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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Boombots - GBBA - 38% {4}
Crusader: No Remorse - AGA - 67% (3)
Gallop Racer - AAB - 33% (3)
Mille Miglia - AA - 50% (2)
Tai Fu: Wrath of the Tiger - BBGAB - 30% {5}
You Don't Know Jack - GAGGG - 90% (5) (1 SR)
Not a strong showing for Dreamworks, though to be fair, I wouldn't say that the issue with either of those games was their fault. It just goes to show though that there's no substitute for good gameplay, but when you have good gameplay, great presentation clearly helps, as we can see with You Don't Know Jack.
Games for this topic:
All Star Soccer
Battle Stations
Extreme 500
Forsaken
Poy Poy
Warhawk
I'm looking forward to testing out Battle Stations, as good naval combat games are a bit rare, I feel it's an underdeveloped genre. I'm also curious to see if the PS1 version of Forsaken will fix some of the issues I had with the N64 version, as PS1 games sometimes have simplified visual effects or geometry that might make the stages a little easier to navigate.
All Star Soccer - B
ReplyDeleteBattle Stations - B
Extreme 500 - B
Forsaken - A
Poy Poy - G
Warhawk - G
All Star Soccer is probably the worst Soccer game of the era. Gameplay is very slow and feels very imprecise, it lacks any of the innovations made by other, better soccer games of the era, graphics are terrible, commentary is low-energy and they barely have anything to say, even the menus are confusing and tedious to navigate. There's just nothing good to say about this one.
Battle Stations sucks, which is unfortunate. The basic idea behind the game is all right, you go on various missions where you need to move your ships around and when two ships meet, a battle ensues, the problem is that the battles are extremely dull and tedious and that brings the entire game down. The basic issue is that this is a game that desperately needed twinstick control and didn't get it. Controlling the boat works okay, but firing weapons completely sucks. You have an autoaim cursor that does the vast majority of the work, you just let it lock on and spam the fire button. There are special weapons and defensive abilities, but they are mostly useless because once you use them, you're inexplicably locked out of firing your guns for an extremely long time. The biggest issue, though, is the inability to lead your targets. With faster ships, the autoaim will always aim at where they were when you fired your shot, but that's never where they'll be by the time the shot actually gets there, so unless they crash into an obstacle you're not hitting. You can manually adjust the cursor but this is extremely cumbersome and prevents you from moving while doing it, it's much more efficient to simply spam and hope you hit, but far less interesting. With slower ships, every shot will hit, so you just ram them and spam shots until you win. There's pretty much no nuance to the game, unfortunately.
Extreme 500 also sucks. Ironically, this is a game that shouldn't have twin stick control but does have it, it's probably the only racing game I've ever played that locks you into using a stick for throttle, which I don't think anyone really likes and it also feels particularly unresponsive here. Beyond this, it's a slow and boring racing game. The presentation is bland and lacks any thing to make it stand out, the game feels much too slow for the size of its tracks, which causes races to feel like they go on forever, collisions feel terrible (which completely nullifies the kick mechanic, you never want to contact anything), and nothing about it really feels like a motorcycle racer. It also has probably the worst engine sounds of all time. What a dismal start to this topic so far.
Forsaken on PS1 is a completely different game from Forsaken 64. Compared to the N64 game, it's a vastly slower but more technical game, though this brings about different problems than they had on N64. On N64, the general gameplay is pretty good but the levels can be a bit confusing. Here, the levels are more straightforward but the enemies are vastly tankier, so there's far more emphasis on dogfighting, but unfortunately the controls aren't really up to the task. The real problem here is that the controls aren't adequately customizable. What the game desperately needs is the ability to customize what the sticks do, but this is not available, and you also can't map the functions of the sticks to any of the buttons either, making it impossible to get any kind of proper dual-stick setup. This, combined with the extremely small size of most enemy targets and very limited ammo for subweapons removes a lot of the nuance from the game, it's generally better to just facetank a couple shots shots to line up your subweapons rather than trying to strafe, which is only used as a last resort when you have no subweapons left. The levels design is also not particularly interesting for the most part and the visuals are a lot weaker than the N64 version. Overall, I feel like the N64 version is clearly the superior one by a good margin. This version is still playable but its strengths are far less evident so there's less reason to put up with its faults.
DeletePoy Poy absolutely rocks. This game is essentially a good version of Tom and Jerry Fists of Furry, it's a fighting game which revolves around throwing objects at each other, but unlike that game it's very fast-paced and has fun mechanics. One of the game's main mechanics is that in addition to your regular item toss, you also have a special item toss, which is often quite powerful but uses energy and takes a little longer. There are many different powers you can have and I don't think they're tremendously well balanced, but it gives the game a fair bit of variety. There's quite a bit of depth to the game, too. For example, some of the items you can throw are heavy and take a moment to pick up, which leaves you open, but they're usually much better weapons if you can get them. In particular, the giant rocket is a huge threat, but if you get hit while trying to pick it up, you're the one who gets blown up, which is super satisfying when you do it to someone to win a match. The voice acting is perfect too and generally it's a very funny game. There's even a fairly fleshed-out single player game where you can buy and upgrade the various special attacks. Overall, this is just a great game that I actually don't think too many people have heard of and I'd definitely recommend checking it out. This would probably be SR quality on a system with fewer games.
Warhawk is also a pretty cool game. It's actually an interesting contrast with Forsaken in that you also control a flying craft that can move in all directions, but it's better in virtually every way. The game is structured somewhat similarly to most flight games, but your craft is vastly more maneuverable compared to most of them, you can fly directly up and down and also strafe, as well as go from full speed to a dead stop on a dime or even fly backwards, all of which you'll need to do constantly as enemies are powerful and accurate and attack from all directions. The only thing about the game's controls that annoys me is that you can only strafe when going fairly slow, at high speeds the strafe becomes a useless roll move instead, which makes approaching a target that's firing back at you immensely dangerous. Another interesting thing about the game is your health system. Your ship has shields which slowly regenerate, but each part of the craft also has its own shield / armor value, and where you get hit determines which part takes damage. Side and back shots are somewhat less threatening than shots from the front, but of course you're also a bit more likely to get shot in the front since that's also where you attack from. There are some issues with the missions, for example I find the second mission where you have to navigate a canyon to be somewhat lousy, it's hard to tell where to go and the mission also goes on way too long, but there are also a bunch of memorable moments, like the third level where you have to fight and then fly through an aircraft carrier. The game is maybe a bit on the short side overall, but the fully-acted cutscenes are pretty cool and it's generally a pretty good game overall.
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