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Last Topic's Ratings:
Jungle Park - BB - 0% (2)
MTV Sports: Skateboarding featuring Andy Macdonald - BA - 25% (2)
Off-World Interceptor Extreme - BAAB - 25% (4)
One - BABABB - 17% (6)
Raystorm - AGBGA - 60% {5}
Tomba - AGGGAGGA - 81% (8) (1 SR)
This wasn't a particularly inspiring week for either console. Funny enough, both systems had 2 games that got 25%, one with 2 votes and one with 4.
Games for this topic:
Bravo Air Race
Deception: Invitation to Darkness
Disney's Aladdin in Nasira's Revenge
Missland 2
NFL Xtreme
Worms Armageddon
Deception is a series that I've always avoided due to the subject matter, but there's something kind of darkly hilarious about playing a game about sadism and torture on Valentine's Day, so I guess I'll manage. For those who would prefer something a little bit more upbeat, we have the Aladdin game and Worms Armageddon. I'm also looking forward to Missland 2, having found the original to be something of a hidden gem.
Bravo Air Race - A
ReplyDeleteDeception: Invitation to Darkness - B
Disney's Aladdin in Nasira's Revenge - G
Missland 2 - B
NFL Xtreme - A
Worms Armageddon - G
Bravo Air Race is a very simple plane racing game. It's a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to control. Side to side movement feels great and the speed of the game is generally good, but vertical movement is far too sensitive and the game slows you down a lot if you get too high, which requires you to be ludicrously gentle with the up and down inputs and never feels quite right. The bigger issue though is the content, of which there's barely any. The game has 4 tracks and that's it, there's not even a tournament mode. When compared to NGEN, obviously that game is vastly more fleshed out, though I feel like Bravo Air Race does have a slight edge in control. If they had tuned up the verticality a bit and added more to the game this could have been a solid competitor to Diddy Kong Racing's flight mode.
Deception sucks, though not for the reasons I thought it would. I was worried this game would be inordinately sadistic and dark, but thanks to the low-polygon graphics and generally silliness of the game it's really not, the real problem is that it's just a boring, one-note experience with little to no variety or depth. The basic gist of the game is that you have control of a castle, which various invaders will stumble into, and you need to kill them using traps. This concept is not terrible, certainly the Dungeon Keeper franchise has shown that this can be fun, but this game has all the depth of of a puddle. To use traps on enemies, you have to trigger them manually, which you can only do from immediately beside the trap, which eliminates anything resembling strategy from the game. To deal with any invader, you will simply place a bunch of traps, run up to them to get their attention, optionally use the Nice Mask so they'll follow you, then press the trap when they walk under it. Enemies with a lot of health need to be hit by a few traps, but there's literally nothing more to the game than this. You can build more rooms in the castle to get more space, but there's no reason whatsoever to bother with this, and you gradually get new traps, but they just do the same thing as the ones you already have, just with more damage. If you triggered the traps from an overhead perspective and had to design the castle in such a way as to bait people into walking into them, that would be vastly better, but as it stands the game is just far too simple to stay appealing for very long. If we compare this to a game like Chaos Seed, for example (which came out the same year), that game has a ton of depth in terms of how you set up the dungeon because the placement of rooms affects your dungeon's economy and the strength of your monsters. Deception's mechanics are just far too limited to make for interesting gameplay. The story isn't really anything to write home about, either. The box implies that you can decide who lives and who dies and that this has moral consequences, but this is totally false, you can choose between capturing and killing enemies but they still die regardless and it has no effect on the story. If you could actually choose to just scare away certain invaders rather than killing them and that would affect the story, that might have given an interesting dimension to the game, but the fact that you have to kill everyone, including characters who are clearly good people, quickly causes me to lose any interest in the story or its characters. Overall, this is just a clear case of the developers not understanding the mechanics that the game needed to be good. Every other dungeon creation game is way better than this.
Aladdin reminds me a lot of The Emperor's New Groove in that it's another pretty competent 3D platformer with good production values from Disney. Compared to the Emperor's New Groove, this game is a bit more simplistic, which probably works in its favour, as some segments from the Emperor's New Groove could be annoying. Most of the time, you're just running, jumping, swinging your sword, and throwing apples, in a way that feels not totally unlike a 3D take on the Genesis game. The core game is pretty competent, the levels are decently varied and the camera is decent, and I appreciate that it actually has the original voice actors (though it has the Dan Castellaneta Genie), which helps it feel authentic to the source material. There are a couple little rough spots, like the rope swinging controls are awkward and some of post-level minigames can be annoying, but overall this is a pretty solid game and a fairly easy G.
DeleteMissland 2 completely sucks. It loses everything that made the original game fun and feels very annoying to play. The game has actually changed drastically since the original, rather than the relatively still scenes from the original, the stages in the new one are more like movies. For example, one stage features a car driving through a mountainous area, while another features a stroll through a museum. There are various objects throughout the video that might differ, and you have to click on them as they do. Compared to the previous game, the scenes are vastly less dense, which makes the differences almost totally trivial to spot in most cases, the only challenge is when an object is in the corner somewhere and it's only onscreen for a split second. There's also an absolutely abyssmal new mechanic where after you spot a difference, a stupid slot machine starts spinning and you have to push a button to stop it. This almost completely wrecks the game as the slot machine is assigned to the same button as finding differences, and you can't find any differences while it's spinning, even though the movie keeps going. You do have the ability to slow down and rewind the movie, but there are no words for how obnoxious it is when you see a difference but can't click it because you have to wait for this stupid animation to end, and it happens constantly. This mechanic alone drags the game into B territory, if it could be turned off, the game might be A. It creates all kinds of other problems too, for example your score is now meaningless because the entire thing is RNG, but we'll leave the slot machine alone for now. As mentioned before, the game is super easy now, the only way you might fail is if you make a misclick or click accidentally while trying to mash the slot machine offscreen, the time limits are very generous and the differences are virtually always super obvious. I seriously can't get over how awful this sequel is, it's easily one of the best examples of ruining a good concept through terrible design.
NFL Xtreme is basically just worse NFL Blitz. Everything about the game is extremely similar to Midway's game, it even has many of the same voice lines. However, while it somewhat matches the presentation, it isn't anywhere near as good in terms of gameplay. The secret of Blitz's success is that although it's fast-paced and hilarious, it's also a great football game, and NFL Xtreme just isn't. One of the biggest issues here is that passing plays are way too good, with there being so few players on the field it's basically impossible to cover the running backs decently well and also put any kind of pressure on the QB, so pretty much someone is always going to be open, and if that person gets the ball, it will also often be a touchdown. Even if you do mark the pass target correctly, passes travel absurdly fast, so even if you read the pass you often can't swap to the right player and tackle the receiver in time, which just feels bad. They try to "balance" this by having your passes just sometimes randomly get dropped, but obviously this has none of the depth or nuance that NFL Blitz does. Running plays are better, the addition of turbo allows the defense to cover the line of scrimmage pretty well, making running plays a decent options for getting short yardage but a poor option for general offense, which is how it should be, this part is arguably an improvement over Blitz, but since passing is so strong there's almost no need to ever run unless it's 4th down and you somehow have 1-2 yards left to go. Speaking of, there's something really weird with how this game detects first downs, I think it's probably the case that every 20 yards on the field is always a first down, as sometimes you might get a first down, only to be told you need only like 5 yards for the next one, which feels strange. The UI in general is much worse than Blitz at conveying information and statistics, and because the game is less interesting games feel like they go on way too long. In terms of score, it's hard to rate. It is pretty much purely worse than Blitz and every second you play it, you'll just be thinking "I should be playing Blitz instead", so I could see the argument for B, but I think Blitz is so good that even bad Blitz is still fairly playable. It's just not a game anyone should really bother to play when Blitz is available, even the worst Blitz game is miles better than this.
DeleteWorms Armageddon on PS1 is another solid conversion of the PC game. Compared to the N64 version, load times are longer, but there are fewer content cuts compared to the PC version. I think the N64 version is probably a touch better overall because the load times do somewhat muddy the pacing of the game (particularly the training missions, which are vastly less fun here due to the frequent and long load times) but it's still a decent way to play a good game.