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Last Topic's Ratings:
Chocobo Racing - AAGGAGAB - 63% (8)
Hyper Pachinko - BA - 25% (2)
Kakugo no Susume - BB - 0% (2)
Shadow Man - GGABAGA - 64% (7)
Small Soldiers - BGGA - 63% {4}
Tennis Arena - ABB - 17% (3)
I was kind of surprised no games from this topic made the high rating range, I thought it actually had some pretty big names.
Games for this topic:
Battle Arena Toshinden 2
Championship Surfer
Cyber Sled
Ghoul Panic
Nightmare Creatures
Ray Tracers
I'm kind of interested to try Championship Surfer because I feel like I've never played a really good surfing game. Ray Tracers also looks like a pretty cool game.
Battle Arena Toshinden 2 - A
ReplyDeleteChampionship Surfer - B
Cyber Sled - G
Ghoul Panic - A
Nightmare Creatures - G
Ray Tracers - A
Battle Arena Toshinden 2 is very similar to the first game. The biggest change is that there is now a second type of super, which is usable when your overdrive meter fills up, though once this meter fills, it quickly drains, so you have to use the super quickly. Supers are absurdly easy to land, though, virtually every character can do light slash heavy slash super, and you also still have the desperation supers when your health is flashing, so I actually feel like there's almost too many supers flying around. This is maybe a good thing though because like the first game there's still a lot of early 3D fighting game jank here. Jumps are worthlessly floaty, moves often whiff if you're close to the person due to being slightly off-angle, and you stay on the ground forever after a knockdown, even if you mash the fast get-up. Still, the music still rocks and it's still kind of fun, there's just a fair bit of room for improvement and they haven't really done too much since the first game.
Well, my search for a good surfing game continues, because Championship Surfer definitely isn't it. Everything about this game completely sucks, for starters, it runs at an atrocious, super inconsistent framerate on the real hardware, and it runs impossibly too fast on an emulator. Even when you account for this, it controls terribly, most of the gameplay involves holding buttons and doing spins, but the control for this is completely awful and there's a ton of crap coming at you from the screen to knock you off your board. I honestly think the California Games surfing minigame is more fun than this.
Cyber Sled is a tough one to rate. It basically plays like a super simplified version of something like Custom Robo, Virtual On, or Last Legion UX. Like those games, it's a 3D arena dueling game, but far more straightforward, you can move in all directions, rotate, shoot a machine gun, and fire missiles, and that's basically it. Despite this, it's actually pretty fun. It's very fast-paced and has great controls, and trying to pick up powerups while not being shot (you need to use the radar) is good fun. However, there's also barely any game here. You can finish the single player game in 15-20 minutes tops, and although the different characters play a little differently, it doesn't have a ton of replay value. There is multiplayer mode, which might be a fun diversion, though you're locked to first-person mode, which makes it a little harder to play. Overall, it's very borderline, it feels hard to justify G for a game that has so little content, but at the same time it feels slightly too good for A. In the end I went with G because I do think it's worth at least one playthrough, but I wish they had made a sequel that expanded the concept more.
Ghoul Panic is incredibly similar to Point Blank, almost feeling like a 4th Point Blank game, though it is also not quite as good. There are a few major downgrades to the game compared to Point Blank, the first is to the level of charm in the game. Point Blank is an extremely zany game with lots of hilarious and quirky characters, by comparison, Ghoul Panic is much more subdued, with most missions just having you shoot ghosts in various ways. The game still looks good but it's definitely not quite as memorable visually. The game's difficulty is also way overtuned, with every stage requiring near perfection to clear even on Normal, which feels a bit lame even though you have infinite continues. One of the major things to be added is boss fights, but these are not great as they rely far too heavily on you just mashing the trigger on the guncon like a madman, as in some of the worst games in Point Blank, like the one where you have to shoot the car hundreds of times. Overall, it's still a fairly fun game and I'm glad I now know it exists, but at the same time it's clearly inferior to Point Blank by a fair margin and you'd be fine skipping it unless you're a really hardcore fan of the series.
DeleteRay Tracers is effectively just a 3D version of Chase HQ. Like in that game, the goal is to speed through a stage, then ram a boss at the end until they blow up without running out of time. It's kind of a fun concept, but the game is actually really short, only consisting of 4 tracks, plus a boss rush and the final boss, if you don't fail it can be finished in 20 minutes. There are multiple cars to choose from but it gets repetitive pretty quickly. I guess there's an interesting contrast to be made with Cyber Sled here, also being a very simplistic arcade-style game, though at least it also has multiplayer and lasts a little longer. I do think this game's visuals are actually pretty impressive, there's some very nice reflection and shadow effects in some of the stages that actually really impressed me (I imagine they must be at least partially pre-baked, but they look very good), but there's really just not enough game here to recommend this one too heavily.
Colour me shocked, but Nightmare Creatures is a drastically better game on PS1 compared to N64. Almost every aspect of the game is much better on this system, allowing you to appreciate the game's ambition a lot more. For starters, this version both looks and sounds better. Obviously, there's higher quality sound and music due to CD Audio, and there's also some voice acting, which I feel helps the atmosphere of the game, but it also looks a lot better, being significantly brighter compared to the N64 version. This makes it far easier to figure out the level geometry and locate secrets compared to the overly drab N64 version, where I had to use the map a lot to figure out where to go. There are gameplay improvements as well. One thing I noticed immediately is that the combat feels a lot more nuanced. In the N64 version, you can defeat virtually every enemy with minimal damage by just spamming your regular attack, but this works far less well here. Initially, I wondered if this might be due to the difficulty setting (N64 defaults to easy and PS1 to hard), but after testing both versions extensively I don't think the difficulty level changes much besides the amount of HP enemies have. The enemies on PS1 are faster and more aggressive, and also block and evade more often regardless of the difficulty setting. I'm also virtually positive player attacks have more favourable frame data on N64, as when an enemy and I both attack at the same time I virtually always win on N64, whereas on PS1 the enemies usually do, forcing you to block and dodge much more often and limiting your ability to stunlock enemies. On PS1, I felt like I was forced to learn and use the different attack chains and adapt to different enemies far more than on N64, which makes the game feel much less repetitive. Finally, the camera also seems to be better in this version, almost always properly framing the action from behind the character, compared to how often it gets stuck in weird places on N64. I guess this game doesn't suck after all, it's just another case of a very shoddy N64 port.
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