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Last Topic's Ratings:
Dejig: AquaWorld - BA - 25% (2)
Lunar: The Silver Star - GGGG - 100% (4)
NinPen Manmaru - BB - 0% (2)
Slam 'n Jam '96 featuring Magic & Kareem - GG - 100% (2)
Star Fighter - AAA - 50% (3)
Street Fighter Alpha - GGGAGGA - 86% (7)
A pretty strong showing overall, though I thought Lunar would get more votes. I suppose due to the language barrier not that many people played the Saturn version.
Games for this topic:
Darius 2
Horde, The
Keriotosse
Mega Man X3
Puyo Puyo Tsuu
SeaBass Fishing
A lot of classic games in the Saturn topic this time. I'm kind of curious to figure out what Keriotosse is, because it's not really clear from the box art.
Darius 2 - A
ReplyDeleteHorde, The - B
Keriotosse - B
Mega Man X3 - A
Puyo Puyo Tsuu - G
SeaBass Fishing - A
Darius 2 is a weird game that's hard to rate. The main thing that's necessary to know about it is that it uses a very unusual arcade cabinet that has a double-wide screen. Most console ports of the game completely revamp the game's stages to try to adapt them to a single screen, but the Saturn version is instead a true port of the arcade version that maintains the extra length, which is achieved by halving the resolution of the game and only using about half the screen space vertically. While it does kind of work, the reduced resolution makes some enemies absurdly small and it can be hard to pick out targets on certain stages with busy backgrounds, like Zone E for example. This is also otherwise a fairly barebones port, with no real options beyond the basic controls and other settings, there's no extra materials here, nor does it come with any other games (might as well have used the same technology to port the original Darius as well). Luckily, the core game is actually pretty good, though the mechanics are basic they're polished quite well, the sound quality is leagues better than the awful Genesis version, and the game has a ton of levels available due to its branching level structure. I do think Darius Twin and Darius Gaiden (both of which were natively designed for a single screen) are better games, it's still interesting to see the arcade version of this concept.
The Horde is a great idea with terrible execution. The core concept of the game is that you have a village that you have to defend from the titular horde. The game alternates between a build phase where you develop the town and build defenses, and an attack phase where you have to fight off the horde. After they are defeated you move back to the build phase and the process repeats. This is actually a very cool idea with a tremendous amount of promise, it sort of feels like an early prototype for a tower defense game. Besides not being wiped out by the horde, you also need to earn money so that you can pay taxes and buy upgrades, which is done between years. The game also features fully acted cutscenes, both a lengthy one for the game's introduction and shorter ones between years and levels that are fairly well done. Unfortunately, almost nothing in the gameplay really works. For starters, you don't control the development of the town itself. The town will automatically expand after every season and your people will plant crops of their own accord. In theory this might automate some of the construction, but expanding the town would probably have been one of the most interesting parts, the the town will expand blindly with no regard for where you've set up defenses (luckily, you can sell and move them at no cost). When it's time to fight the horde, you mainly have to do this yourself, via hand-to-hand combat. Everything about this part of the game sucks. The controls are extremely stiff, the horde's movement is very janky, it's hard to know where they're coming from until they get there, your character moves super slow, and you get bounced around if you get hit. Worse, the traps you can build are also nearly useless. Fences keep the horde out for about half a second, and spike traps, while effective, are used up the second a single enemy gets hit by them, making them an extremely impractical use of funds. You don't really want to spend money on traps anyway, you need most of that money to pay taxes and buy upgrades inbetween years, so the main strategy is just to get really good at the hand to hand combat, which simply isn't fun. It's unfortunate because I feel like if they had refined the gameplay further this likely could have been a G-level game, but unfortunately all of the budget probably went to those cutscenes instead.
Keriotosse is one of the worst games I've ever played. This game is somewhat similar to Poy Poy, but a million times worse. The game takes place in 3D arenas and is a free-for-all between four fighters, just like Poy Poy, but the goal here is to knock the other players off the stage. There will be a couple objects you can interact with, but not nearly as many as in Poy Poy. The basic concept of the game is all right, but the controls and physics are among the worst ever created. For starters, your basic kick attack has virtually no range and the hit detection is atrocious, usually forcing you to sit beside someone and kick them 5 or 6 times until a hit finally registers. After being downed by a kick, players have an extremely unclear amount of invincibility before they can be kicked again, but they are not immune to environmental obstacles during this time, so the general strategy is to kick someone, then follow up with a hit from a ball or something similar to finish them off, but the controls for picking up and launching the balls are also completely terrible so this is almost impossible to actually pull off. The controls for movement are also incredibly slippery and just generally terrible, and the entire game feels almost totally out of control, but not in a good way. This one is just an atrocity and should be avoided at all costs.
DeleteMegaman X3 is pretty much the same game as on PS1. As before, it's mostly the same as the SNES version, except that it features a remixed OST and some extra FMVs in exchange for significant load times before stages. The new FMVs are kind of cool, though the lengthy load times butcher the intended transitions (the intro FMV, for example, intends to end at the exact moment the stage begins, which would be a cool transition if it worked, but it has to go to a blank screen for like 5 seconds first). The remixed OST is also awful. The instrumentation is far worse compared to the SNES version, and the tracks also don't loop properly, they just cut out and restart, which sounds terrible. Overall, this is clearly just one where you should stick to the SNES version.
Thankfully, they didn't manage to screw up Puyo Puyo Tsuu. In case you're somehow not familiar with it, it's a falling block game where you need to connect 4 or more pieces of the same colour, causing them to clear, and any blocks above them to fall, potentially creating chains. The first game involved almost no skill, but they added the ability to block attacks to the second game and the rest is history. Compared to the 16-bit versions of the game, it's virtually identical, save that the 1 player arcade mode allows you to pick the opponents, and the little scenes before the battles now have voice acting. This barely matters, but the core game is still as timeless as it's ever been. True, there's not a ton of reason to play this version anymore when there are so many newer versions of the game that have better visuals and online play and such, but at the same time, the core game is still pretty much identical to the new versions, so you're not really missing out on that much. It just goes to show that great gameplay never really ages.
DeleteApart from the River King series, most older fishing games are pretty bad, but they're slowly getting better as we move through the eras. Every time we talk about fishing games, one of the main things I mention is that the fun of fishing isn't getting the fish to bite, it's fighting the fish after they bite, so one of the keys to making a good fishing game is that hooking a fish should be fairly straightforward. SeaBass Fishing definitely gets this part down, you basically just case your line and a fish will bite near instantly. As for fighting the fish, it's very simple. There's a tension meter, and you need to keep it in the middle, so you hold down the button when it gets low and let go when it gets high and you'll have the fish before you know it. The game does suffer from one of the other issues that many fishing games suffer from, though, which is that each mode wants you to only catch specific types of fish, which you have almost no control over, so you basically just have to catch a ton of fish and hope you get the right ones. Overall, it's a functional game but it's actually probably a little bit too simple. Since there's no nuance at all to hooking fish, you'll just be doing the very simple fish fighting game over and over, which basically comes down to holding a single button and watching a meter in the corner of the screen, and that's basically the entire game. The tournaments are super long, easily giving you time to fight a hundred fish or so, which is way too much. Even the game's music, which is actually pretty great, quickly starts to become repetitive with how short the main cast line / catch fish loop is. A step in the right direction mechanically for sure, but the fish fighting either needs more nuance or there has to be some other elements to the game (like the RPG mechanics from the River King series).