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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage - GBBGBA - 42% (6) (1 SR)
F1 Racing Championship - AG - 75% (2)
NBA Jam 2000 - BAAAGA - 50% (6)
Pokemon Snap - GGGGGGBGGGGAGGGAGA - 86% (18) (3 SR)
Rugrats in Paris: The Movie - ABBBB - 10% (5)
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer - GAAGGAGGGGGGGGGGGG - 92% (18) (2 SR)
This was a fun back and forth between Pokemon Snap and Star Wars Episode 1. Also, both NBA Jam and Aidyn Chronicles just barely missed the squiggle bracket.
Games for this topic:
All Star Tennis 99
Forsaken 64
Killer Instinct Gold
Namco Museum 64
Re-Volt
Space Station Silicon Valley
I actually changed out one of the games in this topic because I couldn't fit it in the topic title with Space Station Silicon Valley. Even now I still can't fit the Gold part of Killer Instinct's name.
All Star Tennis 99 - A
ReplyDeleteForsaken 64 - A
Killer Instinct Gold - A
Namco Museum 64 - A
Re-Volt - A
Space Station Silicon Valley - G
All Star Tennis is okay. It is clearly inferior to Mario Tennis in every possible way, but it's playable enough, certainly a big step up from many older Tennis games which had barely functional controls. The game is quite simple and hitting usually works how you want it to, though they still haven't figured out that holding a direction means "hit it to that side of the court" and not "hit it in this direction relative to my current position", so returning a serve up the line is still effectively impossible. General character controls are decent at least, movement feels to be about the right speed and hitting the ball never feels problematic. Presentation is very muted, there's no music and the announcer doesn't even bother to call out Game Point or anything. There's really no reason to look into this one when Mario Tennis exists, but it's still playable.
Forsaken 64 is a game with some interesting ideas but it's held back by terrible visual design. It's a 6DOF Shooter, similar to Descent, and compared to Descent it boasts a far better framerate and generally vastly smoother gameplay, but infinitely worse visuals. Forsaken 64's levels are basically all featureless tunnel labyrinths that lack any semblance of sensible design or notable landmarks, and there's also no radar or map. Games like Descent wisely use things like colour and wall textures to separate segments of the maps from each other (ie, one section might be red, while another is blue, and the area between them is white, so you always know what part of the map you're in), but Forsaken has no rhyme or reason to its visual design, each level is just a disco hodgepodge of different colours that is instantly forgettable. Enemies also feature very dull colour palettes and don't sufficiently stand out from the surroundings, effectively forcing you to take damage from them firing at you before you can locate them. You have a massive amount of health and shield pickups are common, so it's not overly frustrating, but it does make the game feel fairly mindless, especially when combined with the amount of time you spend wandering around aimlessly or going in circles. It's a shame because some aspects of the game are actually pretty good, weapon variety is solid and the game runs well, if they had simply copied some of the visual tricks that most other games in the genre were already using this would be a standout title. Even something as simple as a basic radar and an arrow pointing to your current objective could easily have salvaged the package into something that would be easy to recommend, but as it stands it feels a bit lacking.
Killer Instinct Gold is a tricky one to rate. In most respects, it's a pretty solid package. It's got a good selection of modes, the presentation is quite good, the controls are fine, blocking is done by holding back, etc. The biggest problem with the game is also the one that is the most core to its design, which is its combo system. Killer Instinct as a franchise is all about overly long dial-a-combos, which significantly eclipse the importance of traditional fighting game fundamentals. The vast majority of normals and special in the game are intended to be used solely as combo fodder, having neglibile utility or terrible hitboxes otherwise, which renders the neutral in the game almost nonexistent. The only depth to the game involves memorizing specific combo routes and combo enders, which may feel like progression to some, but it's really fairly shallow. One of the worst things about the game IMO is that for a game that's basically intended to be all about combos, there's actually zero experimentation in the game's combo system, the combos in the game operate on a strict formula similar to the "magic series" in other games that leaves zero room to improvise your own sequences. I do think this is a decent improvement over the original and it's certainly miles ahead of any Mortal Kombat game, but I'd still vastly rather play Capcom or SNK's offerings during this gen. Even on N64, I find Rakuga Kids and even Flying Dragon to be a lot more fun.
DeleteNamco Museum 64 is a decent collection of games, but it's also a no-frills package that has virtually no extras. There's literally almost nothing more you can say about this collection, other than the fact that starting in the PS2 era collections of this nature started to become vastly more generous with the number of games included so I probably wouldn't focus on the ones from this generation.
I really liked Re-Volt when it first came out, but over time my opinion towards it shifted to a more middling one, and that's where it remains today. In a certain sense, the game kind of plays like a fully 3D version of Micro Machines, it's still got the same "little cars racing around real world settings" concept going for it, but without the top-down racing style. The real-world setting remains a fun change of pace, but compared to Micro Machines the tracks are not nearly as interesting, being fairly barren visually and lacking detail. I realize this is an N64 game, but I recall even at the time thinking that the Supermarket looked absurdly barren (there's like 2 boxes of cereal on the shelves and that's it), which somewhat reduces the novelty of the game's theme. In terms of physics, I feel the game is also only just serviceable. The RC cars skid out and flip easily if they bump into anything and the powerups do not play nicely with this (thankfully, they can be turned off), which results in a somewhat overly twitchy, meticulous gameplay feel that never really feels fast or exciting. It's not a terrible game by any means, merely an average one with an interesting coat of paint.
DeleteSpace Station Silicon Valley is a great concept with perhaps somewhat spotty execution. The basic idea of the game, of using various robotic animals to fight other animals and switching between them to solve puzzles is a lot of fun, and indeed, the game is usually pretty entertaining, however many aspects of the game are a little rough. One of the biggest issues is combat, which is somewhat overly basic most of the time. Unless you're using one of the handful of animals with a ranged attack, most of the combat in the game consists of just running up to whatever you're fighting and mashing the attack button over and over, which gets the job done but isn't tremendously interesting. The game's collectables can also be a bit tedious to get, having to hunt down all the energy cells on the big levels can take a long time and there's absolutely no way you're going to figure out how to get the trophies without using a guide, and one of them is famously glitched and uncollectable, making it impossible to 100% the game. Still, it's a very unique game in a lot of ways and does have a decent amount of charm, if you ignore some of the collectathon aspects that bog the game down and just focus on the main game for the most part it still plays pretty well.