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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Bomberman 64: The Second Attack - GGGGA - 90% (5)
Dezaemon 3D - AA - 50% (2)
Diddy Kong Racing - GAGGGGGGGGGGGGG - 97% (15) (5 SR)
International Track & Field 2000 - ABBB - 13% (4)
NFL Blitz - GGGAAGG - 86% (7)
Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction - BBBBB - 0% (5)
I'm glad to see headlining games like Diddy Kong Racing still pulling in the big vote totals. We're slowly approaching the end of the N64 GAB, so hopefully we can keep things up until the end.
Games for this topic:
FIFA 99
Hey You Pikachu
Jeremy McGrath Supercross 2000
Power Rangers: Lightspeed Rescue
Spider-Man
Susume Taisen Puzzle Dama
I hope my microphone for Hey You Pikachu still works, because I don't think I could accurately rate it from memory. Also, I've wanted to try the N64 Taisen Puzzle-Dama game for some time, which finally appears here.
FIFA 99 - A
ReplyDeleteHey You Pikachu - A
Jeremy McGrath Supercross 2000 - A
Power Rangers: Lightspeed Rescue - G
Spider-Man - A
Susume Taisen Puzzle Dama - A
FIFA 99's a tough one to rate and I went back and forth on it a bit. The first and most prominent thing to mention about the game is that the control is excellent. I've complained about some recent soccer games having overly complex control schemes, but there's none of that here, the control scheme for FIFA is both simple and responsive. A passes, B shoots, C down is the cross, and C Left is run / header. Throw ins and Corner Kicks feel great too, in general it feels very good to pick up and play. One interesting mechanic here is that the standard "steal" action is done with a press of the button, whereas in many other games this is sort of an automatic action that occurs if you get close enough to the ball. This definitely feels more responsive, but it's actually an incredibly strong defensive action in general, as it allows you to strip the ball away 100% of the time if you're close enough without risking a yellow card, and IMO makes the slide tackle feel somewhat redundant. Luckily, passing control is great so offense isn't inordinately weak, but you'll definitely have to move the ball a lot. So far, this sounds like a clear G, and I was certainly leaning that way at first, but there's also a couple problems with the game. For starters, it has the classic EA Sports game problem, which is that the goalies in the game are far too good. Even after you manage to outfox the defenders and the powerful steal move and get an open shot or a one timer, 9 times out of 10 the goalie will still rob you, which feels lame. It doesn't generally feel worth it to set up fancy plays, since things like cross passes can be intercepted, the best option is usually to just keep rifling them at the keeper and hope he misses one eventually. This is accurate to most real sports, but feels lame in game form, especially because with the shortened timeframe of the game, you can easily control possession and have way more shots than your opponent but lose 0-1 to bad luck, though far more often the games will just be 0-0. The other thing is that the game feels incredibly dry, with almost no commentary whatsoever. There's a tiny bit of play by play but they don't even have player names in this version. By comparison, on playstation, there's quite substantial commentary from multiple announcers, and the PS1 version also feels somewhat faster, which helps reduce the power of the steal move a little bit, which in turn creates more openings for one-timers and the like. Overall, I think the right choice is to stick with ISS 64 on N64 and pick up FIFA on PS1 if that's your preference.
Thankfully, my microphone for Hey You Pikachu does still work, because the game is impossible to play without it. The basic gist of the game is that it's kind of like a Pikachu-themed version of Wonder Project J, where Pikachu will wander around various environments and interact with different objects and you have to use the mic to tell him what to do with them. Compared to Wonder Project J it's vastly more simplistic, there's not really any concept of teaching Pikachu anything permanently, and the challenges are equally simple, like cooking a soup, fishing, or feeding flowers to hungry pokemon. The microphone commands work well enough, for the most part Pikachu did seem to understand what I was telling it, though it also feels kind of unnecessary, the vocabulary of the game is quite limited and a button interface probably would have done just as well. Still, it mainly suffices, the only time I had a particular issue with it was during the pinata game, where there are many commands available (I suspect in situations where the game wants you to say something specific it's more generous with the voice detection). As for the game itself, it's very cute, Pikachu has a lot of cute animations and there's some funny little scenes with mom that are shown occasionally, though plot-wise it's definitely a bit of a slow burn. It takes quite a while to get to the part where you get the toolbox and the game allows you to play properly (until then you have basically no control over your movement and can't pick up items), but it does get a bit better as it goes along and the ending is fairly memorable. Overall, while it's certainly not anything I'd call a classic, it's a cute little novelty for kids or anyone who especially loves Pokemon.
DeleteJeremy McGrath Supercross 2000 is not nearly as flawed as many biking games of this generation, but it's still fairly mediocre. Turning control is perfectly fine here, the courses are easy to navigate, the problem is that it's simply not very interesting. Unlike most biking games, there's absolutely no concept of controlling the pitch of your bike here, and tricks are worthless outside of the dedicated trick mode, so jumps effectively don't matter. This causes most courses to feel overly long and dull, as large portions of the courses are dedicated to long straights with many elevation changes, but since they have no gameplay impact you basically just hold the gas and ignore the stick for most of the game. If there was, say, a nitro mechanic and you could build nitro by doing tricks this might feel more engaging, but as it stands much of the gameplay just feels kind of ho-hum. Maybe the most exciting thing about the game is the track editor, which is quite simple to use, though you're very limited in terms of the space available for your track and you're still limited by the generally dull gameplay. Beyond this, presentation is okay, there's a little bit of commentary, though the sound quality is very poor, and the game seems to have some slowdown from time to time when many racers on onscreen. It's playable, but there's really no reason to do so when Excitebike 64 exists.
Call me crazy but I kind of love Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue. Let's get this out of the way right now, this is not a good game in the standard sense, but nevertheless I had a ton of fun playing it. Power Rangers is a dumb game with awful voice acting and hilarious low-budget storybook cutscenes, but it takes itself far too seriously and that only serves to make it even funnier. I never get tired of hearing someone scream out "Somebody help me!", followed by a very low-key "All right!", and the "YAAAAYYYY" from the end of each mission is the stuff of legends. I also love how the comic scenes place heavy emphasize on one word in every speech bubble, seemingly at random, this is just begging to be read aloud with dramatic emphasis. In terms of the gameplay, it's decent enough, it's actually commendably varied, with numerous different mission types and objectives. None of them are great, but they're simple and easy enough that they don't get in the way of the lulz, and the low-budget feel of the entire game contributes well to the humour value. Seriously, this game is a potential goldmine for any Twitch streamer, your average lame youtuber only wishes they could be half as quotable as this. Eat your heart out Goat Simulator and other dumb meme games, Power Rangers was 15 years ahead of the game.
DeleteIt's nice that a Spider-Man port to N64 exists, because by this time N64 was starting to get shafted on most 3rd party games, but this version is a tremendous downgrade from the PS1 version. First, the basics. Spider-Man is a very modern-style action game for its time, with a bit of an open-world feel even though the environments are generally pretty small. Climbing and webswinging feel good, and the game also looks great, at least on PS1. When it comes to the N64 version, for starters, all cutscenes have been axed, replaced with still shots with text. It still gets the story across to some extent, but in some places it's actually hard to tell what's going on, especially in action shots and the like. Some description probably would have been necessary besides just the spoken dialogue. However, there are many further cuts beyond this. Lighting and textures are significantly degraded, so the game looks a lot worse than the PS1 version, and draw distance is reduced as well, frequently making it hard to find buildings to swing to, which can cause cheap deaths. On the gameplay side, there are also hit detection issues in this version, when doing melee combos, Spider-man either doesn't move forward as much or has less range, so even if some of your hits land some of the later hits will often miss, which is never a problem on the PS1 version, and the control scheme sucks as well, with B inexplicably used for the vertical webswing action (which is R1 on PS1) rather than the far more obvious punch. When I first played this version, I wondered if this game was actually just way worse than I remembered, but it's not, it is definitely a good game on Playstation, it's just that this port is crap. I actually heavily considered B for this version, because even the core gameplay isn't really intact, but it's probably just barely good enough to still scrape by with A. Don't play this version, though.
Susume Taisen Puzzle Dama is a bit of a strange package. For starters, it's basically two games in one. The main Puzzle Dama mode plays very similarly to Tsuyoshi Shikkari Shinesai Taisen Puzzle Dama on SNES. Like that game, it's basically a cross between Puyo Puyo and Puzzle Fighter. The board and Pieces are identical to Puyo, though it only takes 3 to make a match, and each character has a unique drop pattern for when they attack. Like in Puzzle Fighter, the game is tremendously unbalanced, with some characters having drop patterns that are so bad they almost can't win, because making even a single match will clear all of their attacks and send hundreds of blocks back to them. Compared to the first game, besides the change in license from using an obscure anime to using original characters, the biggest difference is they've added a handful of special pieces to the mix. There's a happy face and frowny face that change jam blocks to normal blocks and vice versa, and a pac-man like block that will eat any pieces it's touching. IMO, these new additions generally make the game worse. The happy face and pacman are occasionally useful, but you often get them when you don't need them, and the frowny face is effectively always a wasted piece, which basically just slows the game down. Thankfully, you can turn them off in the options, which makes the game play exactly like the original, though I feel that the characters have less charm and the story mode from the original has also been axed, so generally I still prefer the SNES game. However, there's a second mode we have to talk about, which takes its inspiration from Tetris Attack instead of Puyo Puyo. Here, you can literally pick up and place pieces wherever you want, while the stack gradually rises from the bottom, but unlike in Tetris Attack there's no skill chaining, and the puyo-like attacking system combined with the ability to make matches wherever you want makes clearing the opponent's attacks almost trivially simple, so I don't actually think this mode is very good. Beyond this, there's also a simple bowling game that I'm not really sure why it's in the package, there's very little depth to it. Overall, the main game is okay, though honestly for a sequel I would have expected some improvements to the game balance, and there really haven't been any. Compared to the plethora of other strong options in the puzzle genre this gen, this title just doesn't quite feel up to snuff.
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