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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Chill - AB - 25% (2)
Disney's The Emperor's New Groove - GGG - 100% (3)
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete - GGAGGGGG - 94% (8)
Mighty Hits - AB - 25% (2)
OverBlood - GBGG - 75% (4)
Tokyo Highway Battle - AGA - 67% (3)
Despite how much I agonized over my rating for Lunar, it looks like there was never any real doubt about the quality of the game anyway. I guess I really was overthinking it.
Games for this topic:
Big Strike Bowling
D
Mega Man X4
Meisha Retsuden: Greatest 70's
South Park
Unholy War, The
I considered also putting Z in this topic so we could have both 1-letter name games in the same topic, but I decided that was too ridiculous.
Big Strike Bowling - B
ReplyDeleteD - B
Megaman X4 - G
Meisha Retsuden: Greatest 70's - B
South Park - A
Unholy War, The - A
Big Strike Bowling is a terrible game. I alluded to this when we reviewed Ten Pin Alley (as I also tried some other PS1 Bowling games for comparison), but pretty much everything about this game is garbage. For starters, it has among the most simplistic mechanics in any bowling game. Almost regardless of how you stop the meter, your shot just goes totally straight, so there's basically no skill or nuance to the gameplay. The physics also suck, the ball just kind of plows straight through the pins every time, which actually makes it almost impossible to hit strikes or splits. Ten Pin Alley perhaps had some value if you could learn how to play it, but this game definitely doesn't.
I'm a bit surprised by all the acclaim for D because I'm definitely not a fan. For starters, it's kind of like Myst, which I already didn't much care for, but compared to Myst, it's vastly shorter, smaller, and more linear. In some sense this makes it easier to figure out where to go, but it also makes the puzzles feel fairly trivial, the only thing that adds any difficulty is the game's lousy interface, which often makes it unclear which objects you can interact with and even makes basic room navigation a pain in many cases. As for the game's horror theme, this too is lacking, easily among the worst in the genre. I was initially intrigued by the concept of trying to track down a killer in an abandoned hospital, as this seems ripe with potential for horror, but the game instantly morphs into a generic castle setting that feels completely disconnected from the game's narrative and this basically kills any scare potential in the game. Most of the game just consists of walking around a bunch of empty rooms and fiddling with various knobs and levers to solve simple puzzles, and every now and then we'll see some dead bodies or a flashback that the game is trying really hard to convince us is creepy, but since these don't tie into the gameplay in any way it doesn't really work. The only real threat in the game is that there's a time limit, but the game also fails at using this to create tension, if various events in the game would happen as time passed that might make things feel a little bit more intense, but as it stands the time limit does absolutely nothing until it completely expires, at which point the game simply ends. I also think it's pretty hilarious that although you can finish this game in about an hour, it comes on 3 discs, they must be the shortest individual discs in all of gaming. Thank goodness we've left the FMV era of games behind, there's a reason no one ever made games like this again after proper 3D environments became possible, but even among FMV games this is near the bottom.
I consider Megaman X4 to be the second-best game in the Megaman X series. It's comparable in quality to X2 and X3, which is to say it's clearly still a very good game even if it's not quite the masterpiece that is X1, but this time you can finally play as Zero for the whole game! There's really not much more to say that than, the control is still fantastic as you'd expect from the series and they haven't started messing with the core formula in ways that hurt the game as they will in later entries, it's just a great experience all around. Easily one of the top 2D games on the system, and a decent SR contender for sure.
Meisha Retsuden: Greatest 70's is one of the greatest tragedies I've ever seen in gaming. The game is basically a 70's-themed Gran Turismo with good graphics, control, and a neat upgrading system. That should be an easy G, right? Well, it should be, but it has one absurdly massive flaw that ruins the entire experience, which is that the game is completely impossible. The rival cars in this game have endgame-level top speed from the very beginning of the game, and regardless of how long you grind for upgrades, earning a tiny amount of money from finishing last over and over, you will never be able to even come close to matching their performance. There is actually an exploit you can use to progress in the game, which is that while the rivals have the best top speed money can buy, they have almost no acceleration, so you can pass them at the beginning and then cut them off when they try to pass, causing them to lose their speed and have to spend ages accelerating again. This is actually easier than it sounds because you have a very well-done rear view mirror and the AI doesn't attempt to go around you, so you can just slam on the brakes whenever they catch up so they ram you, then speed off for half a lap until they start to catch up again, though this is every bit as dumb and unfun as it sounds. If they would have just coded better AI this game would have been G for sure, but as it stands it's basically just a fender bender simulator.
DeleteSouth Park is a very basic FPS game. It controls well enough and the frame-rate is decent, though the draw distance is fairly bad. Compared to the N64 version, the PS1 version is less colourful, the movies are much more compressed, and it seems to have a lot fewer voice clips, so the N64 version is clearly the way to go if you have the option, though neither version is really great. The biggest issue with the game is just that it's fairly dull. There's very little enemy variety, stages go on way too long, and players have way too much health (this is a problem in multiplayer as well), which simply causes it to become monotonous very quickly. I do appreciate that they got the original voice actors and some of the movies are kind of funny, but it's not worth sitting through the whole game just to see them.
The Unholy War is an okay game. The basic gist behind the game is that it's an arena fighter similar to Destrega, but much more simplistic and fast-paced. In the Mayhem Mode, you'll pit teams of fighters against each other in one-on-one battles until one team runs out of fighters. They all have different abilities, but follow the same general design so they are very easy to pick up and play. Each character has an energy bar that quickly regenerates and 3 attacks they can use, each costing varying amounts of the bar. Matches are very fast-paced, but some characters have good matchups against others, so there's a little strategy involved in picking which one to send out next. In the Strategy mode, you instead take turns moving units on a grid and engage in the arena battles when they touch each other, though IMO this is not nearly as fun because it's much slower-paced. I feel like the core gameplay is decent, the main problem is that there's not many characters, I feel like if there had been like 50+ characters and you could create random teams of them this would be a pretty hilarious multiplayer game, as it stands there's not quite enough content here to keep it entertaining for very long.