This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Army Men: World War - ABB - 17% (3)
Calcolo - BB - 0% (2)
Constructor - GG - 100% (2)
Disney's The Lion King: Simba's Mighty Adventure - BBG - 33% (3)
Street Sk8er - BBAABG - 33% (6)
Test Drive 5 - AAAGGG - 75% (6)
This was a pretty low-rated topic and there weren't a lot of votes, but I still thought it was pretty interesting. At least most of the games in the list were pretty unique in one way or another.
Games for this topic:
C1 Circuit
Die Hard Trilogy
Easter Bunny's Big Day
Frenzy
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing
Of course we couldn't possibly do the Easter Bunny game any other day than today. Happy Easter everyone!
C1 Circuit - A
ReplyDeleteDie Hard Trilogy - A
Easter Bunny's Big Day - B
Frenzy - B
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - A
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing - B
C1 Circuit is not bad. It's clearly a very early PS1 title, the graphics and especially sound effects are very primitive (and you also can't turn down the sound effects either). The gameplay is all right, though, it's a bit similar to Ridge Racer, in particular it has a similar kind of "auto drift" mechanic, though IMO it actually works a little better than the original Ridge Racer, and the handling has about the right degree of sensitivity to it. There's also car upgrading, though it'll probably be a bit hard to figure out if you can't read Japanese. The biggest issue with the game is that there's really only 2 tracks, with a long course being a combination of the two, but at least the tracks feel well-designed. Collisions are also super simplistic, you just kind of bounce back and then instantly regain momentum, and the AI racers can go right through traffic like it doesn't exist, but apart from looking very silly it doesn't harm the game that much. Overall, this game is obviously significantly bettered by later games but it wasn't a bad first effort by any means.
Die Hard Trilogy is an interesting package. As its name implies, it's effectively three separate action games, all with completely different play styles. Die Hard 1 is a simple action game where you need to clear each floor of hostiles and find the elevator to the next floor to advance. It's very basic (there's none of the nuance of the NES Die Hard game here), but it works well enough, the radar helps you get the drop on enemies and find hostages and there's various ways you can take cover or use the level structure to your advantage. Die Hard 2 is instead a Light Gun style game, and I think this might be the strongest game in the package. Unlike many light gun games, Die Hard 2 is fully rendered in 3D the whole time, and while it thus doesn't look quite as good as some of the others, they use this opportunity to make almost everything in the environment destructible, which not only looks cool but is often key to getting bonus points or powerups. I also really like how a cursor indicates the location of bad guys ahead of time, this makes it feel much more fair than many similar games. Die Hard 3 is a basic driving game where you have to find bombs in a somewhat open city within a short time limit. While driving around like a maniac is kind of funny, this mode is easily the most repetitive and has the least nuance of the 3 games, and I find it gets dull quite quickly. On their own, these three games would probably rate A, A, and B, but there is something to be said for the variety in the package, which was probably compelling in the early days of the system when many people probably didn't own too many games. In that sense, I can see it as being a solid collection for its time, though I don't think it's quite good enough to reach G.
Easter Bunny's Big Day is about what you'd probably expect. It's a fairly simple kids game which consists mainly of jigsaw puzzles and a few simple minigames. I do appreciate that it has a difficulty selection which actually does matter a lot, on the hardest level the puzzles have a lot of pieces and take a while to do, which does give the game some value. I feel like jigsaw puzzles are actually kind of timeless and solving the big puzzles is somewhat satisfying, though there are some things that could definitely be done better here, like the way the pieces are all just dumped in a big pile at the start, making it hard to find any specific piece without picking up a dozen and hoping you get lucky. The game also includes some animated puzzles, which should probably be the highlight of the game, but they're instead easily the worst part of it, as the framerate is so atrocious on these stages it makes them a complete chore to play. The minigames are also basically a throwaway, being too simple to hold any real lasting appeal. Overall, this isn't totally atrocious or anything and if it was just the static Jigsaw puzzles or if the moving ones worked better I might have considered A, but it's also not something I'd really recommend looking into.
DeleteFrenzy completely sucks. It's a very basic flying game, and there's lots of stuff to shoot, but it all feels extremely inconsequential. Nothing in the game does much damage to you, and the stages go on for an absurdly long time, so you'll quickly start just flying past everything while spraying things with a few bullets as you follow the arrows through the game's labyrinthine stages to hopefully find a miniboss and progress through the game. The game's presentation also sucks, with lousy music that loops incessantly and boring visuals. You can see everything this game has to offer in 5 minutes.
Harry Potter is a bit of a tricky game to rate. It's an adventure game that attempts to capture the general storyline of the first book and does so fairly well, with good production values across the board. The gameplay mostly consists of wandering around Hogwarts, attending classes, occasionally fighting things, and collecting a ton of differently-coloured beans. One thing that quickly becomes apparent is that the game actually has very little action. The vast majority of rooms in the game have no enemies at all, with combat being almost exclusively restricted to boss fights, which is a shame because the combat in the game is actually pretty decent on the few occasions when it does occur. Instead, you'll spend the majority of your time exploring, platforming, and solving very simple puzzles to try to collect the different colours of beans, which often feels somewhat tedious. On occasion, you get to take various lessons, which consist of a timed obstacle course to get to the class itself, then a simple button pressing minigame to learn a new spell, though the game is very linear so these rarely open up significant new exploration opportunities. Possibly the highlight of the game are the flying and quidditch segments, though like all of the high points in the game they also occur rarely. Overall, it's a bit of a borderline case, it feels decently authentic to the source material, but it's also pretty short, not terribly exciting, and the exploration always feels a bit limited. It might be worth one playthrough but I doubt it's something many would want to come back to.
DeleteReady 2 Rumble is effectively the same as the N64 version. As I noted when we reviewed that one, it's a fundamentally broken game, the game's mechanics simply don't work properly because the boxers are able to move too fast. Out of Stamina? Just move diagonally! Opponent has Rumble Mode? Just move diagonally! Backwards movement is so quick that you can basically never force an opponent to engage you unless they feel like it, which prevents the game from having any kind of depth. Stick to the K-1 series if you want a martial arts game on PS1, it's far better designed.