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Last Topic's Ratings:
2Xtreme - AGBBB - 30% {5}
EOS: Edge of Skyhigh - AA - 50% (2)
Grandia - GAGGAGG - 86% (7) (1 SR)
Hardball 5 - GG - 100% (2)
Lucky Luke - BBA - 17% (3)
Virtual Pro Wrestling - AGG - 83% (3)
Kind of a mixed topic all around, though it's always nice to have a sleeper game like Hardball to boost up these topics.
Games for this topic:
Gex: Enter the Gecko
LEGO Rock Raiders
No One Can Stop Mr Domino
South Park Rally
Tecmo Super Bowl
TRAG
I've been interested to try out No One Can Stop Mr Domino for a while now, so I'm glad we're finally getting around to it. Also, I don't know if TRAG is popular, it mainly made the topic title because its name is very short.
Gex: Enter the Gecko - A
ReplyDeleteLEGO Rock Raiders - G
No One Can Stop Mr Domino - A
South Park Rally - A
Tecmo Super Bowl - B
TRAG - A
To my surprise, the PS1 version of Gex 2 is quite a bit better than the N64 version. It's largely the same game, but the PS1 version controls better, has a somewhat better camera, and has better lighting physics. You might think the N64 version would have the edge in load time, but strangely they're about the same, so the PS1 version really is the way to go here. It still has most of the same flaws as the N64 version, most particularly that each level has 3 goals that must be completed on separate runs, but the level design is often very linear so you basically just do the same thing 3 times (the key to Mario 64 is that the levels are more open-ended for the most part, so you can take different routes to reach each star, though later 3D Mario games like Galaxy also get this wrong). I still think this is a downgrade from Gex 1, where I quite liked the wall cling mechanic and the interesting ways that opened up 2D Platformer level design, but it's at least now decently playable compared to the atrocity that is the N64 version.
LEGO Rock Raiders feels like an early version of the Traveller's Tales LEGO games. Like those games, it's a simplistic action game with collectathon elements and silly cutscenes that lack voice acting besides basic grunts. It's actually surprising how much of the basic formula is here despite not being made by the same developer, though of course the biggest change is that this one is not based on an existing franchise, but rather on an original IP, which doesn't carry quite the same level of charm. The basic game is all right though, you play as a group of diggers who need to collect crystals from various mines. You have a decent number of tools at your disposal, from various weapons to a number of vehicles that you can use, and each of the characters has a different special ability, which is often key to completing levels under the time limit to get the gold medal. It's a fairly easy game, but the speedrun targets for gold are often fairly tight and may require you to replay stages. The cutscenes still have a fair bit of the classic LEGO charm and despite the fact that the game is fairly easy I think this would be a decent game for its target audience. Probably a bit of a low G but it was better than I expected.
No One Can Stop Mr Domino is actually not nearly as good as I hoped it might be. The gist of the game is that Mr Domino walks along levels that are set up along a circular track made up of tiles, and a handful of those tiles are goal tiles that will trigger some sort of animation, such as knocking over a house of cards or activating a popcorn popper. The goal of the game is to place dominos, which you do by holding down a button, causing Mr Domino to drop them behind him, such that they lead to the goal tiles, then hit them on the next lap so that the dominos topple over and hit the goal tiles, triggering the animation. Except for the last one, each animation also causes another specific tile to be hit, and if you've placed dominoes there, they will continue the combo, theoretically allowing many goal tiles to be hit with one set of dominoes, though this is much harder than it sounds as there are tons of obstacles in your way, and bumping into any of them will cause you to stop dropping dominoes and break your chain. The core idea is not so terrible in and of itself, and the game definitely has some charm to it, but there are some major flaws to the mechanics, most notably the way health is implemented. Rather than having a traditional health bar which is lost when you get hit by obstacles or something, Mr Domino actually loses health every time you cross a tile, with you generally having about 1-2 laps worth of health when full. It's ostensibly possible to complete a level in just over a full lap, assuming you make a chain of dominoes to hit the first goal tile and then also set up the combo to hit every other goal tile, but realistically most stages will take 2-3 laps because you won't know the exact location of all the goal tiles ahead of time and will probably miss some. You don't have anywhere near enough health to run around the map for that long, so you need to pick up health on the stage, which can only be done by running across special healing tiles, each of which can only be used once. It's absolutely vital to conserve these healing tiles for when your health is low, but annoyingly, there's no visual indicator of your health until it's critically low, by which time it's almost always too late to find a health tile. There's also a godawful reset tile that instantly undoes all of the goal tiles but doesn't give you your health back, which is essentially an instant loss if touched. This setup basically forces you to know the stages inside out and have a route planned ahead of time, then execute that route flawlessly, which is both tremendously frustrating and doesn't have a ton of replay value, since the "correct" solution to each stage is the same every time. Overall, it's a cute game and it's satisfying when you finally get a stage down perfectly, but I don't generally find it to be that fun to play.
DeleteSouth Park Rally is another game that's way better on PS1 compared to N64. Compared to the N64 version of the game, this version looks a lot worse and the cars also move slower, but it controls a lot better and runs at a much better framerate, making it actually possible to race and tell what's going on. This allows you to appreciate the strengths of the game far better, namely the fact that it has a ton of characters from the show and that the races with varying checkpoints are kind of interesting, though the stages where you do anything other than race, like the trophy race and antidote stages are completely terrible. Overall, it's certainly not a great racer, but as a South Park fan there might be something to like here. It's surprising to see just how slapdash the later ports to N64 were that we got two games like this in one topic.
DeleteI was curious to know how they would try to adapt the classic NES Tecmo Super Bowl game to PS1. My suspicion was that they would simply slap the name on a totally new 3D game that bore no resemblance to the original, but instead, the game is almost totally unchanged from the NES version, except that it's nowhere near as good. One of the biggest issues is that somehow despite the game having a much higher resolution and more detailed sprites, it's actually visually much less clear than the NES game. Choosing plays sucks, because the plays are drawn semi-transparently over the field in a way that just looks awful, and keeping track of which player you're controlling and who is the passing target is needlessly difficult with the new visuals. The presentation is actively worse than the NES game, too. First of all, there's no music, when the music was one of the highlights of the NES game, and it even looks worse than the NES game, with terrible player models and animations and no kind of scenes for things like big catches or touchdowns. This is a good example of a franchise that got things right once but never had any clue how to innovate or improve after that one game.
TRAG is essentially Resident Evil without zombies. Almost every aspect of the game is incredibly derivative of Capcom's game, it has the exact same tank controls and stiff gameplay, it uses fixed camera angles, you have to explore to find items and solve puzzles, you even find notes that are read and stored in the exact same way as Rez Evil. The big difference is that it's not a survival horror game, the areas are mostly bright and there are no real enemy ambushes are anything, supplies are plentiful and the game has no real tension. Stripped of the horror atmosphere, some of the problems with the game become more evident, especially its combat, which is even worse than Rez Evil's. You know how in Rez Evil you can hold a button to aim your gun? Well, you don't have that here, you just have to blind fire, and if you're even 1 degree off your shots just miss, and you take forever to put your gun down. Some of the characters use melee attacks instead, though these aren't really much better, they similarly lock you into long attack animations so you'll get hit a lot more while using them. Luckily, each character has a desperation attack you can perform by pressing X and Square for a little health that hits everything around you, so you'll probably be using that a lot. Speaking of, the game has multiple characters you can play as, and one of the coolest parts of the game is that the story branches and you explore different areas depending on the choices you make at certain points. Despite this, the game is still somewhat fun, the "explore a large area looking for keycards and key items" gameplay still works well for the most part (though the game badly needs faster message speed), it's just clearly not up to Rez Evil's standard.