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Last Topic's Ratings:
Choro Q - GGGG - 100% (4)
Intelligent Qube - GGAGGGAAGA - 80% (10) (1 SR)
International Karate + - AAB - 33% (3)
Spyro the Dragon - GAGGGGGGGAGAGGGAA - 85% (17)
Strike Force Hydra - BBBB - 0% (4)
Wild Boater - AAA - 50% (3)
I'm actually very surprised by the ratings for Wild Boater, I expected to be the only non-B vote for that game. Also, I'm surprised Spyro 1 vs Intelligent Qube was as close as it was.
Games for this topic:
Adventures of Lomax
Breath of Fire 3
Cindy's Fashion World
Mr Driller
Sammy Sosa Softball Slam
Plane Crazy
I feel like I read about Adventures of Lomax dozens of times back in the day, but I never actually played it. I'm also looking forward to trying Plane Crazy, if for nothing other than its stupid title.
Adventures of Lomax - G
ReplyDeleteBreath of Fire 3 - G
Cindy's Fashion World - B
Mr Driller - A
Sammy Sosa Softball Slam - A
Plane Crazy - B
I wasn't surprised to find out that The Adventures of Lomax and Flink have the same developer, as I made the connection almost immediately upon starting the game. They have a very similar overall aesthetic and similarly great 2D animation, though I feel that Lomax is a significantly better game overall, largely because it has much better physics. While Flink always feels a bit sluggish and stiff, the control in Lomax just feels right, which is good because it's a hard game with a fair amount of tricky platforming. One thing that I like about it is that it actually feels fairly authentic to Lemmings, it's got all the sound quips from the original game, the music feels Lemmings-y, and you even get to use some of the Lemmings powers as powerups. A pretty solid platformer all around, I'm surprised that this one isn't talked about more.
I always felt that the first two Breath of Fire games sort of skirted the line between A and G, while Breath of Fire 3 is the game where the series becomes more firmly G. The first two games are generally kind of by-the-book JRPGs with at best a couple interesting ideas, and Capcom seems to have realized this for the third game as it has much more of a focus on more unique systems that help give the game its own identity. Chief among these is the new skill system, whereby your party members can learn new abilities either by seeing them from enemies, or being taught them through the master system, the latter of which also affects your stat growths. Abilities can only be learned by one character (though you can transfer them) and master stat changes are permanent, so this offers a decent degree of customization for the characters and it helps keep the game interesting. Speaking of which, the game also features pretty good writing and character development and the presentation is quite excellent, featuring great spritework and animations and a surprisingly great soundtrack. The game is not totally without its flaws, though. Its random encounter rate is fairly high, and when combined with the aforementioned excellent animations, battles can take fairly long. This can cause some dungeon areas to feel a bit tedious, especially because sometimes the abilities of certain characters are needed to progress and if you don't have the right character with you you often need to leave and come back, which could easily take 20+ minutes with all the battles. That being said, I do think your time investment is decently well-rewarded here even if it can be a little bit of a slog in some parts.
Somehow, Cindy's Fashion World manages to be even worse than Cindy's Carribean Holiday. The structure of the game is very similar and there's a lot of asset reuse, but there's even less effort put into the games this time, if they can even be called that, as most of them are really just dress-up. What I find especially lame about these is that the outfit you choose for the girls isn't even used anywhere, neither the menu that you see when you pick the next girl nor the cutscene at the end properly reflect what clothes you choose. There could be some good comedy potential here to give them hideous outfits if they actually showed up later, but they couldn't even be bothered to put that level of effort in. I feel like more of this game's budget probably went to purchasing the CDs to print the game on than actually developing it.
I was a bit torn on Mr Driller. The basic gameplay of the game is definitely fun, it's fast-paced and yet still has a decent amount of depth to it, in particular I quite like the challenge of figuring out how to safely get the air tanks, particularly since you get point bonuses for them even if you don't need them. It's also very colourful and charming and the PS1 version is a pretty good port, with little to no load time or other issues. However, with the original game, there's just not a lot of content here. There's no multiplayer, the stages don't really vary much (they're randomly generated, but feel much the same every time), and there's no story mode or anything else like that. I was almost still considering G, but the appropriately named Mr Driller G is just so much better in every way that it doesn't feel right to give them the same grade. This is probably one of those cases where you can safely skip to the second game and not miss much.
DeleteI actually kind of like Sammy Sosa's Softball Slam. I feel its heart is generally in the right place, obviously Softball doesn't have quite the same intensity as regular baseball, it's more of a recreational sport, and I feel this game actually does kind of capture that, I like the crowd noise and the jeers and so on, and the general gameplay feels decently suited to the game (the controls are simple, batting is easy, and the fielders aren't perfect). There are some minor issues with fielder selection sometimes but it's not terrible and the view angles for fielding are decent enough that I never felt like I couldn't find the ball. The biggest issue with the game is the presentation. Although the sound is decent, the visuals are quite lame, and I feel that this hurts the game quite a bit. Conceptually, the personality of the players should be the appeal, it'd be great to have some unique celebrations and voice lines for each player and so on, but the PS1 simply isn't quite up to this. If this game had come out in the next generation, it easily could have featured something like this (compare, say, Sega Soccer Slam, which was an early next-gen title and features a bunch of colourful characters). It's too bad it doesn't seem like they ever really did anything more with this idea because I feel like there's still potential here.
Plane Crazy is a very disappointing game. The setup for the game is cool, it's an aerial racing game with long, unique courses (there are no laps here), and as you complete races in a championship you even earn money that you can use to upgrade your plane (longtime GAB followers might remember that I've always enjoyed this mechanic), but the controls simply aren't good enough for the game to be fun. The main problem is that the control is absurdly twitchy, even a slight touch to the controls will make the plane do a 90 degree turn, which makes navigating any kind of tight area immensely frustrating. In theory, you're probably intended to only use the X button sparingly (it's kind of an "afterburner" button, but there's no limit to how much you can use it), because you still go somewhat fast even without it, but even without pressing X the controls simply aren't up to the task. I tried playing it for a while to see if the game would ever feel good enough to be tolerable but it really doesn't. A shame really, if the control could be anywhere comparable to something like Diddy Kong Racing this would be a really cool game.