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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Conker's Bad Fur Day - GGGGGGAGGAGAAGGGGAGGA - 86% (21) (4 SR)
Robotron 64 - AAAABGAAA - 50% (8)
SCARS - AAAABB - 33% (6)
Star Wars Episode 1: Battle for Naboo - GGGAAGGGAG - 85% (10) (2 SR)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 - GGAGBGG - 79% (7)
WWF No Mercy - GGGAGGGGGGGG - 96% (12) (1 SR)
I'm really liking this huge turnout for the last few topics. I guess that's one thing you can say for the N64 library, its brevity and high overall level of quality certainly makes GAB easy to run.
Games for this topic:
Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
NFL Blitz 2001
Pokemon Stadium 2
Puyo Puyon Party
Turok: Rage Wars
World Driver Championship
Though I've long been curious about it, I've put off playing Majora's Mask until this topic (well, almost, I've been working on it a bit in advance because I knew this was coming and it's a long game). We have a bunch of other late era sequels here, you can tell we're almost at the end.
Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - G
ReplyDeleteNFL Blitz 2001 - G (SR)
Pokemon Stadium 2 - B
Puyo Puyon Party - A
Turok: Rage Wars - G
World Driver Championship - A
It's not a secret that I've never been a big fan of Ocarina of Time, largely because I find it to be fairly dull. When we reviewed OOT for GAB, I said that the Child Link part felt like G, while the Adult Link part felt like A, but since Adult Link is most of the game it's A. Child Link's section has far more variety, there's minigames, dungeons, overworld segments, a stealth segment, and so on, but as Adult Link the overworld is almost totally empty and you basically just walk from one dungeon to the next and that's it. Majora's Mask is basically the game you'd have if the game kept up the quality of the Child Link segment for the whole game, though actually, I would say it even surpasses it to become truly great. The "gimmick" of Majora's Mask is that the game takes place over 3 days. When 3 days pass, the world ends, but you can use time travel to go back to the beginning of the three days and try again. This might sound like it would be really repetitive, but the game is very cleverly designed. Even though no one remembers the things you do from day to day, so if a character has a sidequest that you've been working on and you go back in time, it will be reset, there are a ton of little shortcuts you can use to save time. To use a very simple example from the beginning of the game, one of the first things you have to do is play hide and seek with some kids to learn the password to their little hideout, which will take most of the night. However, after you know the password, the next time you can just skip their game and just give them the password, saving you the trouble of finding them. Another common situation is that you'll do a lot of work to learn a new ocarina song, which you will then remember and can use right away after you set the time back. The end result is that it doesn't really feel like you have to repeat a lot of content, and the time travel mechanic makes for a lot of interesting puzzles. For example. with many sidequests, the way you'll find out about them is by finding out that you've already failed them. Someone will tell you about something that went wrong the previous day that you're now too late to do anything about, and you can then use that information to go back in time and do something about it. It's a very interesting way to give information to the player and it feels satisfying to solve the game's puzzles. Another huge aspect of the game that I haven't even gotten around to talking about is the masks. There are different forms that Link can take, which helps give the game a lot more variety, and unlike in OOT where Young Link is virtually never necessary after you get Adult Link, you'll be switching between them constantly to use their various abilities. Speaking of, one of the abilities of Deku Link is to use a flower that lets him fly into the air, which adds more verticality to the game, which is another thing I felt was lacking in the first game, and it results in vastly more dynamic and fun dungeon design. In case it's not clear by now, there's an absolute ton going on in this game, this blurb is already really long and it barely even scratches the surface of the game, and the wealth of content results in a vastly better paced and more engaging game overall. If I had one complaint, it might be that the song of inverted time which slows time down is crazily overpowered in this game, giving you almost an absurd amount of time to work with. The 3DS version does nerf this and has some other little improvements, but the game is still a fantastic one even on N64. It's too bad I was so put off by OOT that I didn't play this game until much later because this is exactly the kind of game I wish OOT had been.
Despite the fact that I'm giving it an SR, my review of NFL Blitz 2001 is probably going to be pretty short. Basically, just take my previous review of NFL Blitz, and remove all of my criticisms, and you have this game. NFL Blitz was already a very good concept, it just had some minor tuning issues, all of which are fixed here. The control in the game feels perfect, the balance between offense and defense is just right, and you can now play with 4 players. What I think is really remarkable about this game is that although it's totally hilarious, there's also a ton of depth to it. Defense in this game is actually quite nuanced, if you play it safe you can generally hold the opponent to short gains, but taking a risk can also force an easy turnover if it works out, so you really have to make smart choices and know how to play the clock. Presentation is also great, the game runs silky smooth and the announcer has a ton of hilarious quotes, overall I don't think there's really much more you could ask for. I can't believe I'm saying this, but rather than NBA Jam or Hangtime, I think this is actually Midway's masterpiece. Easily my favourite football game of all time.
DeleteYou can really tell that Puyo Puyo was struggling to find its identity during this era. Both Puyo Puyo Sun and Puyo Puyon are desperately trying to come up with some kind of comeback mechanic so that the match isn't just instantly over the second someone gets a big attack off, but while Puyo Puyo Sun erred on the side of caution and thus Sun Puyo don't have an overly dramatic effect on the gameplay, Puyo Puyon goes completely the other direction where the character special moves completely dominate the gameplay. In PPN, every character has access to a special move, all of which have different effects, but almost all of them can be used as a "get me out of trouble" button, usually being able to instantly erase all of the jama puyo on your field. As if this wasn't powerful enough (it's basically an extra life that instantly erases the opponent's hard work), you earn them very fast and can hold up to 3 of them. As you might imagine, this slows the game down tremendously, as it essentially makes it impossible to kill anyone until you drain their power gauge first, and because it can be refilled so quickly in many cases no one will be able to break through until the margin time arrives and combos start doing way more damage, often turning matches into a game of "who gets the first attack after margin time". The gimmicks don't stop there though, for the first time in the series individual stages also have gimmicks, most of which also make the game slower. By far the most obnoxious is the water stage, which makes puyo fall at like 10% normal speed, but many stages also limit garbage to falling one row at a time, which gives people even more chances to counter. While I can kind of see why they were trying to make it so that taking one attack isn't instant death, Puyo Puyo Fever simply does this so much better that it's no surprise they've never revisited this concept. Despite all of this it's still not a total atrocity, it is still Puyo after all, but it's probably the second worst Puyo game after PP1.
DeleteI kind of love Turok: Rage Wars, but I also kind of hate it. It's basically Unreal Tournament: Turok Edition, which is a good start because Unreal Tournament rocks. There's no plot here, instead you just go through a series of matches with various Turok characters. There are actually a bunch of really cool ideas here. Unlike Unreal Tournament, all of the characters are somewhat different, humanoid characters have different weapons available to them, and there's even a few monster characters who have totally unique abilities. As you finish missions, you'll unlock new weapons and extra lives that carry over into later missions, which is also cool. The core setup and progression in this game is actually one of the best I've ever seen. Unfortunately, the gameplay is not without its issues. The first issue is the AI. Simply put, it sucks. The AI can shoot to some degree, but has almost no concept of pathing or strategy, just wandering around the levels aimlessly until they spot you, then making a beeline straight for you until they either lose track of where you are or die. Obviously, you can exploit the heck out of this, both by simply running around the map to load up on powerups, which the AI almost never picks up, and by leading them into corridors where you have mines or rockets set up. The second issue has to do with the way the match types work. As you might expect, there are multiple match types in the game, but in single player mode, your failure condition for every map is "run out of lives". This includes things like Capture the Flag, where you win by capping the flag 3 times, and lose by running out of lives. If the AI captures the flag, it literally doesn't matter at all, which feels weird. Similarly, in team deathmatch, if they kill your teammate, it doesn't matter (though your teammates kills do count towards your score). This tends to trivialize some game modes, and some stages can literally be won in under a minute if you get lucky. There are also boss fights, and these are generally pretty lame. The bosses have a massive advantage over you in every way, so the entire thing comes down to exploiting their AI to land free hits and running around to grab powerups. They're not that hard to win but they're not very fun. Gameplay isn't all bad though. One thing I really do like about this game is the map design. In most Arena FPS games, particularly those on console, I feel that the maps are usually much too big for the typical number of players, but this game's maps feel just perfect for 2-4 players and there are many standout maps that feel memorable. As such, deathmatches in this game are actually really fun, even against the AI, I just wish you spent more of the campaign doing them (and way, way less time on Monkey Tag, which is such an atrocious mode I don't even want to talk about it). Overall, this is almost certainly still a G-level game despite its issues, it's just too bad it wasn't polished a bit more because I think it would be easily SR quality with a few improvements.
DeleteWhen we covered Pokemon Stadium, I mentioned that I felt it was a perfect compliment to Pokemon RBY that gave them the only thing that was missing from the base games - an extensive post-game that encourages you to explore the strategic side of the game. By contrast, Pokemon Stadium 2 also compliments its game well - by highlighting the slow and unfinished nature of Gen 2 that makes it drastically worse than Gen 1. Gen 2 is a fairly crummy game to start with - most of the new pokemon are lame, it plays drastically slower than Gen 1 (largely due to tons of forced fights against underlevelled trainers, like during the rocket segment), and its most hyped feature, the addition of the Kanto region, feels lacking and unfinished. Stadium 2 could have remedied some of these issues, but instead it suffers from most of them as well. A great example is the gym leader castle. The Gym Leader castle for Johto is pretty good, it's much like the gym leader castle for Stadium 1. Some gyms don't have a full roster of trainers, which is a little weird, but for the most part it works pretty well and ends with a climactic showdown against the Elite 4 and the Champion, all in a row, which feels like a fitting end to the challenge. Then you got to the Kanto tower, and... all of the gym leaders are easy lone fights, including the final showdown, which is drastically easier than the Johto side and feels like a big letdown, much like Kanto does in the gameboy game. However, this pales in comparison to the butchering of the Gameboy Tower. One of the best features of the original Pokemon Stadium is that it lets you play the GB Pokemon games with speedups, which is fantastic for raising your teams for use in the stadium modes. TMs in the older games are one use only, so you have to run through the game a bunch of times to get enough, but this isn't a big deal because with the Dodrio tower you can finish Pokemon RBY in like an hour tops even if you're not a speedrunner. The biggest issue with Pokemon GSC is how slow it is, so this feature could have helped tremendously, but they completely screwed it up. For starters, you don't unlock the ability to even use speedups on GSC until Round 2, Round 1 is only for RBY, which feels like a slap in the face because obviously people are playing this game to play Gen 2, but the real kicker is that YOU CAN'T USE THIS FEATURE UNTIL YOU BEAT THE ELITE 4 in GSC. This completely kills any value it might have in running the game quickly to pick up TMs or other things like that, as you will be forced to play through the entire tedious slog through Johto with no speedups whatsoever every time. This issue alone is enough to drop the game from A to B, and is a major factor in why I've never bothered catching em all in Gen 2 the way I did in Gen 1. The minigames are okay I guess, but N64 had a million minigame collections by this point, rendering this entry and Gen 2 in general almost totally forgettable. Just stick to HGSS, it's basically what Gen 2 should have been, and it features its own battle frontier which is better than this game.
DeleteWorld Driver Championship is a very borderline game. On PS1, it would not be borderline at all. When compared to Gran Turismo, it pales in pretty much every way. GT's handling is better, there's way more cars, it has a far better progression system, and just generally feels a lot more fun. However, N64 doesn't have Gran Turismo, or anything else like it really, and this does matter to some degree. World Driver Championship is essentially your only option for a GT-style game on N64. And it fills that niche relatively well for the most part. By far the game's standout feature is its track selection. There are 10 tracks, each of which (except the very last track) has 3 variations that can also be raced in reverse, which is a very commendable amount for a game from this generation. It looks quite good, too, the Kyoto track in particular is quite stunning. Unfortunately, beyond this it's a fairly average affair. The controls are fine, they're still not quite as good as Gran Turismo but they get the job done, and it has a very barebones progression system where you gain points from races that gradually unlock better cars, but these cars can't be upgraded or tuned in any way. I feel like one of the game's biggest issues is that it lacks any kind of hook or standout feature, besides the fact that it's a GT-style game on N64. If we compare, say, Wangan Trial, which we covered for PS1 somewhat recently, this game definitely has more content and is a bit better balanced, but Wangan has the fact that it's also a movie as a hook to make it stand out, and World Driver Championship just really doesn't have anything like that. I feel like maybe the racing teams could have given the game a little bit more personality, but save for a couple blurbs when you join / leave / win a race / lose a race they don't really do much, which feels like a missed opportunity. I waivered a bit between A and G on this one, but the more I played the more I started to move towards A. I feel like if we had done this game in the first week of GAB for N64 I might have given it G, but as time has gone on I've discovered more good racing games that have gradually raised the bar. For example, this game doesn't only pale to Gran Turismo on PS1, I would say it also stacks up quite poorly against Ford Racing and Advan Racing as well, both of which offer generally better polished driving mechanics and a neat scheduling system that adds some strategy to the game. Even on the N64 side, the game faces some competition from Indy Racing 2000, which offers a fairly similar progression mode but IMO does it somewhat better and has more variety. It's not a bad game by any means and I actually think it is worth playing through if you like games of this type, but I wish they had done a little bit more with it.
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