This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
FIFA 99 - AAA - 50% (3)
Hey You Pikachu - BBABAB - 17% (6)
Jeremy McGrath Supercross 2000 - ABA - 33% (3)
Power Rangers: Lightspeed Rescue - BBBBGBB - 14% (7)
Spider-Man - GAAAGGAAAGABA - 62% (13)
Susume Taisen Puzzle Dama - GAA - 67% (3) (1 SR)
This topic was a pretty emphatic "Playstation" to poor Hey You Pikachu. I'm also kinda shocked so many people played the N64 version of Spider-Man.
Games for this topic:
Asteroids Hyper 64
Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling
Nuclear Strike 64
Paper Mario
Road Rash 64
WCW Backstage Assault
I've actually kind of been dreading putting Road Rash 64 up for GAB. For a long time I've named it among the best N64 games, but I haven't played it in ages and I'm not sure how it'll compare to my memory of it. I'm also interested to see how people are going to rate Paper Mario, as I feel like this one is one that has instead become much more popular over time.
Asteroids Hyper 64 - B
ReplyDeleteBrunswick Circuit Pro Bowling - B
Nuclear Strike 64 - G
Paper Mario - A
Road Rash 64 - G
WCW Backstage Assault - G
There's been a lot of attempts to update classic arcade games this generation, but I think Asteroids is one of the worst of the bunch, IMO it's actively worse than just playing the original game. For starters, gameplay-wise there's just not a lot there. This is basically just Asteroids with powerups and a couple new enemy types. For the powerups, they're essentially special weapons, of which you can only hold one at a time. The one called Gun Satellite is tremendously powerful, so if you'll have it you'll never want anything else, and finding it one time lets you keep it for 4 stages. Most of the others are fairly unremarkable and are barely even worth using when you do have them, especially mines. Beyond this, there are also new enemies, the most annoying of which is a regenerating asteroid which can be almost impossible to clear out in large numbers. In terms of the rest of the gameplay, one big problem is that the level backgrounds are quite busy and often obscure regular asteroids. This is by far the biggest downgrade in the game, if the colour palette was chosen more smartly this might be A. Beyond this, the control is also downgraded, the ship feels far more slippery and just generally a lot worse to control. You can unlock the original Asteroids here and it makes it clear just how much better the control was in this version. I do think there's some potential in updating this game, but this definitely wasn't the direction to take it in.
Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling is another instance of a game being a big downgrade from the PS1 version, though in this case the game was only just okay to begin with. Obviously, Brunswick Pro Circuit is a bowling game. It is also maybe the most simplistic one ever. Setting the power and accuracy meters in this game is probably the easiest of any bowling game, which ensures you will throw perfect shots every time and essentially eliminates any aspect of skill to the game. This pretty much only leaves the presentation, which is an atrocity. The playstation version doesn't exactly look great, but the N64 version is a huge downgrade in every way, with diminished lightning, reduced texture quality, and what the hell is going on with that crowd? The idea of playing in different bowling arenas might have had some appeal if they didn't look drastically worse compared to any other bowling game of the era. About the only interesting concept in the game is the career mode, but the AI is way too good and the overly simplistic shot meters means this game gets boring before you can even finish one game, let alone a full season.
No matter how many times I see a helicopter game with the word "Strike" in its title, somehow it never occurs to me that it's part of the Strike series, like Desert Strike and Jungle Strike from the previous generation. Gameplay here remains much the same, blow up some stuff, take damage, pick up more armor and weapons, blow up some more stuff, occasionally rescue some people from being blown up, etc. The core formula still works and the addition of the onscreen minimap helps a lot with finding targets. Missions are generally somewhat shorter than in past games, but there are more of them, which is probably a good change to prevent you from having to redo too much if you fail a mission. Generally speaking the game also feels somewhat easier, probably due to various QOL upgrades compared to past games. It looks and sounds decent as well, though nothing too remarkable in this regard, and actually my one complaint is that the regular rockets don't have a lot of feedback to them, I'm sometimes not sure if they're hitting or not, but you get lots of them at least. At any rate, it's a fairly solid game, though if you've been playing a ton of these games it might get repetitive because the formula doesn't change too much. If not, though, this might be a good place to start.
DeleteI actually kind of like WCW Backstage Assault. It's a very unusual take on Wrestling, in that it actually doesn't take place in a ring at all, instead it takes place in a variety of other areas like a garage, locker room, and loading dock, similar to the ability to leave the ring in games like WWF Smackdown. While those games often featured only a few interactables in any given area, this game instead has dozens of things you can mess around with per area, generally by either picking them up and using them, jumping off of them, or irish whipping someone into them. This is actually a fairly cool concept and it does help the game feel unique, though it has the caveat of making the wrestlers themselves feel somewhat interchangeable due to shifting the focus towards the arenas, though many wrestling games from this era have a similar issue of wrestlers feeling samey so I can't be too hard on it for this. The game also has a pretty cool progression system where there's various challenges in each arena (generally related to using various interactables) and you can unlock all kinds of new content this way. There's also a neat post-match scoring system that works a bit like the one from Smash 64 where the game gives you points based on various things you did in the match. It's not without its issues though. The biggest one is the visuals. The arenas look decent, but the superstars look pretty bad and aren't animated very well either. The core gameplay engine is also at best serviceable. Basic actions work well enough, it's not hard to perform key actions like picking up and using weapons, performing irish whips or slams, and pinning, but hit detection generally feels a bit off and the number of moves for the characters is somewhat limited. Despite this, I feel like the core concept comes through enough and if anything the sort of low-budget feel to the game helps with the comedic aspect of it, and thankfully the commentary is actually pretty decent. Overall, the best thing about this game is that it legitimately feels unique. I'm sure at the time people complained that it looked like crap, but all games from this era kind of look like crap now, so having unique gameplay systems and good progression actually counts for quite a bit these days. I feel like this one is probably worth another look.
I mentioned when we started the topic that I was interested to see what the reception would be to Paper Mario because it's been a franchise with such a diverse history. I recall when it first came out, the general impression was that it was somewhat disappointing, particularly as a follow-up to the much-loved Super Mario RPG, but when The Thousand Year Door came out, people warmed up to it a lot. Then, we had the radical departure that was Super Paper Mario, which a few people like but isn't as popular as the ones before it (I also personally think it's the worst but this is a story for another time), and the almost universally panned Sticker Star and Color Splash. Finally they've somewhat turned it back around with Origami King, but people are still clamoring for a return to the "classic style" of Paper Mario, so it was interesting to go back to the beginning to see how it holds up. And, in my opinion, the answer is actually not all that well. No doubt, the original Paper Mario is a game with a ton of charm, but at the same time, I wasn't very engaged while playing it and I actually felt pretty bored a lot of the time. I think it's very easy to illustrate why this is the case if we take a look at the game's pacing. For starters, it took about 15 minutes to even get into the first battle. There's nothing particularly wrong with the intro, but we'll return to this later. Even once you get into the first battle, you can't use any action commands for a preposterously long time, it's not until well after the first boss that the ability to have any kind of nuance to the battle system is unlocked. Playing at a regular rate, I unlocked the action command at about 1 hour into the game, by which time I'd estimate I had done about 20 battles and was level 2. The game does pick up at this point, but even then it still feels a bit dull, which I would probably attribute to the fact that there's just so many battles against the same handful of enemies. A typical battle awards about 3-4 star points, and it takes 100 to level up, so that's an average of about 20-30 battles per level. Even bosses tend to only yield about 20-30 star points. The result is a lot of time spent doing fairly easy, repetitive battles to get anywhere. You could always attempt to avoid some of the enemies, and I started doing this for a while, but this causes you to become underlevelled and also restricts access to the badge system (since you need levels for badge points), which is probably the most interesting part of the game. I suppose you could just buy a bunch of Fire Flowers and other attack items to try to quickly finish battles, but you have very limited inventory space, which is also tedious to manage, and some of them don't work well against certain enemies.
DeleteAfter a few hours my eyes were starting to glaze over, so I decided to play something else for a while and come back to it. For the sake of comparison I loaded up Mario and Luigi, which I would kind of consider to be the successor to the classic Paper Mario games, as they retain the same action-based battling and the great sense of humour, though it quickly became apparent that the pacing in these games is also drastically better. In the original Mario and Luigi on GBA, it takes about 3 minutes to reach the first battle. You are taught about action commands immediately, and defense in this game is more dynamic than Paper Mario as well. There's a tiny bit of tutorial about the game's mechanics, all of which is skippable (which it isn't in Paper Mario), and I was already on the way with the adventure within 8 minutes. I barely even had control in Paper Mario by this point. Within 30 minutes I had access to the Bros actions and was level 3, and within 45 minutes I was done the first area and was level 5, a whole 15 minutes earlier than I even got action commands in Paper Mario! There's a lot of little things that contribute to this faster pacing, like shorter animations, faster text speed, higher movement speed, and fewer but more rewarding battles, but the end result is a much more engaging experience. To make a particular example, let's consider the jump command in both games. In Paper Mario, when you choose to jump, Mario walks up to the enemy, crouches, jumps and hits the enemy, if you hit the action command he bounces, lands on them a second time, lands on the ground, then walks back. In Mario and Luigi, they simply jump from their current location straight to the enemy, if you hit the action command the animation of hitting the enemy changes but the length of the animation does not, then you bounce straight back. I would guess the animation in Mario and Luigi takes less than half the time, maybe even close to one third of the time, which makes a tremendous difference when you're going to be doing it thousands of times throughout the game. Even though battles in Mario and Luigi tend to last for more rounds compared to Paper Mario, they feel much faster and more skillful. Of course, Mario and Luigi is not totally without its own flaws (the fact that you can usually just press both buttons to dodge is lame, and I really hate the level up roulette wheel), but it's a much more comfortably G-level game in my opinion. The original Paper Mario isn't a terrible game by any means, but I think this helps shed a bit of light on why I found it a bit disappointing back in the day and never really went back to it, despite having beaten Super Mario RPG at least 5-6 times. There's no doubt that it's a charming game with a lot of attention to detail and a fair number of memorable moments, but they're spaced out by a lot of fairly repetitive and forgettable field segments and battles. In retrospect, I do think the later games somewhat had the right idea to diversify the gameplay and cut down on the number of battles, they just probably shouldn't have axed the unique characters and the levelling system in the process.
DeleteWell, I can rest easy, Road Rash 64 is indeed a pretty fantastic game, though for somewhat different reasons than I remembered it. For those not familiar with the series, Road Rash is a crazy bike racing game. Win races, punch rivals to knock them off their bikes, kick them into cars, get money, buy faster bikes, etc. The basic formula remains the same here, but the game is now fully 3D, which allows for significantly more focus on verticality in track design and some added craziness when it comes to collisions, which both greatly improve the experience because the one issue with the older Road Rash games is they could start to feel repetitive after a while. Something I noticed quickly while playing the game is that when looked at purely from the standpoint of being a racing game, it doesn't really have a lot of depth. Much of the game takes place on relatively straight stretches of road, and even when big turns do occur as long as you take the turn on the inside you're usually fine. However, the fact that you have to share the road with 10 other homicidal bikers who are doing everything they can to bash your face in makes navigating even a relatively simple course significantly more engaging. Of course, you don't have to take their abuse lying down, you can collect an assortment of weapons and powerups to fight back against them, and the results are frequently hilarious. For example, one option as you play through the campaign is to join one of the two motorcycle gangs, if you do, its members will not (initially) be hostile towards you. You are not penalized in any way for attacking your own teammates other than that if you do this too much, they will start to attack you for that race only. There's little more satisfying than "helping out" in a battle between the two gangs by first cheap-shotting your own ally to get him out of the way, then taking out the guy he was fighting against, thereby netting yourself two knockout cash bonuses instead of one! I never get tired of seeing how many times I can crash Bruce in one race, especially once he finally gets tired of me and starts fighting back. Great fun. You can also wheelie off of cars, which feels amazing when you pull this off on a turn and not only avoid being wiped out but also land back on the track, though at least as many times you'll probably go flying way off course or hit a building or something. I also love how after a race, the enemies come flying in at extreme speeds and usually wipe out, it makes it fun even when you don't finish well, which happens often because if you wipe out near the end you're basically screwed, regardless of how well you've done up to that point. Overall, I think this game generally does a great job of addressing some of the issues that were present in past Road Rash games by simply making the game so much more enjoyable and varied that you don't really care about them anymore. Lost a race due to a cheapshot at the end? Oh well, time to knock Bruce off his bike another half a dozen times and try not to get busted in the process. I would probably give this an SR if I had any left.
Delete