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Last Topic's Ratings:
Alundra - GGGGGGGG - 100% (8)
Backstreet Billiards - BGGG - 75% (4)
Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout - BBGBBB - 17% (6)
Gubble - ABA - 33% (3)
Hit Back - GA - 75% (2)
Speed Machines - BB - 0% (2)
It kind of looks like Backstreet Billiards and Dragon Ball GT traded one of their votes.
Games for this topic:
Colorful Logic
Disney's The Little Mermaid II
Populous: The Beginning
Rage Racer
Slam 'n Jam '96 featuring Magic & Kareem
Wing Over
I wonder how many times we're going to rate Populous for GAB? I was thinking this might be the last one, but both Sega Master System and Game Boy also have it. On the plus side, I'm getting pretty good at it.
Colorful Logic - B
ReplyDeleteDisney's The Little Mermaid II - A
Populous: The Beginning - B
Rage Racer - A
Slam 'n Jam 96 featuring Magic & Kareem - G
Wing Over - B
There's a funny story behind Colorful Logic. I've wanted to put this game up for a while now, because it's part of a series, but the first game was almost impossible to locate. I finally found it, and it's about as underwhelming as a picross game could possible get. For starters, the interface sucks. The game has the same problem as a number of other games where marks overwrite each other if you're moving through the puzzle, which, when combined with the cursor moving too fast and feeling kind of "slippery" leads to plenty of mismarks. It's also devoid of the features that many other games have, like showing a column in blue if there's something you can solve there, and in fact, you even have to specifically tell the game when you think you're done with a puzzle so it'll check to see if you've solved it, which feels very unintuitive. The puzzles themselves also look quite bland, being only very simple shapes. The one interesting thing about this game is that there is a story mode of sorts, where you solve puzzles to give you clues on how to explore a jungle. For example, the first puzzle is the kanji character for left, which tells you which way to go at a fork. This is kind of neat, and luckily the game will still allow you to keep playing even if you choose the wrong option due to not knowing Japanese, though the interface still remains annoying. Still, it's a neat idea, if they refine the mechanics a lot for the sequels and keep this kind of mode it might become something worth playing eventually.
The Little Mermaid 2 is another game in the same general vein as The Lion King: Simba's Pride and The Emperor's New Groove. Like that game, it's a fairly simplistic action game where you'll play short action stages, gather collectables, and watch scenes from the movie inbetween levels. Or perhaps I should say "movies", because this game actually covers both the original movie and its sequel, though the section on the first game is kind of half-baked, skipping huge parts of the movie and having much shorter cutscenes compare to the sequel. Things do pick up when you get to the second game, though, the missions have much more variety and the storytelling is also much better. The game is still very short and easy, but this probably isn't a bad fit for its target audience. Overall, I find this one a bit less interesting and polished than the Lion King and Emperor's New Groove games, though it's still not terrible and fans of the second movie might enjoy it. If the segment for the first game was better it might have been G.
Well, one thing you can't say about Populous: The Beginning is that it plays things too safe. The game actually bares almost no resemblance to past Populous titles, virtually all of the mechanics that defined the series are gone, instead it has become a simplistic RTS with a number of innovative features that unfortunately generally don't work well. The main gameplay involves controlling your shaman, who is kind of like a hero unit in most RTS games, and your Braves, who are basically workers. You can order the Braves to build buildings, and they'll do so by slowly gathering wood and putting the building together, in a manner somewhat akin to more modern city builders like Stonehearth, though the AI here is lousy and frequently seems to get stuck or forget what it's doing, so you'll have to micromanage them quite a bit. This has the effect of making building things take forever and makes this part of the game very dull. Once you finally have an army, you basically just point and click them towards the enemy base while controlling your hero unit and casting various spells on the enemy units. The game itself is extremely simple, there are basically no resources besides wood, and you get spells by praying to idols, which you can then use a few times before they run out and you have to go back and get more. The PC version contained multiplayer, which gave it some replay value, but it's been axed for this version, which leaves only the very boring campaign. The campaign is far too linear for its own good, basically feeling like a tutorial pretty much the whole way, and between this and the aforementioned dull gameplay the game really just isn't fun, which is a shame because the visuals look fantastic. They probably should have just kept the original gameplay of Populous, coupled with the new engine and better production values (and a real tutorial!) it actually could have been pretty fun.
DeleteRage Racer is a bit of a mixed bag. For starters, it contains a drastically revamped progression system, whereby you now earn money through races and use them to buy and upgrade cars, which is a massive improvement for the series, giving the game far better longevity compared to previous titles. However, there are also some drawbacks. By far the biggest one is the controls. I feel that the series trademark drifting mechanic is at an all-time low here, somehow it controls drastically worse than it did in the first game to the point of almost being unusable. The game is still playable if you try to treat it like a sim-style game and just break before you come into corners, but it doesn't really feel authentic to the franchises and the tracks aren't well set-up for it. Speaking of, there's still very few tracks overall, like in past games, and although the new progression system does help extend the game it still feels a bit repetitive. It's by no means a terrible game or anything, but I do feel that both Ridge Racer 64 and especially R4 are a lot better, so these days I probably wouldn't heavily recommend it.
Slam 'n Jam 96 is almost the same game as NBA in the Zone. Like that game, it's another basketball game with a "behind the basket" viewing angle and ridiculously fast-paced gameplay. The biggest difference is in presentation, with Slam 'n Jam being 2D and NBA in the Zone being 3D. Of the two, I feel Slam 'n Jam generally looks a bit cleaner, though the effects (such as replays) in NBA in the Zone are clearly better. Slam 'n Jam also features a turbo meter, but the game is already so fast-paced it feels a bit unnecessary, it's basically just used to do dunks. On the other hand, stealing the ball feels much better in NBA in the Zone. In pretty much all other ways the games are effectively identical, to the extent that it's too close for me to call a winner between them. Either way, I feel both provide a fairly novel take on the sport, which is something you don't often see in sports game, so I would recommend trying one of them out.
DeleteI debated between A and B for Wing Over but ultimately I think it's probably B. The main thing that made me consider A is that the core flying control feels decent. I always felt like I had good control of my plane through the environments and chasing the opponent and pulling off fancy manuevers feels good. However, pretty much everything else about the game isn't great. For starters, using weapons feels lame, your basic machine guns are okay I guess, but this is another one of those games where missiles are more like a suggestion and never really hit against planes that aren't flying in a straight line. It seems like most of these games struggle to find the right balance between "missiles are always guaranteed to hit" and "missiles never hit", I suspect the right answer is that missiles should hit fairly consistently but getting a lock should be hard. There are far bigger issues than this, though. The biggest one is the game's draw distance, which is atrocious. You can only see a very short range around you, as though you were constantly flying in thick fog, which compromises most of the game's other systems. For example, you don't dogfight alone, it's a team vs team game, but because the draw distance is so atrocious, you'll almost instantly lose track of everyone except possibly for one enemy that you might be able to track down, making it feel like you're alone. There's also plane upgrading and such in place, though the system is confusing, it's not at all clear what the various upgrades will do for you, or whether they're even better at all. There might be a bit of potential here for the sequel but it'd need a lot of upgrades.