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Last Topic's Ratings:
Ayrton Senna Kart Duel 2 - GBB - 33% (3)
Gekisou Tomarunner - GAG - 83% (3)
Land Before Time: Return to the Great Valley - AAAB - 38% (4)
Medal of Honor - GGGGAGAG - 88% (8)
Tall Twins Tower - AAA - 50% (3)
V-Tennis - BAA - 33% (3)
I was very surprised to find while updating the ratings list that Aryton Senna Kart Duel 1 had a rating of 50% (1), meaning I must have actually given it an A, not a B as I suspected. Have the past few years really changed me that much? I almost want to go back to it now to see if it was better than I remembered.
Games for this topic:
Armorines: Project Swarm
Bishi Bashi Special
Final Fantasy 4
Monaco Grand Prix
One Piece Grand Battle
This is Football
We have the first title in another PS1 series that I love here, Bishi Bashi Special. Playstation is so unabashedly weird and I miss that in more modern Sony consoles.
Armorines: Project Swarm - A
ReplyDeleteBishi Bashi Special - A
Final Fantasy 4 - A
Monaco Grand Prix - A
One Piece Grand Battle - B
This is Football - G
Unfortunately, while Armorines: Project Swarm on PS1 does have a few small advantages over the N64 version, it has just as many drawbacks so the end result isn't any better. For starters, the PS1 version looks way, way worse. I would guess it is running at only half the resolution and also has drastically worse textures, effects, models, animations, and virtually everything really. I would say it almost looks like it's a full generation behind the N64 version. It does run at a pretty rock solid framerate and the draw distance is actually a little better than on N64, and some dark areas are easier to see here due to more simplistic lighting effects, but overall it's a huge downgrade. There's some added voice acting, though I don't think it adds a lot, the N64 version is definitely much nicer in terms of presentation. It also doesn't support the dualshock so there's no dual analog controls. That said, I think the control scheme where R1 moves you forward is all right, and the cursor control feels better than it does on N64, so I would actually call the controls an upgrade even though they're not great. The core game is seemingly untouched, level geometry appears to be the same, and load times aren't too bad. Surprisingly, this version also retains the co-op feature from N64, and the performance here remains solid, so I guess that's not too bad. Overall, the N64 version is probably better, but this version is still sort of tolerable, either way it's a pretty middling game on both platforms and probably not one you'd go out of your way to play.
I played Bishi Bashi Special 2 and 3 a long time before I ever played the original Bishi Bashi Special, and I remember being tremendously disappointed with the original game. Upon going back to it, it's maybe not THAT bad, but it is a lot worse than the sequels. For the uninitiated, Bishi Bashi Special is a crazy minigame collection from Konami. The games are very short, the objectives are extremely insane, and the announcer calls out the name of each game with aplomb before you play. Much of the basic concept for the series is already here in the first game, the main issue is mainly that the games just aren't quite as interesting for the most part. Many of them are extremely basic, there's at least 6 games where you simply mash, and many more are just basic colour matching games, leaving the number of games that are legitimately interesting as a fairly small number, and of the handful of good games, almost all of them reappear in the sequels, so there's not a ton of reason to go back to the original. I also feel like the game has much less charm than Bishi Bashi Special 2 in particular, the addition of the names you can call yourself and the two wacky competitors playing the games really helps give it a sense of cohesion that is lacking here. Overall, this entry isn't completely atrocious but you're really not missing anything by skipping it, all of the good ideas that are in this game are improved upon by the sequels.
Whenever Final Fantasy 4 comes up, I always expect to post something about how it's a very simplistic and dated game. After all, Final Fantasy 4 is easily the most simplistic Final Fantasy game, and one of the most simplistic RPGs of all time, offering almost no customization or strategy whatsoever, you can't even choose your party in most early versions of the game. Despite this, somehow it is still kind of fun, probably due to having good pacing and a classic story, so it is a game that people might still want to play. So the question then becomes "is the PS1 version any good?". The main differences are that this version undoes some of the dumb changes that were made in the US SNES version of FF4 and also features a new translation. The gameplay changes here are purely positive. The US SNES version pointlessly removes many abilities, like Cecil's Dark command that does damage to all enemies in exchange for HP, and it does improve the game to have them back. The translation is an improvement as well, though there are still some unusual dialogue choices here and there and the text can occasionally be a bit hard to read due to the way text boxes are broken up, later versions are better in this regard. On the technical side, thankfully, this version isn't a butchering like some of Square's other ports, load times are kept reasonable and thus the game still plays pretty much how it's supposed to. Graphically, I find this version doesn't look especially great, it's using the old sprites but they just don't look quite as good here as they did on SNES, probably due to sprite scaling. There's also a strange audio balancing issue where the battle music is far too loud compared to everything else in the game that gets on my nerves pretty fast. Overall, for its time, I think you could probably say this was the best way to play FF4, but we got even better ways very shortly afterwards. The GBA version adds a ton of new content that helps the game a lot, and the PSP version is basically an even better version of that game paired with its sequel, FF4 The After Years. There's also the DS version, which is a total overhaul of the game, and the new Steam version, which also has various enhancements. As such, these days there's not much reason to play this version anymore, and I also feel it doesn't really stand up that well against most of PS1's other RPGs, but I guess for its time it was an okay way to experience this part of the series.
DeleteMonaco Grand Prix is a fairly basic F1 game. Like Formula 1 Championship Edition, it features two very different modes, an arcade mode that feels kind of like virtua racer, and a sim-style mode that feels more like a traditional F1 racer. As with F1 Championship Edition, the variety is commendable, but in this case I don't feel either of the two modes really stand out. I guess the arcade mode is maybe the better of the two, but it has nothing resembling progression, it's just single races. Even the regular mode only has a very basic championship mode and that's about it. Overall, it's okay for an early title, but F1 Championship Edition is better in pretty much every way.
One Piece Grand Battle is basically just Smash Bros, minus all of the things that made that game enjoyable. Like Smash, it's a 2D platform fighter, but the first thing you'll notice is that instead of the very fluid movement of the Smash series, movement here feels still and just generally bad. There's almost no momentum to your actions, your default movement speed feels slow, and performing supers makes you feel even slower and stiffer than that (more on these in a bit). Another big problem is guarding. Guarding in this game is massively overpowered, as it blocks everything with no concept of guard breaks or anything like that, not even chip damage. The only counter to guarding is throws, which do pitiful damage and have pitiful range. The game also has no combos, you can recover from hit states absurdly fast, in many cases causing moves that are "intended" to combo like jab strings to not even work properly and be punishable. Perhaps to mitigate this, the game contains "supers", which you can perform by tapping R1 (it is vital that you don't hold it, this causes it to fail), then pressing a couple buttons you have to look up. Once the super state is initiated there's a super visible flash while you have to put in the commands, making them completely trivial to react to, though they do a ton of damage if landed successfully. There are also items that spawn constantly, though none of them are particularly fun to use, most are just passive buffs that do so little it's hard to even notice that they're in use. About the only commendable thing is the presentation, the stages look good, character animations are not bad, and the music and voice acting is also pretty decent, but it doesn't really matter when the game isn't really fun to play.
DeleteThis is Football is basically Playstation's answer to International Superstar Soccer 64. Compared to the FIFA series, this is a vastly more complicated game, but it's also a much better balanced one. You might recall when we discussed FIFA on N64 I mentioned that although the steal move was a nice addition, it worked a little too well, essentially making the slide tackle unnecessary, well, that isn't the case here. The steal will now pilfer the ball if it's perfectly touching you, but otherwise you just stumble a bit and accomplish nothing, so the slide tackle is a vastly more reliable option with the downside that if they dribble or pass the ball as you do it you'll get a penalty. I also previously complained about how in Michael Owens WLS 99 the cross was mapped to a weird button combination and how it felt unreliable because the ball sort of didn't magnetize to the player well enough, well, here cross is just circle and following up the cross feels good. In general, pretty much every mechanic in the game feels very responsive when you get the controls down, though this may take some time as there's a lot of options available and pretty much all of them are necessary to play the game even moderately well. A good example of the polish and nuance of the game is evident when passing. Something I like about passes in this game is that when you pass to a teammate, they will actually run towards the ball to receive it, significantly reducing the number of interceptions. However, sometimes you might not want them to do this, because doing so often causes them to double back and lose momentum, so you can also hold R1 while passing to do the through ball, where you'll pass instead to where they're going to be. This is much riskier in terms of pickoffs, but often leads to scoring opportunities when done well. You can also do all kinds of tricky passes, like passing directly behind you and such, which are relevant due to the way the steal move puts extra focus on ball positioning. The game even gets the goalie balance right, where the goalies aren't really very good so your defense had better be on point or the opponent team is going to score a lot of goals. Presentation is quite solid too, with pretty good commentary and decent visuals, and in particular I think this game's intro is pretty cool. In general, while this game is quite complex and takes a while to learn, there's a lot of nuance and there's very good attention to detail. You can even take a dive and pretend to be injured to try to incur a penalty on the other team. This is Football!
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