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Last Topic's Ratings:
Army Men 3D - GBBAA - 40% {5}
Dexter's Laboratory: Mandark's Lab - GBA - 50% {3}
Jigsaw World - AG - 75% (2)
Rally de Africa - BG - 50% (2)
Striker 96 - BB - 0% (2)
Tama - AA - 50% (2)
There weren't too many votes last week, I think this is one of the only topics that didn't even make it to 10 posts. Hopefully we'll get a bit more this time.
Games for this topic:
A Train
Burning Road
Jet Ace
Prince of Tennis, The
Sorcerer's Maze
Street Fighter Alpha 2
A quick heads up, the Prince of Tennis game (or "Tennis no Oji-Sama") game is the first one, not the one called "Sweat and Tears". I was also very surprised to see that Sorcerer's Maze has a US release, it totally looks like an import-only title.
A Train - B
ReplyDeleteBurning Road - B
Jet Ace - B
Prince of Tennis, The - A
Sorcerer's Maze - G
Street Fighter Alpha 2 - G
A Train is barely even a game. At its core, there is a somewhat interesting transport simulator here, but it's packaged in the absolute worst way possible. There's no goal to the game, you can't even make a city from scratch, you have to play one of the existing scenarios and simply upgrade it, and there's already so much built on most of them that there's not a lot to do. Or maybe there is, but the game also includes no tutorial and no explanation of how anything works. The construction tools here are somewhat powerful, I figured out how to set up a bus route and placed some buildings along it, but in the absense of any objective or anything like that to achieve, it doesn't feel compelling. When you compare this to something like SimCity, it immediately becomes apparent how much better of a grasp the developers had over the basics of the genre. SimCity sets you up with a reasonable amount of starting money, and gives enough guidance that it's relatively easy to get into, while still being challenging. Here, I have an infinite amount of money and nothing that I care to spend it on. If I could just start a level from scratch maybe I'd be able to find some enjoyment in the game, but that's not even an option.
Burning Road sucks. It's a very arcadey-style racing game, albeit with a completely terrible handling engine and generally awful controls and physics. The cars slide way too much, ensuring you almost never have any real feeling of control, and it's also way too bouncy (you can't control at all when in the air, which occurs far too often) and has terrible collision physics. Tracks are extremely short, around 30-40 seconds or so, but have a bunch of laps to try to pad out the game, and there's only 3 tracks anyway. There's also no progression system and nothing to unlock. Easily one of the worst racing games of the era.
Jet Ace is more playable than A-Train, but only just. There's so little here I was sure this had to be part of the Simple 1500 series, though even if it was it would be pretty limited game even by their standards. It's basically identical to something like After Burner, though it has even less content than those games. You fly around, lock on to planes shoot missiles, and hold down your main gun, and that's basically the whole game. The only attack that ever comes your way are enemy missiles, and as long as you don't stay in one place they will never hit. The only wrinkle is that there are rings you can fly through for more ammo, fuel, or points, and flying through them requires you to be in a particular place at a given time, where there might be a missile, but if you have to give up on a particular ring there will be lots more. That's effectively the whole game. There are no bosses, it only has one music track that plays the whole time, there's no enemy variety, nothing. This game cannot have taken more than a week to make. Even though it is playable for a few minutes there's just so little gameplay that I can't even justify giving it A.
The Prince of Tennis is basically to Tennis what Captain Tsubasa is to Soccer, though I don't find it to be nearly as fun. Like in Captain Tsubasa, this is not really an action-based game, when the ball is hit towards your side of the court your character automatically moves into position and time stops, and then you choose where to hit the ball. Depending on your choices, the opponent will have a certain likelihood of getting to hit the ball back, in which case the process continues until the RNG says someone misses a shot. It's not completely about luck, though, characters also have stamina, which depletes as they run around, and shots that force them to run further are more likely to score, especially if they're tired, so the same general strategy of trying to work the opponent out of position from regular Tennis applies. You can choose to play the baseline or the net by pressing L1, with the net being a much riskier strategy, it can open up smash attacks, but you can also get the ball lobbed over your head for an easy point. There are also special shots which vary by character, though all of them take a bite out of your stamina to perform in exchange for a shot that's a lot more likely to score, so you have to decide when you really need to score a point right now vs keeping your stamina for later. There's also a story mode featuring a bunch of matches and dialogue, characters will speak at different points in the match, which the guide indicates are probably tied to certain conditions, though I'm not adept enough at Japanese to get much out of it. There is definitely some strategy to the game, but ultimately I don't find it to be especially interesting.
DeleteSorcerer's Maze, on the other hand, is a simple game done right. It's another game in the same vein as Arkanoid, except that it's quite possibly the best game of this type that I've played. The core gameplay is very similar to Arkanoid, with tons of powerups being hidden inside the blocks, though it contains a new mechanic where every time you break a block, you gain MP (which functions like money) which you can spend to buy powerups at the start of each stage. This is a really cool concept that adds a lot of depth to the game. Do you go with big paddle or barrier on most stages for safety, as clearing multiple stages without losing a life earns a big point bonus, or do you save it up and then blow it all on power ball or multi ball for huge combo bonuses? This simple little change adds a lot of strategy to an otherwise simple experience. Speaking of the powerups, there's quite a number of them, beside the standard ones like bigger paddle and power ball, there's also some pretty crazy ones like aftertouch ball (which I often avoid as I frequently kill myself with it) and the utterly insane mega ball. I also really love this game's implementation of multi ball, where a new ball spawns every time the ball hits the paddle, it can quickly become total madness, especially if combined with say, catch, which spawns one new ball and catches one ball every time you hit a ball. The only part I'm not super crazy about are the bosses, they feel a bit cheap and you cannot buy any powerups for them, but they're only a small part of the game and they're not that terrible. There's even a two-player mode, though it's versus and not co-op. Overall, this is a pretty fun and cute game, a hidden gem for sure.
When we reviewed the original Street Fighter Alpha I said that even though it was significantly outdone by its sequels I found that it was still good enough that I pretty much couldn't not give it G, so it's fairly obvious that this one will be G too. Actually, I think there's a decent argument to be made that Alpha 2 is the best of the Alpha games, even though it has a lot less stuff than Alpha 3, it's also a lot less busted. The major new mechanic here is alpha combos, a custom combo system that will reoccur many times throughout the series, though I most prefer its implementation here. When activated, your character will start moving torwards the opponent and every button cancels into everything. Obviously this allows for some very cool strings, but I like the "constantly moving forward" limitation, because this can create situations where you actually move past the opponent and become a sitting duck, and generally somewhat limits the power of alpha combos to the point that they don't completely dominate the game like they do in Alpha 3 and (to some extent) CvS2. Beyond that, there's also obviously more characters compared to the original Street Fighter Alpha, which is always welcome, and Alpha Counters have been reworked a tiny bit, with each character now having both a punch and kick alpha counter. Overall, it's still a pretty simple game that's fairly easy to learn (especially compared to Alpha 3), but there's still a lot of complexity to many of the matchups due to the unique tools that different characters have. Overall, just a very solid game that's starting to see a resurgence in popularity.
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