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Last Topic's Ratings:
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain - GGAGAAGGG - 83% (9)
Chess - BA - 25%
F1 Championship Season 2000 - AGGGG - 90% (5)
NFL Blitz - GGGG - 100% (4)
Ninja Jajamaru-Kun: Onigiri Ninpouchou - GA - 75% (2)
WCW/nWo Thunder - BBBBB - 0% (5)
A pretty highly-rated topic all around. It looks like other people agreed with me that the PS1 port of NFL Blitz is actually very competent, it actually outscored any of the games on N64.
Games for this topic:
Cyber Tiger
Final Fantasy 5
Grid Runner
Lone Soldier
Truck Racing
U.P.P.
Kind of a weird mix this time, but we have a Final Fantasy game so that should draw people in. I'm kind of intrigued by U.P.P., I'm always surprised at how many puzzle games there are that I've never heard of.
Cyber Tiger - G
ReplyDeleteFinal Fantasy 5 - G
Grid Runner - A
Lone Soldier - B
Truck Racing - A
U.P.P. - B
CyberTiger was a hugely surprising game to rate. On N64, the game is a very bland title that is most readily described as simply being "bad Mario Golf". It's very arcadey in its setup and takes many cues from Camelot's masterpiece, but virtually everything about it is a lot worse. I was expecting to have a conversation about whether "bad Mario Golf" is enough for G on PS1, which obviously doesn't have Mario Golf, but actually, the PS1 game is completely different from the N64 one. Unlike on N64, the PS1 game is a much more simulation-style affair, and uses a completely different engine that has different strengths and weaknesses. For starters, compares to the N64 version, the tech in this port is much less impressive. The graphics look a lot worse, the game feels a bit slower, and reading the terrain really sucks. However, everything else about the game is drastically better compared to N64. The game now features a pretty cool career mode where you get to start out as goofy-looking kids on the junior circuit, then see your stats gradually improve as you enter adulthood, which is actually really cool. The PGA tour games later did something like this, but I really like the touch of making the characters kids at the start, it really gives the game a unique feel. The swing mechanic also works drastically better here than it did in the N64 version, it now gives you a good balance between precision and depth and I particularly like the ability to add aftertouch spin to the ball. The one big issue is that the putting in this version is incredibly bad, due to the aforementioned difficulty in reading the course layout. I did slowly start to adjust to the bizarre terrain viewer (it massively exaggerates the slope of the terrain to give you an idea of what the slopes are), but putting is super inconsistent at best, so you'd better try to drop your shots close to the hole. Still, this version of the game is at least interesting and unique and is drastically better than the N64 version. While still clearly not as good as Mario Golf, it does at least feel very different, and is probably the era's second-best golf game overall.
Of Square's SNES ports on PS1, FF5 always stood out to me as the highlight. Compared to FF4 and FF6, the biggest advantage here is that this is a game that hadn't previously been released in North America. In case people aren't yet familiar with it, Final Fantasy 5 features a return of the job system from Final Fantasy 3, except significantly expanded. As you level up jobs, you learn abilities, which can be equipped by other jobs. The system is still a little bit on the simple side (you can only have one other ability besides your job skill), but it gives the game a lot more flexibility compared to FF3. Storywise, the game is definitely a bit on the basic side, in fact you could probably make the case that it has the weakest story of FF4-FF6, but in a certain sense this almost works in its favour, because the low point of the PS1 ports is the quality of the story translation, but it affects FF5 the least since it's the most heavily gameplay focused of the three. I have heard some complaints about other technical issues with this port, but I can't say I've personally encountered any, the game runs fine for the most part, load time is kept minimal, save for the battle swoosh being a little long, which can be a bit annoying as the encounter rate here is also fairly high, but it's not nearly as disruptive as the added load time to Chrono Trigger. Overall, this is a good game and it was the best way to play it at the time. There are better versions available now, but it was still a solid pickup for PS1.
Grid Runner is an interesting title. It is essentially a sci-fi version of Tag, the goal of the game is to travel through a maze and collect flags while avoiding being tagged by the other player, which will give them the ability to collect flags instead. There is a little big of complexity to the game beyond this, you have access to a number of magic "spells" which are really more like attacks, for example you can make a block appear, shoot a projectile, or leave a trap for the opponent. By far the best spell is the speed spell, which makes you faster, you'll want to spam that constantly to get maximum speed. The game is pretty simple when playing against the AI, the bigger challenge is not winning but rather exploring each stage to find the hourglasses so you get more time on the bonus levels, but thankfully you can also play against another person as well. It's not a bad game overall, but I feel like it's a little too simplistic to stay interesting for that long. If the speed spell was temporary rather than lasting until you took a hit it might add more nuance to magic usage that would help keep the game interesting longer.
DeleteLone Soldier is a ridiculously stupid game, so much so that I actually kind of like it, but I can't rate it as A in good conscience even though I kind of want to. It is an absurdly simplistic action game where you play as a Rambo-type, gunning down legions of enemies from a third-person perspective. Bullets are a mere suggestion to Lone Soldier, it takes at least 500 shots to down you, and there's also no practical way to avoid being shot, so you basically just walk through the levels like the unstoppable terminator that you are, indiscriminately murdering everything in your path. You get a couple different weapons to use and the carnage is entertaining to some degree, particularly when augmented by the terrible voice acting and cutscenes. There's not really too much more to say about the game, it gets repetitive really fast, but it's a good meme game for sure.
Truck Racing is another one of those weird racing games where the fundamentals are solid but there's just not much to the game. It actually controls pretty well, has a decent number of tracks for its time, looks not too bad, and even has a decent soundtrack. The problem is just that the game has no progression of any kind, it's solely a single race mode against easy AI. Weirdly, despite being billed as "Truck Racing", the vehicles don't control like trucks and the courses are all circuit tracks, which makes me wonder if it was originally intended to be a car racing game but they slapped the truck theme on it to try to make it stand out. It's unfortunate that they didn't do more with the game because I feel with some kind of career mode this actually could have been G, it's certainly way ahead of terrible racers like All Star Racing, but as it stands there's just not a lot to do here. At least it's a lot better than that other famous truck racing game.
DeleteUPP is actually pretty bad. The game is essentially what you'd get if you doubled down on the character powers system from Puyo Puyon, with a significantly worse core game behind it. The core of the game is essentially Columns, which isn't a terrible base game, but certainly isn't known for fast-paced gameplay, except played versus another player. You'd think the key to the game would be knowing how to create combos (which involves a lot of diagonals in Columns), but actually, combos do nothing here, the only way to attack your opponent is by making matches and then using your character power. Each character has 3 specials, which are used by charging up a meter by clearing blocks. These are accompanied by some very flashy animations which admittedly look quite good, but their actual effect on gameplay is often quite dull. For example, the first character's three powers are a buff that makes his drop speed slower, a move that clears away a few pieces from his board, and an attack that burns out a few pieces on the opponent's board, making them unusable. The third move is essentially worthless and takes far too much bar, so the strategy as him is just to use the first two powers to play extremely defensively and wait for the opponent to eventually die. A few characters have attacks that are a little more useful, but in general, the fact that you can't attack the opponent directly by making chains makes the game feel extremely passive and generally dull. I feel like this is another one of those cases where the developer just didn't have any understanding of the genre at all, because with a few simple tweaks this could have at least been decent.