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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Blade - BAGA - 50% {4}
NASCAR Racing - AGABA - 50% {5}
Pro Backgammon - AAB - 33% (3)
Putter Golf - AAB - 33% (3)
Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace - AAABA - 40% (5)
Tomb Raider 2 - GGBAAAGG - 69% (8)
This was a pretty brutal topic. It's interesting to me that the games I think will be controversial are almost never the ones that actually end up being very divisive. For this topic, I had Star Wars Episode 1 pegged as the game that would get the most diverse opinion, yet it had the most consistent ratings. I guess we've just learned over time that my predictions are basically never right.
Games for this topic:
Crusaders of Might and Magic
Iron Soldier 3
Killer Loop
Smash Court
Techno BB
X-Men vs Street Fighter
No, I didn't screw up and do games in a series out of order again, the first two Iron Soldier games are exclusive to Jaguar. Besides this, I think Killer Loop looks pretty cool, I hope it turns out to be good.
Crusaders of Might and Magic - G
ReplyDeleteIron Soldier 3 - A
Killer Loop - G
Smash Court - B
Techno BB - G
X-Men vs. Street Fighter - G
I'm so torn on Crusaders of Might and Magic. The game is a 3rd person WRPG that essentially plays like an early version of the Elder Scrolls games, and it actually does a fairly remarkable job of pulling off that type of gameplay on PS1. Areas are large and have a fair number of secrets, there's a lot of weapons and spells to use (all of which get stronger with repeated use), and the presentation is also generally pretty decent. However, there are also no shortage of flaws that hamper the experience. For starters, there's the frame rate. It's tolerable at best, and many areas chug pretty badly, which reduces the visual spectacle and sometimes makes the game hard to look at. There are also issues with combat. Melee attacks are quite slow and you cannot move while performing them, so if you commit to meleeing an opponent it's a virtual guarantee that you're just going to trade blows. You can use a shield to block, which reduces a lot of damage, but it doesn't really create openings and due to the slow speed of your own attacks you'll still take a lot of hits. You can often simply back up or do the backflip move to avoid damage entirely, as most attacks have fairly short range, but even this is very unreliable. A much better way to tilt the scales of battle in your favour is to use magic, which can either allow you to attack from a distance or use powerful effects to power yourself up or disable your opponents. This feels all right, though if you commit to that mage life you'd better get ready to quaff thousands of potions because you don't get much mana in this game (luckily, potions are cheap). You can also add various buffs to your weapon (thankfully, these are free to use) and apparently enemies have different strengths and weaknesses, though there's no real indication when you're hitting for effective damage so I don't know how you're intended to figure this out. The final issue with the game is that it's also fairly short and linear. You generally can't go anywhere other than where the game wants you to go or back to the main town, and even in situations where you can stray from the beaten path to some degree a quick death at the hands of a powerful enemy is usually the result. Still, for all of its flaws, I still think this game is kind of fun. It helps that Drake is legitimately a pretty cool character in a 90s anti-hero kind of way (being voiced by Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy doesn't hurt) and I do like the mechanic of gradually levelling up your abilities as you use them. It's pretty borderline between A and G but I guess I'm inclined to be generous due to how impressive it is, even if you have many better options these days.
Iron Soldier 3 is just all right. I like the idea of completing missions to earn new weapons and parts to customize the mech, and there's something kind of inherently satisfying about stepping on tanks to blow them up (though this does cause you to take damage and thus isn't usually a good idea), but the mech is quite unwieldy to control and this makes the gameplay feel somewhat mindless. Something that particularly annoys me is that even though the mech can equip many weapons, you can only fire one at a time, and must toggle through them with the square button, which kind of makes it feel like only your most powerful weapon is relevant and all others are just backups in case you run out of ammo. In terms of the missions, they vary a fair bit, which is good, though finding your mission objectives is often annoying, I wish the radar would do a better job of highlighting the things you need to complete your mission. There's also an arcade mode and a two-player mode, which are both decent additions, but I feel like the core gameplay here still needs a bit more work. Certainly, this is nowhere near as good as Extreme Power as mech games go.
Killer Loop is a pretty cool game. It's clearly extremely similar to Wipeout, from the stylish yet minimalistic menus to the futuristic hovercars and the techno soundtrack, but its controls and physics are very solid and it has a couple unique features. For starters, Killer Loop features a kind of "slide turn" on the shoulder buttons that I can't really describe, but it works really well and is indispensable for navigating the courses. In general, I really like the way this game controls, I might actually give it the edge over Wipeout here (particularly the older Wipeout games), even when the speed gets crazy fast it still feels manageable because the controls are very responsive. Another unique system in the way powerups work. Powerups are divided into two categories, offense and defense, and picking up a weapon on the track will give you the first powerup from either category. You can use it right away, or pick up another powerup, to get the second powerup from that category, up to a maximum of three levels. All 6 powerups map pretty closely to Wipeout powerups, being Rockets, Cannon, Missile, Mines, Shield, and Turbo, for offense and defense respectively. I think this is actually quite a neat system as it removes some of the RNG in weapon pickups. We all know Turbo is clearly the best powerup in both Wipeout and this game, but here you have to earn it rather than just getting it by luck. Even then, a well-placed mines or rocket is still sometimes useful, so there's a fun risk vs reward element here. The boost pads have also been replaced by "boost zones", which you can drive through to charge energy that lets you travel faster for a period of time, which I also like because it means hitting the boost arrow isn't "all or nothing" the way it is in wipeout, even if you get there a little late you still get some speed. In terms of mechanics that are less great, there's the magnet system. The courses in this game frequently do corkscrews and go through tunnels and other things like that, and sometimes you can race on the underside of the track. To avoid falling off, you have to engage the magnet. However, with the speed of the game, it's hard to figure out exactly when you need to use magnet without trial and error. Luckily, there is an auto-magnet setting which will automate like 95% of this for you, which I strongly recommend, even then auto-magnet is not infallible and sometimes won't activate it early enough or in certain sections to stop you from losing speed, so you can still gain just a little bit more speed as you learn the courses better and figure out when to press the magnet button. As far as the game's progression, this is also a bit novel. Just like in Wipeout, the game is divided into different speed classes, and you have to win every race in a class to unlock the next one. What this game does that's a little different is that winning every race in a class only unlocks the next class for that vehicle manufacturer, if you want to unlock all the vehicles you have to beat every race with every vehicle, which helps extend the experience somewhat. And of course, in true Wipeout fashion, the game is hard as hell, it took me dozens of tries to even beat the first speed class. Overall, it's a pretty solid package and I quite recommend it for fans of the Wipeout series. It should be noted that there's also a Dreamcast version, which features one extra car and track, as well as multiplayer support. However, this version drops the powerup system for a more traditional one where which powerup you get is pure RNG, which I think is a downgrade, and the race HUD also looks quite a bit worse IMO, so there's pros and cons to each. Either way though, it's another solid entry in PS1's racing library.
DeleteSmash Court is another bad Tennis game. To its credit, this game mostly gets the hitting control right, if you're in the bottom left corner, holding left causes you to hit it up the line, as it should be (it's amazing how many games get this wrong). However, the game has a different problem, which is that its controls feel overly sluggish and delayed. Swings have a massive amount of windup before they actually contact the ball, which forces you to be in position and hit the button absurdly early compared to other tennis games, as well as requiring perfect timing as the actual hit window is quite short. The power swing is particularly absurd, I would guess it has at least a 30 frame windup for a 1-2 frame hit window, requiring you to start swinging in many cases even before the opponent hits the ball in order to actually hit with it. There's not really much more to say about the game than this, any game which has fundamentally bad controls is going to be bad regardless of what options and modes that it has. At least I feel like Tennis games are slowly starting to make progress towards Mario Tennis, but there's still a way to go yet.
DeleteI've said before that I like puzzle games that force you to think in different ways, and Techno BB is a good example of this. The basics of Techno BB are simple. There is a grid of squares of different colours, and the objective is to line up 4 in a row. BB can walk across the grid, and pressing Circle will make him rotate the tiles surrounding him clockwise, while X results in counterclockwise. After making a match, you have a few seconds to make another match, which results in a combo if you are fast enough. This probably sounds super simple and easy, but once you actually play it you'll find it's quite a bit harder than it sounds. Moving pieces even a couple spaces over frequently needs you to move BB, and you have to be careful not to rotate any other pieces you need out of position. As I played, I was slowly learning what patterns to look for and I was starting to rack up some big chains, which makes you feel super smart, but whenever I got too full of myself I would immediately fail some simple match and look like an idiot, so it keeps you on your toes. In terms of modes, the main game is a pretty chill experience, the goal is to clear enough tiles on each stage before all of the tiles turn into ghost blocks, which limit your ability to rotate them and if they all turn into ghost blocks you lose. As long as you're doing relatively well this isn't a major threat though, so you can mostly just chill out and listen to some cool beats (as the name implies, there's a big focus on music here, and the OST is pretty catchy). There's also a puzzle mode if you want to try to learn some of the patterns in the game a little better, and the extra variety this provides helps the package quite a bit. Finally, there's a mode that just challenges you to get as many points as you can in 3 minutes, though I don't find this one to be too exciting. Overall though, it's a pretty solid game that actually feels quite unique among puzzle games, which isn't something I can say too often.
X-Men vs Street Fighter has seen some changes since the arcades, but it's still a great game. For starters, this is a much better port than Children of the Atom, the game runs great and has no slowdown anywhere, and the menus and the rest of the interface are very slick as well. In terms of gameplay, the biggest change since the arcade is that the tag mechanic is gone, you now only use one character to fight, with the other character only being used for team supers and alpha counters. The other new mechanic to the PS1 version is Super Cancelling, the game allows you to cancel supers into each other, creating some extremely flashy looking combos. Other than that, the gameplay is pretty much arcade perfect, if some frames have been dropped it's certainly not enough to impact gameplay. One question people might ask is whether or not this game is worth playing over the later VS series games. Sure, there's definitely some jank here, you build meter unreasonably fast, there's a ton of infinites, and some supers seem to deal unscaled damage, which is crazily broken when combined with super cancelling, but IMO this type of silliness is actually a key part of the appeal of the VS series so I wouldn't hold it against it. I also feel that X-Men vs Street Fighter feels a bit different to play compared to the rest of the games in the series, largely due to the lack of some very strong mechanics that are introduced in later games, like assists from MvsSF, double hero from MvsC, and especially MvsC PS1's meter-less alpha counters, so there's a bit more focus on neutral play here. Plus, I think the roster in this one is a particular highlight, with fan-favourites like Sabretooth and Rogue, who wouldn't return until Marvel vs Capcom 2 (and Rogue never again gets the ability to steal attacks like she can in this game). Still, even if you prefer one of the later games, I feel it just can't be denied how fun this game is, and the soundtrack rocks too. This review alone took ages because I kept procrastinating by playing the game more.
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