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Last Topic's Ratings:
All Star Tennis 99 - BBAB - 13% (4)
Forsaken 64 - GGGGAAA - 79% (7) (1 SR)
Killer Instinct Gold - GGGGAGGGAAA - 82% (11)
Namco Museum 64 - AAAAABG - 50% (7)
Re-Volt - GA - 75% (2)
Space Station Silicon Valley - BGGAGGAG - 75% (8)
I was very surprised there were only two votes for Re-Volt. I guess it must either be one of the most obscure racers on the system or everyone got distracted by Killer Instinct.
Games for this topic:
Cruis'n World
Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers
Dr. Mario 64
Famista 64
StarCraft 64
WWF Wrestlemania 2000
I realize now that I've made a miscalculation and there are a lot more baseball games left than I intended, so you may end up seeing quite a lot of them for the next little while.
Cruis'n World - A
ReplyDeleteDonald Duck: Goin' Quackers - G
Dr. Mario 64 - G
Famista 64 - A
StarCraft 64 - G
WWF Wrestlemania 2000 - A
Cruis'n World has some interesting ideas but overall I don't like it as much as USA. For starters, the driving physics of the game feel more "open" compared to USA, with slightly smoother driving control and the ability to perform some special moves and nitro boosts. Stunts have been added to the game, but generally feel superflous, costing you speed to execute and having no real in-race purpose, though the ability to wheelie over incoming traffic is useful. The focus of the game has also changed from USA to the World, so the track design definitely feels a bit more varied, though we've lost the connected feeling that the races in the original had. The progression system from the original has been tossed out too. The game is now divided into a championship and a cruis'n mode, though the latter is largely redundant, all of the progression is in the former mode. After each race you can earn points, almost entirely based on doing stunts, and when you have enough, you can get an upgrade to your cars that makes them faster. This feels incredibly grindy though, the number of points required for upgrades quickly skyrockets, forcing you to do races with many trick opportunities over and over to get your car powered up so you can even take on the next set of races. These races aren't terribly fun, either, they've for some reason made the decision to turn Cruis'n into a standard Circuit racer for this mode, and the AI rubberbands far more compared to the original game, which makes the races feel long and tedious as only the last half of the last lap really matters. Had they just stuck to the formula for the original, where you beat Cruise Mode with each car to upgrade it, it probably would have been a fair bit better, as the cars also now feel generic and interchangeable since the points are shared between them and they all upgrade at the same time. I feel like the move to "the World" was probably the right direction for the franchise, but the game tosses out too much of what made Cruis'n USA a good game.
Donald Duck: Goin Quackers provides an interesting contrast with Cruis'n World. In virtually every way, the game is simply "Crash Bandicoot with Donald Duck", but due to solid level design and good polish all around it comes out all right. Just like Crash Bandicoot, Donald Duck has its share of hallway 3D stages and more conventional 2D platforming stages, with some various collectables and an associated time trial for each stage. Combat is extremely simple, just like Crash, with most of the focus being on platforming challenges. One thing it does better than Crash 1 is that it's better at giving visual cues to help you judge distances, no more trying to jump onto platforms floating over a dark void. Actually, visually the game looks quite nice, making nice use of colour and having decently varied stage layouts, and it controls well, too. Donald has a proper double jump, which is to say he can initiate the second jump at any time whatsoever, giving the game very precise control. With only 4 worlds of 5 stages each, the game might be considered a little short, though it takes decently long enough if you try to get everything. Also, the PS1 and N64 versions of this game are actually a bit more different than you'd expect, but I think this is the more polished one overall. It just goes to show that you don't always have to reinvent the wheel, there's often room for at least a few variants on a good idea.
Dr Mario 64 is pretty good. By far the most significant improvement compared to previous games is the addition of the VS Com mode. This is an extremely crucial mode for games like this an its inclusion instantly elevates the game above all previous versions. The core gameplay of the game itself remains unchanged, with all the pros and cons that that entails. It's definitely a classic and has a kind of timeless feel to it, but at the same time stages with a ton of viruses still feel very daunting, probably because cleaning up your mistakes takes a really long time in this game. Compared to previous versions of Dr Mario, one of the things I find the most annoying, namely that you have to wait a long time for enemy attacks to come down, is still sort of the case here, but at least it's been sped up a little bit so it doesn't feel quite as obnoxious. Overall, it feels like a solid addition to N64's puzzle catalogue and of course benefits from N64's incredible DPad (this is the one advantage to buying it here as opposed to as part of Nintendo Puzzle Collection on GC), even if it isn't one of my top favourites.
DeleteFamista 64 is not bad. It's a very simplistic game in a lot of ways, with very basic 3D graphics and controls, but it plays decently enough in an old-school sort of way. There's a decent number of modes, though the standout one seems to be a very bizarre create a player mode, where you travel across a board representing Japan, taking advantage of various power-ups and doing contests against other players before they get sucked up by a UFO. It's pretty hard to make sense of it unless you can understand Japanese very well, but it's certainly wacky.
It's obviously instantly why Starcraft 64 has long been praised as one of the best RTS to console ports. For starters, not only do you get all of the missions from the original game and the expansion in one cart, there's even some bonus missions that were created specifically for this version. Cutscenes have been cut down a bit and the resolution is not great, but the voice acting is intact and it's generally a very impressive volume of content to see on a cart. The game controls great too. Finally, you can select units with one button and attack move them with another button! Why was this so hard? Using unit abilities is also wisely mapped to the C-buttons, which works well, you can call up the build menu at any time (no need to hunt down an SCV), you can press a single button to select all military units onscreen and there are map shortcuts on the dpad, which makes resupplying your army a breeze. Heck, they've even increased the number of units you can select at a time compared to the PC version, which is probably its biggest flaw. As if this somehow wasn't enough, there's even a two player mode, and it's robust enough not to be limited to 1vs1, you can have matches with multiple computer players as well and can even have alliances against the AI. What a solid job of adapting the game to console. Of course, unit pathing still isn't fantastic, your short range units will get stuck behind marines and the like, but what did you think this was, Starcraft 2? Still, this might actually be the preferred way to play the original if the unit selection limit in the PC version bothers you as much as it does me. It just goes to show that RTS games can work on console if some effort is made in adapting their interface.
DeleteWWF Wrestlemania 2000 is another Aki wrestling game, so you pretty much know what to expect by now. The gameplay and modes are largely unchanged, the big addition this time is a very fully featured edit mode, which allows you to complete wrestlers completely from scratch this time, defining all of their moves, attributes, skill at performing moves of various types, and anything else you could ever imagine. As you might imagine, creating a character in this manner takes forever, but you can theoretically create just about any character you might ever want to using this system. I do still feel that this results in the characters in the game feeling somewhat generic, and visually, the characters actually seem to look worse than their WCW titles, though at least they do have their correct entrance music and videos. It's not a bad effort or anything, but if you want an Aki-made WWF title the obvious choice is to wait for No Mercy, which is a huge upgrade from this game in almost every way.