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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Ace Combat 2 - GGGGGGGGG - 100% (9)
Army Men World War: Final Front - GAA - 67% (3)
Deadheat Road - BBB - 0% (3)
F.A. Premier League Football Manager 2000 - BB - 0% (2)
Sabrina the Teenage Witch: A Twitch in Time - BBB - 0% (3)
Table Hockey, The - BB - 0% (2)
People sure love them some Ace Combat, I'm surprised I never hear Ace Combat 2 mentioned when people talk about the best PS1 games. It's a good thing too, because the rest of this topic was a disaster. Has there ever been a topic before with 4 games scoring 0%? I hope not.
Games for this topic:
Jungle Park
MTV Sports: Skateboarding featuring Andy Macdonald
Off-World Interceptor Extreme
One
Raystorm
Tomba
I'm kind of curious about Jungle Park, the artwork for it looks neat, but I can't find any information about it anywhere. One also has maybe the most generic name of any game we've rated so far (it's not even part of the Simple 1500 Series!)
Jungle Park - B
ReplyDeleteMTV Sports: Skateboarding - A
Off-World Interceptor Extreme - A
One - B
RayStorm - B
Tomba - A
Jungle Park is an incredibly weird game. Actually, it's probably not correct to even call it a game, because it doesn't really have gameplay, it's an incredibly weird program. The game starts off with you in front of your house. I had to look up a video to even figure out how to get past this part. You can walk around the house and when you get close to things your monkey character will do stuff with them, such as kicking a bush or drinking tea at a table. None of these interactions have any use whatsoever, but walking around and interacting with things is 99% of the game. To escape this first screen, you have to stand on the red button, rotate the view all the way to the right, pick up the logs behind the house, rotate back to the default orientation (with the button at the bottom), then walk to the top left with the logs, without accidentally interacting with anything (it may help to hold start, which disables interactions). This solves the game's one and only puzzle, allowing you to access the rest of the game, which consists of a variety of mainly empty screens with a few things you can interact with. You can head to the titular Jungle Park by taking a nearby boat, which is ostensibly filled with somewhat more activity, but not purpose. Jungle Park is sort of like a theme park, and you can walk around and do various things, like use a vending machine and go for a swim, but none of these activities actually accomplish anything. There are a few "mini-games" scattered around, for want of a better term, but these are atrocious. For example, in the forest you can play a weird version of table hockey, but like most everything else at the game it animates at like 1 frame per second and is completely unplayable. Even if you win it, it doesn't seem to do anything whatsoever, so perhaps you could call this game an "activity simulator" or something, where you just wander around and do things until you get bored. Which clearly won't be very long as almost nothing about the game is interesting or funny to any degree. I think this could have been fun if there was more to do and the minigames were actually enjoyable, but as it stands it's simply bizarre, but not in a good way.
It's super obvious what game MTV Sports Skateboarding is aspiring to be, but it pales in comparison to Tony Hawk in every way. For starters, let's talk the controls. This game makes an unusual choice where in order to do tricks, you have to press a direction and Square or Circle at the same time, if your tricks aren't coming out, this is why. Ostensibly, this allows for more tricks total, as there are tricks that are linked to double taps and such (ie, double tap up + circle is different from up + circle), but it definitely doesn't feel as intuitive. Nevertheless, I did adjust to it and it's not gamebreaking, the bigger issue is just that the game generally feels uninspired. Like THPS, the game features a career mode, but unlike THPS it's basically just all competition events. On each stage, you have to hit a score of 200000, which is super easy once you get the handle of the trick system (I routinely get 500k-600k), and then you move onto the next one and do it again. Occasionally, there is a sub goal to fulfil, like collecting some symbols around the track in addition to getting a high score, but this doesn't add much to the experience. Though the competitions are tolerable, they feel very static. These events were the worst parts of the THPS games, you basically just find a halfpipe and do grab tricks over and over, with pretty much no incentive to go for grinds or other lines, so basing the game around them predictably leads to a dull experience. There is also a mode where you have to collect MTV symbols which is ostensibly aping Tony Hawk's "SKATE" letters, but it's not nearly as interesting. The symbols are all in obvious locations, with the only challenge being to get them without falling off your board (if you fall, a random symbol gets placed back where it started), which is harder than it should be because the controls aren't as well polished as THPS. While it does get the basics down, this game just can't capture the thrill of exploration that the stages in Tony Hawk had. It's functional, but very uninspired. It looks and sounds decent I guess, but if you want a Tony Hawk game that's not Tony Hawk, Razor Freestyle Scooter is the way to go.
DeleteOffworld Interceptor Extreme is an almost completely mindless game, but I suppose it's tolerable for what it does. In many ways, the game actually reminds me of Off-Road The Baja, it's a game where you're racing into the screen, going over all manner of bumps, and trying to pick up powerups without wrecking your vehicle. However, in this game, far more things are actively trying to destroy you, but other than fire your lasers and drop mines constantly there's not that much you can do about them and they respawn endlessly, so generally the focus is on trying to grab powerups, particularly the all-important repair powerup, so you don't get worn down before you reach the end of the stage. There are also boss fights, but these basically just consist of dumping all of your mines, then hiding at the sides and trying to find more ammo and wrenches before you go in for another salvo. It undoubtedly feels very cheaply designed, the controls and physics are kind of iffy and there's very little nuance to it, but it's tolerably fun for a little while. A strange quirk of the game is that it has FMV cutscenes, but there's also a fake audience riffing on them, which I don't think really works, parody has little bit when the source material wasn't intended to be taken seriously in the first place.
One is completely terrible. It's a 3D platformers / run and gun where the gimmick is that killing enemies gives you health and increases your weapon power, and much of the environment is destructible. The problem here is very simple. Besides shooting, there's also a ton of focus on precision platforming, but every time something blows up, the game's framerate drops to single digits, and things blow up constantly. Even when you're not blowing up, missiles are constantly being fired at you which drop the framerate down to a crawl, usually in the middle of jumps, and you can't simply sit back and wait either as they'll often blow up the path you need to keep moving forward. If this game ran at something resembling a sensible framerate it might be A (it's never great even when it works), but the performance is such an atrocity that it's a clear B.
DeleteUnfortunately, Raystorm is just another game that proves what we already know - 3D graphics do not enhance the shmup genre. This game's visual design is especially bad, there are some standard issues involving it not being clear when enemies are below you or on the same plane as you, but there's so much unnecessary visual clutter that the entire experience is made dozens of times worse than it needed to be. For starters, the game's unique mechanic is that you have a lock-on function that allows you to fire at enemies. However, when you shoot this, the makes an obnoxious green spray and dozens of little explosions when it hits that obscures projectiles to an absurd extent, to the point that it's almost worth never using this attack and sticking to your main gun. Something else the game gets wrong is that enemy projectiles come in a rainbow of different colours, it seems like every enemy fires a differently coloured bullet, and enemy explosions shoot out a bunch of colourful particles using the same palette as the bullets, all of which just contributes to the storm of visual noise that makes this game feel so lousy to play. It gets even worse when fighting bosses, as the game tends to go into a kind of chase cam which makes determining the exact position of the boss's hitbox and the bullets virtually impossible, and boss fights go on for an eternity in this game. Overall, the game just feels bad to play. Just like One, they massively needed to dial back the particle effects here, visual clarity always has to come first.
Tomba is another really weird game, but at least it's way better than something like Jungle Park. It's a platformer / adventure hybrid that bares the most resemblance to Wonder Boy, but it has a lot of very unique mechanics that make it stand apart from almost any other game. For starters, Tomba has a million traversal mechanics. He can jump, he can swing from vines, he can wall climb, and he can jump into and out of the foreground, all of which you'll be doing constantly. His combat repetoire is considerably more limited, he does carry a weapon, but it's mostly just for show, at best it stuns enemies, his main form of attack is to jump on enemies and toss them, which you'll do to every enemy in the game with little to no variation. Besides exploration and limited combat, the main thing you'll be doing in this game is quests. There are hundreds of them, and you'll be given them almost constantly. In the process of doing one, you'll probably discover 3 more. The game has a madcap sense of humour and these quests contribute a lot to it, but many of them are quite uninituitive, often requiring you to use items from the menu in extremely specific locations, which will almost unquestionably require the use of a guide. For example, you can find a telescope on the roof of a hut. It's intended to be used in the exact center of the floor below, but if you didn't figure that out you'll be lugging it around for the entire game. The game constantly throws strange situations and puzzles at you, and it definitely feels very unique, but somehow I wasn't ever really that enthralled by it. The thought I kept having while playing it is "this game is so weird" rather than, say, "this game is fun". I think a lot of the issue is that the combat is too simple and the quests interrupt the game's pacing. Most quests require you to backtrack, which makes the process of getting from one place to another take much longer than you'd think, doubly so if you get lost or have to use a guide. I think with games like this, much of the fun comes from exploring the game yourself, rather than having the game guide you through it the way Tomba does. If you compare something like Metroid, your only goal in that game is "find and kill the bosses", but it's vastly more fun. It is very unique and I can see how people could like it, but at the same time I'm not all that surprised it didn't become as popular as many of the other games in this genre.
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