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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Azure Dreams - BAGGGG - 75% (6)
Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu - GGG - 100% (3)
Chicken Run - AB - 25% (2)
Mortal Kombat 3 - BABGAB - 33% (6)
Posit - BB - 0% (2)
Snow Racer '98 - BB - 0% (2)
What a turnaround for Azure Dreams as the topic went on. I was also extremely surprised by the reception to Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu, it seemed like one of those wacky games that I like but no one else does.
Games for this topic:
Fear Effect
Hugo 2
Jet Moto 2
Keeper
Men in Black: The Game
WCW Nitro
There are two version of Jet Moto 2 that are mostly the same, Jet Moto 2 and Jet Moto 2 Championship Edition (which is actually just the Greatest Hits release). We won't be doing both games separately because they're too similar, so you can rate based on whichever version you'd prefer.
Fear Effect - A
ReplyDeleteHugo 2 - B
Jet Moto 2 - G
Keeper - A
Men in Black: The Game - B
WCW Nitro - B
Some aspects of Fear Effect are quite cool, though it also has some issues. Gameplay-wise, it has a few similarities with Resident Evil, with similar controls, fixed camera angles, and puzzles. However, compared to Resident Evil, it is vastly more linear and there aren't really many survival-style elements. Visually, the game looks fantastic, featuring a cel-shaded look for the characters that still holds up decently well, certainly it looks much better than many other such games, and the backgrounds feature some degree of animation to them, which looks quite nice. Sound is pretty decent as well for the most part, voice acting varies a bit in quality but is certainly a fair bit above the likes of RE1. However, there are issues with the gameplay. For starters, there's the health system. Fear Effect features a very weird health system where your health is kind of like a mood meter. As you'd expect, it goes down when you get shot, but it also drops when enemies are around, and recovers a bit when they're not. You can't actively restore it with anything, instead, the game just refills it automatically at certain points. It's a very weird system which IMO doesn't work well, I feel it would be vastly better just to have medkits you could pick up and let you refill your health when you need it. The periodic health refills feel like they trivialize playing well during certain segments and in areas where they are absent it feels overly punishing in that you can't heal for potentially long stretches of time. Secondly, the combat in the game isn't great either. Resident Evil's fixed camera angles weren't really designed for enemies that can shoot back. In Rez Evil, when you encounter an enemy, you always have a little time before they can hit you because they're slow, and you can also aim at them when they're offscreen, neither of which is the case here. The game rewards you for stealth killing enemies, but you're often forced to walk into an enemy's line of sight in order to attack them even if you're positioned somewhere where you should be able to shoot them considering the layout of the area. There's also a ton of instant death sequences which are generally annoying, though thankfully save points are very frequent and there's no limited saving here. And then there's the boss fights, which really make it clear that the game's controls simply aren't great, these are always extremely painful to go through. There's a lot to like here, and I feel the game is somewhat borderline between A and G, your experience with the game will probably depend on how patient you're willing to be with it.
Like its predecessor, Hugo 2 is absurdly bad. It's pretty much the same thing, where it's a collection of awful minigames featuring Hugo the troll. The games are probably more technically sophisticated this time as most involve some degree of 3-dimensional gameplay, but they've become even worse to play for the most part, with Cliffhanger being the only one I could consider to be somewhat playable. I actually think the awful Nintama Rantarou game that we reviewed in the last N64 topic is actually a better minigame collection than this one is.
When we covered Jet Moto 1, I mentioned that the series had yet to find its identity. It has now found it, and that identity is SPEED! Jet Moto 2 is very similar to Jet Moto 1 in most ways, except it's now 50% faster, which makes the game vastly more fun to play. The only real downside to the game is that the tracks haven't really been built for this level of speed, being full of overly tight turns and other obstacles that you'll spend a lot of time slamming into. The grapple mechanic clearly should have been used to help you navigate turns at insane speed, but it's used very sparingly, leading me to wonder if the speed of the game originally matched Jet Moto 1 but they decided to increase it sometime during development. Nevertheless, despite being somewhat uncontrollable it's still fun and when you do manage to pull off something cool while going way too fast it feels very satisfying. The progression of the game feels much better compared to the first one, too, featuring a more reasonable level of difficulty from the get go, and there's also a lot of content here as the game also retains all of the tracks from the first game (which, oddly enough, often seem to work better at this game's speed than the new tracks do). I also quite like the game's sense of style, the racers are pretty cool and I like the artwork that appears after races. Even though Jet Moto 3 is clearly a much more polished game, I think this is still clearly G.
DeleteKeeper is a fairly simple puzzle game, as you might expect from the Superlite series. Tiles appear on the board, and your goal is to push or pull them to create matches, either by colour or by symbol, or ideally both. There's a fair number of ways to score points, though the tiles appear so absurdly fast that I often find I basically just have to take the simplest matches I can just to stay afloat. The game will sometimes create good matches for you anyway, which sort of makes the game feel like it doesn't have a ton of depth. I feel like probably one of the biggest issues with the game is that you have to move the keeper around to move the tiles, which severely limits how fast you can play. If you used a cursor instead (similar to Tetris Attack or something), you'd be able to match blocks way faster and that would probably allow you to use more skill in setting up matches. You can also play with 2-players, which helps a bit because you can get twice as much done, though of course you'll have to communicate. There's not really much else to the game. It's entertaining enough for a short time but probably not something you'd come back to.
Men in Black clearly sucks. It tries to follow the plot of the movie, but the gameplay is so rock-bottom bad that there's just no reason to put up with it. For starters, the game uses prerendered backgrounds, but they're very dark and this often obscures key aspects of the surroundings. The controls are also an atrocity, being overly stiff and limiting and just terrible in general, melee combat in particular feels absolutely terrible. I had to use a guide literally every two seconds to figure out what to do because of the two aforementioned issues, I couldn't even figure out how to open the door in the very first screen of the game (it turns out you must try to open it from a very specific position). I actually don't know how you'd manage to screw a game up this badly. Hopefully they can use that mind-wipe device to remove my memory of playing it.
WCW Nitro is pretty similar to the N64 version, save for having minorly better controls due to not using the C-buttons. Still, all of the other problems persist, where it feels somewhat too fast and mashy in a time where most wrestling games have gotten substantially more nuanced. Easily in contention for the worst wrestling game of the generation.