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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Ganbare Goemon: Uchuu Kaizoku Akogingu - GG - 100% (2)
Gungage - GG - 100% (2)
Irem Arcade Classics - ABBB - 13% (4)
PGA Tour 98 - AB - 25% (2)
Real Racing: Toyota, The - BAG - 50% {3}
TigerShark - AABBB - 20% (5)
Bit of a quite one last week, I was hoping to see more votes for Gungage, which I'd say is a bit of a hidden gem. It's always my hope that people will go back and take a look into some of these games later when they have the time.
Games for this topic:
Legend
Moto Racer 2
NHL Faceoff 2001
Parasite Eve
Rampage 2: Universal Tour
Shoot
Something about "Shoot" feels vaguely threatening to me, probably the angry guy with a shotgun on the boxart plus the word SHOOT in huge letters. It looks significantly scarier than Parasite Eve, despite it being based on an actual horror franchise. Still, I can easily tell which of the two I'd have rather received for the holidays.
Legend - A
ReplyDeleteMoto Racer 2 - G
NHL Faceoff 2001 - G
Parasite Eve - A
Rampage 2: Universal Tour - G
Shoot - B
Legend is an okay game with a few interesting ideas and a few big problems. Its unique mechanic is that it's a beat-em up with a heavy focus on weapon usage. Weapons have both limited durability and will be dropped if you're knocked down, and even though you can fight unarmed, it's vastly worse than having a proper weapon as you don't really stagger enemies and they can easily interrupt you. Weapons are plentiful, but grabbing one in the middle of combat isn't the easiest thing in the world, which gives the game kind of an interesting feel. However, it doesn't have much going for it beyond this. It is absurdly repetitive, even moreso than most beat-em-ups, every stage is just endless corridors of the same enemies over and over, and even though the battle system is interesting it can only stay fresh for so long. The game also has some control problems. It has a number of special attacks, but they're very awkward to use. You have to hold R1 and R2 and input special combinations to use magic flasks or special combos, which simply feels awkward, especially since L1 and L2 are unused. There are other instances of stiffness in controls as well, jumps are super slow, and running also feels clunky. There's definitely a few things to like here and sometimes the game feels good, then other times you'll try to do a special combo or use a flask and it won't come out and you'll get destroyed for it. There was potential here, but this really needed a sequel to polish it up a bit more.
When we covered the original Moto Racer, I noted that the Superbike and Supercross sections of the game didn't feel especially cohesive and that the Superbikes felt overly fast and hard to control, with my hope being that they would focus the sequel more around the supercross aspect and maybe tone down the superbikes a little. Instead, EA looked at the game and said "what this game needs is a hard rock soundtrack and to be even faster". Clearly they must have been fans of F-Zero because this game is basically F-Zero on bikes now. Surprisingly, it works, largely due to a drastically improved handling system that makes controlling the game's breakneck speeds (mostly) possible. As for Supercross, it actually got the axe entirely, probably for the best as highly technical Supercross stadiums wouldn't work well at this level of speed, instead they've been replaced by Motocross events that play mostly like the Superbike sections, just slightly slower and narrower, but the core gameplay remains pretty much the same. There is one problem with the game, though. There's a reason F-Zero X was on N64 and had really simplistic geometry, it's because going this fast requires a lot of processing power and the PS1 can't always keep up with this game. It's fine on some courses, but on courses with more complex visuals there are segments that drop a ton of frames, and when you're going 200mph you need every frame possible. It's not enough to drag the game out of G range, but it feels like a punch to the gut every time it happens, and there's many tracks where it will happen every time on a certain part of the course. Besides this, there's also been some improvements to the championship mode and the game has more tracks now, so it feels like a decent overall package, and the new soundtrack is pretty great, I just wish it ran a little bit more smoothly.
I originally intended to cover NHL Faceoff 2001 shortly after we did Blades of Steel on N64, but I ended up pushing it back for some reason I no longer remember, which is kind of unfortunate as the two games are quite comparable, both being very fast-paced arcade-style hockey games. For starters, NHL Faceoff is a very solid game, with great controls, visuals and commentary. Gameplay-wise, this is a far faster game, though, having even more resemblance to something like NHL '94 than Blades of Steel does. Something I noticed about this game right away is that the ice feels very open, likely due to a combination of the rinks being large and your players being quite fast. The viewing angle also does a great job of showing a ton of the rink at a time while still making it easy to follow the action, which makes the game a playmaker's dream, where you can easily pass all over the ice and set up crazy plays. Like in most good hockey games, it's also fairly easy to score, though some of this is just the constant barrage of incredible shots the goalies will be facing due to the game's playmaking capacity. Despite this, defense does not feel inordinately weak, checking still works well, but there's probably a bit less nuance to this game compared to Blades of Steel. Nevertheless, if you prefer your hockey to be more on the fast and crazy side there's certainly a ton to like here.
DeleteParasite Eve is an interesting title in some ways, but it was also a much lower-budget affair for Square that can't quite stand up to their better games. One of the first things to know about Parasite Eve is that it is absurdly short. A standard playthrough of the game will clock in at only around 8 hours, which would be low even for a SNES RPG, let alone on PS1. When compared to FF7, the entire game would pretty much fit within the Midgar segment of the game. That being said, short does not automatically mean bad, there are many games that are less than 8 hours and are great, it depends on the gameplay and replayability of the game. Unfortunately, these aren't especially great either, and the game actually starts to feel repetitive partway through despite its short length. Parasite Eve features a real-time battle system where you can run around and dodge enemy attacks, then fire back at them using your gun. It's a refreshing change of pace at first, but it quickly starts to wear thin. Aya can attack only when her meter fills up, which means you spend a lot of time running around and waiting until you can do something, and so do the enemies, which means quite a lot of time in battle is spent just waiting for something to happen. Enemy variety is also not great and most enemies have only a single attack, while bosses have many attacks that can't be avoided at all, which compromises the action aspect. The game's customization is also very lacking. The game has a tuning system which ostensibly allows you to customize your guns quite a lot, but it has much less depth than first appears. Certain guns have various modifiers, affecting things like their rate of fire, AOE, critical rate, elemental damage, etc, which you can move to other guns, and their damage, range, and clip size can also be upgraded and transferred. The problem is that this system is fairly poorly balanced, killing almost all variety and strategy. For starters, a lot of the modifiers are simply bad and you'd never want to use them. The ones that let you shoot many times per turn are awful, they don't do any more damage than just shooting twice, and they lock you in place way longer, causing you to take far more hits while trying to attack. Similarly, the elemental effects are poorly balanced, when hitting an enemy's weakness you do 1.5x damage, but when hitting the wrong element you do only 0.2x damage, and many lategame enemies resist everything, so you'll never use these. The ability to pull mods off guns and stick them on other guns also causes guns to quickly feel generic and disposable. The only stats of a gun that matter are how many slots it has and what weapon type it is, as the stats of guns barely get better throughout the game and the increases will not even come close to keeping pace with the boosts you'll be able to transfer, so you'll just pick a gun early, slap all the good mods on it, then pull stats off other guns to boost it, which kills all the excitement of finding new weapons.
DeleteSpeaking of gun types, there are a few, but they're also terribly balanced. Handguns and Machine Guns shoot faster and build the turn bar faster than all other types of guns while having no drawbacks, so they're the only ones worth considering. Rifles, Shotguns, and Grenade Launchers are all actually the same gun, having the same fire rate and turn bar speed, and are worthless, existing only to have their modifiers swiped and put on your other guns. If the weapon categories actually mattered more (for example, the burst effect should probably be inherent to shotguns and non-transferrable, and the grenade launcher should do an AOE when it hits, maybe rifle could have a high critical rate), this might give the game some replay value, but it just feels like another missed opportunity. The game's inventory system is also a pain, you have limited inventory space that quickly fills up with literal junk, forcing you to discard items or run back to the police station to store your items constantly, which feels needlessly tedious and adds nothing to gameplay. There's also limited ammo, but this is an irrelevant mechanic as you will always find vastly more ammo than you could ever need, if weapons had different types of ammo and it was more limited this might have helped add more strategy to the game, since it'd give you a reason to use other weapon types. There is also a new game plus mode, which gives you access to the game's bonus dungeon, which arguably helps to boost the game's length, as the bonus dungeon is about as long as the rest of the game put together, but it's also very tedious and repetitive and the limitations in the game's systems become very evident by this point. Despite all of this, the game isn't all bad, it still has some of that classic Squaresoft magic. The setting is cool, the music is pretty good (though there's not a lot of it, the main theme sees a LOT of use), and the graphics are pretty great for their time. There are definitely a few cool moments and I like the parts where the game dips into a bit of a horror theme, though I wish they had gone farther with this. Character development is pretty poor, though, we barely learn anything about the characters due to the game's brevity and linearity, Aya in particular receives virtually no development or characterization. It's kind of a shame this was clearly a B-tier project for Square because I do feel like the idea had a lot of potential, it just needed to be fleshed out a lot more. If the game was about twice as long and had better balancing and character development this would probably be an all-time classic.
DeleteLike I mentioned when we covered the N64 version, I think Rampage Universal Tour is the best game in the series. It hasn't changed a ton since the previous game, but I already kind of liked it and they improved just enough to make this one feel definitively better. The biggest change is that the game is now divided into groups of stages that unlock new characters, which gives the game a better feeling of progression than the first game. It's kind of lame that in order to use the new characters you have to enter a passcode and can't simply swap to them after they're unlocked, but it still helps make the game feel more focused than before. Compared to the N64 version, this version has cutscenes, but they're mostly throwaways. I don't like the controls here quite as much as on N64, where they are perfect (this is largely because there are a limited number of control schemes available and you can't get one that matches the N64 layout), and the fact that a multitap is needed for 3 player is also a minor downgrade. Still, it's pretty much the same game on both platforms so whichever version you prefer is fine. Of course, one other difference is there's actually one more game in the series that is exclusive to PS1, but that's a story for another time.
DeleteShoot proports to be a minigame collection with 7 games, but it's actually a collection of 3 games, with the other games simply being reskins of them, which is pretty scummy. Wild West / Ace is the standout game in the package. It's a gallery shooter that bare some resemblance to Wild Guns, though it's not nearly as good. I wish this game had twinstick controls as the ability to aim and move at the same time would be a solid improvement over Wild Guns, but it does make one good innovation in that a circle is shown when enemies are shooting at you, making their bullets much easier to track. It's still a very simple game, far moreso than Wild Guns, and doesn't have a lot of visual style, but it's tolerable. War Drones, Space Rebellion, IF-22, and Air Rescue are all the same game, which is actually a game we already reviewed for GAB called Jet Ace, just skinned with different planes (IF-22 is literally Jet Ace). As before, this is a somewhat overly simplistic plane game where you mostly just shoot things and fly through rings, which in no way felt like a complete enough game to be a full retail release. It does a little better as part of a collection, but the fact that 4 of the 7 games in this set are the same really hurts it. The last game is G-Squad which is unique, but not great. It feels a bit like a traditional light gun game where you just aim and shoot enemies that appear on the screen, ideally before they can shoot you too many times. You can swap weapons and such, but it feels slow and not very exciting. Overall, Wild West and IF-22 are both okay, and if the collection actually contained 5 other distinct games the package might be A (maybe toss in a basic horizontal and vertical shmup, some kind of shooting gallery game and maybe a simple Doom-style FPS), but the fact that it's only really 3 games sinks it. The most absurd thing is that apparently all 7 of these games have separate retail releases, even the ones that are pure reskins of each other, though the fact that we've done them here means we don't have to cover them again, so there is a silver lining.