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Last Topic's Ratings:
AFL 99 - AB - 25% (2)
Criticom - BBBBB - 0% (5)
In Cold Blood - AGB - 50% {3}
Korokoro Post Nin - AA - 50% (2)
NASCAR 99 - AGGAB - 60% - {5}
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 2nd Edition - AGB - 50% {5}
This must have been the squiggliest topic ever. 3 Squiggle bracket games! As a fun fact, one of the games that was originally slated for this topic got yanked out for a reason that will become clear eventually.
Games for this topic:
Ace Combat 2
Army Men World War: Final Front
Deadheat Road
F.A. Premier League Football Manager 2000
Sabrina the Teenage Witch: A Twitch in Time
Table Hockey, The
It really confused me that the first Ace Combat game was called Air Combat in the US, I had to double check that like 10 times to make sure I didn't get one of the titles wrong. The Table Hockey game here is the one that's part of the Simple 1500 series, not the "Highschool Kimengumi" version that is part of the Simple Characters 2000 series. I'm also kind of curious about the Sabrina the Teenage Witch game, even though I never watched the show.
Ace Combat 2 - G
ReplyDeleteArmy Men World War: Final Front - A
Deadheat Road - B
F.A. Premier League Football Manager 2000 - B
Sabrina the Teenage Witch: A Twitch in Time - B
Table Hockey, The - B
Ace Combat 2 is very solid. It's pretty much just a massively upgraded version of the original Ace Combat, in particular it looks way better in terms of graphical detail but doesn't compromise in terms of performance. The increased complexity of terrain allows for more varied types of missions, with many missions taking place in mountainous regions or cities. One memorable mission tasks you with flying through a ravine, which makes an interesting comparison with Warhawk, though it clearly plays a million times better here. My one criticism of this game is that it's actually fairly easy. Enemies have fairly low aggression for a game of this type even on hard mode, rarely firing their guns or making any effort to get a lock on you, so I make it through many missions totally unscathed. It doesn't hamper the experience too much, though, the combination of excellent controls and great presentation ensures that shooting people down remains entertaining even if the threat level isn't too high. I'd also like to draw attention to the game's soundtrack, which rocks, it kind of reminds me of the music from the Choro Q series.
Army Men World War: Final Front is a massive upgrade to Army Men World War in virtually every way, though considering how atrocious the previous game is this still leaves some room for debate about its quality. Compared to the Sarge's Heroes series, World War is far more tactical, you can not take many hits so careful use of cover is essential. Unlike, say, Winback, this game does not have an "automatic" cover system, you simply run and dive behind objects in a frantic effort to put anything between you and the enemy. When this works well, it actually feels pretty great, you even have allied units on some missions who have fairly decent AI, but there are occasional hitches where some objects have much larger collision boxes than they appear, potentially blocking your shots even though you seem to have a clear bead on your target, sometimes forcing you to use a risky "roll out of cover, shoot, roll back into cover" strategy. Still, the missions that take place on foot are generally pretty decent. Significantly less welcome are the vehicle missions, the vehicles are much tankier compared to the normal gameplay, but the controls are very stiff and bad, causing these missions to feel drastically at odds with the rest of the game. The fourth mission has you control a motorbike and is particularly awful, as the motorbike's controls are terrible and halfway through they start tossing one-hit kill boulders at you which the controls are in no way good enough to avoid on reaction, you simply have to know where it's safe to drive, which will take many tries. Actually, that's probably the game's biggest weakness overall, while the core gameplay is pretty good, it's also extremely unforgiving, and missions are long and have no checkpoints. A checkpoints and lives system would have increased playability greatly, as it stands you'll need a fair bit of patience to get through it, even if the moment to moment gameplay can be rewarding.
The moment I started up Deadheat Road, it felt extremely familiar. A nighttime street racing game from 1996 with only 3 tracks? It took me a while, but I found that the game it reminded me of was actually C1 Circuit. In any case, despite their similarities, they aren't the same game, and C1 Circuit is actually a lot better, which probably gives you some idea of what to expect from Deadheat Road. The second you start playing the game, it's immediately obvious that the handling engine is just terrible. It has the handling engine from San Francisco Rush where you can only turn the car a little bit before your handling just "stops", except that it's also super twitchy, so you turn to that degree almost immediately. There is a powerslide move, but it's completely garbage, it's almost impossible to come out of powerslides so you pretty much always lose more speed than you might maintain. The optimal strategy is just to hold the handbrake and bonk the wall if you have to, the game generally isn't very hard so you can win easily without clean driving, giving the game effectively no nuance. The presentation is a little better, with decent music and not bad lighting effects (I like how the time of day changes from lap to lap) but with a racing engine this bad there's no reason to put up with it.
DeleteFootball Management is a concept that I think could be interesting, but we haven't yet found a game that does it well, and that trend continues with Football Manager 2000. Actually, compared to previous games, this is much more of a step in the right direction, the game is now not inordinately difficult to understand and works properly for the most part, the biggest issue is that the interface is an absolute disaster and it makes the strategic side of the game almost impossible to access. A simple example of how the interface sucks can be found on the team overview screen. On this screen, we can view players by their name, position, and current condition. Some very important information I'd want to see on this screen would be how much they cost and an overall metric of how good they are, but to find this you have to go to their individual subpages by pressing circle on the player, which is what you'll spend most of your time doing. Something else obnoxious is that if you want to see all of your players, you can't simply press down to scroll the list, you have to move over to the side, grab the scroll bar, and scroll it, then leave the scroll bar and go back to the player view. This system was obviously designed for PC and no effort went into porting it to PS1. This is actually one of the more minor problems, however, it gets even worse when dealing with trade offers. Clubs will frequently make offers to buy your players, to which you can answer yes or no. However, when deciding whether or not to sell a player, I'd really like to see the status of my team, so I can determine what role that player is playing and who could sub in for them if I agreed to sell, and maybe even check the market to see what kind of players in that position I could buy. However, this is not an option, you can see the player stats and that's it, and you have to decide before you can get back to the team view. As such, I just always refuse all offers. When it comes to playing games, you can opt to watch the entire game, though this takes forever and thus isn't really feasible, or you can watch the fast view, which also shows no useful info. There is a possession display and the score and that's it, if you want to know if your players are doing well to make substitutions or something there's none of that information available, the entire screen is clogged up with scores from other games in the league that you don't care about. Overall, I do feel that you can see that this concept has potential, but it's still far away from being a decent game at this point.
Unfortunately, the Sabrina the Teenage Witch game is absolute garbage. It's an extremely poor 3D platfomer that does pretty much everything badly. It has terrible controls, terrible hit detection, extremely generic enemies and bosses, and even the talking cat is super obnoxious (thankfully, you can skip his dialogue). The game does absolutely nothing interesting with its magic theme, either, you can pick up various spells, but all of them either just incapacitate enemies momentarily or kill them outright (obviously, the latter is better), none have any interesting uses. There are tons of enemies who are totally impervious to all of your attacks, if some of the spells could stun them that would be something, but they can't. Also, the platforming in this game is some of the worst I've ever seen, luckily in most cases where you need to do it there's a damage floor underneath you can it does little to no damage, so failing the jumps doesn't really matter. At various points in the game there are doors that need costumes to enter them, but there's no indication as to which costumes are needed, so equipping each one and doing the level over and over again is the only way to figure it out. Alternatively, just don't play the game at all, which is clearly the right choice.
DeleteThe Table Hockey is absolute ass. Everything about this game completely sucks. For starters, there's the visuals. Besides its incredibly generic presentation, the game is viewed from an overly shallow angle that makes properly judging the position of the puck far harder than it needs to be. Table hockey should always be viewed from the top, either horizontally or vertically, so that visibility is as high as possible. Heck, even Pong got this right. Secondly, there's the control. The paddles are slow and have a weird sense of acceleration to them that simply feels terrible to control, making it virtually impossible to control the paddle normally. Instead, you can push a button to attack with the paddle, which will have your paddle home in on the puck and hit it. This works, but it also eliminates anything resembling skill from the game. In case you find the standard mode too boring, there's a mode you can play with items, like shields and homing pucks, that make the game even more degenerate. This one just isn't fun even for a few minutes. Maybe the worst game in the Simple 1500 series.