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Last Topic's Ratings:
Doubutsu no Mori - GG - 100% (2)
ECW Hardcore Revolution - BBAAAGA - 43% (7)
Mike Piazza's Strikezone - BBB - 0% (3)
Roadsters - AAAA - 50% (4) - Old rating stays
Superman: The New Superman Adventures - BBBBBBBBBBB - 0% (11)
Tetris 64 - AGA - 67% (3)
I'm surprised no one caught this, but we had actually done Roadsters already. I thought it was the PS1 version we had covered, but it turns out we had actually done the N64 version. It got the exact same score, just with one more vote, so I won't change the score. Also, Superman 64 is now the all-time GAB leader in terms of most votes with all Bs, but what will happen when Bubsy 3D comes up?
Games for this topic:
Jet Force Gemini
PGA European Tour
Shiren the Wanderer 2
Space Invaders
Top Gear Rally 2
Toy Story 2
I just noticed that almost every game in this topic has something to do with "two". Even PGA European "Tour" kind of sounds like it. It's a complete coincidence, though, which is why Space Invaders is the odd one out.
Jet Force Gemini - A
ReplyDeletePGA European Tour - A
Shiren the Wanderer 2 - G
Space Invaders - G
Top Gear Rally 2 - G (SR)
Toy Story 2 - G
I'm actually surprised Jet Force Gemini is rating so well, as I feel it's much more of a mixed bag, with both very strong and very weak points. For starters, the game is insanely ambitious, easily one of the biggest games ever released on N64. It's a massive game, with a ton of levels, 3 playable characters, loads of weapons, a fairly well-crafted narrative with a bunch of cut-scenes, and a ton of sidequests and secrets. There are plenty of modern shooters whose campaigns are way less developed than this one, and it also has a multiplayer mode as well. However, it is also a game that is full of major issues that made it somewhat painful to play even at the time and that have prevented me from ever wanting to play it again. For starters, there's the controls, which are both terrible and uncustomizable. The game is a third person shooter, but doesn't provide any ability to aim while in third person mode, as most modern games would. Your shots auto-aim, but only horizontally and not vertically, and enemies attack you from above near-constantly, rendering the auto-aim ineffective for large parts of the game. To mitigate this, you can hold a button to go into first-person mode, which is the preferred way to play the game, but the controls here are atrocious. For starters, in this mode, movement is forced to be on the C buttons while the stick aims, there's no option for right hand aiming. You also have both inverted Y-axis and an obnoxiously sensitive look spring and neither can be disabled, which makes aiming in this mode feel clunky and imprecise. With a lot of practice you can kind of adjust to it but at all points in the game it feels like you're fighting the controls and leads to a lot of hits and deaths that feel unfair. How did they screw this up so badly after Goldeneye got shooter controls pretty much perfect? The game had enough buttons that they easily could have mapped Jump to A (the normal controls do this, but disable the ability to move in first person mode and are thus nonviable) and allowed you to use C up and C down to aim up and down while in third-person mode, which would have solved almost all of the game's issues with controls. Even if you can tolerate the controls, there are other issues with the game as well. On every level, there a bunch of hidden teddy bear creatures, which will either be placed right in the line of fire, or hidden somewhere that usually needs an upgrade to reach. To beat the game, you must save all of them on every level, and even more obnoxiously, you have to save them all in one go, as if any die or are missed, you have to start the level again from scratch, and many of the levels are long and are set up in ways that some of the bears are very likely to get killed. This is easily one of the most obnoxious sidequests in gaming history, and I never completely finished the game because of it. There are also some hidden missions where you have to control the drone Floyd in a tunnel, and these also kind of suck, as the controls are lousy and the time goals are very tight. It's a shame, because the game does have many strong points, but there are enough issues with it that I don't think I'd really recommend it today. I have heard that the version in Rare Replay has a new control scheme, though, so if you want to play it you should probably go for that version.
PGA European Tour is not bad. I still think Mario Golf basically does everything it does better, but not nearly as drastically so as with many previous games. The interface here is pretty decent, you can easily view your shot's landing point and jump to it using a single button, and other key features like wind and pin distance are easy to read. Course graphics also generally look good, and there are even some weather effects that look pretty nice for their time. I'm not quite as much of a fan of the controls, even though there are multiple swing styles available (which is a nice touch), I'm not a fan of the circular power meter that some of these games use, as I feel it is far less intuitive for judging percentages compared to a simple bar. I also agree with the previous comments about putting where it seems a bit overly generous, particularly with regards to the speed of the ball entering the cup, but based on the aforementioned difficulty of judging percentages accurately perhaps this is for the best. It's too bad your golfer's stats don't change throughout the tour mode because I feel that could have been a standout feature. As it stands it's kind of a poor man's Mario Golf but it's still playable.
DeleteShiren the Wanderer 2 is cool but the localization barrier on this one is pretty substantial. Gameplay-wise, it's fairly similar to Shiren 1 and other Mystery Dungeon games where you'll explore randomly generated dungeons, fighting enemies and collecting items along the way. Like some of the other "hardcore" style Mystery Dungeon games, you'll begin every dungeon at level 1, and you're only allowed to take a few items with you. Should you ever be defeated, you'll lose everything that you have on you, so it's important to make use of the storage (particularly for money) whenever you can. However, the game has a secondary goal besides exploring and beating the mystery dungeons, which lends the game a lot of its appeal. You're also tasked with building a castle to repel demon attacks, and you can find materials to build the castle within the dungeons and contribute them towards castle construction, which kind of gives an overarching sense of progression that persists beyond each individual dungeon, and IMO, this makes the game vastly more interesting. The game's presentation is quite good too, with nice visuals and a good soundtrack, and some funny NPC designs and dialogue sequences. It's really too bad this one never got localized for this or any other system because I definitely still think this one would be worth playing.
Space Invaders is actually a pretty cool update to the classic game which manages to feel fresh and interesting while still generally staying true to the original formula. Most of the gameplay is pretty similar to the original, except that there are now powerups. By shooting four ships of the same colour in a row, you can get a special attack, which can help clear out a lot of them at once. You often have to think about how you're going to approach each stage to get 4 in a row, which almost gives it a sort of "combo" mechanic like you'd find in a traditional puzzle game. And addition that I'm not quite as fond of is that there are now bosses, though there aren't a ton of depth to these, you basically just shoot them a bunch of times until they go down. Still, I feel like this is a pretty solid title overall, and one of the better examples of how you update a classic arcade title.
DeleteTop Gear Rally 2 feels like a totally different game from its predecessor, though it's also significantly better. There's little point in extensive comparisons with the first game since they're so different, but the biggest change is that this game feels like a far more authentic rally experience. While the first game featured generally Rally-like tracks, it was otherwise a fairly typical racing game. Here, the gameplay is quite different from traditional racers. Like in a real rally race, the cars start separately and your goal is to score the best time on each leg of the track rather than to finish first (though this certainly doesn't hurt if you start towards the back). There is also car damage, as you race through the tracks, mistakes and hazards will gradually damage your parts, eventually leading to decreased performance or impaired handling. Some repairs can be made mid-race (at the expense of time), whereas others have to be done between legs, though even here you lose a little time if you make too many repairs. You also earn money from races that you can use to buy new parts, though parts have tradeoffs, there's rarely a clear best part to have, but the versatility is useful, you'll often want to swap parts out between legs to better prepare for upcoming segments or replace damaged parts that you don't want to spend time or money fixing. Beyond this, the game also features good controls, a lot of tracks, and generally solid presentation across the board. You can even play the main campaign mode in multiplayer. My one beef with the game is that it doesn't tell you a lot about the makeup of the tracks before you race, so you kind of just have to learn what hazards to expect on each track. Other than that, though, this game is very fun and feels unique. I feel like this is secretly one of the N64 racers that has aged the best.
Toy Story 2 is a pretty fun game. There's nothing too remarkable about it from a gameplay perspective, it's a collectathon 3D platformer that bares some resemblance to Banjo-Kazooie. Every level has a number of different objectives, which usually involve finding a number of different things to get Pizza Planet tokens, which mercifully don't kick you out of the stages like they do in Mario 64. You can also unlock some persistent upgrades by completing challenges in levels as well. Nothing about this setup is unique, but it controls well and the stages are well-made and fun to explore. Really, I think a lot of the appeal here is just that it's a good game made with a license that many people are fond of, and it does indeed make pretty good use of the Toy Story license, not only with the levels feeling very authentic to the theme, but also using a lot of characters and music from the movies, as well as stills to tell the story inbetween levels. Compared to the PS1 version, it could possibly be argued that this version is a downgrade, as the PS1 version largely matches it in performance but has clips from the movie instead of the stills, as well as a CD quality soundtrack (though it has different tracks for the levels in the game and IMO they're not always better). In general, though, the two versions are pretty close and I feel the stills do the job well enough, it's a solid game on either platform.
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