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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Bubble Bobble also featuring Rainbow Islands - AGAAA - 60% (5)
Fatal Fury 3 - ABAB - 25% (4)
Japan Super Bass Classic '96 - BA - 25% (2)
Krazy Ivan - ABA - 33% (3)
Road Rash - AAAAA - 50% (5)
Shanghai: Triple-Threat - GGA - 83% (3)
It's always funny to me when you get a topic full of relatively big names like Road Rash and Fatal Fury and the game that comes out on top is something unexpected like Shanghai.
Games for this topic:
Chaos Control
Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
Shin-Oh-Ken
Sonic 3D Blast
Sorvice
Strikers 1945
No, Chaos Control isn't Shadow the Hedgehog's forgotten origin game, it's a completely unrelated rail shooter, but for the Sonic fans we do have Sonic 3D Blast. Saturn is also making my life easy by not releasing Strikers 1945 2 in the west, thereby saving us the confusion that happened when we did that game on Playstation.
Chaos Control - B
ReplyDeleteFrank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball - G
Shin-Oh-Ken - G
Sonic 3D Blast - G
Sorvice - G
Strikers 1945 - G
I actually kind of like Chaos Control, but it's very clearly not a good game. It's an on-rails light gun shooter, similar to Area 51 and the like, except that instead of being on foot you're in a starfighter. The visuals are totally prerendered and look pretty nice, but the gameplay is absolutely rock bottom for a game of this type, with it having virtually every problem that any of these games have. Enemies appear onscreen and start firing instantly, making it effectively impossible to avoid constant damage, there are absolutely no alternate weapons or powerups, and the main gun constantly overheats, forcing you to tap the fire button constantly throughout the game. Literally the only skill involved in playing the game is setting the lives counter to 9 at the menu, without which I highly doubt clearing the game is possible. Later levels also go on way too long, especially the incredibly monotonous third stage, which feels like they were just trying to pad out the length of the game. If this game had competent gameplay it might have been great, but it's a great example of style over substance.
Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball is pretty solid. It's a classic-style baseball game that pretty much only separates itself from 16-bit games by the fact that it has a voiced announcer and better graphics, but it has solid enough general mechanics that it remains fun to play anyway. Something a bit weird about this game is that I feel like you have to swing really early on pitches compared to most games, which makes pitches a little harder to read, but this is somewhat counteracted by the fact that stealing bases is pretty strong in this game. Overall, I feel like it has generally good fielding control and offense / defense balance, which is important for baseball games. Compared to its sequel, All-Star Baseball 97 (which we covered in PS1 GAB), it is almost the exact same game, save for having a different announcer (this game has Tim Kitzrow, which is kind of cool), and I feel the swing timing is slightly faster in the sequel. Still, in cases like this where there's basically no improvement in the sequel, it helps to come out earlier so there's less competition, so I would tend to give the nod to this game in terms of ratings. Both are totally fine if you want some classic baseball action, though.
Shin-Oh-Ken is an incredibly dumb game. It looks like a 3D fighter from the artwork, but it's actually not, it uses prerendered characters but has totally 2D gameplay, similar to Mortal Kombat (though with far more frames of animation, thankfully). I think this looks slightly worse compared to 2D animation, but it doesn't significantly affect gameplay in any way. Speaking of, this game's gameplay is completely insane. The first character, Susanoo, is a fairly standard shoto with a fireball and a dragon punch. Except that he also has a divekick. This divekick is safe on block (probably even plus at some heights), leads to a big combo and a hard knockdown on any hit, must be blocked high, and has NO HEIGHT RESTRICTION WHATSOEVER. So essentially, you can do instant overheads leading into huge damage any time you want, and the only defense against it is dragon punches, but this game has air blocking so predictively DPing is very risky (unless you're Sheena, who has a DP-like move that doesn't leave the ground, is safe, and leads into a combo, which is maybe even more busted). There is an alpha-counter like mechanic, but it never felt like it significantly threatened my offense, about the only thing that did was when an opponent got a knockdown on me and then they could start up their own vortex. This game also has an insane dash mechanic where your dash is actually a short hop that goes almost full screen and any moves you do from dashes are overheads, so you can essentially do fullscreen instant overheads that you can combo out of, and hitstun in this game is very long so you can do huge combos off pretty much anything. I would normally criticize games with clearly degenerate gameplay like this, but I have to admit this is fun in a stupid kind of way, kind of like the Capcom VS series. I kind of doubt it has the depth of those games and I don't think this game is anywhere near as good as Dark Legend, but it's a solid title if you want to throw out a bunch of trijumps without learning Marvel's complex inputs.
DeleteSonic 3D Blast on Saturn is basically just a very enhanced version of the Genesis game. In terms of the level layouts, the game is identical, and it still doesn't have a save feature on Saturn, which is kind of inexcusable, but pretty much everything else has seen a nice upgrade. First are the visuals, which look a lot better, with significantly better texture detail and colour work. The Genesis version sometimes made some odd colour choices that could be hard to look at, while this version is undeniably much easier on the eyes. Another huge improvement is to the framerate. The Genesis version runs like 20ish FPS most of the time, and can frequently feel choppy when moving fast, but the Saturn version runs at a silky smooth 60fps. Beyond this, there are a few other changes. The OST is totally redone, and is decent, though I like the Genesis OST a lot as well, and they redid the special stages, which IMO are kind of a mixed bag. They look better for sure, but the new special stages are basically just a 3D version of the special stages from Sonic 2 and I've always been clear about how much I hate them (I always skip Super Sonic in Sonic 2 because of this). Still, while it's a clear improvement to the Genesis game, it's still very similar to it and it still kind of feels like a last-gen game, certainly it doesn't have the scope or ambition of a title like Mario 64 or even Crash Bandicoot, and the fact that this is the only new-ish Sonic platformer that Saturn got unquestionably hurt the system. That said, it still plays well and is fun, it helps that the Genesis game was a solid title in its own right. The core game loop of defeating the enemies to collect the Flickies works well, even if it can get a little repetitive eventually due to the game's length (this is why that save feature would have helped) and it generally feels well-polished overall. It's not something I'd go back to anywhere near as often as Sonic Adventure, but it's still a decent game.
Sorvice is an interesting game. It's a dungeon crawler of sorts with an action rpg-style battle system, but there's also a lot of focus on its card system. Cards are essentially spells, and there's a ton of them. You can have up to 30 cards in your "deck", each of which can only be used once until you return to the town or use a special item. An interesting wrinkle is that that more cards you have, the fewer cards you can pick up along the way, so you may want to travel light if going on a long expedition, but at the same time you need to be prepared enough to stay alive. There are tons of enemies who are difficult to defeat with your sword, for example a stone golem might take very little damage from physical attacks but can easily be worn down by poison, so the Poison Splash card would make short work of it. Of course, unless you collect a lot of Poison Splash, you won't be doing that often, so sometimes you'll just have to run. You can capture monsters and turn them into cards, too, which you can then use like summons, so there's a lot of variety. The game's main goal is actually not just to reach the bottom of the dungeon, but also to conquer the arena in town, which uses a different battle system from the rest of the game. In the arena, you can't use your weapons, and your cards are drawn randomly, unlike in the dungeon where you can use them all at any time. Initially I thought these fights were absolute garbage until I realized that the way to charge up your card guage so you can fight is to stand still, which is obviously a bit difficult when the other competitor is trying to murder you, but it rewards good positioning and strategy. Overall, it's a pretty interesting game and it's not too hard to play without Japanese due to the simplicity of the main loop (there's only a few places to go in town). The card names are all in katakana, so if you can read that you're golden, and you can use the google translate app for the spell descriptions if you can't figure them out. Would be nice if there was a guide for it, though. Maybe I'll eventually end up writing one.
DeleteStrikers 1945 is a very simple shmup, but it's still very solid. One thing I like about this game is that it feels very "clean". With recent shmups, I've often complained about bullets being strange colours or distracting particle effects or what not, but this game has a very simplistic aesthetic that makes everything very easy to identify. Enemy bullets are always orange, the colours are chosen well so that the enemies tend to be drab colours that don't clash with shots or the background, and everything runs at a flawless framerate that never creates any issues. In terms of the gameplay, it's one of the most simplistic shmups out there, there are a lot of planes to choose from, but each has only one weapon. You can do a charge shot, but I find it to be largely superflous, mostly you'll just be autofiring, dodging, and using a bomb when things get hectic, as it should be. An interesting wrinkle in this game is that when you continue, it makes you restart the current stage, which I think it a decent compromise to make the game accessible without making it trivial to reach the end. I also love the boss designs in this game, everything somehow manages to be a mech, which feels like something right out of transformers (well, until the very end, anyway, when crabs take over). Overall, this is just a good simple shmup that I would recommend to genre newcomers as a good way to learn the basics.