This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Goemon's Great Adventure - AAGGGGGAAGG - 82% (11) (2 SR)
Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 6 - GGG - 100% (3)
Rampage 2: Universal Tour - BAAAABGGB - 44% {9}
South Park Rally - ABAABB - 25% (6)
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six - AGBAGGB - 57% {7}
Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals - BABBB - 10% (5)
It's funny how I thought the most controversial part of my ratings for the last topic would be my thoughts on Goemon, but my opinions on the other games were actually further from the norm. Still, I can't complain too much about a topic where no game gets less than 3 votes.
Games for this topic:
Big Mountain 2000
Carmageddon 64
Indy Racing 2000
Rocket: Robot on Wheels
Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion
Zool: Majuu Tsukai Densetsu
Rocket: Robot on Wheels is another one of those games I liked a lot when I was younger but I'm kind of afraid to go back to. Also, this Zool game has nothing to do with Zool on Super Nintendo, for anyone who was curious.
Big Mountain 2000 - G
ReplyDeleteCarmageddon 64 - A
Indy Racing 2000 - G
Rocket: Robot on Wheels - G
Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion - A
Zool: Majuu Tsukai Densetsu - B
Time to make myself unpopular again but I think Big Mountain 2000 is a much better game than 1080 Snowboarding. The two games are very similar in a lot of ways, but Big Mountain 2000 fixes pretty much everything that annoyed me in 1080. For starters, one of my biggest issues with 1080 was the damage bar. Take one too many bonks or fail too many jump landings and you're DQed in 1080, which, when combinred with the limited lives feels incredibly lame. Big Mountain also has a damage bar that works in mostly the same way, but if you run out of health, you simply go a little slower, which is much more sensible (the reason for this is that you have a turbo move of sorts by holding up on the stick, which slowly drains health, and you can't use it if you have none left). The game also generally controls a little better compared to 1080, particularly when it comes to landing jumps, and I like the balance system that exists when turning, it adds a little extra nuance to the game. Another thing I like about this game is that it probably has my favourite implementation of slalom in any snowboarding or skiing game. The way Slalom works here is that you have a time limit to finish the race, and every gate you hit gives time, and every gate you miss takes away time. As long as you make it to the end before running out of time and finish first, you're the winner. This feels so much better compared to games where you either get disqualified or face huge penalties for missing gates, here, even if you miss a few gates it feels like you can always come back by playing well, which makes the mode a lot more enjoyable. Like 1080, this is also almost a pure racing game, there are tricks, though they're only for style points. That being said, style points are not useless here as the game has a level-up system, and doing tricks helps you level up faster. The one downside to this game might be that it's a bit short and easy, there's only 4 courses and the game simply lets you try each event over and over until you win (though to be honest I prefer this to having to redo multiple courses if you lose in 1080). Although you need to finish 3 events per course for both skiing and snowboarding and there are also mirrorred tracks, it's not a tremendously long game, though progress is saved separately for each of the game's 9 boarders so there is a fair bit of longevity if you want 100%. This is probably still not quite as good as MTV Snowboarding, but it's a pretty solid arcade-style snowboarding game with a good sense of speed and control.
I'm not sure why Carmageddon gets quite as much hate as it does. It's not fantastic, but I frequently see it named among the worst games ever made and it's nowhere close to that. Seemingly the biggest issue people have is with the control, which is maybe a bit overly sensitive, but in less than half a lap I had it down, and it's clear it's set up this way to facilitate the exploration in the game (more on this later). Really, the game's actual biggest problem is its lack of focus. You can play any race (save for the missions, which give you a specific goal) in one of 3 ways - you can simply finish the race before time runs out, you can wreck all opponents, or you can run over every zombie. Whichever approach you choose to take, the other two are irrelevant, for example, when racing, it doesn't even matter if you finish first, as long as you finish at all. When wrecking your opponents, even if you never finished a single lap, you instantly win. And so on. Running over zombies and hitting opponents does grant a time bonus, which is the start of a good idea as this means there is some value in doing this while racing, but the timer is generally lenient enough that you don't need to bother, which makes the game's mechanics feel like they're not tied together well. If you compare against, say, later Burnout games where doing takedowns grants boost meter which helps you be fast, the mechanics have a lot more synergy. An even bigger problem though is how you upgrade the car. In Carmageddon, you earn credits for doing most things, like hitting zombies or rivals, completing laps, or doing stunts. The problem is that these credits are almost totally worthless in the N64 version, being used only to repair or reset your car, which are helpful but trivially cheap, you'll have all the credits you ever need after a couple races. In the PC version, you also use credits to upgrade your car, but in the N64 version, to earn upgrades you must instead find them on the tracks and then win the race afterwards, which is annoying as the levels are huge and the powerups aren't guaranteed to be anywhere near the actual track. In general, I feel like after the N64 era developers wisely realized that we mainly play racing games to race, exploring environments in a car usually isn't very fun. Still, the game is easy enough that you can pretty much ignore the powerups. Overall, it's playable and does feel kind of unique, and I wouldn't call it one of N64's best racers, but you should clearly get the PC version instead.
DeleteLet's get this out of the way right now, Indy Racing 2000 is not a serious Indy Car game. Races are short, there are no rules whatsoever, you can powerslide around turns, car tuning is absurdly simple, pitting is unnecessary, and cars have pinball collision physics. This is less Formula One and more Need For Speed with Indy cars. If you go into this game bearing that in mind, though, it's actually a lot of fun. For starters, the game really gives you a great sense of speed, and the controls are quite responsive too. It may have crazy arcade-style physics, but these are still Indy Cars and you can definitely feel the speed of them compared to street cars in other games. Secondly, I quite like the game's presentation. Tracks look nice, the UI is very clean, and the announcer is a lot of fun, he would sound more at home at a motorsports event compared to a Formula 1 racetrack, but it fits well with the overall gameplay. The game also has a really cool feature called the Gold Cup where you start off by racing Midget Cars and gradually work your way up to Formula 1, unlocking better cars along the way in a way that reminds me a lot of F1 ROC 2 on SNES. Purists would probably think this game is dumb, but I've been hoping to see a solid arcade-style take on F1 for a long time. I would probably even consider SRing this if I wasn't out.
The moment I saw that Rocket was created by Sucker Punch (the same team that made Sly Cooper) I knew I was wrong to worry about the game's quality. When playing games that are well-made, you can kind of feel it right away, the controls and physics just feel so much better compared to more slapdash games (a good comparison can be drawn between this and the similarly themed Starshot, this game just feels way better to play). My fear surrounding this game mostly revolved around the fact that I remember the first level being awesome, and then I recalled almost nothing about the rest of the game, leading me to believe that it probably significantly fell off after the first level, which to be honest, it kind of does, but only because the first level is so great. I definitely remember the roller coaster minigame, and the fun house and midway sections of the first stage are a lot of fun as well. I do wish they had sort of maintained the theme park gimmick a little bit more throughout the rest of the game, though the later levels are still fine and have their own gimmicks, they just don't have quite the same energy as the first stage. By far the game's biggest issue is its camera, as is the case for virtually all 3D Platformers of the era, developers hadn't quite realized that the camera usually just needs to be behind you, and there's a lot of situations where it will frame the action from bad angles, like forcing you to make jumps from a side view rather than behind. Thankfully, this game is quite simple and missing jumps is rarely penalized heavily, but it can occasionally be a bit frustrating. Still, it's a fun game overall, playing with the grapple and the vehicles is always entertaining, I'm kind of surprised this game has never received any kind of re-release considering that Sucker Punch is still around.
DeleteWhile Turok 3 feels a bit more polished compared to previous games, it does have some issues that gradually brought down my enjoyment to the A range. The first thing about the game is that the controls continue to get better with each game. You now have the option for mostly correct dual analog controls. You still can't have movement and strafing on the left stick and turning on the C buttons as you can in Quake, but you can at least move with the left stick now, which is a huge upgrade in playability, and you can also invert the Y axis and disable look spring, also great options. I also think the idea of the multiple playable characters, each of whom has a different route through the stages, is very cool. They've also fixed the obnoxious camera angle change when climbing ladders that gave me a headache. However, the general gameplay has some issues. One of the biggest ones involve the enemies themselves, who, simply put, are not fun to fight. Almost every enemy now has a projectile attack, and if they decide to shoot at you, you're getting hit. It doesn't matter if you're strafing at the time they decide to shoot, enemy projectiles have absurdly large hitboxes in this game and effectively never miss (they can even shoot through doors and other forms of cover), so unless you know exactly where the enemies will be and get the first shot off you're going to take at least a little damage. Compounding this issue is that the game is very stingy with health pickups, most pickups only recover 10, which is usually less than a single enemy hit. This definitely feels like a downgrade from previous Turok games, perhaps because many of the enemies in the past games were melee attackers who you would have time to shoot before you would take damage. There are also some odd choices when it comes to level design, one notable one comes at the end of the first area where you have to get on top of an elevator and then duck into a hole in the wall at the very last second to avoid getting squished. There's absolutely no way to see the hole on the way up or any indication it's there, you simply have to hold the stick to walk into the right wall (you'll also instantly get shot by an enemy upon getting in there), so you're going to die at least a few times to this. On the plus side, the game does have very frequent checkpoints so you won't lose much progress to this but it's still an annoyance. Speaking of, I like the organic feel of the new stages, but I'm definitely not a fan of the fact that the game needs a couple seconds to load every time you go to a new area, particularly given how tiny the areas are. You can traverse many areas in under a minute, but it still incurs load time. It's not gamebreaking or anything, but I wish they had found a way to load the next level segment while you're playing the previous one. It definitely seems like many N64 games manage much larger areas more smoothly than this. The small areas also cause the game to feel super linear and also don't seem to have many secrets. Overall, it's still a fairly solid game, but the shooter genre on N64 is pretty competitive and this still wouldn't quite be one of my top picks.
DeleteZool is a monster-catching RPG, but it might be the dullest one ever made. The biggest issue with the game is that it is extremely simplified and limited for no reason. During battle, there are 4 actions available to your monsters, attack, defend, special, and flee. If left alone, they will choose actions on their own, but you can also use the C buttons to command them to choose a specific action, though this consumes a meter so there's a bit of a limit to how many commands you can give. In practice, you will basically just choose attack over and over again to prevent them from wasting their time defending or using specials, or particularly fleeing, so your contribution in battle mostly just consists of rapidly switching monsters and pressing C Up to ensure they attack. Monsters have secondary attacks that consume their stamina, but you can't specifically command them to use these, and unless your monster has a special that restores their stamina, you have no way to recover their stamina mid-battle, either. You can bring a team of up to 4 monsters into battle, but you can hold 8 with you, so swapping out your monsters offers some minor degree of strategy, but the game does not allow you to switch monsters mid-battle, and you can't use items in battle either for some reason. The lack of options available in battle generally just causes battles to be fairly boring. If you're fighting a powerful enemy, you have very little ability to influence the outcome, at best you can command your monsters to run away, but for the most part you just watch things unfold and hope you win. After battle, you can potentially capture monsters that you beat, though you have to choose one of your monsters to try to convince them, and it's also somewhat random, which is a bit annoying. Plus, other than potentially doing more damage, the relative lack of control you have over the game also makes getting new monsters not feel that exciting. Speaking of not exciting, there's also the controls you have on the map and in dungeons, where you have literally the slowest movement speed of any game ever made. I would guess you literally move at about one quarter the speed you would move at in any other game, and random encounters are also really common, which makes the game feel slow and padded. Overall, this game just feels super slow and dull, I doubt I've ever played another monster catching game that was less interesting than this.
Delete