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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Legend - BAB - 17% (3)
Moto Racer 2 - AAGAA - 60% (5)
NHL Faceoff 2001 - AGG - 83% (3)
Parasite Eve - GGGGGAGGAGGGA - 88% (13) (4 SR)
Rampage 2: Universal Tour - BAGAB - 40% {5}
Shoot - BBB - 0% (3)
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:
AFL 99
Criticom
In Cold Blood
Korokoro Post Nin
NASCAR 99
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 2nd Edition
In Cold Blood looks pretty cool, I hope it's good. Also, apparently I'm going to have to learn the rules of another sport because we have an Australian Rules Football game here. I sometimes impress my friends with my knowledge of the rules of various sports but all of it comes from games.
AFL 99 - B
ReplyDeleteCriticom - B
In Cold Blood - G
Korokoro Post Nin - A
NASCAR 99 - G
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 2nd Edition - G
AFL 99 is hard to rate because Austrailian Rules Football games are almost nonexistent, so there's very little to compare it to. To give a brief summary, Austrailian Rules Football bares virtually no resemblance to American Football, for starters there's no concept of plays or downs, instead it plays somewhat more like soccer, albeit with no keeper and hand passes. Easily the most significant mechanic of the game is that after catching a kick, the player who receives the ball is "marked" and cannot be tackled by the opposition, functionally allowing them to freely kick the ball again. In my opinion, this is kind of an uninteresting mechanic, it means the game tends to come down to a series of kicks where the only contention is over grabbing the ball as it comes down. Should the ball not be caught by anyone, it becomes free and there's a scramble where tackles are allowed. Generally, during this time you just want to find a free moment to kick the ball again so you can become marked and get your kick chains going. Eventually, the goal is to kick it between the uprights, of which there are four, the outer 2 are only worth 1 point, while the middle ones are worth 6, at which point it restarts from a kickoff. In my opinion, the core rules of the game aren't a great fit for a video game (this is probably why there aren't many of them), if this was a fantasy sports game I would probably say it was too passive. Rules aside, though, the game also controls very poorly. The worst thing about the game by far is player selection. The game does not automatically switch you to an appropriate defender when passing, so you have to frantically mash the player change button and hope it makes you the right player. Actually landing a catch also feels very unreliable, the only thing you have to gauge the location of the pass is a little circle, which is in no way enough for how important catching passes is to the game's mechanics, and grabbing a downed ball also feels incredibly unreliable, your AI teammates won't grab it for you so you have to mash player change again to try to find someone close to it, and you can also often run by the ball without picking it up. The game's presentation is also so basic that determining which players are which is often tough, which is bad considering that you have to fight with the player change button constantly. Some smart auto-player selection would probably have elevated this to A, but as it stands I feel like this game is only barely playable.
Criticom is maybe the worst fighting game ever made. The first thing that needs to be mentioned is the game's utterly atrocious controls. I've talked before about games that have issues with motion detection, but this game actually has issues with blocking detection! I spent ages pouring through various resources trying to figure out how to block, only to eventually find that you actually just block by holding back or down back, as I had been attempting to do all along, the blocking control is just so atrocious that you only block like maybe 1% of the time. Of course, this doesn't affect the AI, who can block normally. Special moves are atrocious too, virtually all of them are executed by holding a button and a direction and just hoping it comes out, which it sometimes does but sometimes doesn't. The game also allows 3D movement, as you can roll to evade attacks, but this wreaks havoc on the already terrible controls, destroying any semblance of playability. Of course, the AI has access to perfect controls, as though they were playing a version of this game that was programmed competently. The game's sole interesting mechanic is that the characters can be upgraded if you finish the arcade mode, but no one is ever going to bother doing this so it's a pointless mechanic. I'm shocked at how a poor game like Boombots looks like an absolute masterpiece compared to this.
In Cold Blood is one of the hardest ratings I've done in a while. The game essentially plays like a cross between Grim Fandango and Metal Gear Solid. You play as a secret agent on a mission to rescue a missing agent and later unravel a mysterious government project, using a mixture of puzzle solving, conversation, stealth, and gunplay to accomplish the game's various missions. It's undeniably a very ambitious game, which is easily seen through the game's excellent presentation. The game is full of cutscenes and voice acting, and the voice work is quite well done, and it's also a fairly lengthy game too. Like Grim Fandango, the game uses fixed camera angles, and the prerendered backgrounds look great, though this is also the source of most of the game's issues. The game features Resident-Evil style tank controls, which simply aren't well suited to fast-paced action. Resident Evil makes it work because the enemies are generally pretty slow, but when you have to face enemies with guns, you need the ability to aim and shoot very quickly, and the game simply doesn't really offer that. As such, stealth is your preferred option most of the time, but the fixed camera angles work against you here, as enemies often hide around corners or in other areas where you can't see them easily but they can certainly see you. Luckily, you are not completely powerless, you're equipped with a powerful radar that can show the floor map and also highlights people and machines, and using it constantly is vital to your survival. I wish they had put it onscreen at all times and included a vision cone like in MGS, but at least the radar screen is very snappy and generally does its job. An interesting wrinkle is that the radar can't identify friend from foe, and there are a lot of non-hostile NPCs whom you'll have to work with rather than against on your mission. John Cord is very smooth and can often bluff people to get information or avoid detainment, which is fun, and interacting with characters is often vital to solve the game's puzzles. When the game is focusing more on puzzles than gunplay, it plays vastly better, the controls are much less of an issue here and it lets the great voice acting and storytelling shine through. The game has a somewhat robust conversation engine where you can learn about various topics and then tell other people about them that feels fun to use, and although the puzzles are usually not too complex, they work well and I think it adds an interesting dimension to the game. Overall, how well you'll like this game depends on how patient you're willing to be with it. It's full of cool set pieces and characters and the story is also pretty interesting, and when the gameplay is working well it feels decent (for example, a good strategy for dealing with guards is often to hide and make a noise, like by shooting your gun, then ambush them when they come to investigate, which is satisfying when it works). However, there are also a lot of cheap deaths due to the game's controls and camera angles. The game does let you save quite often and it's not too hard to progress with occasional use of a guide, but the gameplay is clearly not on the level of MGS. I struggled for a long time between A and G on this one, and in the end, I think the key deciding factor was that it never bored me. The way that it constantly shifted between puzzles and gunplay kept it from getting stale, and the constant observations and banter from John also helped. I think if we compare with Parasite Eve, the voice acting and cutscenes inject vastly more personality into the characters, I felt like I learned more about John in the first half hour than I did about Aya in the entire game, and the fact that it was a much harder game also kept me from getting bored. Generally speaking, I think I'm a lot more willing to tolerate frustration than tedium, but of course individual preferences on that might vary.
DeleteKorokoro Post Nin is a very simple game that reminds me of On The Ball / Cameltry. The goal of the game is to deliver papers to mailboxes within the time limit, but the player has no direct control of the character (Akane), instead they can rotate the world around the player to influence her movement. When the world is rotated at a very steep angle, Akane will run very fast, which is also her only method of defeating enemies. As the game progresses, more hazards and other wrinkles are introduced that can take away time, but it never diverges much from this very simple concept, and I feel like this is its greatest weakness, it feels somewhat too simple. I feel if the player had a few more actions to perform, say, perhaps if you could actually throw the papers into the boxes for extra points or something, it would help add some much needed extra nuance to the game. Also, unlike On the Ball, time does not carry over between stages, which reduces the intensity of the game quite a lot. It's still cute and fun for a little while but it starts to feel pretty repetitive after a dozen stages or so.
DeleteNASCAR 99 is a huge improvement over NASCAR 98. For starters, the biggest upgrade is to the presentation. As opposed to NASCAR 98, which just featured music, NASCAR 99 has full commentary, which drastically enhances the experience. The commentary has a ton to say, beyond simple race commentary they also have a lot of interesting factoids about specific tracks and drivers, as well as lots of general information about Nascar and its history. This is a huge boon to the game that really helps you get a feel for the sport and adds tons more personality to the game. In terms of gameplay, it's fairly similar to NASCAR 98, but smoother and more polished. The game runs better compared to last year's entry and the controls have also been tightened up a bit and feel great to use. It's an interesting contrast with AFL 99 here, where this is another sport which is very simplistic from an outside perspective (on almost all tracks, you only turn left), but the turning and braking controls are so finely honed that it still feels nuanced and interesting anyway. It's a real testament to this game's physics engine that even though most of the game's tracks are ovals, they actually feel quite different to race. Between the great commentary and visuals and the well-polished controls this is probably one of the best takes on the sport that I've seen.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire 2 is effectively identical to the original, except that it's now based on the US version, which means Regis Philbin and questions based on US history and culture instead of the UK. Obviously, this will be much easier for people from North America to play, but I actually kind of like the UK version since it's so different from what we got here. Either way, the core of the game remains unchanged. By far the game's best feature is the phone a friend option, where you get a full spiel from the friend rather than just a canned computer voice telling you the answer. There must be one of these recorded for every question, which is pretty impressive. As I mentioned with the first version, I like how the game trolls you by pausing before revealing the answers and such, it feels very authentic to the show. There's not too much more to say about it, it was a pretty solid conversion of the show at a time when it was super popular, I actually owned the PC version of this and played it a fair bit.