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Last Topic's Ratings:
C1 Circuit - BAA - 33% (3)
Die Hard Trilogy - AGAABAAAAAG - 55% (11)
Easter Bunny's Big Day - BBBB - 0% (4)
Frenzy - AB - 25% (2)
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - GGGAAG - 83% (6)
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing - BBBBB - 0% (5)
Pretty much in line with what I expected for this week. I guess I should stop considering Ready 2 Rumble a headlining game since it always gets rock-bottom ratings.
Games for this topic:
Actua Soccer
Ape Escape
Fighters' Impact
Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth
Mobil 1 Rally Championship
Vadims
I'm very interested to see the reception to Hoshigami because it was pretty divisive on DS.
Actua Soccer - B
ReplyDeleteApe Escape - A
Fighters' Impact - G
Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth - G
Mobil 1 Rally Championship - A
Vadims - G
Actua Soccer is pretty bad. On the surface, the game kind of seems tolerable, but it has many subtle problems that make it substantially worse than most of its competitors. One major example is the camera, which is atrocious, almost always framing the action from bad angles. For example, when you're approaching the opponent's goal, the camera will show the goal, which is fine, but if a turnover occurs, the game will continue to show the goal even though the play is now going the other way, making it impossible to find passing targets or even spot incoming defenders. The camera also faces the goalie during goal kicks, making it impossible to see the players or where the ball will land. Bad camera work aside, the game also feels like it moves slightly too fast, giving you almost no time to line up passes even in the rare opportunities where you can see your teammates. As far as presentation, the audio is decent, but the visuals are very drab, with all players using the exact same player model and have very limited animations. This is definitely not one to go for.
Fighter's Impact is actually kind of an interesting game. It's a 3D fighter with a fairly free-flowing combo system, allowing you to alternate high and low punches and kicks in interesting ways that feel a bit more natural compared to many similar games. It's also kind of cool how each character has access to multiple different fighting styles that play very differently, effectively tripling the number of characters. The game's storyline and presentation are hilarious too, with some of the most bizarre load screens of all time and similarly off-the-wall character designs, which gives it a kind of kooky charm. I actually think this would have been easily top of the line when it released in early 1997, and it remains fairly playable even now.
I'm going to make myself super unpopular and say that I think Ape Escape is a good game at its core but the controls are an unnecessary gimmick and the normal-controlling PSP version is superior. The supposedly revolutionary innovation of Ape Escape that necessitated a second control stick and a completely bizarre control scheme is the ability to attack in any direction, though this is almost totally pointless because attacking always brings you to a stop, meaning that you never need to use both sticks at the same time for regular combat (compare, say, shooter games, where you can move and shoot instantaneously). Something you DO need to do often though is quickly alternate between the face buttons and the right stick to select and use gadgets, which is obviously awkward as you must move your thumb, this makes something as simple as stunning a monkey with the stun baton and then capturing it in the net far more cumbersome than it should be, and this is easily the area where the PSP version improves the most. The swimming controls also suck, forcing you to press in on the stick to dive (I didn't even know PS1 controllers supported the L3 and R3 buttons, I thought this was only added with Dualshock 2), when they easily could have just used the unused shoulder button for this. There are also a few other gimmicky uses for the sticks, like controlling a rowboat, which is one of the most atrocious things I've ever had the misfortune of playing. I think there's a good comparison with Mario 64 to be made here, a recent top 10 list on the site made the very good point that although Mario 64 was unlike anything most people had ever played before at that time, it contains effectively no tutorial, it just drops you in an open area and trusts that the controls are intuitive enough that you'll figure everything out, which everybody did. By comparison, Ape Escape has to interrupt you every 5 seconds to explain how things work or toss you into another boring tutorial stage because its controls aren't well-designed or intuitive. It's kind of bizarre to me that the developers of the game apparently thought it was necessary to convince gamers that having a second analog stick was useful, I feel this was instantly obvious. Many N64 games clearly already lamented the lack of a second stick (ie, the Turok games that attempt to put movement on the Dpad to allow the main analog to function as a second analog), and for pretty much any other game, it just makes the camera control so much better that it's really not a hard sell. Speaking of which, the camera in the game is not great, it takes way too long to adjust itself so you have to press the button to center it constantly, and it's very annoying to see above or below you, I would have given up the manual aiming control that the right stick provides for proper camera control in a hearbeat. I think it would have been an interesting experiment if the PS1 version also offered the PSP version's control scheme as an option (where X jumps, the right stick / DPad is camera, and the face buttons just use gadgets), would anyone have ever used the default controls? I certainly would have switched them immediately. But enough about the controls. As a 3D platformer, Ape Escape is cute and has strong production values. The idea of catching the monkeys is fun, and you've got a fair number of tricks and tools to do so, though in most cases a fairly simple approach will work well enough. The game also has a decent number of stages that are fairly varied and doesn't go totally overboard on the collectables, and the graphics and music are pretty good too. Overall, it's not a bad game and it does have some charm but it always feels like I'm working around the controls rather than with them.
DeleteHoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth is a fantasy-themed Strategy RPG not too dissimilar from Final Fantasy Tactics, but with a number of unique mechanics. The biggest difference from Tactics and most other SRPGs like it is that it has an Action Points system, each character can perform a number of different actions each turn as long as they have AP, potentially allowing them to move, attack, or cast spells several times in a turn, and you can also save some of your AP to have your turn come faster. This adds quite a bit of depth to the game and makes it feel quite different from Tactics, though it's also probably why some people find the game very hard, they try to play like Tactics by moving as far as they can, then attacking once, and wondering why they get hit like 15 times before their turn comes again. There's also a spell synthesis system of sorts that lets you customize your magic, and some branching paths in the storyline leading to multiple endings. As noted before, the game has a reputation for being extremely hard (I remember reading a funny guide that recommended grinding to level 99 before the first story battle!), but it's really not, I suspect most of the complaints are from people who simply didn't understand the battle system. A more legitimate complaints might be that battles can take a long time as most attacks don't do that much damage and the AP system makes turns take longer, I think you can probably make the case that the simpler move once act once system from Tactics is superior overall, but at least it makes the game feel unique, and a number of the features in the game actually feel pretty advanced for a game that came out in 2001. It probably doesn't beat Tactics but I think this is at least among the better Strategy RPGs on the PS1.
DeleteMobil 1 Rally Championship is a weird game. Let's get this out of the way right now, whomever programmed the steering controls in this game has never touched a real car. This game has maybe the most unrealistic physics of any game I've ever played. The cars can spin 90 degrees on a dime, though this has no immediate effect on the direction you're heading in, as though your car pivots around its midsection and the front end is completely unaffected by friction. The rest of the car sort of follows the front-end a while later, in a bizarre manner which doesn't resemble any game I've ever played. If mastered, it allows you to take tight corners without losing speed in completely impossible ways, but most of the time it just feels and looks silly. The rest of the package is pretty decent though. There's a ton of track in this game, and it mostly looks pretty good, featuring a diverse mix of countryside to drive and even some nice weather and dirt effects. If you can adjust to the physics, which actually doesn't take that long, there is a decent amount of content here, though it never really feels like an authentic rally experience.
Vadims is an interesting game. For starters, it's actually almost absurdly simple, there are only 4 different blocks and two colours, and you simply line them up to make diamonds, but there is a surprising depth of strategy involved in recognizing the patterns that allow you to make combos or clean up seemingly misaligned blocks in a hurry, like most good puzzle games. There's also something strangely hypnotic about the game, probably a combination of its soothing yet somewhat eerie music and overall muted aesthetic. The only thing I don't like is the timer system. While it works well enough in isolated levels, the fact that it carries over between stages in the arcade mode is very annoying. You can refill it by doing combos, but it's an annoyance I'd usually rather not deal with while clearing stages. The fact that you have infinite continues largely mitigates this, but it would be nice if they just gave you some time back between stages.