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Last Topic's Ratings:
GunGriffon - BAAAA - 40% (5)
Hyper Duel - GGGGG - 100% (5) (1 SR)
King of Fighters 95 - AGGGGGG - 93% (7)
Minnesota Fats: Pool Legend - GAA - 67% (3)
Race Drivin - BBBB - 0% (4)
Star Bowling, The - GA - 75% (2)
Hyper Duel ended up being both the first game to get 100% and to get an SR for the Saturn GAB. And Race Drivin' still can't catch a break no matter how many systems it appears on.
Games for this topic:
Dejig: AquaWorld
Lunar: The Silver Star
NinPen Manmaru
Slam 'n Jam '96 featuring Magic & Kareem
Star Fighter
Street Fighter Alpha
Lunar: The Silver Star wasn't released in English on Saturn, but there's a translation patch for it. Also, I'm looking forward to trying out Ninpen Manmaru, it looks kind of neat. Also, I just realized this week's topic title reads like one of those before and after puzzles from Wheel of Fortune.
Dejig: AquaWorld - B
ReplyDeleteLunar: The Silver Star - G
NinPen Manmaru - B
Slam 'n Jam '96 featuring Magic & Kareem - G
Star Fighter - A
Street Fighter Alpha - G
Dejig is really bad. It's an extremely basic jigsaw puzzle game but it does pretty much everything wrong. The puzzles are in low resolution, are generally poorly designed and have large sections that are a single colour or have no identifying features, and rotation is a mechanic, which is almost always terrible in these games. The game also has no options whatsoever and as such the game feels extremely barebones, and it also has literally the worst soundtrack of all time, with each song being a literal 3 second loop of only 6 notes or so (this is the only game I've ever played where the music is worse than what I could compose myself). Its only saving grace are the little movies you can watch when you complete a puzzle but they're nowhere near enough to redeem this game.
Coming back to Lunar again was more interesting than I had expected. When we review games for GAB that we've covered before on another system, I'll often read my review of the previous version of the game after I finish my playtime with it, to see if my thoughts match what I said previously, and it usually pretty much matches up, but this is one of the rare times where it doesn't. When I rated the PS1 version of Lunar, I said that I felt it was borderline between A and G and I thought Grandia was probably the better game overall but I enjoyed Lunar more. Coming back to it, I now realize that Lunar is very clearly G and it's also clearly better than Grandia, almost certainly because Grandia is now much fresher in my mind, having rated it for PS1 just recently (this wasn't intentional, but is a lucky coincidence). Grandia has some things going for it but its pacing is quite bad, as I noted in the Grandia review it takes close to an hour to get into a real battle, dungeons drag on way too long, battles take way too long, and it just generally feels slow. Lunar, on the other hand, is quite well paced. You can get into the first dungeon within 10 minutes (2 minutes if you skip the cutscenes), the dungeons are generally a much more reasonable length, and battles go by far faster. It is definitely a somewhat simpler game compared to Grandia, but when that complexity comes at the expensive of pacing it's usually not worth it, and Lunar still has a boatload of charm and just enough difficulty that it doesn't get dull. It's probably telling that even though I've beaten 2 different versions of this game and played through the others pretty far on several occasions, when I have to come back and play it again for a review it still feels fun and engaging, while when I had to go back to Grandia (which I've only ever played through one time) it instantly felt tedious. It really just can't be stated enough how critical pacing is to the quality of a JRPG, almost every good JRPG heavily relies upon it. At any rate, back on the subject of Lunar: The Silver Star, the Saturn version is almost identical to the PS1 version. An interesting quirk is that if you're using the dubbed version of the translation patch, they've actually inserted the dub from the PSP game, which is vastly better than the original PS1 dub, so this kind of gives Saturn an edge, though I feel this shouldn't count because obviously the patch is unofficial. It's still a good game on either platform though, and a good example of how pacing and charm can carry a game despite its simplicity.
Ninpen Manmaru is an extremely simplistic early 3D platformer. In some ways the aesthetic reminds me of Jumping Flash, but it's a vastly worse game. For starters, it's incredibly basic, the only goal is to jump your way to the end of each level, you don't even have any attacks. The controls are also not great, the game does a number of things weirdly, for example Ninpen always turns to face the camera, so if you press down, he will run backwards, then when you let go, he'll immediately turn around on his own, which feels really strange, and he also moves forward a bit when attempting to turn left or right. The game involves a heck of a lot of precion platforming between floating platforms that move, and they aren't even synced up in most cases, for example at the end of 2-1 you have to ride a horizontal platform across a chasm, then jump to a platform that moves vertically at the end. Unfortunately, the second platform is on an extremely slow timer and only syncs up with the bottom platform every 3-4 passes or so, potentially forcing you to wait for up to a minute for it to line up. After every set of stages, you get to a duel stage where the goal is to race your rival to collect the most tokens. This is vastly more fun than the main game and if this had been more of a focus, the game might be A, but unfortunately these stages are brief and uncommon.
DeleteSlam 'n Jam '96 is pretty much the same game as on PS1. It's an arcade-style basketball game that uses a unique "behind the basket" perspective, similar to NBA In the Zone. The two games are quite similar, both being very fast-paced and having similar controls. Of the two, I think NBA In the Zone is a little better gameplay-wise but Slam n' Jam looks a bit better. The player sprites here are a particular highlight, the players are all totally identifiable and look great, which stands out compared to many other games of the era where the players are almost totally nondescript (compare Tecmo Super Bowl from the PS1 topic for example). It's a toss-up between the two games on PS1, but NBA In The Zone isn't on Saturn, so the choice is much easier here. A solid game in any case.
Star Fighter is a potentially interesting game hamstrung by technology issues. It's a flight game, similar to something like Ace Combat, but it has an incredibly primitive 3D engine that draws each tile of the map at a time, similar to the the PS1 Racing game Hi-Octane. This results in atrociously poor draw distance even compared to other games of the era, which is a shame because almost every other aspect of the game is pretty cool. The game controls well and has a great soundtrack, and the missions have pretty decent variety. There is a map that you can call up at any time and if you make very heavy use of it the game is somewhat playable, but it's far harder to play than it should be, which is too bad because with a proper 3D engine this game would probably be G. As it stands, I think it's the lowest of low As, I could definitely see the argument for B because it really is borderline unplayable, but when it is sort of working it has its moments.
DeleteStreet Fighter Alpha is also pretty much the same as PS1. Saturn sometimes has an edge in fighting games due to its superior RAM, but the PS1 port of Alpha 1 is very good, so there's really nothing to complain about on either system. What I find most surprising is how well this game holds up. Compared to Alpha 2 and 3, Alpha 1 is a bit more simple. There's no custom combos or ISMs yet, but to be honest, I don't mind it that way. I have sort of the same impression of this game that I have of X-Men vs Street Fighter where the simplicity helps make it more accessible and also helps it not feel completely redundant in the face of its successors. About the only thing that's a little lame is the character roster in this game is a bit small, but it still looks great for its time and has a great soundtrack. It really shows how far fighting games have come since the 16-bit era that a game this well-polished would have the main strike against it be that it might be a bit too basic.