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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Aquanaut's Holiday - GGGBB - 60% (5) (1 SR)
Big Bass World Championship - BBA - 17% (3)
Creature Shock - BBB - 0% (3)
Rascal Racers - BBBB - 0% (4)
SaGa Frontier - BBGGA - 50% {5}
Spot Goes to Hollywood - AAAAA - 50% (5)
I was pretty surprised by these results, generally you expect putting a Squaresoft game in a topic is going to be a slam dunk, but I guess even they can be divisive sometimes.
Games for this topic:
Army Men 3D
Dexter's Laboratory: Mandark's Lab
Jigsaw World
Rally de Africa
Striker 96
Tama
I had no idea this was a thing, but apparently Jigsaw World is part of the same franchise as one of my favourite finds from the SNES GAB, Pieces, so I'm very hyped to play that. Also, we have another one of the million Army Men games on PS1, it's got to be one of PS1's most prolific franchises.
Army Men 3D - A
ReplyDeleteDexter's Laboratory: Mandark's Lab - A
Jigsaw World - G
Rally de Africa - G
Striker 96 - B
Tama - A
Army Men 3D is not a total atrocity like Army Men: World War was, but it's still a shadow of what the series will later become. This game is an extremely simple one, it's actually barely even a shooter, it plays more like a pure action game. One of the biggest issues with the game is that you can take very few shots and you can't strafe, so you do have to use the radar and figure out how to approach the enemy or you'll be wiped out almost instantly. Spending any time aiming is a waste, the best option is just to spray and pray, your main gun shoots fast, has unlimited ammunition, and most enemies die in one hit, so there's almost never a bad time to be hammering the fire button, which makes it feel like a somewhat brainless affair at times. The visuals are very simple and the game doesn't yet have any of the humour that the series will later be known for, but it's just barely playable enough to avoid the B ranking. That being said, there's not a lot to see here even for series fans so it can be safely skipped in favour of the much better games that come later.
Dexter's Lab is essentially a minigame collection with a cute framing device. The game features a plotline of Mandark having taken over Dexter's Lab, and Dexter has to wander around 3D environments and play minigames to restore it. The 3D environments are little more than glorified menus, there's no gameplay here, save for some ever so slightly hidden blueprints to find that let you unlock some little upgrades. 99% of the game takes place in the minigames, of which there are only 8. The minigames are a little bit more fleshed out than you might sometimes suspect for a game of this type, but they're still very simple and none of them really have a lot of replay value in my opinion. The use of cutscenes and voice acting between the stages is a nice touch and the presentation might make it worth playing through once for fans of the show, but I can't really see anyone coming back to it. Compared to, say, South Park: Chef's Luv Shack, I feel that one makes for a vastly better minigame collection.
I was excited by the fact that Gamefaqs listed Pieces and Jigsaw World in the same franchises, but I thought at best they'd be loosely related, but it's actually a direct sequel! The basics remain extremely similar to the SNES game, so if you need a quick refresher, it's basically Jigsaw puzzles, but as a competitive game. You each are given 3 puzzles to solve, and as you place pieces you can earn powerups to either help you place pieces faster or screw with the opponent, which is hilarious and fun. The biggest change from the SNES game is that the puzzles have gone from 4x6 to 6x6, which actually makes a huge difference, as it's now much harder to figure out where pieces go (previously, almost half the pieces were edge pieces). Although I think you can argue that this makes the game take more skill, I find it's actually somewhat of a mixed bag overall, as it also disrupts from the breakneck pace of the original and tends to make matches take longer and feel less intense. It also definitely messes with the overall game balance, the UFO power (previously called "help") is now crazily strong, it lasts far too long compared to the other powers, many of which have been made weaker, so the strategy is now just to keep spamming dog until it shows up, then win the game easily. I also feel that the soundtrack to the game is also definitely somewhat worse, even though it's clearly the same composer. Overall, it's clearly still pretty fun and I'm glad it got a sequel, but it feels a little bit worse in most ways. The main area where the game has seen bigger improvements is in the single-player mode where you just solve larger puzzles, this has many more options, but IMO the puzzles generally don't have enough detail for the large piece selections to be very fun (you pretty much just have to place the pieces by shape rather than by what's going on inside the piece). However, the game has yet another sequel in Jigsaw Madness, so perhaps that game will be the sequel the first game deserves.
DeleteI was a bit worried that Rally de Africa might be another lousy budget title, but thankfully it's a pretty decent game. For starters, this is not a rally game in the same vein as Colin McRae Rally or Top Gear Rally 2, this game is much more like an offroad version of Ridge Racer. You'll be travelling at high speeds and powersliding almost all the time, and the game has a lot in common with Namco's racer presentation-wise as well, it also features colourful cars from made up car manufacturers and even a somewhat similar-sounding soundtrack. Still, Ridge Racer isn't a bad game to take inspiration from and it controls pretty well, so there's definitely fun to be had here. The biggest issue with the game is that it has a small number of tracks, only 5, but they look good and the game makes fairly good use of them. The main championship mode is divided into 3 cups, with progressively faster cars, which is quite challenging but otherwise doesn't take long to complete, particularly as each race in this mode is only a single lap. The game also features a single race mode, but rather than being a throwaway, this is the main meat of the game. The game tracks exactly which courses have been won by which cars, and you can unlock tuned up versions of the cars by winning here that you can use in the championship mode. Like when we reviewed Killer Loop, I'm a fan of this kind of setup as I think it does a decent job extending the life of arcade-style racing games like this. Another thing to note about this game is that it's also really hard, maybe slightly too much so, you have to race almost perfectly to win, and using the manual transmission is almost essential (luckily, due to the speed of the game, you won't have to shift down particularly much). It's maybe nothing too groundbreaking, but it's still a pretty fun game.
Striker 96 is clearly a very early PS1 game, but even then it still feels extremely dated. For starters, it's an extremely simple soccer game compared to most of the others of the generation. It's basically a two button game, there's pass and shoot, and you can hold down either button to kick a bit higher. That's about the extent of what there is to the game, you won't find through passes, dribbling, dekes, or any of the other stuff you'd tend to associate with Soccer games of this era here. The presentation is also absurdly simple, with undetailed 2D players and almost no commentary, the commentators only speak when specific things happen, like a free kick, and they have only a couple lines to say that repeat almost instantly. About the only good thing you can say about the game is that it's very fast, but honestly it's probably slightly too fast-paced, it makes plays very hard to follow, especially when the action is moving toward the bottom of the screen. Overall, this basically feels like it should be a SNES game, and even then it wouldn't be one of SNES's better soccer titles. Far better options became available this gen almost immediately.
DeleteIf you've ever played with one of those marble games called Labyrinth, that's basically exactly what Tama is. You rotate the stage to try to roll the little ball into the hole without it falling off the edges or into holes. Just like the real thing, it's super frustrating because there's tons of spots where the ball can fall into a hole or back to an earlier part of the level, causing you to lose precious time, but I can't really fault it for this too much because it it wasn't a pain the ass it wouldn't be authentic to the real thing. The main advantage the game has over the toy is that there's many different levels to play, time carries over between stages in a manner somewhat similar to Marble Madness, so if you do really badly on a stage you're going to be screwed for future ones, but that almost feels appropriate given the type of game it is. The one thing I'm least forgiving of is the camera angle, which I feel does a fairly poor job of framing the action. I feel like the camera position should clearly just be almost directly overhead, but even though there are many options for the camera it doesn't feel like any of them are great. Overall, it's a very niche game that probably does what it sets out to do but I don't think I'd want to play it for very long.