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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bass Landing - AAA - 50% (3)
Cotton Original - GAGG - 88% (4)
Master's Fighter, The - BBB - 0% (3)
Rugrats: Search for Reptar - GAGGA - 80% (5)
Taiketsu Rumi-Zu - AB - 25% (2)
Woody Woodpecker Racing - ABB - 17% (3)
A pretty strong showing for Rugrats after some disappointing past performances. It's always nice to see games that do justice to beloved childhood IPs.
Games for this topic:
Ganbare Goemon: Uchuu Kaizoku Akogingu
Gungage
Irem Arcade Classics
Real Racing: Toyota, The
PGA Tour 98
TigerShark
It's the 100th topic! PS1 GAB is now tied for the third-longest running GAB (though it has a long way to go before it will be #1, as SNES had 180 topics). We have kind of an electic mix here, I actually think some of these games look pretty cool (and I'm always down for more Goemon), so while this maybe isn't a celebration of the biggest names on the platform I think it's an interesting topic nonetheless.
Ganbare Goemon: Uchuu Kaizoku Akogingu - G
ReplyDeleteGungage - G
Irem Arcade Classics - B
Real Racing: Toyota, The - G
PGA Tour 98 - B
TigerShark - B
Ganbare Goemon: Uchuu Kaizoku Akogingu feels almost exactly like the SNES Goemon games. Presentation-wise, it's a bit underwhelming for a Playstation game, with only some very minor graphical effects like parallax to distinguish it from the SNES titles, and there's also no voice acting, which was even present in the 4th SNES game, but gameplay-wise it's quite solid. Like the first and third games on SNES, there's a mixture of overhead and side-scrolling gameplay here, and there's also some adventure elements, you can collect the silver fortune dolls to increase your health like in the N64 game and there's also a lot of puzzles to solve. One change I like is that the difficulty feels appropriate this time around, you still have a boatload of health like in the N64 game, but the challenge is a lot higher, so that health actually feels somewhat necessary. You'll also need to swap between the characters a lot more often than in most other games in the series, as their unique abilities are needed almost constantly to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. The series' trademark madcap humour is also definitely still present here and the Impact battles are as solid as ever. Overall, while it's certainly not pushing the PS1 in any way, it's still a solid game.
Gungage rocks. I often mention that with many G-level games you can tell if the game is G in like 2 minutes, and this is another one of those cases. Gungage is a third-person shooter, and one of the first things that stands out are the controls, which are awesome. Gungage isn't a dual stick game, so it makes heavy use of autoaim, but the autoaim is very competent. As long as you hold down the shoot button, it will lock onto whatever you're currently shooting until it dies, giving you a lot of freedom of movement (this is how Megaman Legends ought to have worked), and the jumping and strafing controls feel good to use. I have to give special credit to the default character's dodge move, which is easily my favourite mechanic in the game. By tapping strafe twice, you can perform a sideways jump that also greatly speeds up your cursor, allowing you to leap out of the way of an enemy rushing at you then immediately whip around and shoot them in the back the second you land, which feels super badass. You'll be doing it a lot, too, the first few stages are a fairly easy warm up, but the difficulty ramps up quickly as you get farther into the game, forcing you to make good use of your specials and learn enemy patterns in order to succeed. There's quite a lot of content here too. There's 4 playable characters total, and they're actually quite different from each other. For example, the second character lacks the cool dodge move and is generally slow, but instead has many different weapons. Rather than just jumping in to a room full of guys and dodging your way around all their shots, he can instead use his bouncy grenade and homing missiles to pick some of them off from around a corner, then overwhelm whatever's left with his flamethrower or laser. Each character also does the stages in a different order, and takes different routes through some of the stages that they share, which helps the game avoid feeling repetitive. There's also some hidden unlockables you can get by finding flowers in each stage (many of which are only accessible to specific characters) to further increase replay value. The presentation of the game is also pretty strong, the music rocks and it's also a pretty decent looking game that runs pretty well, the last few levels have some occasional slowdown when there's a ton of enemies onscreen, but with the amount of bullets flying at you you'll probably appreciate the extra reaction time. My only complaint is that I wish the game supported the analog stick for movement as holding up on the Dpad for the whole game eventually gets tiring, but overall this is another super solid title from Konami.
DeleteThe term "classic" is used very loosely in Irem Arcade Classics. This collection includes 3 games, Kung-Fu, 10-Yard Fight, and Zippy Race, all of which are early 80s arcade games which also saw ports to NES. 10-Yard Fight is famously terrible and the arcade version really isn't any better. Zippy Race is an absurdly primitive early racing game that plays somewhat like a much worse version of Spy Hunter. Kung Fu is the only somewhat fun game in the set, but it's not a significant upgrade over the NES version. The package is also super barebones and has no extras or anything. Irem actually put out some pretty good games, like R-Type, Image Fight, and Lode Runner, so it really makes you wonder what the selection process for this collection was. Had they included a few more games this might have been a worthwhile set, but this is bottom of the barrel as retro collections from this era are concerned.
The Real Racing: Toyota is extremely well fleshed out for a budget title. The first thing that's apparent is there's a lot of content here. For a budget title, you'd probably be expecting like 3 cars and 3 tracks, but instead, it has like 12 cars and 9 tracks. It plays fairly well too, it's a bit basic, there's no car customization or upgrading or anything, but the handling system works well, it has a rock solid framerate, and the AI cars have a decent, well-balanced difficulty level (this is something a pretty large amount of racers get wrong). It even looks pretty decent and has a very solid soundtrack. The only thing that really gives away its budget nature is its lack of progression. There is a basic grand prix mode and it also supports 2 player races, but there's not all that much to the game beyond this, which is a little weird because I feel like if they had just made a couple different speed classes and made some of the cars unlockable this could easily have been sold as a full-price game. Still, while it doesn't stand up to the best racing games on the system in terms of content or polish, I feel like you really can't complain about what you're getting here for the price. Definitely one of the best games of the Simple 1500 series.
DeleteI'm shocked that PGA Tour 98 is still as bad as it is. I was sure they'd have moved onto a proper 3D engine by now, but the game is still using the only "quasi-3D" engine that they've had for half a decade now, and the gameplay hasn't seen much improvement either. One thing that has improved a little is the UI, there's commentary now and the game will show a small picture of the place your ball will land, though obviously this is vastly inferior to the ability to zoom the camera to that location as you can in Mario Golf. Putting is terrible in this game, as the grid on the green makes it almost impossible to get any kind of feel for the slope, so that still needs a lot more work. As I've mentioned before, I also completely hate the swing mechanic from this series, the circular bar makes judging the timing on shots far more annoying than it needs to be and even being slightly off on the timing causes the ball to go way off course, a straight meter is just so much better for playability. Another issue with the game is that it has TONS of load time. Every course has a several second load before it starts, then you're taken to a simplistic overview of the course where the commentator explains the general strategy, then it loads again to start the hole. The little commentary is kind of cool, but they should have used this to mask the load time rather than having it load twice, which just makes the game feel absurdly slow, particularly because the game needs a little time to render the next scene after every shot, too. While some improvements have been made over the completely dismal past entries in this series, it's just way too dated by this point. Even CyberTiger feels like it's miles ahead of this game in every respect. It looks like they finally redesigned the game to use a 3D Engine with the next installment so I'm looking forward to that one.
TigerShark is hugely disappointing. It's a cool premise, you control a transforming sub / boat that can fight both on the surface and underwater, but unfortunately the game simply isn't fun at all, largely due to technical and balancing issues. For starters, this game has probably the worst collision physics of any game I've ever played. Everything in the game is treated as though it's a rectangle, and the rectangle around your ship is much bigger than the ship itself, causing you to collide with structures even though you're clearly not touching them. It's quite absurd to cleanly go around a building and smack into it anyway because the invisible box around your craft touched it, especially because this game's geometry is extremely simple so doing proper collisions wouldn't have been hard. To make matters worse, touching anything also brings you to a dead stop, forcing you to realize what happened and then start accelerating again, and your acceleration in this game is not fast. Beyond this, combat is obnoxious too. Everything in the game is a perfect aimbot, the moment you enter their field of vision (which is often larger than the game's draw distance) they will constantly pelt you with lasers that never miss, probably because they only have to hit a massive cube around your craft rather than your craft itself. Going to the surface is also worthless, as every underwater enemy can still shoot you there, as well as some surface-only enemies, so you'll stay underwater 99% of the time, it might have been more interesting if the other form was instead a plane, that would at least give you some protection from the relentless assault of underwater enemies. The controls are also pretty bad, there's a useful sonar button on L1, but you also have to constantly cycle targets with circle to fire missiles, which is a tedious process when you also have to be constantly managing your thrust, it would have been nice if they would either auto-lock when you Sonar or just aim at what the cursor is positioned over. Even if you do make progress the stages are very samey and uninteresting. Overall, it just feels extremely bad to play despite its cool premise and no matter how much time I tried to give it it just became more and more clear that it is B.
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