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Last Topic's Ratings:
Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - AAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGAGGGGBGG - 90% (26) (12 SR)
NFL Blitz 2001 - GGGAGG - 92% (6) (2 SR)
Pokemon Stadium 2 - AGGGGGGGGAGAABG - 80% (15) (3 SR)
Puyo Puyon Party - AA - 50% (2)
Turok: Rage Wars - GGAGGAGGGGAAGA - 82% (14)
World Driver Championship - GGGAGGA - 85% (7)
I mentioned that I thought Majora's Mask was decisive, but I guess in the end it really wasn't. That's what happens when you only look at the beginning and end and miss the string of like 15 Gs in the middle. It's also interesting that both it and OoT got 26 votes. OoT's score is higher, but MM has more SRs.
Games for this topic:
40 Winks
Dinosaur Planet
Excitebike 64
Mario Tennis
Sin and Punishment
Viewpoint 2064
It's obviously kind of irresponsible to put up two games that only exist as prototypes for the final topic, particularly considering Dinosaur Planet can't even be fully completed, but I feel it's recent discovery is simply too notable to be ignored. We also have 40 Winks, which only recently saw an official release, but it existed as a fully complete prototype for ages so I was always planning on putting it up eventually.
40 Winks - G
ReplyDeleteDinosaur Planet - A
Excitebike 64 - G
Mario Tennis - A
Sin and Punishment - G
Viewpoint 2064 - A
40 Winks is pretty much the same game as on PS1, but with a couple notable upgrades. As before, it's still a pretty solid 3D platformer with some creative level design and decent controls and performance. Compared to the PS1 version, cutscenes have obviously been axed, but they've been replaced by in-engine cutscenes that look pretty decent, and I think texture quality has taken a tiny hit, but there's also less texture warping so the game looks somewhat cleaner than it does on PS1. More notably, though, load times are completely gone, the game actually loads impressively fast, when you touch a portal there's a quick fadeout and you're just instantly there, which really helps the game feel snappy. Of course, the real upgrade here is that the N64 version supports two players, and it's a surprisingly robust implementation of the concept. Unlike many platformers where the two players cannot go offscreen from each other, here you can separate as much as you want within a level because each player has their own screen. Obviously, there's a huge hit to resolution here. The game doesn't go for the typical approach of splitting the screen in half vertically or horizontally or anything like that, instead, they keep the screen resolution the same and draw two very small screens in the middle, leaving about 30% of the screen unused on both the top and bottom. Smartly, the game does relocate the UI to this newly unused area when playing two players so it's not as bad as it might sound, but hopefully you've got a pretty big TV for this. Of course, there's some room to debate how much having a 2 player mode really helps in a game like this, I suppose on the more open levels you can separate but many levels are fairly linear and you'll just have to do much of the same content twice, but it's an interesting novelty nonetheless. Overall, this is another solid version of a solid game and it's kind of surprising they didn't officially release this one because it seems like a fair bit of effort went into this port.
Dinosaur Planet is obviously a hard one to rate because the game can't be fully completed, and even what you can play is glitchy and unfinished, but I think there's enough here to get a decent idea of what the game was going to be like. Like Conker, the game is a technical marvel on N64, with large, highly detailed areas and cutscenes and tons of fully voice-acted cutscenes. If there's one thing you definitely have to give Rare credit for, they knew how to squeeze every inch of power out of Nintendo hardware. Gameplay-wise, the game plays somewhat similarly to the Gamecube game, though with a number of important differences. The first, and the one I wish they had kept the most, is that both Krystal and Sabre / Fox remain playable throughout the game, with the player being able to swap between them. I really wish that this had stayed in the game in at least some form as Krystal felt woefully underused in Starfox Adventures, but its implementation here still leaves something to be desired. For starters, Sabre and Krystal play exactly the same, the differences between their weapons are purely cosmetic and they have the same abilities, the sole difference is in their partner characters, and the partners are fairly annoying to use, constantly requiring you to feed them after every action you need them to perform. Sabre and Krystal's adventures also feel very distinct from each other, both in terms of location and story, which also causes the mechanic to feel a bit superflous. It almost seems as though Rare knew this, as the mechanic is introduced abruptly, you simply appear at the swap point during Krystal's story, and when the game asks you to swap to Sabre, Krystal even lampshades the way it breaks the game's immersion by saying something like "I'm in the middle of something important here" but the game forces you to swap to Sabre anyway. It feels obvious that a far better implementation of this mechanic would be to have the story switch to the other character at natural breaks in the story until the two characters eventually meet up, then be able to freely swap between them to use different abilities to overcome various challenges. As it was implemented here I can actually kind of see why they cut it from the GC version. Another big issue is the combat. The combat is one of the highlights of the Gamecube version, featuring a bunch of combos that flow together nicely and just feel good to perform, but none of that is present here, you just have a single swipe attack that you spam against enemies and it feels very basic and dull. The lock on is also incredibly temperamental and the game makes you use it constantly to interact with things, though perhaps this would have been cleaned up a little before release. Overall, even though the game is quite interesting to see, I don't think it's actually very fun. It's very linear and basic and I don't think it would have stood up against Majora's Mask or Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon in any real way, even OoT clearly has a lot more going on. Overall, it kind of feels like they had a bunch of ideas for the game that hadn't really gelled all that well yes and I think the move to Gamecube was definitely the right call, I just wish they had been given the time to actually finish the game on GC.
DeleteI've spent so much time throughout this generation trashing various other motocross games for not being as good as Excitebike 64 that it now feels like there's not too much left to say about it. Excitebike 64 isn't a tremendously flashy game, it's basically just very competently made. It controls well, it has a decent announcer, there's a lot of tracks covering both motocross and supercross events, both of which play well, and it has a decent progression system. There's not really anything mindblowing here, but it ticks all the boxes for a solid motocross game in a way that most other games struggled to. One of the game's strongest points is the Excitebike boost system, where you can boost whenever you want but you overheat if you use it too much. It's not quite perfect here, in particular the penalty for overheating is probably a bit too mild, merely slowing you down slightly for a moment (you should probably blow up or wipe out, similar to Motorstorm), but it helps add nuance to standard racing, which in turn helps ensure the game never gets dull. Speaking of which, probably the weakest point of the game is how dry its presentation can be. The announcer helps, but generally there's very little flash here and the game doesn't have much identity visually. Apart from a few cool ideas, like the procedurally generated desert track and the 3D remake of the original Excitebike, you might be able to say that the game feels somewhat forgettable. Certainly, when compared with Excite Truck, it's not nearly as ambitious or as high-octane and I do think that game is a fair bit better, though this is still undeniably a solid racer and one of the earliest examples of a 3D motocross game done well.
DeleteSin and Punishment is a pretty cool game. In a lot of ways, it's kind of similar to Starfox 64, being another on-rails shooter, though with you controlling a character on foot rather than a plane. Probably the most innovative thing about the game is its control scheme, which uses a twin-stick like setup where the left stick aims and the C-Buttons move the character. Compared to Starfox 64, this tends to give the gameplay quite a bit more nuance, as you must actually dodge in addition to aiming rather than just spamming barrel roll over and over again. Besides comparisons to Starfox 64, the game also has some similarities with Alien Soldier, as it generally consists of short segments followed by tons of boss fights, many of which are very creative. There's also a lot of cutscenes, and although the game's plot is almost totally nonsensical, the voice acting is frequently hilarious. Generally speaking, it's a very fun game, I pretty much couldn't put it down when playing it again for this review (and I've beaten it a bunch of times before), the only issue is that it's pretty short overall, with none of the branching paths or medal system that Starfox 64 had to give it longevity. The game's scoring system is quite nuanced, with zillions of optional targets to hit and other ways to score points, so if high scores are your thing there's some replay value, but I do wish there had been a little bit more to the game overall. Still, when your biggest complaint about a game is that you want more of it that's generally a pretty good indicator of the game's quality.
Mario Tennis is a very hard game to rate. For starters, we need to talk about how ludicrously on top of the game Camelot was during this generation. Both Mario Golf and Mario Tennis are so revolutionary for their respective sports that they effectively render all previous games in their genres unplayable. Ever since the beginning of GAB I've basically been saying about all Golf and Tennis games that they are at best all right but pale terribly to these two games. And certainly, they just nail the controls to such a degree that it seems hard to understand how previous games struggled so much. In the case of Mario Tennis, the ability to charge your shot before the ball gets there is a total game changer, and makes Tennis games finally feel like they control "properly". No more having to perfectly time a lengthy animation to hit the ball at just the right moment, just get to the right spot and press the button and you'll hit the ball when it gets there. Aiming shots finally works properly too, if you want to hit the ball up the line, you hold towards the edge of the court, as it always obviously should have worked. In that sense, this should probably be the easiest of easy Gs because it's so far ahead of everything else at its time of release. The only problem is that unlike Mario Golf, which hasn't aged a day since it came out, it's vastly harder to go back to Mario Tennis on N64. While I would consider Mario Golf N64 and Mario Golf Toadstool Tour to be comparable in quality, Mario Power Tennis is an absolutely massive improvement over this game in every way imaginable. The original Mario Tennis basically just seems to have a lot of tuning issues. A simple one is that the lob shot is utterly worthless in this game, even if the opponent is squished up against the net they can instantly smash it right back, which makes net play much too strong and also makes the drop shot nearly worthless. This tends to lead to absurdly long rallies which don't feel very skillful, made even worse by the fact that characters hit shots into the net or out weirdly often in this game, so many points will be decided by who gets unlucky with bad RNG rather than through actual tennis skill. I do recall liking this game a lot at the time, but also that the second I got Mario Power Tennis I never went back, and indeed, playing the two of them back to back it's night and day how much better Power Tennis feels to play. This is still a very important step forward for Tennis games as a whole, but you can also safely skip this one and just play Power Tennis instead, which I don't feel is the case with Mario Golf (since, if nothing else, it at least has different courses from the GC game).
DeleteViewpoint 2064 is an interesting game. Compared to Dinosaur Planet, it's much more complete, with only a few issues remaining that distinguish it from a fully completed game. It's a shmup, though one with a few unique ideas. The first is that as its name implies, it changes the viewpoint every now and then, from a starfox-esque "flying into the screen" perspective to a more traditional vertical shmup perspective. This is actually one of my biggest gripes with the game, when in the starfox-like mode, pressing up and down makes you fly in and out of the screen, rather than moving your vertically towards the top or bottom of the screen as you'd expect (you cannot move vertically at all, and are locked to the bottom of the plane). This feels extremely weird as the enemies can move and attack vertically and you can move the crosshair upwards to lock onto them, and I think the game would almost certainly be G if these sections just worked how Starfox does. Speaking of, the other unique features of the game involve your special attacks. You have a charge shot that functions very similarly to the one from Starfox, but you also can collect options that enhance your shots and allow you to perform a blocking move that can absorb enemy shots from the front, which builds up energy to fire a massive laser. Lack of vertical movement aside, the game generally plays decently well and the bosses are pretty cool, being huge enemies with multiple weakpoints that you can destroy to limit their attacks, though the balance of the game feels a little off. In particular, the charge shot and the laser do virtually no damage to bosses, only the rapidfire shot has any real use against them, which feels weird, and generally, the shield move seems a little too strong as it can instantly trivialize bullet hell-esque patterns from the enemy, only being vulnerable to ballistic attacks like missles, which can be destroyed with your shot. One last feature I haven't touched on yet is the stage system, which is interesting, there's 15 stages in the game, but you only play 5 of them per run, after each stage the stages branch and the path you take determines your ending, with all of the various endings gradually revealing bits of the story (though many of them are unimplemented and crash the prototype). I think there are a lot of neat ideas here and with a little bit more polish this one might have been a worthy contender to Starfox 64, it's too bad they never quite ended up finishing it.
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