Monday, August 30, 2021

GAB N64 #56 - Revote Topic 2: Mischief Makers, Glover 2

This topic is now closed


Gamefaqs Link

Last Topic's Ratings:

Donkey Kong 64 - GBAGGAGGAGGAGGABGAG - 73% (19)
ODT: Escape or Die Trying - GAG - 83% (3)

I was a bit worried by the early votes for DK64 that it was going to go down, but it actually went up quite significantly, from 53% to 73%. I was also glad that we covered ODT, which is not only a complete game but also very different from the PS1 version, it definitely earned its place in the list.

Games for this topic:

Mischief Makers
Glover 2
See the Gamefaqs topic for the blurbs provided by our nominators.

1 comment:

  1. Glover 2 - NR
    Mischief Makers - G

    I actually don't think Glover 2 is complete enough for my to be able to rate it properly, so I'm going to abstain from giving it a rating. I'm not sure if it's just me having the wrong prototype of something, but I'd say it feels like it's less than 5% done. Not even a single stage is properly playable, you can use level select to warp to levels and walk around empty environments that lack proper progression or enemy behaviour, but that's about it. With games like Dinosaur Planet you can at least tell how they were intended to play, but here I feel like anything I could say about the game would be pure conjecture. Clearly, the game's mechanics revolve around collecting ingredients, which suggests a more open-ended sort of level design where rather than taking a ball from point A to point B, the goal is instead to travel from A to B, find something at B, then take it back to A and repeat. This might be interesting, though from what little we can see of the level design it seems as though the levels are far simpler to traverse than the original. At any rate, I don't think we missed out on a lot here, but maybe it would have changed my mind if they had finished more of it.

    The funny thing with Mischief Makers is that on paper I could see how the game could be A but it's actually a lot better than the sum of its parts. It's a very weird game, levels are extremely short for the most part and almost excessively varied, enemies are actually fairly uncommon on many levels so the clock is the only real threat a lot of the time, and the whole game just feels bizarre and experimental in almost every way. Except that somehow it all just works. Treasure were so good that they could slap together a completely random assortment of levels that lack any kind of cohesiveness and it's still fun. Something interesting about the game is that the main challenge in the game is actually completing levels fast enough to get the highest rank, making this a very early example of a speedrun-focused game, and luckily the game's movement is complex and interesting enough that optimizing it is actually fairly enjoyable. Considering how big speedrunning has become I feel like this was surprisingly prescient of them to nail this kind of mechanic so early. And beyond that, of course there's also awesome boss battles and great music. It's a very strange experienced, but a very well-polished one nonetheless, and I feel you kind of can't help but like it to at least some degree.

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