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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bravo Air Race - AGAAB - 50% {5}
Deception: Invitation to Darkness - BAGGBAA - 50% {7}
Disney's Aladdin in Nasira's Revenge - BGB - 33% (3)
Missland 2 - GB - 50% (2)
NFL Xtreme - AAAB - 38% (4)
Worms Armageddon - GGGGAGGAAGG - 86% (11) (1 SR)
This was a very divisive topic, though I secretly enjoy topics like this because my goal for GAB is for it to represent a diverse range of opinions. Regardless of what people's opinions are, I want as many people to vote as possible. Also, an interesting note, Worms Armageddon got the exact same score as it did on N64.
Games for this topic:
Bubsy 3D
Casper
Colorful Logic 2
Cool Boarders 3
Pro Pinball: The Web
Taxi 2
We couldn't put it off forever, someday we had to rate Casper. Oh, and Bubsy 3D is here too. I'm actually very curious to see how it will compare to other famously bad games. I've never played it or paid much attention to it before, despite being a fan of some of the other Bubsy games, so I have a kind of morbid curiosity about it (but we all know that curiosity killed the cat). We also Pro Pinball: The Web, which is just called "Pro Pinball" in some territories.
Bubsy 3D - B
ReplyDeleteCasper - A
Colorful Logic 2 - A
Cool Boarders 3 - A
Pro Pinball: The Web - G
Taxi 2 - A
Somehow, even knowing that Bubsy 3D is one of the worst games of all time going in, it still feels disappointing. Some of this is because it's not funny bad or evil bad, it's just very boringly bad. For starters, the controls are among the worst ever. It uses tank controls, like Croc, but feels vastly stiffer and worse to play. One big issue is that Bubsy has only a single height he can jump, and unlike in previous Bubsy games, you can't choose to transition into glide mid-jump, which makes jumping on any enemies that move almost impossible. Speaking of the glide, it's also totally useless, it makes you fall super fast and is almost totally uncontrollable, in contrast to the great glide physics of the first game. The one thing the game does have going for it is that somehow the ledge grab mechanic is implemented pretty well, they probably spent their entire budget on it. Beyond the awful controls, the presentation is equally bad. The game looks completely terrible, and Bubsy doesn't have his originaly voice actor, instead having an unbearably squeaky and scratchy voice that is among the most annoying video game voices of all time. He also talks constantly, like Gex, but thankfully there's an option to turn off his dialogue. The level design is also extremely bland and bad, featuring almost entirely flat levels full of generic collectables that take forever to get due to the bad controls (the ability to use the atoms as ammo is interesting but poorly realized) and it gets dull well before you even complete the first stage. Overall, this game is easily way worse than Superman 64, which at least has some parts that are interesting, but it's so boring that I don't want to call it the worst game of all time, we should all just try to forget it exists instead.
Casper is kind of interesting. It's sort of an adventure style game, it takes place inside a huge mansion, which you can explore by pressing switches, finding keys, and solving simple puzzles to open doors and open up new rooms. Periodically you can get new powers for Casper, like allowing him to go through vents or fit through small passageways. The general exploration gameplay is not bad, though it can be a bit overly cryptic at times. Strangely, there's almost no combat in the game, there are certain screens where Casper's uncles can be found, but you mainly just avoid them until you're ready to defeat them using a specific item. It's not a big deal, but it does make the frequent health pickups feel somewhat superflous. A bigger issue is the constant load time. Every time you go through a door, the game loads briefly, and although these loads are not long, some of the rooms can be very small and it makes exploration tedious, especially when you're in a hurry. The game is also not particularly long or large in scope, and IMO it kind of feels like it should have been on Game Boy Advance rather than PS1 (it probably would have had no load times here). Still, you could do a lot worse as movie tie-ins go.
Well, Colorful Logic 2 was not what I expected. For starters, I have to issue a correction in regards to the first game, as there's something important about that game that I missed when I rated it originally. When we review Picross games, I pretty much always note that they're pretty much all the same, but Picross is a fun concept so they're always decent. However, the Colorful Logic isn't actually the same as all other Picross games, it actually puts a unique twist on the Picross formula that feels legitimately innovative. Before we get to that, though, this game also does include standard picross and there are some things to say about that too. For starters, this game retains the somewhat sloppy controls of the first game. It feels like the cursor scrolls somewhat too fast, and you can also overwrite spaces while marking (the correct way to implement controls in picross is that holding a button down shouldn't overwrite tiles that are already marked). Thankfully, unlike the first game, the puzzles do at least now automatically complete when you finish them, however, there is another strange quirk to this game, which is that this game contains many picross puzzles that can't be solved deterministically, and you have to use trial and error to find the solution past a certain point (ie, you can't eliminate any more squares by normal means, and must just guess a square and see if it leads to a contradiction). The game does provide an alternate marking colour for this, but I'm not sure if this mechanic is fun, most Picross games deliberately avoid creating puzzles where this is necessary, but it happens constantly here. As such, this game isn't the best for standard picross. However, there's a second mode in the game, the titular Colorful Picross, which I completely missed when I played the first game because there's only a single set of puzzles for it (it has a much bigger focus on the sequel). In Colorful Picross, you not only have to figure out which spots on the grid are boxes and which are spaces, you also have to figure out what colour each box is. For example, the clue for one row in a 10x10 puzzle might be "5 blue 3 red", which tells you that there is a group of 5 blues, a group of 3 reds, and (implicitly) 2 spaces. Because the groups have different colours, they might be separated by a space, or they might not, which actually changes up the way you have to think about these puzzles quite substantially. These puzzles kind of hurt my brain, but they're definitely interesting, and in retrospect I could see how you could argue the original game is actually a low A because of this, but the sequel is better overall so it doesn't really matter too much. Speaking of hurting your brain, Colorful Logic 2 also includes another new mode they call Tile Picross, where the boxes are instead triangles. I actually think this plays exactly the same as standard Picross (the triangles are arranged into rows of 10, but it makes for some interesting shapes. Overall, this game has some unique ideas, but the interface is still kind of wonky and it's also slightly too hard a lot of the time IMO, though it might be worth a look for experts.
DeleteCool Boarders 3 has a new engine and this brings some significant improvements, though there's still a lot of jank. For starters, the awful "you can only do tricks at specific parts of the course" mechanic is finally gone, you can now do tricks anywhere and this feels a lot better. The game's control has also generally improved too and tracks are wider and more open to take advantage of it. However, the experience feels fairly unpolished in many ways and that holds it back from being as good as it could be. One very minor thing that bugged me is that the game forces you to choose your board for the next event before it tells you what the event is, which is really dumb because you need drastically different board types for races vs trick events. Sure, you can just memorize the order of the events, but this feels sloppy. Speaking of which, the game's trick system, while a big improvement over previous games, still needs quite a lot of work. One good way to tell if a snowboarding or skateboarding game is decent is to check how cleanly grinds work. If you cannot comfortably do a trick, land on a rail, grind, then jump off and do another trick, the trick system has issues, and although this is technically possible in Cool Boarders, it's almost impossible to pull off due to the jankiness of the game's grinding mechanic. Races aren't perfect either, though this owes mainly to course design. Races in this game take a slalom format where you must pass gates the right way, but the gates are small and jumps are frequent, and gates are usually set up so that if you are not positioned correctly at the start of the jump, you will not have time to reposition to pass the gate, which feels lame. There's also no "tuck" mechanic, which makes the races feel sort of basic, there's no reason not to hold the carve button all the time. Overall, it's not a terrible game and certainly a step in the right direction, but MTV Sports Pure Ride is still a million times better (I keep going back to that game to make sure I'm not misremembering it, but it actually is that good).
DeletePro Pinball: The Web is pretty cool. It uses the same technology as the other Pro Pinball games, which once again means it's a Pinball game with only one table, but it's quite well fleshed-out as Pinball games go. Like with Big Race USA, I think this table is pretty cool, which is the main factor that separates A from G here. In particular, I like the top flipper placement on this board. There's a loop you can hit the ball into with the top flipper, which you can potentially do over and over with good timing to get bonuses, and there are many opportunities to start these chains. The game is also full of events, like most similar LCD games, and these are pretty neat, and the music is good too. The one thing I do notice is that I feel that parts of this board seem specifically designed for you to bank off them and have your ball go straight down the middle, but that's basically just pinball for you.
Taxi 2 is a ludicrously stupid game. For starters, don't let the name fool you. This is not Crazy Taxi, there's no actual picking up passengers or anything like that, this is a pure racing game. It does have a mission mode, which is apparently based on an (insane) french film, but the game consists solely of point to point races against the clock, where the main challenge is not to wreck the car before you reach the finish line (a few missions also have opponents whom you must beat). The controls for the game are actually not that bad and it runs all right, but this is very clearly a budget title and every aspect of it feels cheap. However, it kind of runs with that, and the storyline of the game is so impressively stupid that I kind of appreciate it (the beginning of the game deals with picking up a pregnant woman and taking her to the hospital, but the taxi driver decides to take a shortcut through a rally race, but of course he also has to win the race because he has his pride as a taxi driver. Later on you end up protecting a diplomat from the Yakuza and rescuing the president, you know, typical taxi driver stuff). The one major issue with this game is that as far as I can tell, there's no way to reverse, and there are some parts of some tracks where you can hit a wall and get stuck, in which case you just have to try to pull yourself around by ramming into the wall. You're probably not wondering how this version compares to the Dreamcast version, but because I'm overly thorough I also tried that one. It has a higher resolution, but actually looks pretty bad for a Dreamcast game and the controls and framerate are actually a downgrade from the PS1 version, so this is actually the version you should play if you're going to play it, which you probably shouldn't unless you're drunk. It's still easily better than NFS1 and Test Drive 4 though, which is kind of sad.
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