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Last Topic's Ratings:
Abalaburn - AA - 50% (2)
Dino Crisis - AGGAGGAGGAG - 82% (11)
NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC - AGGG - 88% (4)
Roll Away - GAGGA - 80% (5) (1 SR)
Shadow Madness - BBBAA - 20% (5)
Sports Superbike - AA - 50% (2)
Actually a pretty highly rated topic despite the back and forth over Dino Crisis.
Games for this topic:
Army Men: World War
Calcolo
Constructor
Disney's The Lion King: Simba's Mighty Adventure
Street Sk8er
Test Drive 5
It's funny how after originally thinking the series was cheap shovelware, I'm actually now looking forward to trying out the Army Men game because the first few have been pretty good. Also, I can never correctly spell Street Sk8er without looking up where the 8 goes.
Army Men: World War - B
ReplyDeleteCalcolo - B
Constructor - G
Disney's The Lion King: Simba's Mighty Adventure - G
Street Sk8er - G
Test Drive 5 - G
I was expecting an upgrade to the already fairly decent Sarge's Heroes, but Army Men World War is actually a massive downgrade in virtually every way. For starters, the controls have changed completely compared to Sarge's Heroes. Sarge's Heroes largely revolved around making use of the generous auto-aim combined with strafing, however in this game the auto-aim is now almost nonexistent and strafing has been removed entirely, and the game's incredibly stiff movement control (and total lack of right stick functionality) simply aren't up to the task. There's a quick turn option, but it's far too quick to be used for precise aiming, and a roll move, but you can't aim while doing it unless you sit still for a while, which usually gets you shot to pieces. As if that wasn't bad enough, most of the goofy charm has gone out the window too for a significantly more realistic setting and tone, which doesn't mesh at all with the franchise. Definitely avoid this one.
Unfortunately, Calcolo sucks. At its core, it's very similar to Puyo Puyo, but with a drastically different control scheme. In Calcolo, numbered balls fall from the top of the screen, which clear when the number of balls touching matches the number on the ball (so if the ball says 4, you'd have to make 4 touch, like in Puyo Puyo). However, the process of positioning the balls is vastly different, you move them around by controlling a character who can fly around the screen and shoot projectiles that push the balls. So if you want to move a ball 3 spaces to the right, you have to move beside it, shoot right 3 times, then (optionally) shoot it downwards from above to fast-drop. It's a unique idea, but it's really not fun to play at all. Positioning each individual ball takes several seconds, so making even a small combo by puyo standards takes ages, and a single missed shot or enemy attack can ruin several minutes worth of work. Attacks also aren't actually very powerful and jam blocks can be destroyed fairly easily, so it takes ages to finish even a single match, by which time the game will long have since grown tedious. While I appreciate them trying to put a unique spin on a familiar concept, taking a good game and giving it lousy controls and worse pacing is never the way to go. The game does have a fair number of modes and the presentation is decent so if you do enjoy the gameplay it's not a bad package, but out of all the puzzle games I've played I find this to be one of the least enjoyable ones. I suspect this is one of those games where everyone who playtested it told them that it wasn't very fun but they remained convinced it was a brilliant idea and that people just weren't getting it.
Constructor is a neat little game. It's a city builder of sorts, but compared to games like Simcity where you oversee the City from a very high level, Constructor has a lower-level approach. For starters, in order to build anything, you need foremen and workers, who you control in a standard RTS kind of way, ordering them to create houses, utilities, and farm resources, somewhat akin to building a base in an RTS. There are also rivals in this game and there is a form of combat through annoying citizens like hippies and thugs, as well as in a more direct manner through gangsters. You'll also choose the tenants for your houses and have to do specific things to keep them happy, such as upgrading their houses and dealing with various things that stress them out. It's generally a pretty novel idea and the polish in the game is solid, particularly for its time. About the only downside to this is that it's clearly a PC port and while the interface works decently on PS1, it would clearly play better with a mouse and it requires a full memory card to save. Still, it's probably more widely available than the PC version and it's not a bad game for people looking for a different take on city builders.
DeleteSimba's Mighty Adventure isn't a tremendously inspired or long game, but I still like it. As was mentioned previously, it's a little similar to Crash Bandicoot, being a kind of "hallway" 3D platformer, where the main goal is to collect all the tokens on each stage. This isn't quite as tedious as it sounds as the vast majority of them are out in the open. There are also some more traditionally 2D segments, and the controls and production values are solid throughout. It probably helps that The Lion King is one of my favourite movies of all time, so I greatly enjoy the video clips, which occur at the beginning and end of each stage, though the stages themselves feel generally faithful to the movie as well, even if the low level of difficulty does take most of the tension out of the game's more serious moments. I definitely think this is a better effort than the 16-bit Lion King game, at least.
I'm really surprised by all the Bs for Street Sk8er, I actually think it's really fun. For starters, it's very similar to Top Skater, which I always thought was a cool game, if I had known there was a console game that was very close to it I'd have been all over it. As noted by many, this game is much more simplistic compared to Tony Hawk, it's effectively a one-button game, you simply push the jump button at the edge of ramps and you do a trick, the quality of the trick depends solely on how fast you're going. You can hold a direction to do visually distinct tricks, but the points awarded are based solely on the level of the trick and how many times you've tricked off that particular ramp. This is a bit of a bummer, there are often parts of levels I expect tho be grindable but aren't and there's often little bumps where you could definitely get enough air to do a trick, but they're not considered ramps so they don't count. Despite this, it's still very fast-paced and fun in an arcadey sort of way, and the soundtrack is also pretty great, with a different song per stage for every character. A comparison was made between this game and Coolboarders, but I feel Street Sk8er is clearly vastly better. For starters, this game properly manages to balance going fast with doing tricks, which coolboarders and most older snowboarding struggle with. You want to go fast so you have more time to farm tricks on halfpipes, and you also don't want to miss ramps or rails because the target scores can be quite high, so it helps keep the intensity up the whole way through. The controls are also way better than Coolboarders and there's far more opportunities to do tricks. Of course, the biggest issue here is the length of the game. There's only 3 main stages, and while they do have branching paths and there's a number of things to unlock, it's not a lot of content. This was originally a part of the Simple 1500 series, and while it's easily one of their best games, its budget origins are still clear here. If this game had, say, 10 stages, I feel there'd be very little to complain about. Overall, I can see the argument for A, but I feel I had too much fun playing it not to give it G. Hopefully the sequel has a lot more content.
DeleteTest Drive 5 is a decent improvement over Test Drive 4. The biggest change is that the controls are way better, in particular, you can actually steer now (seriously, go back and try out Test Drive 4 in case you've forgotten, the cars there barely turn at all). The controls are still not totally perfect, in particular it still feels a little slippery, but it's miles better than it was and is now decently playable. Graphically, the game looks pretty solid, with decent models for both the cars and the tracks, and there are a couple of nice modern touches, like the collision physics, which are pretty good for their time, and the course map that helps you read turns better compared to early games. It's a decent package overall, boasting quite a fair number of tracks and a decent selection of modes, and it's a fair bit ahead of NFS2 in almost every way, but of course, it released in the same year as NFS3, which was a huge step up from NFS2 and bests it in most areas. Still, I feel like this is a fairly worthy racer in most respects and probably one of PS1's better traditional street racers, even if it is a bit outdone by later NFS titles.