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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Mischief Makers - GAGGAABGGGGG - 79% (12)
Glover 2 - AGA - 67% (3)
It's perhaps not a very surprising result that Mischief Makers dropped slightly (from 86 -> 79), as its score was already very high, but I think it made an interesting touchpoint to see how things have changed since the start of the N64 GAB, since it was one of the first games we rated. Something I thought was cool to see when going over the original topic is how many of the same people are still around to rate it this time. The participation in this GAB has been great in general, which I'm very happy about.
Games for this topic:
Glover
Dragon Sword
See the Gamefaqs topic for the blurbs provided by our nominators.
Dragon Sword - A
ReplyDeleteGlover - G
Dragon Sword is another game that's very unfinished, but at least you can get a pretty decent idea of how it plays. The game is a fairly basic 3D beat-em-up with a handful of interesting ideas. The basic gameplay involves moving through 3D levels and destroying enemy generators, which is probably the weakest part of the game. This mechanic works well in Gauntlet because you're constantly being swarmed so finding time to shut down the generator is difficult, but here the enemies aren't very aggressive and really just feel like fodder for the most part, but you can't easily destroy the generators because 99% of the time they can't be attacked. Sometimes when a generator summons a new enemy, it will drop its barrier for a while, which gives you a very short moment to destroy it before the cycle starts all over. This is fairly tedious and you have to do this dozens of times per level. I had one on the second level where there were some infinitely spawning enemies near the generator and it took me like 3 minutes to realize that there was an enemy it had summoned some distance away that I had to kill before it would try to summon again, finally becoming vulnerable (I figured it was just a softlock). Beyond the spawners, there are a couple other things that stand out. One of the coolest parts of the game is that you can collect some weapons and other items, like a shield, which you can switch between at any time. This is pretty cool and the weapons add some good variety to the combat. Enemies also carry varying weapons and you can even break their shields, which is neat. There are also boss fights, though only the first one really works properly, and I feel like it sort of exposes that the game's combat system is a bit too basic, you basically just run around to bait him into attacking and then he has one move he can do where you can hit him, but there's very little depth to it, which also kind of describes the game in general. It apparently would have had co-op and there's also a versus mode, but I feel like this game needed a bit more to it to work as a full title. Either some kind of level up system or at least more varied attack chains would have gone a long way, as well as probably some improvements to that spawner system.
As I posted the first time, I actually think Glover is a pretty decent game. It's not without its flaws, particularly its camera and combat, but it's a very unique game and I also appreciate how well fleshed-out it is, both having quite a lot of stages and also having some bonus challenges in the form of the garibs and time attack challenges on the levels. Going back to it again, I feel the combat is clearly the biggest problem, transforming the ball into the bowling ball and then slapping enemies with it is both slow a slow and finnicky process, made even worse by the fact that if enemies touch the ball while you're holding it you get hit, even if they don't actually touch you directly, which is really dumb. This also makes the boss fights pretty lame, though thankfully you can just stockpile lives and brute force your way through them. Something I like about the game that I didn't mention the first time is that it actually has a very nice checkpoint system, which is a little like DK64 but even better. Once you activate a checkpoint, you can use it to fast travel at any time from the pause menu, as long as you and the ball are on the ground (you don't even have to have the ball with you). This makes exploring the levels to find all the garibs a much less painful process and you feel like you're decently rewarded for making it to the checkpoints, which is nice because this game can be pretty challenging. I think it's interesting that we compared the two games back to back, even with Glover 2 being very unfinished I feel like the first game seems drastically better, turning Glover into more of a standard 3D platformer just loses everything that makes it special. It's a very meticulous game that definitely isn't for everyone, but I still think it's kind of neat. I just wish my cart didn't have a weird issue where it frequently loses your save data.
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