This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Gex: Enter the Gecko - GAGABAAAA - 55% (9)
LEGO Rock Raiders - BGB - 33% (3)
No One Can Stop Mr Domino - AGAAG - 70% (5)
South Park Rally - BBBBAB - 8% (6)
Tecmo Super Bowl - GBA - 50% {3}
TRAG - GGA - 83% (3)
Interestingly, the two Gex games actually got the same score on PS1. Both also scored vastly better than the N64 version of Gex 2.
Games for this topic:
Bass Landing
Cotton Original
Master's Fighter, The
Rugrats: Search for Reptar
Taiketsu Rumi-Zu
Woody Woodpecker Racing
I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the original Cotton considering there's a recent remake of it. We also have another kart racer in Woody Woodpecker, considering he's basically the original troll it seems like a good fit for it.
Bass Landing - A
ReplyDeleteCotton Original - G
Master's Fighter, The - B
Rugrats: Search for Reptar - G
Taiketsu Rumi-Zu - B
Woody Woodpecker Racing - B
Cotton is a simple but fun horizontal shmup. It's a port of an arcade game that was very old by this point, but it still plays quite well. The game's most notable mechanic is that defeated enemies drop crystals that you can shoot to turn into either experience to power your main weapon, or into one of two consumable bomb-like magic spells, in a manner very similar to Twinbee's bells. Similar to Twinbee, trying to shoot the crystals to turn them the colour you want while also not being killed in the process is a fun mechanic, and the magic attacks you can get from the crystals are fun to use too. You also have 1-2 little fairy companions who also provide you with shots and can be used for a special attack, which is devastating to some enemies but worthless on others, and they also enable an alternate magic spell if you use both buttons. It's not a complex setup and you can obliterate most things with magic, which you can also get a ton of, but it's a fun game nonetheless. Compared to the SNES version, Cotton 100%, which is somewhat of a reimagining of this game, there are some differences. The PS1 version looks a lot better and you get vastly more bombs, as the crystals don't reward magic in the SNES version, which I think is not nearly as fun, but on SNES there are multiple different magic spells that you can choose from that aren't present here. Still, I think this version is quite a bit better overall, and as I mentioned when we reviewed the SNES game, I like these versions of Cotton much better than Panorama Cotton, which looks nice but doesn't play nearly as well.
The Master's Fighter is easily one of the worst fighting games of all time. Everything about this game just feels cheap and terrible. For starters, there's how it looks. The sprites are terribly pixelated and have very weird colour choices, as though they were trying to fit this game into a 16-colour palette or something. Animations are also really bad, hitboxes are almost nonexistent, moves have nonsensical hitstun, often leading to moves being punishable on hit, many sweeps don't knock down, whether moves hit high or low seems to have been decided at random, there are no combos, motion detection is atrocious, the victory quotes are just basic grunts, characters stand back up after being KOed... there's really just no end to the amount of ways to slag this game. I actually almost wonder if it was made this bad on purpose or something, as some kind of twisted joke on anyone who might ever play it. At any rate, there's no reason to waste any longer talking about this garbage.
Bass Landing is another one of those great contrasts that I didn't intend but I'm glad worked out the way it did. Compared to Seabass Fishing, which is far too simplistic for its own good, Bass Landing is by far the most complex fishing game I've ever played. Nothing illustrates this better than the game's tutorial, which is divided into 7 lengthy sessions with complex exercises and instructions in each, and completing the entire thing takes about 3 hours. Purely calling it a tutorial is probably doing it a bit of a disservice, though, as it doesn't just aim to teach you how to play the game, but about real-life fishing as well, there are some fairly well-written lectures about the function of different types of lures and the behavioural patterns of bass, which the game somewhat mimics through its mechanics. After playing this game, I now understand the difference between a crank bait and a popper bait, which is inconsequential in most fishing games besides perhaps the fact that different fish like different ones, but this game not only teaches you when you should use each one (it has to do with the weather, temperature, and season) but also how to reel each one in to attract fish, which involves not only knowing the patterns to use when reeling but also making certain movements with the rod to simulate movement. This is actually kind of interesting, it gives a level of nuance to tackle selection that simply isn't present in other fishing games. It's not all good though. For starters, the little tests associated with the lessons are far too hard. Most of them give you a very specific task to perform and an incredibly tight time limit, ensuring that you'll fail if you don't nail it on the first try (and sometimes you even need to be somewhat lucky as well). Without save states, I could see each test taking dozens of tries to pass, which very few would have the patience for. Once you get through the lessons and onto the real gameplay, it also starts to show some of the issues that plague other fishing games as well. In particular, although the game builds it up a lot in the lessons, driving the boat is easily the worst part of the game. It controls fine, but trying to use the depth meter to find fish is tedious and slow, since you have to come to a near dead stop to get an accurate reading out of it, and it's obnoxious to find the perfect spot and choose the perfect tackle for the weather and season, only to find that there just happen not to be any fish there right now, forcing you to start the process from scratch. Once you actually land a fish, the fish fighting is fine, though it's a bit simplistic compared to all the other mechanics in the game, you basically just hold the reel button and pull the rod opposite the fish. Sometimes you want to use the fast reel or change the line tension but putting down and away from the fish will work like 90% of the time. Overall, there are some good ideas here but the accessibility could use some work and some parts could be streamlined. One example is to the UI, in some of the training missions other UI features are shown that the game does not typically use, like how the game will display an indicator when you're doing the reeling technique properly for your bait, which is enormously helpful, that should be an option in the real game. There's also a lesson where you can see the underwater cam, which both looks great and makes figuring out how to attract fish a million times easier, but it's only allowed for one part of a lesson because the game seems to pride itself on the fact that it doesn't allow you to do this in normal fishing. I'm interested to see what this game's sequel is like, it sort of feels like they just threw a bunch of ideas at the wall with this game, some of which are pretty good and others not so much, with some further refinement this could have real potential.
DeleteI was a bit worried going in given the series mixed track record, but Search for Reptar is actually pretty fun. The first and most important thing is that it really nails the look and style of the show. There's a 3D rendition of the show's opening at the start and each level begins with a typical episode title card, both of which are dead ringers for the original (I'm also surprised I remember them this well after all this time), and it also seems to have all of the original voice actors. The gist of the game is that you need to find the pieces of Tommy's Reptar puzzle, though this barely matters, it's just an excuse plot to go on various Rugrats-themed adventures, such as going mini-golfing or finding Grampa's missing teeth. These are quite charming and often fairly funny, the series's oddball sense of humour definitely makes the transition intact. One of my favourite moments is a minigame where you have to play keepaway with Angelica and a box of cookies, tossing it between the babies and scarfing down as many cookies as you can before she catches you, which is legitimately hysterical. Overall, it's a very short and easy game, but you can tell it was made with a lot of love for the source material, so it's a worthy playthrough for fans of the show.
DeleteTaiketsu Rumi-Zu is a weird game. In a certain sense, it plays kind of like Bomberman, it takes place on a similar sort of grid, supports 4 players, and the goal is to be the last one standing, but instead of using bombs to trap and catch opponents, you instead use water. The water is activated by turning valves, which will open a nearby drain, allowing water to rush out. It will turn at corner and split at walls, and continue until it comes across a manhole. If the water hits you, it carries you into a manhole and you're out, unless you have the inner tube item. Items are obtained through water balloons, which can be hit by the water to reveal their contents. The biggest issue with the game is that you simply don't have much control over what's going on. For starters, opening a valve takes a pretty long time, making it almost impossible to create any specific plays or capitalize on situations. For example, you might see another player running towards you to run away from water, and a clever player might want to send more water after them so they'd be trapped, but you simply can't do this fast enough to be effective. At best, you might be able to close off an escape route if you have the ice block or water bag items, but the random appearance and disappearance of the manholes will still frequently save people and foil your plans. As such, the primary strategy is just to focus on keeping yourself alive, maybe break a few water balloons to try to get an inner tube, which nearly guarantees victory, and wait for everyone else to die on their own, which obviously isn't very fun. This is just another one of those cases where the game could have worked but needed more tuning. I sometimes wonder if many good games (like Bomberman for example) just got lucky with their tuning, as with slightly worse mechanics they easily could end up being forgotten like this game.
Woody Woodpecker Racing is pretty bad. I had one hope for this game going in, which is that I'd be able to blast someone and then go "hoo hoo ha heh heh", which thankfully is indeed present in the game, though they use it for passing opponents instead. Unfortunately, there's really not a lot else to it. It's one of the most barebones kart racers you'll find anywhere with virtually no unique or interesting mechanics. The game has all the basics down, there are zip pads (well, they're little swirls in this game), items to pick up and use, and a basic powerslide move, but nothing about it works especially well or stands out. There's no mini-turbo, for example, the powerslide just lets you turn a little sharper, and the controls generally aren't very good. There are multiple vehicles to drive, which might have been intended to be the game's selling point, but they all feel the exact same, seeming to be an almost purely cosmetic feature. I might have actually considered A for this game if it came out earlier, but it released in 2000, long after Mario Kart 64 and Crash Team Racing established the formula for how to do a kart racer right, so I really can't cut it too much slack. If we compare this to something like Chocobo Racing, which itself is considered to be kind of a second-tier kart racer, that game has a ton more things going for it - a funny story mode, the unique magicite mechanic, a ton of memorable characters, great music, etc. This game really just doesn't have much to offer beyond the laugh.
Delete