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Last Topic's Ratings:
Cadillac - BA - 25% (2)
Chrono Trigger - AGGGGAGGGGG - 91% (11) (1 SR)
Gunship - BB - 0% (2)
King of Bowling - BB - 0% (2)
Micro Machines V3 - GAAAG - 70% (5)
Monkey Hero - AGG - 83% (3)
I had to tally up the votes for this topic like 5 times because I kept making mistakes. Even when I finally got the totals, I accidentally deleted them the first time! Hopefully they're right now at least.
Games for this topic:
Azure Dreams
Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu
Chicken Run
Mortal Kombat 3
Posit
Snow Racer '98
I thought since a sequel to Chicken Run was recently announced it made sense to cover the game now. Also, I'm unreasonably excited to try out Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu.
Azure Dreams - G
ReplyDeleteBakusou Dekotora Densetsu - G
Chicken Run - B
Mortal Kombat 3 - B
Posit - B
Snow Racer '98 - B
Azure Dreams is pretty cool. It's not technically considered a member of the Mystery Dungeon series, but it might as well be, as its gameplay is virtually identical to them, and particularly to the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, which I've always considered to be the best ones. Like in PMD, Azure Dreams has a focus on collectable familiars who can help you fight. The main character's level is reset at the start of each dungeon, but the familiar's is not, giving you a second form of progression, and you can also get stronger familiars or even fuse them together to create ones with hybrid abilities. It's not nearly as complex as the battle system in the Pokemon games, but it still does a lot to add variety to the action, and finding a new ally is always exciting. There's a surprisingly large amount going on beyond the main tower and the mystery dungeon-esque mechanics, too. The main town can be upgraded with new buildings that enhance your capabilities in various ways or further the game's story, which revolves in large part around meeting and romancing various girls in the town. It's a bit of an odd match with the game's general story about finding out what happened to the protagonist's father, but it's a fun diversion nonetheless. Overall, it might have been surpassed by now, but this is still a pretty deep game which would easily have been one of the best games of this type for it's time. I'm kind of sad I didn't know about this game when it was new because it probably would have been one of my favourites.
I expected Chicken Run to be a simple platformer, but it's actually a stealth game akin to Metal Gear Solid. Unfortunately, it's also probably the worst stealth game of all time. The problem with Chicken run can almost completely be chalked up to its camera. Basically, the game is always framed from the most unhelpful angle possible, ensuring that you can never see any threats until they're right on top of you, even often allowing them to catch you without ever being onscreen. You have a radar, but it has extremely short range and doesn't display the vision range of any threats who are not on the radar currently, even if their vision extends into your radar range, and enemies can seemingly see much farther than their vision cone indicates anyway. Luckily, the penalty for being caught isn't much, you'll just have one of your mission items confiscated and be returned to the entrance to the last room, but I feel this only highlights how lousy the stealth mechanics are. It's generally more effective to play the game almost like it's a pure action game and just run like heck whenever you get spotted, because being spotted is almost inevitable and escaping your pursuers is actually often fairly easy. Awful stealth mechanics aside, the game does generally feel somewhat authentic to the movie, you'll try to assemble various gadgets and tools to escape the chicken ranch, and periodically you have to play minigames, which are maybe the highlight of the experience since at least they usually work properly, though they aren't anything to write home about either. The game is also extremely short and the presentation isn't much to write home about apart from the voice acting. In general, I think they had the right idea with this one, but they needed someone who had actually played a Stealth game before on the staff.
Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu is a very strange game. The game's title translates as "Art Truck Battle", which is basically a perfect description of what it's about, the game is a simple racing game where you race down the highway in your truck, attempting to reach the finish line before the opponent. The layouts of the tracks are super simple, with no highway off-ramps or anything like that, instead the main gameplay consists of weaving through traffic and blocking your rival when they try to pass (or drafting them when they're in front of you). There's two control schemes available (you can change them in the shop), and under the default one, you don't even really steer, you just indicate lane changes and the game keeps you in your lane automatically, but you can have normal controls too, which forces you to actually navigate turns yourself. Both feel fair, it's certainly easier to use the default controls, but the more nuanced controls can sometimes slip through traffic in ways that the normal controls can't. Assuming you do win a race, you'll earn money you can use to upgrade your truck, but you won't be buying things like engines or transmissions or anything because who cares about that stuff, everything is about the visual customization of your truck, which is very extensive. In addition to painting it with cool drawings (and you can even make your own designs using a built-in editor, though it's not very convenient), you can also choose from dozens of roof scoops, roof racks, bumpers, side skirts, mufflers, and tons of other stuff to really make your truck feel unique. Overall, the gameplay is quite simple, but it's kind of relaxing and fun in its own way, and I appreciate the soundtrack having a pretty large number of tracks, all of which are voiced songs in Japanese. There's also quite a lot of content to the game, there's also a full story mode and a time attack mode where you can use the trucks of defeated opponents. It's a very weird game for sure, but I appreciate their commitment to the theme. Like Choro Q, I feel this is one of those games that was clearly a passion project for the devs and that gives it a sense of charm that helps make up for its shortcomings. I just wish the drawing editor was easier to use and that there were more premade drawings to use, though I suspect this will be something that comes in the sequel.
DeleteMortal Kombat 3 on PS1 is a terrible MK game even among MK games. For starters, by now Mortal Kombat is starting to feel extremely dated. While you could maybe once argue that the digitized sprites looked cool compared to the kinds of graphics the 16-bit consoles could put out, they've certainly lost all of their wow factor by now, and the lack of animation frames looks terrible when compared to most other fighting games on PS1. The game isn't any better on the gameplay front either, it's still very generic, with most characters having very similar moves and the game having little depth, and the package is also super limited, basically only having the basic arcade mode and VS mode and that's it. To add insult to injury, an updated version of this game was also released around the same time that the PS1 version came out, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, which the 16-bit systems got but PS1 never did, and eventually Mortal Kombat Trilogy was also released, which includes even more characters, making this version of the game totally obsolete.
Posit is a fairly simple puzzle game. For starters, I'll explain the game, because there's no tutorial and not much information about it anywhere. The game is a turn-based game where the goal is to trap your opponent. Each turn, the player first moves their peg in any direction, followed by placing a block. Blocks can be placed anywhere on the board, including ontop of each other, to a maximum height of 3. A peg can move up when moving, but it can never move down, and it can't climb up to a stack of height 3. As such, you generally want to try to place the blocks in such a way that you force your opponent to move up and eventually get stuck. You can also use your piece to block them too. That's the basic gist of the game, and the entirety of the game revolves around it, with virtually no variation (don't expect differing board shapes or anything like that). Unfortunately, I don't find the game to be very fun. For starters, I feel that the game would be vastly more interesting if you could place the block first, then move. One of the more potentially interesting things about the game is that once you are on ontop of a block, rather than using your move to trap the opponent, you can also place blocks on the lower level to create a path for yourself. However, since you can't move onto that path until your next turn, the opponent can always choose to block it by placing another block, so at best, such a move just serves to stall out a turn. This makes the game feel like hyper-aggression is really the only viable approach, and what's worse, if you make even a single mistake at any point, you can basically lose the entire game instantly, as the AI is extremely good and you basically have to play perfectly to beat them. In general, I just don't really find it to be very fun to play, and the very limited nature of the package does it no favours.
DeleteThere's basically nothing good to say about Snow Racer 98. It has a handful of different modes, though they are all very similar, on any given race, you'll need to finish within a certain time and with a certain number of points from tricks. The controls are generally bad, the core racing controls for skiing are kind of tolerable but are very simple, and the boarding controls are just flat out bad, with tricks feeling lousy to perform and your board often randomly losing speed for no real reason. About the only good thing you could say about it is that the visuals aren't too bad, but it's not fun enough to play for this to really be worth anything.