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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bass Hunter 64 - BABB - 13% (4)
Doreamon 2 - BB - 0% (2)
GoldenEye 007 - AGGGGGGGGGGGAGGAGGGG - 93% (20) (5 SR)
Milo's Astro Lanes - BBAAAA - 33% (6)
Wipeout 64 - GGAGGGAAA - 78% (9)
WWF Attitude - AGGGAAGAA - 72% (9)
I find it kind of funny that WWF Attitude and WWF War Zone got exactly the same grade, so I guess there really is no consensus on which is better. Also, Goldeneye continues the trend of being a well-known game that gets an absolute boatload of votes and SRs.
Games for this topic:
Armorines: Project Swarm
Iggy's Reckin' Balls
Jeopardy
NBA Live 2000
Pokemon Stadium
Tonic Trouble
I remember all the hype for Tonic Trouble when it was initially in development, they basically thought it was going to be the next Mario 64 or something, but it took ages to come out and when it finally did people thought it was disappointing and I actually never played it. I've been looking forward to finally trying it out ever since we started the N64 GAB, just to see if there really is something there.
Armorines: Project Swarm - A
ReplyDeleteIggy's Reckin' Balls - G
Jeopardy - G
NBA Live 2000 - G
Pokemon Stadium - G (SR)
Tonic Trouble - A
Armorines: Project Swarm is okay. It's clearly trying to imitate Goldeneye to some extent, with varying mission objectives and generally similar gameplay, but it doesn't do nearly as good a job, the missions are comparatively much more simplistic and the general control is never quite as good, though at least it is highly customizable. It also suffers from a problem that many other N64 games do where it's frequently way too dark, but at least it otherwise does run fairly well and look decent, at least with the expansion pak. One thing I do like is that your primary weapon has infinite ammo but needs to be reloaded periodically, years before Overwatch made this cool, it's much better than getting stuck with a wimpy kick or something. Multiplayer options are also decent, this game might actually be decent on PS1 where your FPS options are more limited, though apparently that version runs a fair bit worse.
Iggy's Reckin' Balls is actually a pretty neat game. For starters, the gameplay is super unique. It's a kind of platformer / racing game hybrid, where you have to climb up towers using your grapple arm. Of course, there are other racers too, and you can attack each other with your grapples as well. The towers vary tremendously, and there's a bunch of different characters as well, each with their own stats and even voice acting. The game is generally very chaotic and fun and there's really nothing else like it before or since. Probably the only real flaw the game has is with its progression, the game is divided up into 10 cups of 10 races each, but doing 10 races at a time can take ages, particularly once the tracks start to get longer. Furthermore, you're required to win all 10 races to get unlockables (you can savescum by using the "restart race" option as many times as you want, but it only extends how long it takes to progress the game). Either splitting the tracks up into 20 groups of 5 or reducing the number of laps on bigger stages probably would have helped quite a bit. Still, it's a very interesting game and one most people should probably check out.
The N64 version of Jeopardy is a very good rendition of the game show. For starters, it has a surprisingly robust suite of options to customize the experience, and I particularly appreciate that you can customize the difficulty of the questions depending on how ignorant you wish to feel at any given time. It's also got the look and feel of the show down pat, with all the correct music and voice clips from Alex Trebek, though I do kind of wish he would announce the categories aloud. The best thing by far, though, is that when the computer gets a question wrong, they provide a plausible incorrect answer! Longtime GAB viewers will know that this is one of my pet peeves with game show games, where the AI will simply put in a bunch of symbols or something when the game decides that they get it wrong, the whole experience just feels so much better this way. Bravo to whomever wrote the wrong answers for this game, they're the real hero here.
Pokemon Stadium is kind of a weird game to rate, largely because in a certain sense it's not really its own game, it's more of an extension to Pokemon RBY. I guess before we can talk about Stadium, we have to talk about RBY a little first, so I'll give you a little glimpse into Gameboy GAB and say it's obviously an SR-level game, it completely redefined what a portable game could be with its volume of content and overall polish, but the one issue it did have to some degree is there was no real postgame, you just caught Mewtwo and that was it. Once you were at a high level the Elite 4 stood no chance, so unless you had friends who liked to grind a lot (and didn't just cheat to get a whole team of level 100 Mewtwos) there wasn't much you could do with your beefed up Pokemon. Enter Pokemon Stadium and the Transfer Pak, which basically exist to fill that void. Sure, technically the game also has some minigames and you can use rental Pokemon, but no one bought the game for that, you were buying it to see your team from the GB game duke it out in full 3D and see if they were up to snuff against the game's toughest challenges. First, let's talk about the presentation. Like RBY itself, this was mindblowing for its time. Every pokemon was modeled in full 3D, they had varying attack animations, hit animations, entrance and defeat animations, and everything just looked great (embarrassingly, this game features more distinct animations than some of the newer Pokemon games). There's also an announcer who provides commentary on the battles, and though he's a little goofy, he's definitely an integral part of the experience. As for the gameplay itself, there's tons of content here, and although the AI definitely fights with kid gloves during round 1, almost never using fully evolved Pokemon or good movesets, by the final tournaments in the game you'll need top-level meta teams to stand a chance, as the AI not only has strong teams but much better AI than you'd ever see in the mainline games to take advantage of them. Speaking of, the game also made some pretty smart changes to the game by introducing the Sleep and Freeze clauses, fixing some bugs, and introducing the "pick 3 of 6 after seeing the opponent's team" rule, which actually makes Gen 1 feel fairly balanced overall. Beyond this, the game also features the ability to play the GB games on your TV, with speedup, which is an incredibly welcome feature and almost justified the purchase of the game on its own. I actually recently went back and 100%ed this game (as well as creating a living dex for Gen 1) and it was still a super intense and fun experience even all these years after it first came out. I still remember brave little Dratini clutching the Petit Cup Round 2 with like 2hp remaining using the Agility Wrap combo (which the AI is actually smart enough to switch out of, necessitating many, many turns of hoping Wrap doesn't miss), it was incredibly hype. Overall, I consider this game an essential part of Generation 1, and a big part of what makes Generation 1 still the best generation of Pokemon to this day.
DeleteThere's not too much to say about NBA Live 2000, it's clearly just a good game. All of the fundamentals are good, the control, performance, visuals, sound, etc. are all pretty top notch for their time. In terms of the gameplay, it kind of positions itself in the middle between sim and arcade style, it's quite a fast-paced game and you have the options for arcade-like rules, complete with Turbo, pushing, and no rules beyond the shot clock, which makes it play a lot like NBA Jam (this just goes to highlight once again how much NBA Jam 99 sucks), but it also plays well using the generally more realistic rules, so there's something for everyone here. I don't really have too much to say about it beyond this, production values across the board are clearly high, and there's a lot of nice touches here and there (for example, I like the pop-up stats that appear during games from time to time), you can tell EA knows what they're doing when it comes to sports titles.
DeleteTonic Trouble is actually not a bad game. It's extremely similar to Rayman 2, but that's not a bad thing because Rayman 2 is a very good game. The first thing I'd like to draw attention to is the controls, which are quite good. The game has a lot of tricky platforming, but I found I was almost never missing jumps, the control feels quite precise and the ledge grab works well. The level design is very reminiscent of Rayman 2 as well, levels are often comprised of lengthy set-pieces with occasional comedic moments and frequent changes in gameplay, which helps prevent the game from feeling tedious. The Camera also isn't bad, even though it doesn't rotate well you can instantly center it behind you with Z and this works well enough, it also usually selects good angles during fixed-camera scenes. One area where the game is maybe a touch better than Rayman is that you get a lot of new abilities in Tonic Trouble, basically one per stage, and they feel pretty well-integrated into the game. The game is vastly shorter than Rayman, though, which is a bit odd for a game that was delayed so many times, it's actually a fairly short title overall. Ultimately, though, the game's biggest issue is that it came out too late. It was delayed a million times and by the time it came out, Rayman 2 was right around the corner and it's clearly the better game. If this had come out in 1997 or early 1998 when it was originally planned for release this might have been G. Despite this, there's still some fun to be had here and I figure I probably would have liked this if I played it at the time. It's not an epic failure by any means, just a game that got overshadowed by later titles.