, and there's a block button, and you can attack while holding it, so there's almost no reason to ever let go of it. I'm shocked Konami published this, their other efforts on the system are so much better.
Before I played it, I didn't realize that Doom 64 wasn't simply a port of the original, instead being an entirely new game in the game general style. There's not much to say here other than that it's a good game, it has good level designs, enemy variety, controls, and weapons, basically all the stuff that made the original Doom a classic, plus it runs well and so far it remains exclusive to N64. I like that there's even options to adjust the stick sensitivity and brightness and so on and there's also a helpful mapping feature that helps you avoid getting lost, in general the package feels quite modern for its time. I guess the one thing that's unfortunate is there's no multiplayer here, but as single player experience it's very solid.
Top Gear Rally is decent. The tracks are quite large and the physics engine works well, I like that you can cut corners and go up slopes, unlike in certain other racing games when things like this would actually be walls. The tracks themselves are also large, have alternate paths, and feel distinctive, and I feel like the visuals in this game are pretty good for their time. The only thing I don't really like is the controls, I feel that they're a bit overly slippery, even on the tightest setting. In some ways this game actually reminds me a bit of MRC, though I think gameplay-wise MRC is better, this game has significantly more content though.
BEGIN OOT
DeletePeople who know me well probably know that I've never been a big fan of Ocarina of Time, for years I've lambasted its pacing and general gameplay, but I know that it's also one of the most popular games of all time so obviously I couldn't just phone this one in and base my opinions on a playthrough from over a decade ago. To my surprise, for much of the game I did actually find my opinion wavering between A and G, and so I actually ended up completing the entire game for this review to try to solidify my opinion. Like with Lunar, I'll start by explaining what elements of the game pushed me in each direction. For starters, the game's presentation is fantastic. Apart from some framerate issues here and there, the game both looks and sounds great, and feels very cinematic compared to most earlier games. Certainly, this is a big step up from Link to the Past in this regard. I also feel that the early stages of the game, particularly the Child Link segment, are pretty fun. There's a good mixture of overworld exploration, dungeons, story, and minigames early on, if the game could maintain the level of quality that it has during the child segment, it would be G.
However, the game has three major flaws, all of which start to become pronounced when you start playing as Adult Link. For starters, every time you re-enter a room, all the enemies respawn, even if you just went into the next room. Not even Zelda 1 does this, and coupled with the frequency of narrow corridors and platforms that force you to fight, this quickly causes exploration to become tedious. The second problem is that the game's combat system simply isn't very interesting. The vast majority of all enemies in the game are dispatching using one of two strategies. Either you just hack away like mad (this even beats enemies like the Stalfos and Gerudo, as the thrust attack is too fast for them to defend against), or you wait a moment for them to leave themselves open, then jump attack. For flying enemies, you simply Z-Target, then use a ranged weapon, though these are by far the most annoying enemies in the game because Navi is very picky about locking on to flying enemies. Boss fights don't fare much better, with all bosses having at most two separate attacks, which you virtually always simply counter with the dungeon item to stun them, then slash away.
The third problem is that many of the dungeons simply aren't very well-designed. The much maligned Water Temple is easily the highlight of the game, being by far the most well thought-out dungeon, but sadly the later dungeons will not match this level of quality. The Spirit and Shadow Temples are especially bad, being super linear, having almost no real puzzles, and starting to focus heavily on dumb platforming challenges using the Hover Boots. Pretty much the moment the silver rupee rooms start to appear, all semblance of good dungeon design has gone out the window, with the final dungeon being especially lame and anticlimatic. Some of the game's coolest mechanics feel drastically underused, for example the Ocarina allows you to do a number of cool things, but about the only puzzles it's ever used for are moving blue blocks with the Song of Time or playing Zelda's Lullaby on a Triforce symbol, both of which feel like cop-outs whenever the design team couldn't come up with a puzzle for a given room. Epona and the ability to switch from Child Link to Adult Link are also barely used. Epona basically just exists to make travelling Hyrule Field more tolerable, but Child Link has no access to it and Adult Link gets the warp songs that make Epona largely redundant. It's also almost never necessary to be Child Link again after you get to the adult section, the only things he can do that Adult Link can't is crawl through thin passages and plant beans. I also feel that this game has among the weakest collection of dungeon items in the series. There's fewer of them than usual, and the fact that Child Link and Adult Link don't share items is basically just used as an excuse to use the Bow as a Dungeon Item twice.
DeleteThere are also some minor annoyances, like the game's lack of a proper message skip, the text scrolls super slow and you can't hurry it up, you can press B but this only sometimes works and when it does it skips the entire conversation, even if it's something important. In general, the game simply doesn't feel as well-designed as most other games in the series, and I still feel it's the worst 3D Zelda by a significant margin. Incidentally, I suspect a number of these issues are corrected in the Master Quest version, as I've heard the dungeons are much harder and have more puzzles, but sadly this version doesn't include it. This game is still obviously not B though. It has its moments, they're just bogged down by problems that I can't excuse even based on its age. Even when this game was new I found it fairly dull, largely due to the dungeons taking up most of the game and not being very fun.
END OOT
Of Midways' 3 main sports games on N64 (the other two being NBA Hangtime and NFL Blitz), Wayne Gretsky's 3D Hockey is clearly the weakest one. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, it's still fun for a little while, but it simply doesn't have the nuance of the others. The biggest issue is that the goalies simply aren't good enough. I've said before that the key to making a good Hockey game is that the goalies can't be too good, but there is such a thing as going too much in the other direction. The difficulty level of the game seems to affect the competence of the goalies to some extent, but they still get fooled by one-timers almost every time, and the absurd success rate of these shots makes it almost pointless to ever attempt anything else. I also feel that this game's presentation is a bit more lacking compared to the others, in particular it feels like the announcer has less to say, and there's also no sign of the create-a-player option from Hangtime either. Of the three Midway games, this is the only one where I've never completed a full run of the main gameplay mode, it simply doesn't really have the longevity for it. A decent multiplayer game for the time though.