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Last Topic's Ratings:
NBA Hangtime - AAGA - 63% (4)
Pacapaca Passion - BA - 25% (2)
Time Commando - BBA - 17% (3)
Virtual Hiryu no Ken - AB - 25% (2)
Warzone 2100 - GGG - 100% (3)
Wipeout XL - AGGAGGG - 86% (7)
This one was a little quiet, I'm hoping we get a bit more turnout this week, but I suppose with the PS1 library being so big there will be some gaps between major releases.
Games for this topic:
Cabela's Big Game Hunter: Ultimate Challenge
Colin McRae Rally
Dead Ball Zone
Hello Kitty Illust Puzzle
Strider
VR Golf '97
I'm sort of morbidly curious to try Cabela's Big Game Hunter. The subject material couldn't possibly appeal to me less, but I do enjoy fishing games when they have good progression, so maybe it would be possible to make a good game out of it. Dead Ball Zone also looks kind of interesting. As for Strider, I debated as to whether or not to combine this game with its sequel, as in most territories they were released as a package, but the original does have a standalone release in Japan and for most other games that were released this way (ie, the Final Fantasy Anthologies and Arc the Lad) we've covered the games separately.
Cabela's Big Game Hunter: Ultimate Challenge - A
ReplyDeleteColin McRae Rally - A
Dead Ball Zone - B
Hello Kitty Illust Puzzle - A
Strider - A
VR Golf '97 - A
Well, there was no point worrying about Cabela's, the graphics in this game are so basic that it could never really be offputting. You basically just point and click on animals and if you hit them they fall over, there's no blood or anything like that. As for the game itself, there's more detail here than you might expect at first glance. You can move around the areas in a third-person viewpoint to track prey, with the end goal being to get close enough to land a good shot before it spots you and runs away. You can also buy and use all kinds of different gear and there are many animals to hunt. In the main mode, you earn money from your kills which you can use to purchase better equipment, though much of it is consumed during the hunt. The scope of the game is somewhat commendable, but there are also issues. For one, it's very slow. The areas in the game are absolutely enormous and 95% of the game will simply be spent walking from one place to another. There are vehicles you can use, but obviously you can't get too close to an animal with one of these, and even they aren't terribly fast. The areas themselves are also pretty uninteresting, being mostly just flat plains with a bunch of randomly allocated trees and bushes, no part of any of the stages feels memorable and they don't even feel very different from one another. There are also multiple characters to choose from, though the old man is clearly the best since he's the most accurate, with the other characters there's so much random shot waiver that you'll struggle to hit anything (I would prefer a system where your aim jitters rather than you simply missing due to RNG even when your shot is lined up perfectly). Overall, it's a decent take on the concept but not one I could see myself playing for any length of time.
Colin McRae Rally does some things really well but I feel it falls just slightly short of the G rank. For starters, the visuals and track design are excellent. The game looks great, with highly detailed courses that have a lot of variety. Even though each rally is divided into many legs, most courses have some kind of identifying feature, for example the second course has a part where you drive through a gravel pit and the third has a section that goes through a farm. I was quite impressed with how the game didn't feel repetitive despite the huge amount of terrain you cover in the game. What I'm not quite as fond of are some of the gameplay mechanics themselves. Controls and physics are generally not too bad, certainly the control is a bit slippery but you kind of expect that from this sort of game. Car damage is present, but not to quite the same degree as Top Gear Rally 2. There's no onscreen indicators when you damage the car and the effects seem to be more minor, instead car damage serves mainly to facilitate the pitting part of the game, which is probably the part I like the least. After every 2 stages, you get to visit the pit, at which point you're given 60 "time points" to make repairs and settings changes to the car. Using up this time doesn't count against you in any way and any time you don't use up is simply forfeited as you get the full 60 back every time. The main problem I have here is that there's simply not much strategy to this. The time given is so abundant that I never had to consider which parts to repair, I just always repaired everything. In terms of changing the settings, this too feels somewhat inconsequential. The game often places two drastically different courses back to back, and there are not too many parts to choose from, so there's rarely any particularly good choices you can make here. If you take the rain tire because one of the courses is rain, you'll get screwed over on the non-rain course that follows. Similarly, adjusting your gearing for high speed because one of the courses is pretty straight will hurt you on the next one that has tons of turns. It almost feels like they went out of their way to make sure no two courses in a row ever lent themselves to the same settings, which makes the "choose settings for the next two tracks" mechanic feel pointless. I think it would be far better if you could choose settings and do repairs after every track, but you had only a fixed amount of time points for the entire circuit. This way, you might have to make hard decisions about whether certain part swaps or repairs are worth it in the long run, which you currently really don't. In terms of other mechanics, something else I don't think is done too well is the difficulty. There are no enemy cars in this game, you simply race against the clock, but the rival cars have posted times for each leg of the track, which are frankly nonsensical in most cases. I'll often find that I will race a leg well only to get completely smoked by the AI's time in a way that doesn't even seem possible (for example, I've often fallen behind by 2 or more seconds at the first checkpoint while driving it almost perfectly), whereas at other times I will gain tons of time despite making significant mistakes. It's not a huge deal because I guess ultimately it's the overall time that matters but I do miss having the other cars on the track. Overall, this is a pretty solid game but I do think Top Gear Rally 2 is better in most ways. Still, it has a sequel, so we'll see what improvements they make when we come to that game.
DeleteI like the idea behind Dead Ball Zone, but I just don't think the execution is good enough for the game to be fun. The basic idea is that it's a very violent take on a sport that somewhat resembles soccer (though the ball is thrown rather than kicked), where you can use weapons and players can be hurt or even die, similar to the Mutant League games. I'm always a fan of seeing games that try interesting things with the sports genre, but in this case, the gameplay just feels like a chaotic mess that doesn't feel fun or strategic. I would mainly pin this on the game's visuals and controls. The visuals in the game simply muddy and lack detail. The game moves at an insanely fast-pace, and the character models simply aren't distinct each other to make out which players are your and which are the opponent's at a glance. This is something where the visual clarity of sprite-based graphics would have done far better than 3D graphics in this era, if I compare, say, Dolucky's A-League Soccer on SNES, it's a somewhat similarly fast-paced and crazy game, but identifying the players is never an issue due to how different the sprites are. Secondly, your passes also don't automatically aim towards your own players, you have to aim them manually, which compounds with the above issue, at the very least this game should have had a form of auto-passing like most other sports games do. The end result is generally a fast-paced mess of constant turnovers where occasionally someone gets a shot off and it goes in, which simply doesn't feel very deep or fun, it almost feels like a button masher. This is kind of a shame, because the game does have some interesting systems, like being able to swap out damaged players between quarters, all of whom have different statistics, but the game is so chaotic that the statistics simply don't matter, no one ever has the ball for more than a second anyway and most shots go in regardless of your shooting ability. It's a fun concept but I feel like this one needed significantly more fine-tuning.
DeleteHello Kitty is another Picross game, and it might be the simplest one ever. You might recall that when we reviewed some other games, I often complained that when holding the button down to multi-mark squares, if you passed over a square that was marked already with the other symbol (ie, one you Xed out or already marked), it would re-mark it, which is never what you want. Well, Hello Kitty doesn't have this problem, because you can't multi-mark at all, you simply have to mark every square individually. It also doesn't have any modern features like showing you which groups have a value you can solve or marking off groups as you finish them (it will mark off an entire line when it's done, but that's it). The presentation is also super simple, with very barebones menus that don't even show the pictures for completed puzzles, and only a single music track for the game. Despite this, I still can't really say I hated playing it because it is still picross and at least I feel like the pictures are fairly well-designed (it certainly has the edge over, say, Mario's Super Picross in this regard, which has many puzzles that are just awful). It's certainly not something I would really recommend to anyone, not even fans of Hello Kitty, as I feel it doesn't make especially good use of the license (you can unlock a little gallery by playing but it's crazily basic), but it's still probably just barely good enough for A.
While the Playstation port of Strider is not bad, it's really starting to show its age. This game came out around the same time as the Genesis and it shows, the gameplay is quite primitive compared to more modern action games, and although this version is based on the arcade version, the Genesis already received a very good port of this game so not that much will be new to players of that version, the Playstation version mostly just boasts reduced flicker and better sound. In terms of the gameplay itself, it's very simplistic, you spend most of the time just swinging your sword over and over, which has absolutely no recovery or vulnerability, and enemies also have no mercy invincibility whatsoever, so there's not a lot of nuance to the gameplay. Many bosses can be mashed to death before they can even attack. Strider is also a character who can't change his jump trajectory in mid-air and the screen is pretty zoomed in (though, thankfully less so than the Genesis version) which can lead to a fair number of cheap hits, but once you have some of your robot buddies helping you fill the screen with plasma you're pretty safe. It's still playable and it helps that it came bundled with a port of its sequel but it's not something I'd be rushing out to play anymore.
DeleteVR Golf '97 is tolerable for its time. By far its best feature is that it's actually 3D, in the early days of this era some golf games still used the 16-bit technique where they would only render the scene when you were about to hit the ball and when it landed, but this game has full 3D camera control. Nothing about it beyond this is particularly remarkable, though. I guess graphically it looks ok, but the camera controls are not great and the shot meter is far too picky, if you're not dead on you go a mile off-course, I don't think this game would be playable without the mulligan feature. Putting is also tolerable, the grid lines on the green do a decent job of showing the slope of the green I guess. The commentary is a nice touch, though they don't have a ton to say, rather than providing so many commentator options (there's like 10) they probably should have just focused on one and recorded more lines. Overall, it would have been okay when it released but it's still a far cry from Mario Golf.