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Last Topic's Ratings:
Jet Force Gemini - GGGGGGBGGGGGGAG - 90% (15) (4 SR)
PGA European Tour - GBAA - 50% {4}
Shiren the Wanderer 2 - GGG - 100% (3)
Space Invaders - AAGAA - 60% (5)
Top Gear Rally 2 - GGA - 83% (3) (1 SR)
Toy Story 2 - GGAABGGGG - 78% (9)
Quite a good result for Jet Force Gemini, though what surprised me the most was that 3 people rated Shiren. I was sure from how much kanji was in the game that no one else would rate it. Generally I try not to put up games that seem to require too much Japanese knowledge but I was hoping that due to the fact that many other games in the series have been localized that it would be possible to play.
Games for this topic:
F-Zero X
Knockout Kings 2000
Polaris SnoCross
Starshot: Space Circus Fever
Star Wars Rogue Squadron
Triple Play 2000
I think after this topic we'll be back to a normal amount of Baseball games remaining and won't have to do them all the time.
F-Zero X - G
ReplyDeleteKnockout Kings 2000 - G
Polaris SnoCross - B
Star Wars Rogue Squadron - G
Starshot: Space Circus Fever - A
Triple Play 2000 - A
F-Zero X is probably one of the biggest improvements between two games in a series of all time. I've stated before that I felt the original F-Zero was fairly mediocre, with races that lasted much too long, courses that all felt fairly samey, and generally feeling a bit lacking as a package, especially when compared to games like Super Mario Kart or F1 ROC 2. Well, Nintendo wasn't content to just let things end there, so they basically completely invented the game for the N64 outing, and wow, what an improvement. By far the best change is the change to how boost works, the idea to let you use your shield meter for boosting is a stroke of pure genius that gives the entire game this awesome sense of risk vs reward that meshes perfectly with the insane speed and overall adrenaline rush of the game. There's nothing better than making it a shield panel with literally a pixel of health left. The ability to attack other racers is also welcome, which also conveys a similar reward mechanic, as attempting to attack your racers can easily send you careening into walls or off the track. Couple this with a ridiculous 30 racers on the track at once (that still somehow holds 60FPS on N64!) and vastly better course design and control and you have a clear winner. Oh, and on top of this, there's also the X-Cup, which is one of the coolest features of all time, giving you effectively infinite tracks to race, decades before thoughts of proc-gen and randomizers would become common. My only beef is that the game is sometimes a bit too crazy for its own good, it's not uncommon to be going and insanely high speeds and then just randomly fly off the track to your doom because you hit a misaligned seam in the track geometry in a way the game doesn't like, which can make Master class quite frustrating, but even if you end up skipping out on Master this is an incredible game for its time. The only thing that might keep you from playing it now is that as much as this game improved over the SNES game, F-Zero GX somehow makes equally drastic improvements over this game, which might make F-Zero X seem somewhat redundant today except for the X Cup. Still, going back and playing it, it's still really fun and I'm very impressed that this came out when it did.
Knockout Kings 2000 is a decent take on the sport of boxing, certainly a vast improvement over much of the garbage we've seen in the past. Before we get started, I should note that the PS1 and N64 versions of this game are completely different games that have almost nothing in common, with the PS1 being a more detailed, sim-style experience and the N64 game being very arcadey, so there will not be much by way of comparison here. In any case, the N64 version is very fast-paced. I quite like the controls, you throw various punches by tilting the stick up or down, and you block punches by holding the stick in the same way while holding back (ie, hold down back to block body blows). It's still not super deep because the motions are far too fast to react to (at least, for individual punches), but at least it feels very responsive. There's also an interesting system where you can perform special flurry combinations using the C buttons, but must expend a little bit of health to do so, making this a fairly risky manuever. I feel it's usually not worth it since you can easily be jabbed out of it but it's a neat idea at least. Movement around the ring also feels good, where you can move strategically to some degree but not simply run away the entire match. It does still feel a little mashy, though I feel that the conversion to a more arcade-style experience was a good fit for the N64 as the PS1 game's control scheme simply wouldn't have worked on N64 (though I do kind of wish they had maintained some concept of stamina). The presentation is also good, with in-match commentary and generally decent visuals and animations for its time. This is definitely not a bad option for boxing fans.
DeletePolaris SnoCross is just dull, which doesn't bode well for a racing subgenre whose main appeal is its novelty. Snowmobile racing games are rare, but there's nothing here you haven't played a thousand times before, in large part due to the lack of any kind of unique mechanics or physics. The Snowmobiles mostly control like dirt bikes, minus any of the "leaning" mechanics that make bikes feel different from cars. You'll catch a lot of air in this game, but it's super generous about landings, with your snowmobile automatically adjusting itself laterally while in the air, so the jumps barely matter. The racing action is very simple, try to take shortcuts whenever you can and never let go of the throttle for any reason, but the AI rubberbands to an obnoxious degree so really only the last part of the race matters (this is a big part of what makes tracks feel so dull, nothing you do on the first 2 and a half laps matters to any extent). You can upgrade your snowmobiles a bit after each race, which is one of the game's only redeeming features, though you can easily just max them all out, which quickly removes any distinction between them. The presentation is very drab too. Just skip this one.
Everyone knows this by now, but Rogue Squadron is a really impressive game. This is probably the first truly good Star Wars game, as well as one of the best 3D flight games of its time. It looks pretty nice and runs very well, the controls are spot on, and the audio is also a particular highlight, featuring tons of voice acting and music from the movies. The gameplay is generally pretty good too, though I'm not a huge fan of the medal system (and I remain not a fan of it in Rogue Leader), the inability to view the medal targets mid-mission is very annoying, and you often have to deviate from your mission objective in ways that require you to memorize enemy placements in order to get good medals (for example, in the second level, you have to protect a convoy, but if you just shoot the enemies along the convoy's path, there aren't enough to get a gold medal. You have to specifically abandon the convoy by knowing at which specific times they don't get attacked to hunt down additional enemies if you want gold). Minor gripes aside, though, this is clearly a very impressive effort, and one of the best games to show off N64's technical prowess. It would later be outdone by Rogue Leader (which seems to kind of be a theme in this topic), but that doesn't take much away from what this game achieved at the time.
DeleteStarshot in many ways feels like a prototype for Ratchet and Clank. Like that game, you'll jump and shoot your way through different planets along with your smart-talking crew, solving puzzles and fighting enemies along the way to each objective. Some of the features in the game feel very modern for an N64 title, such as the removal of a lives counter (instead, the game features checkpoints, as many modern games do), and the ability to call up a map showing the entire level and your next objective at any time. Unfortunately, while the game nails many of the mechanics that would later become genre staples, it struggles with the fundamentals of the genre, as the camera, frame rate, physics, and controls are all fairly bad. Platforming in the game feels especially bad due to these issues, though thankfully there is a flight feature that you can use at any time as long as you have fuel that I found myself using to skip as many platforming segments as I could. There are definitely a lot of good ideas here, just not quite the necessary polish for them to be fully realized. It's an interesting piece of history but you'd be far better served by just playing Ratchet and Clank, which is far better in every way.
Triple Play 2000 is a decent Baseball game. I've said before that you can usually tell right away if a baseball game is good by how the fielding control works, if it's easy to get to the right fielder and follow the ball as it's hit, and this game succeeds at both. I also like the use of the C-Buttons to throw to the different bases and using the analog stick to aim the pitches, it feels intuitive. As far as batting is concerned, you have the choice for either a very simple one-button swing method, or a slightly more nuanced mode where you have to use the stick to aim the batting box towards the ball, and both work well. One minor annoyance is that it takes the pitcher a moment to set between each pitch, which does slow the pace of the game down a bit, but you do have the choice of playing a game with fewer innings if you don't want to play that long. Beyond this, there's not much about the gameplay that really stands out from other baseball games but it does everything it needs to. What really needs to be talked about with this game though is the presentation, particularly the audio presentation, which is fantastic. The game has a very deep bank of announcer quotes as well as very well made crowd noises and even other nice little touches like the home team having music when their batters come up and such. It really makes it feel like actually being at the ballpark and adds quite a lot to the game. The only downside here is that the colour commentator from the PS1 version has been cut, and while I don't feel his omission from the N64 version feels overly noticeable if you only play that version, I do miss hearing his commentary after playing the PS1 version as he has quite a lot to say and does add a fair bit to the game. The visuals in this version are clearly better than on PS1, though overall I feel like the PS1 version is probably slightly superior as it also boasts slightly more nuanced fielding control. I found it hard to choose between A and G for this one, but ultimately I think it's probably just barely A, for a game where the appeal is the authenticity to the real ballpark experience the loss of the colour commentary does pull this version down a fair bit for me.
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