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Last Topic's Ratings:
Boxing - AA - 50% (2)
Digimon World 2 - AGGGGB - 75% (6)
Mary-Kate and Ashley: Magical Mystery Mall - BAA - 33% (3)
Reboot - BGBA - 38% {4}
Street Racer - BBBB - 0% (4)
Zoku Gussun Oyoyo - GG - 100% (2)
It's going to be interesting to see how the ratings for the Digimon World series play out, considering how drastically the franchise changes from game to game. Were it not against the way I generally space these topics out, I think having a single topic with all the Digimon games in it would be hilarious since there's actually a lot of variety.
Games for this topic:
Chocobo Racing
Hyper Pachinko
Kakugo no Susume
Shadow Man
Small Soldiers
Tennis Arena
Like Mickey's Speedway USA, Chocobo Racing is one of those games I know I played a lot of, but I don't remember much about it. We also have another Pachinko game, and every time I'm hopeful it's finally going to be a game that really does a good job of making the Pachinko concept fun, though it hasn't happened yet.
Chocobo Racing - G
ReplyDeleteHyper Pachinko - A
Kakugo no Susume - B
Shadow Man - B
Small Soldiers - A
Tennis Arena - B
Chocobo Racing is a fairly fun game. In many ways, it bares a bit of resemblance to Diddy Kong Racing, albeit without the adventure mode. Like in Diddy Kong Racing, pickups are visible on the track, and they become more powerful if you get the same powerup in succession, though you can also hold multiple, different powerups as well, so there's definitely some strategy involved in how you use items. Each character also has a unique crystal skill as well, which builds up over time, which adds another layer of strategy to the experience, as some of these can have quite powerful effects when activated at the right time. Beyond the item mechanics, the core driving mechanics are solid (the power turn, done with Accel + Brake, is very strong when tapped repeatedly), and the visuals and music are both quite nice. The game's progression is mainly handled through the story mode, which is basically just a series of single races that you can retry infinitely until you win, so it's not a very hard game, but there's a lot of hidden characters to unlock by beating it over and over again. There's also a grand prix mode where you can make your own cups (or let the randomizer do it for you) and there's a couple unlockables here as well, and you can also create edited characters after finishing story mode that can have overpowered stats. Overall, it's a pretty good game with a decent amount of content. It's probably not quite on par with Mario Kart 64 or Diddy Kong Racing but it's one of PS1's better kart racers for sure.
Hyper Pachinko is another pretty straightforward pachinko game. Like many others, there's a story mode of sorts where you have a certain amount of money to try to strike it rich playing Pachinko. In this game, however, it seems like the main purpose of acquiring money is to see a bunch of comedic scenes at various places you can visit during nighttime. These are very short and lack any kind of animation and it seems like you have to pay every time you want to see them, but at least it gives you something to spend your money on. As for the pachinko itself, it's pretty much the same as it always is, the machines here aren't especially fancy, what this game prides itself on is statistics, you can see a ton of stats detailing various things about the current state of the machine and how well your rate of return has been so far. I can only understand some of them but from what little I understand I know these types of numbers are critical to playing Pachinko "well", though it still takes forever to get even a single jackpot and I don't find the game to be particularly entertaining. Playing (watching?) this game, I feel like the clear method to make a pachinko game more fun is more interactivity. I can play this game on like 10x speedup and it literally doesn't matter because it's all RNG. If I could actually do something to affect the likelihood of scoring a jackpot during the little video events that occur when you get close it would be far more engaging. It wouldn't be as realistic, of course, but for a game where the objective is just to throw away money watching silly scenes I feel like this would be a fine tradeoff.
DeleteKakugo no Susume might be the worst fighting game ever made. For starters, it's also one of the simplest. There are no motions whatsoever in this game, all moves are just done by a single button, including moves you'd expect to be specials in other games like fireballs and dragon punches. As such, there are barely any moves available, it has probably among the most limited movesets of any fighter ever made. Blocking is done with a button, but there are no throws, so the only way to overcome block are jumps (which are uselessly slow) and overheads, which are dangerous because it's never clear what moves are overheads. However, there's really no reason to ever block in this game because everything is safe or even plus, so you might as well just attack all the time. There are chains to the game, but if you attempt to press a chain that doesn't work, you simply won't do anything, so you can simply mash all the buttons to do fancy looking chain combos that do a lot of damage, and since everything is safe you can't really be punished for doing this, making it easily the most mindless fighting game of all time. I feel like the developers of this game had clearly never played a fighting game before.
Shadow Man is a great game... on every system other than PS1. The PS1 version of the game is such an enormous downgrade that I don't think I can even give it an A. For starters, it looks drastically worse than every other version, with way worse textures and models, but I could forgive this if the main gameplay was still intact. A much bigger problem is the framerate, which is one of the worst of the era. Shadow Man runs absolutely atrociously on PS1, dipping to <10 FPS near-constantly, to the point that I would almost deem it to be unplayable. This game can give me a headache in less than 10 minutes from how jittery it is. The gameplay is also impacted, as the frame drops significant hamper combat and platforming as well. Unlike some other bad ports, like the N64 version of Spiderman, I don't feel that the qualities that make this a good game really come across to any degree in this version, just do yourself a favour and play this on N64 or DC, or just get the remastered version instead.
I kind of like Small Soldiers. It's a very simple third person shooter that somewhat reminds me of Doom. You'll travel through various levels blasting a handful of enemies and picking up keys. The controls in the game are pretty decent, though it's very dependent on the autoaim and it can sometimes be temperamental (the homing weapon is recommended when fighting other soldiers). Graphics are not especially great and draw distance is very short, but it runs decently enough and the levels were small enough that I didn't get lost. Overall, there's probably not enough here for it to be rated G, there's only a handful of enemy types and weapons and nothing is quite as inspired as the likes of Doom or Quake, but it's not bad for what it is.
DeleteTennis Arena reminds me a lot of some of the lousy Tennis games we played on Genesis. Like those games, pressing a button to hit the ball locks you into a lengthy animation that only actually contacts the ball near the end, so you must press the button well in advance of when you actually want to hit the ball, and once again they haven't figured out that holding towards the side of the court means you want to hit it to the side rather than hitting it out. The only notable mechanic to the game is that it features a power shot mechanic, similar to the one from Mario Power Tennis, though they are very basic, basically just a shot that travels faster than normal, likely to try to prevent rallies from going on too long since you can't really play the net or aim shots effectively. The game also has effectively no progression to speak of, you can do a simple tournament but there's nothing to unlock and the game becomes tiresome long before completing even a single match.