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Last Topic's Ratings:
AColorful Logic - BB - 0% (2)
Disney's The Little Mermaid II - AA - 50% (2)
Populous: The Beginning - AAABB - 30% (5)
Rage Racer - AAAGAAAGAA - 60% (10)
Slam 'n Jam '96 featuring Magic & Kareem - GG - 100% (2)
Wing Over - GBA - 50% {3}
Seeing Wing Over's rating I'm sure there'll be plenty of comments about these scores if we ever end up doing Gameboy Advance.
Games for this topic:
Cadillac
Chrono Trigger
Gunship
King of Bowling
Micro Machines V3
Monkey Hero
Fun fact, in addition to Colorful Logic, King of Bowling is the other first game in a Japanese series that I've wanted to put up for a long time.
Cadillac - A
ReplyDeleteChrono Trigger - G
Gunship - B
King of Bowling - B
Micro Machines V3 - G
Monkey Hero - G
Cadillac is an interesting game. It's basically a fusion of a falling block puzzle game and poker. The falling blocks in this case are playing cards, and you need to match 3 (or more) to create poker-style hands. For example, the worst possible hand is a flush, which is just 3 of the same cards of any suit. Other combinations include straights, 3 of a kind, straight flushes, and so on. You can create combos, since cards fall when matches are made, and the fact that you are dealt all 52 cards before the deck reshuffles allows you to somewhat predict what's coming next. There was actually also an NES version of this game, and compared to that one, there are a few changes - they now allow diagonal matches, there's now a joker card which acts as a wild card, and after they deal the full deck, there's now a shuffle card which causes you to get the next handful of cards face down before play continues (previously, a round ended after all 52 cards had been drawn). All of these help expand the game a little and make it a bit easier to play, though I'm not a huge fan of the part where you get the cards face down. In any case, it's a unique concept which can be fun. The biggest issue is that there's simply not much to this package. You can play the game alone, which is just a high score challenge, or you can play against another player, and that's it. It would have been nice to at least have the option to play against the AI. It's kind of a shame that a more complete version of this game was never released because I feel like it actually does have a fair bit of depth to it. What's here is not bad, but I feel like they could do a lot more with it.
Chrono Trigger is widely considered to be one of the best games of all time, but the PS1 version is also widely considered to be a disappointment, largely due to added load times in the port. Without going into an enormous amount of detail because we've discussed it before, a lot of what makes Chrono Trigger so appealing as a game is its fantastic pacing, unlike most games of its time that featured random encounters, all of the encounters in Chrono Trigger are scripted (even though some are avoidable), which ensures that you never spend too much time fighting enemies (even if you want to explore areas thoroughly), and the strength of the enemy encounters remains consistent between playthroughs, generally getting progressively harder as you approach each boss (as you'd expect from most games, though in most RPGs, the level of enemy resistance you encounter is random, rather than progressing in this manner). Of course, the story is very well-paced too, introducing new twists and turns at just the right rate to keep the player invested. As such, for a game where pacing is so critical, adding additional load times would seem to be a very serious problem, since it disrupts the gameplay pacing. This is mainly what I expected to be talking about coming into this review, but upon playing it again, the load times just aren't quite as bad as I remembered (and I made sure to play it on a real PS1 for the most authentic loading experience possible). The worst load times are actually upon opening the menu, the pre-battle loads aren't THAT bad, and the fact that the encounters are scripted means you can't encounter too many of them. It certainly would have been nice if they could have buried the load time inside the weapon drawing animation, but it's not actually that disruptive. The quality of the game does still generally shine through and it's almost just as addictive as it is on Super Nintendo. Beyond the load times, the PS1 version also features a few cutscenes, a redone translation, and a brief extras mode. The extras mode isn't much to talk about, it mostly just lets you review some of the data from the game, and the cutscenes are well done but infrequent. As for the new translation, I've never been a fan, I feel it changes some of the most memorable lines into ones that are much more dry, but once again, upon revisting this it's not as bad as I remembered. Incidentally, there's also a DS version, which is mostly the same as the PS1 version, but lacks the load times and has a new monster battle subquest, so that version is essentially wholly superior to this one. In general, although this is probably still the worst way to play the game, the game is clearly still too good to be rated anything other than G. You should definitely play this on some system, ideally not on PS1, but if that's somehow your only option then go for it.
DeleteGunship is easily one of the most boring flight games ever made. The game's core progression structure is interesting, it's similar to a number of older PC games where you take on somewhat randomly generated missions and gradually earn promotions as you play (compare the Carmen Sandiego games, for example), but the gameplay is so bland that it's irrelevant. For starters, your helicopter is absurdly slow, making even the simplest mission take forever, and the game also has very limited draw distance, so even when you do finally engage enemies, you'll just be firing missiles at targetting boxes and hoping they hit. This is probably one of the least interesting games I've played in all of GAB.
DeleteKing of Bowling is a very basic bowling game. I agree that the shot meter is a bit confusing (it's a 2 button swing, you want to stop the meter near the back and then near the end of the red zone), but once you figure it out the game is almost trivial, as pretty much any fast shot that hits near the center of the pins results in a strike, making throwing repeated strikes far too easy, which kills almost any reason to play the game. About the only good thing you can say about it is that the presentation is decent for such an early title, but King of Bowling 2 is so much better than this game that I can't see any reason to play the first one.
Micro Machines V3 is effectively the same game between N64 and PS1. As I mentioned when we covered the N64 version, I initially wasn't the biggest fan but I've warmed up to it over the years and now see it as a mostly worthy successor to the original, though I do wish they had built a bit more on some of the concepts in the game, particularly the prize cars.
Monkey Hero is very obviously inspired by the 2D Legend of Zelda games. Almost everything in the game is highly reminiscent of Link to the Past (one of the most obvious copycats is the running move, which is a dead ringer for the pegasus boots), but at least it copies it relatively well and generally preserves what makes the 2D Zelda games fun. Something I like is that the dungeons tend to have a decent degree of environmental interaction, with many boxes, barrels, and other things you can use to defeat enemies, which feels useful as your basic attack has little range and unlike Zelda, enemies actually do a reasonable amount of damage here. Another cool idea is that one of the first abilities you get is a hover move, which allows the dungeon design to have some degree of verticality. The story is very by the numbers and the presentation isn't really anything special, but the game is still decently fun. It's clearly not quite as good as Link to the Past, but as games of this type are fairly rare it doesn't hurt to have a couple decent ones.