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Last Topic's Ratings:
Animal Snap - BB - 0% (2)
Explosive Racing - BB - 0% (2)
NBA Basketball 2000 - BG - 50% (2)
Pandemonium - GAA - 67% (3)
Perfect Weapon - BBB - 0% (3)
WWF War Zone - ABGAG - 60% {5}
Wow, this one wasn't very pretty. I was expecting way more votes for Pandemonium, maybe it was a lot more obscure than I thought.
Games for this topic:
Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time
Fighting Eyes
Hot Shots Golf
Paris-Marseille Racing
Virus: It Is Aware
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
The "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" in this topic is the original, which was seemingly only released in Europe on PS1, rather than the Second Edition or Third Editions, which were released in the US.
Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time - A
ReplyDeleteFighting Eyes - B
Hot Shots Golf - G
Paris-Marseille Racing - A
Virus: It is aware - B
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire - G
Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time is a bit of a mixed bag. For starters, the game has a pretty good sense of style. In particular it nails the visual feel of the source material quite well, and also has good voice acting and music. There's even some nice little touches like little cutscenes full of familiar lines from the series and title cards before each level. What it doesn't nail quite so well is the controls. They always feel a bit on the stiff side, and the camera is also very unhelpful, leading to a ton of cheap deaths and hits. Luckily, the game has infinite lives and checkpoints are frequent, which does a lot to mitigate any frustration this might cause, but the gameplay never really feels especially satisfying or fun. This one is really all about how much you like the franchise and are willing to put up with somewhat half-baked gameplay for it. At least it does more to stand out from many other 3D platformers of the era, even if I wouldn't put it in the top echelon of them.
Fighting Eyes is ridiculously bad, a solid contender for the title of "Worst 3D Fighter of the Generation" (which is a very hotly contested category). For starters, it's a typical crummy 3D fighter with terrible frame data and no interesting moves, but what sets it apart from a lot of the other garbage is its awful blocking system. Blocking in this game is done with a button, but it's actually more of a parry than a block, blocking an attack repels the opponent, leaving them open and building meter for you. However, there's no actual parry animation, you're free to just mash the block button and if they attack, you parry, which means it's effectively never safe to attack as no moves in the game actually combo. The game also has among the lamest supers in any game, they're basically all command grabs, which are very hard to pull off since ranged pokes dominate the game, and there's some weird system where if you win a round with one, you instantly win the match even though it's a 2 out of 3. About the only thing you could say about the game is that the presentation is not bad, but everything else about it is.
Since the beginning of GAB, I've probably said at least a hundred times that there are almost no good Golf games that predate Mario Golf. Well, the wait is FINALLY over, Mario Golf has arrived! Well, technically it hasn't, but Mario Golf was effectively just a slightly upgraded version of Hot Shots Golf, and virtually everything that made Mario Golf such a gigantic leap over previous golf games is already present here. For starters, the controls and interface are vastly better than any Golf game before it. The UI and Camera controls are fantastic, everything in the game just feels natural. Adding Spin to a shot works exactly how it obviously always should have worked. It's very easy to read the layout of the course, the wind, where your shot is going, etc. We take all of these things for granted now, but past games almost never got these things right. It's also a bit easy to overlook this now, but the game also looks fantastic visually for its time, being fully 3D with a smooth framerate and decent lighting and particle effects. The game also has a good progression system, in particular the way you unlock characters through Match Play is really cool. About the only flaws the game has are areas where Mario Golf made further improvements. Mario Golf has a bit more personality, largely owing to better animations and voice acting, and its soundtrack is also substantially better (Hot Shots Golf's music actually defaults to off, though it's still worth turning on). Mario Golf also has one more course compared to this game, and slightly more characters, especially if one considers the transfer pak functionality. The biggest difference, though, is that the green indicator in Mario Golf is a fair bit better, the moving lines make it much easier to read the slope of the green. However, regardless of these issues, Hot Shots Golf is such a massive leap forward for the genre I couldn't give it anything but G, and some fans of Mario Golf might enjoy giving it a look to try out the different courses.
DeleteParis-Marseille Racing is effectively the same game as Autobahn Racer 2 and London Racer, down to having the same identical UI and soundtrack. As such, most of the same things apply here, controls and gameplay are generally decent, if a bit simple, the real-world locations are generally recognizable and I actually feel the graphics have gotten a touch better compared to the previous games. The biggest annoyance continues to be the damage meter, considering that the AI doesn't have to deal with it and will happily ram you to sap your precious race winnings, but you can kind of play around this by driving less aggressively. These titles are not bad, but I kind of wish they would have just combined them all into one game where you could race all over Europe.
Virus is, as noted by many others, very bad. I actually feel like the controls are decent, but everything else surrounding it sucks. It's a third-person shooter of sorts with very generous autoaim, so you'll mainly just be running through corridors repeatedly shooting your gun, which wouldn't be terrible by itself, but you have very little health, enemies are constantly popping out of nowhere, certain enemies can shoot way too fast, and there's no real pickups or powerups of any kind to be found anywhere. In a certain sense, the game is actually very basic, as it's totally linear and there's basically nothing to mix up the gameplay at any point in the game, but somehow it fails even with this level of simplicity. The story to the game, which should probably be one of its strongest points, is also a complete letdown, suffering from laughably poor writing and editing. This one is just a disaster all around.
DeleteWho Wants to Be a Millionaire is a very simple game, but the appeal of the franchise has always been in its simplicity and accessibility, which carries over well here. The multiple choice format and lifelines allows the game to be enjoyed even by those who aren't trivia masters, which is appreciated. One thing I'd like to draw special attention to is the game's pacing. The game has many variants on how it can tell you that you're right or wrong, and the announcer will often deliberately stall for time or ask you if you're sure in an attempt to psyche you out. Sometimes before a question, he'll tell you about how much money you could win or lose, which obviously you already know, but making you wait just that little bit longer for the question makes you just a little bit more nervous. They do this in the actual show as well, and it's reproduced perfectly here. I also appreciate that when you phone a friend, they actually say the answer (rather than just saying the letter), if they know it. My one concern is that in about an hour of playtime, I did hit several repeats in the questions, making me a bit way of the size of the question pool. Also, with this being the European version, a number of the questions are specifically about the UK, so foreigners would probably prefer to play the localized version. Still, I find this to be a pretty good conversion of the show and I imagine this would be a pretty solid party game.