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Last Topic's Ratings:
NHL Powerplay 96 - AAAA - 50% (4)
Sakura Wars - GGGGG - 100% (5) (1 SR)
Tryrush Deppy - BGGA - 63% {4}
Virtual Kyoutei - BB - 0% (2)
Welcome House - GBB - 33% (3)
X-Men: Children of the Atom - GGGGGAA - 86% (7)
I was surprised no one else gave Sakura Wars an SR. In general, not many have been given out yet. It'll be interesting to see what games draw them out.
Games for this topic:
Astal
Dark Legend
Hissatsu Pachinko Collection
Impact Racing
Virtua Cop
World Series Baseball
This has got to be one of the shortest topic titles we've had for GAB in a while. Come to think of it, I probably should have saved Astal for a week with games that have long titles. Oh well.
Astal - G
ReplyDeleteDark Legend - G (SR)
Hissatsu Pachinko Collection - A
Impact Racing - A
Virtua Cop - A
World Series Baseball - G
Astal is pretty cool. It's a 2D sidescroller with gorgeous hand drawn art that reminds me a fair bit of Rayman. Compared to Rayman, it skews much heavier on the action side of things. There's definitely some platforming, but most of the focus is on combat, as Astal throws, slams, and ground pounds his enemies into submission. Astal is also joined by bird friend, who can do a couple different things depending on how full his energy meter is, most particularly he can go find a healing item for you, which is very handy. Structurally, this game also bares some resemblance to Clockwork Knight, the game is broken up into world of (mostly) two stages each, which are quite diverse in their settings and structure, followed by boss battles. It's a little longer than Clockwork Knight, featuring 10 regular stages and 6 bosses, but it's still definitely a bit on the short side. Still, like I said when I reviewed Clockwork Knight, if my only criticism about a game is that it's short, that's usually still an indication that a game is pretty good, and it really does look and sound quite fantastic. It's too bad that they didn't make more games like these in this era.
Dark Legend totally rocks. It sort of plays like a cross between Samurai Shodown and Street Fighter, but with an incredible amount of polish and a number of features that feel extremely ahead of their time. For starters, it has all the basics down. You have 3 strengths of punches and kicks, and various special moves, which you can cancel from your normal attacks. Though some standard normal into special combos exist, these are a bit more limited compared to most games of this type. Instead, most of the game's combos use the game's special state system. Many normals cause the enemy to be put into a special state, namely launch, spinlaunch, ground bounce, or wall splat. You're allowed to chain these together, but you only get one of each per combo. Unlike many other games that have such states, most of these are trigged from normals, for example most characters' air HP is a ground bounce or launcher, allowing for very rewarding air-to-airs. Doing an air ground bounce into a spin launch into a special move or super is incredibly satisfying and does a hefty chunk of damage. A concept which is borrowed from Samurai Shodown is that your weapon can be destroyed by blocking too much (or you can throw it at the enemy), granting you access to a different, unarmed moveset, though generally this moveset is worse overall. It does grant some interesting strategy in that you can use the weapon toss mid-combo to dizzy the enemy, allowing a second combo for huge damage, but at the expense of not having your weapon for the rest of the round. At any rate, a major part of what makes this game so good is how well-polished it is. I've complained many times about poor motion detection in fighting games, but it's dead on here, and the game generally has fairly "simple" inputs, where pretty much everything is QCF or Dragon Punch, though even if you have something more complex for your super (for example, the first character has F, HCF + P), it still comes out pretty much every time. Beyond the game's great fundamentals, it also has a cool chinese-inspired sense of style and an absolutely kickass soundtrack. Compared to the already good PS1 version, the Saturn version is a little better, most particularly in that its framerate is more consistent. The PS1 version's framerate is fine almost all the time, but struggles a little with Gong (the puppet character), whereas the Saturn version has no issues. Either way, if you're a fighting game you should definitely play this, this is easily one of my favourite fighting games of the generation.
Hissatsu Pachinko Collection is another fairly typical Pachinko game. Like most games of this type, there's a story mode of sorts where you try to make your fortune playing Pachinko, and a free play mode where you can just play the machines (of which there are 6) as much as you want. One thing I do appreciate about this game is its presentation, this is a collection of retro-style Pachinko machines and it also has an appropriately contemporary soundtrack that goes well with the experience. Other than that, though, this is a very basic experience. I've mentioned before that I don't think Pachinko is really engaging enough to be fun without the thrill of gambling real money, these machines are functionally just glorified slot machines. I imagine the appeal in Japan might be that these are seemingly accurate recreations of real pachinko machines that people might have played, but even then I doubt it would be very interesting to play them in this form (after all, the main appeal isn't the machine, it's the gambling element). It's weird to me that other than the Pachiokun games, no one has tried more of a fantasy take on the subject because I think there is potential here (combine Pachinko with Pinball and I think you'd have a very cool game).
DeleteImpact Racing is a decent concept but it can get a bit repetitive. The term racing is used somewhat loosely here, your only opponent is the clock, and other cars are purely there to be destroyed for powerups, in a way that reminds me of Spy Hunter to some degree. The goal is to finish each stage before the time runs out, but if you destroy enough cars you can go to a bonus stage where you can earn a powerup. There are some decent ideas here, for example I like the fact that if you destroy a car that's behind you with mines, you just get its powerup instantly (when shooting a car from the back, its powerup appears a little bit ahead on the track) and the game controls fairly well. The biggest issue with the game is that it can get repetitive. Driving well barely matters, and each race goes on for quite a long time. There are also only 3 tracks, and many of the powerups feel somewhat superflous compared to your default laser and mines. Overall, it's an all right game, but not one of the best in the genre.
Virtua Cop is a decent game, but suffers from the fact that it was an early game in a genre that evolved quickly and it was already a couple years old by the time it released on Saturn. Virtua Cop is a fully 3D light gun game, unlike many games that used full motion video everything is rendered in 3D here, though this results in the game not looking nearly as interesting from a visual standpoint compared to most of its competitors. In theory, rendering everything in 3D could be used for a significant degree of environment destructibility (as in Die Hard Trilogy, for example), but this is only barely utilized, there's a few boxes and barrels you can blow up for powerups or to defeat enemies, but more would have been greatly appreciated. One feature I like is that a crosshair shows where enemies appear and when they're going to attack, though despite this there's still a ton of cheap shots, like when an enemy fires the second they appear onscreen. There is some decent variety in enemy types and the boss fights are pretty good, but overall the experience feels kind of forgettable.
DeleteWorld Series Baseball is a retro-style Baseball game with decent commentary. There's not really a lot to say about it beyond this, it plays a lot like 16-bit Baseball games, except with a proper announcer. The game also features 3D graphics, which look decent, the different ball parks have proper dimensions and everything, which does affect gameplay (good luck hitting it over the wall at Fenway Park). Controls for batting and fielding are also both decent, though nothing that hasn't been done before. Overall, this is another solid early sports effort from Sega.