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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Aironauts - AG - 75% (2)
Final Fantasy 7 - AGGGGGGGGGGGG - 96% (13) (5 SR)
Formula 1 Championship Edition - AGG - 83% (3)
Jingle Cats: Love Para Daisakusen no Maki - AA - 50% (2)
Lemmings & Oh No! More Lemmings - GGGG - 100% (4)
Micheal Owens WLS 99 - BA - 25% (2)
I was getting a bit worried when there weren't too many votes for Final Fantasy 7, but a few more came in just as the topic was running out. Still, a bit less than I'd expect for one of the most famous games of all time. I hope we're not losing too many people because there's still a lot of games left.
Games for this topic:
Area 51
Atlantis: The Lost Tales
DragonHeart: Fire & Steel
Madden NFL 99
Psychic Force
Re-Volt
When I put this topic together I thought Psychic Force was going to be the import title, but it was actually localized in all regions, instead it's the Atlantis game that is the limited release.
Area 51 - G
ReplyDeleteAtlantis: The Lost Tales - A
DragonHeart: Fire & Steel - A
Madden NFL 99 - G
Psychic Force - B
Re-Volt - B
After mentioning Area 51 every time we review any kind of light game it finally comes time to rate it. Area 51 is basically the quintessential arcade-style light gun game, you move through prerendered environments, shooting badguys and powerups and trying not to run out of health. The arcade game has made the conversion to PS1 pretty much totally intact, but that's also pretty much all it is, don't expect much by way of console-specific additions or anything like that. In terms of the mechanics from the original arcade game, in many ways they are what you'd expect, but there are a couple little touches that I appreciate. For one thing, unlike many light gun games, you don't just instantly take damage the moment any enemy appears on screen and fires at you, you have a somewhat sensible amount of time to react to them. I'm not sure exactly what determines when you take damage because sometimes I do take a point of damage quite quickly after an enemy appears onscreen (my suspicion is that you have an invisible health counter that diminishes when enemies are on screen before you take "real" damage), but whatever they're doing it works well enough. The game also appears to have some degree of dynamic difficulty as after playing the game a few times I noticed I would get more enemies in certain segments if I was playing well. Beyond this, there's also some hidden rooms, though the conditions for finding them are obscure and you'll likely have to use a guide, but it gives the game a bit of extra replay value. My biggest beef is that I wish there had been a way to regain health by playing well, as I feel this would give the game a bit of extra nuance, but it's obvious why this wouldn't have been in the arcade version, it'd have to have been added for the home port. In general, the game is pretty solid and it's kind of a classic. I probably wouldn't spend too much time playing it anymore but it's one of the better titles of its type.
Atlantis: The Lost Tales is Cryo Interactive's take on Myst. Easily the best thing about the game is its visuals. You can fully rotate the camera in the first person sections, and even look up and down, which looks great and really increases the immersion (you might recall I complained about the inability to do this when playing Myst). Unfortunately, this innovation comes at a price, which is load time, the game needs to load for about 2 seconds any time you move anywhere, which, given the nature of the game, you'll be doing constantly, significantly hampering how enjoyable it is to explore the otherwise nicely rendered areas. Also reducing the exploration aspect is that the game is very linear, with constant opportunities to get game overs by picking wrong dialogue options or moving to the wrong area, though the game is divided into a million exceedingly short chapters and each one lets you save, so if you do screw up and die you won't lose much progress at all. As for the story, it's kind of standard fare and there are relatively few puzzles, the setting is by far the most interesting aspect of the game. Human characters look particularly laughable, and the game spends quite a bit of time on dialogue, probably to its detriment. Still, it's a pretty visually interesting game and a good showcase for the technology, if they could reduce the load time and focus a bit more on exploration it would be pretty cool.
Dragonheart is often considered to be an atrocity but it's not really THAT bad. It basically just feels like a Genesis game, it's a pretty basic action game with those motion captured sprites that people used to think were cool that would feel quite at home on a 16-bit system. The game's combat is very simple, there is a stamina bar but it's mostly irrelevant apart from boss fights, you have a couple types of attacks but really only the crouch slash and back slash are necessary. Levels are extremely basic in design, with mainly one on one fights or some basic platforming, though this is still far better than something like Mortal Kombat Mythologies. Health pickups are sufficient and there's some secret areas, so the main stages are not a total slog. Inbetween some stages are FMV scenes where you have to input QTEs which are easily the worst part of the game, as these segments are often long and tend to have some almost unreactable prompts near the end. Besides those, there's not too much to say beyond this other than that it's playable and I didn't hate it but there's not much notable about it.
DeleteWhen we last talked about Madden (for Madden 97), I mentioned how although EA had made some big changes, not all of the aspects of the game where quite there yet, such as the presentation. With Madden 99, everything is now in place. There's not too much else to say besides the fact that this game is very well-polished. I think particular attention needs to be drawn to the commentary, which has a ton of interesting player specific quotes and other things to add that really helps make it feel like you're at a real football game, this alone is worth the upgrade from 16-bit games. The visual presentation has also seen some upgrades and certainly looks nice for the system, while also running well. In terms of the gameplay, you probably know what to expect by now, it's fairly typical but every other football game emulated this series because they got it right. Pretty much all of the complaints I've had about other games, like plays being hard to follow or passing control being bad and such are not the case here. Something I noticed about the game, which makes an interesting contrast with NFL Blitz in the N64 topic, is that running plays feel somewhat weak here, they're quite easily stopped and often lead to short losses. I think this is generally how it should be, as this incentivizes you to make more high-risk passing plays, though this opens up an interesting metagame where because passing plays are usually better you want to use zone defense, which in turn makes running plays somewhat more viable. Overall, this is just a really solid game that pretty much sets the standard for sports games of the era.
Psychic Force is ass. It's very unique, but the design of the game is terrible and it never really feels fun or satisfying in the way most other fighters do. The basic gist of the game is that it's a weird cross between a shmup and a fighting game, where two characters sling various projectiles at each other in a box shaping fighting ring. Besides normal projectiles, characters also possess special moves, which drain energy to use. These present the first of the game's myriad problems. Special moves are inputted with motions, but you can also move in all directions and also aim your projectiles with your directional inputs as well. As such, you're required to rotate your special moves to do them in the correct direction. For example, if you wanted to do a quarter circle motion up and to the left, you'd input down left, left, up left. Unfortunately, this game tends to misread a lot of motions, either causing you to get the wrong special move, shoot your move the wrong way, or just fire a normal shot instead, all of which can be immensely costly, due to a bunch of other issues with the game. One of these is that normal shots are never worth using. They do little damage, all special moves blow right through them, and so does the superdash, which means that if you ever use a normal projectile you're basically just giving the opponent a free hit. This removes a lot of the depth from the game, as it essentially reduces your offense to just specials. You might think this would be balanced out by the fact that special moves have an energy cost, but energy regenerates super fast and you also have access to a no-commitment charge move (it has no startup and you can stop it at any time) so meter is never an issue. Specials also deal chip damage, and in some cases a massive amount of it, making blocking them a very bad idea, and you can't superdash through them either. Your only defense against specials is the perfect guard, which is done by pressing guard and doing a 360 on the pad. This is also an immensely overpowered action as it makes you completely invincible and pushes opponents away, allowing it to kind of act like a burst and even deflecting throw attempts (throws in this game have no range and are generally useless). The only limitation of the perfect guard is that it drains a little meter and takes some time to input the command (although not for the AI, who can perform the move whenever they want, which is super cheap). The game also has "combos", though these too are immensely annoying, if you get hit into the wall by a special move, you get stunned for a long time, allowing the opponent to, you guessed it, hit you with another special move, but it feels fairly skilless since you'll just be spamming special moves most of the time anyway. Overall, while the game feels unique, it also feels like one of those fighting games that was designed by people who didn't really understand the genre. One of the basic ideas behind fighting games is that there should be a counter for every action an opponent can take, but here, the game boils down to two actions that essentially have no downsides or counters, which just turns into a war of spam. I can only hope for the sequel they'll have adjusted the mechanics in a way that adds more strategy to the game.
DeleteRe-Volt on PS1 is a huge downgrade from the already not especially great N64 version. It looks worse, it controls worse, the physics are worse, it has tons of load time, and a lot of the cool little touches that gave the game personality are gone (for example, you now simply select the cars from a menu rather than the RC Boxes of the N64 version). It also needs to be pointed out that this game has one of the worst OSTs of all time. It's completely different from the N64 version and is a total atrocity. They somehow even screwed up the menu song, which sounds like a lazy remix of the N64 version or something. The one "upside" if you can call it that is that the AI in this version is complete garbage, with rival cars often getting lost or stuck, so the game is easier than the N64 version. Still, definitely get this on N64 if you're going to play it.
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