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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Chaos Control - BBBB - 0% (4)
Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball - GG - 100% (2)
Shin-Oh-Ken - GAA - 67% (3)
Sonic 3D Blast - BAAAGABBA - 39% (9)
Sorvice - GA - 75% (2)
Strikers 1945 - GGGGG - 100% (5)
The reception to Sonic 3D Blast was very surprising to me, though it's actually almost the exact same rating it got on Genesis. I guess people really just don't care for it.
Games for this topic:
Battle Arena Toshinden Remix
Die Hard Trilogy
Full Car Mini Yontou Super Factory
Myst
Sol Divide
Striker 96
Striker 96 has nothing to do with Strikers 1945 from last topic, despite the similar name. I'm also interested to try out Full Car Mini Yontou, which looks like it's another game in the Bakusou Kyoudai series.
Battle Arena Toshinden Remix - B
ReplyDeleteDie Hard Trilogy - A
Full Car Mini Yontou Super Factory - B
Myst - A
Sol Divide - G
Striker 96 - B
It's hard to know what to do with Battle Arena Toshinden Remix. It's a very simplistic early 3D fighting game that heavily benefits from the fact that it was a launch title on PS1. On Saturn, the game is not a launch title, and instead comes after a number of significantly better fighters, but it does have some upgrades compared to the PS1 version. The biggest change is that there's a new character and a new story mode, which definitely do help to flesh out the game more. The inclusion of the story mode is somewhat compromised by the game's absolutely godawful dub, which is another one of those legendarily bad dubs from this era, and the game would have benefitted massively from dual audio. It's so bad I'd almost recommend playing the Japanese version, though that would obviously render the story mode largely pointless unless you can read Japanese. As for the gameplay, it seems to be unchanged from PS1. The game is still functional but very floaty and basic, it mostly consists of just spacing with fireballs and pokes and battles generally feel slow due to a lack of good offensive options. Graphically, it does look pretty good and the music is really nice too, but this isn't really why people play fighting games. Overall, this game is a little better than Virtua Fighter 1, but not by much, and it suffers a lot from the abundance of good fighters on Saturn. If they had included Japanese voice options it would probably be A.
On the other hand, Die Hard Trilogy is a game that benefits from being on Saturn compared to PS1, as Saturn has less competition in terms of Action games. As before, this is a compilation of three games, two of which are pretty decent and one of which is bad (the driving game). The third person shooter feels really good on Saturn actually, this is easily the standout game in the Saturn version. Unfortunately, the light gun game is severely downgraded compared to PS1, as it runs at only about half the framerate and feels very jerky. This is a real shame as this mode was quite good on PS1, and while it's still okay here, the downgrade is very noticeable and this keeps this title out of G range. The driving game still totally sucks. Overall, it's still a solid package, but the downgrade to the light gun game really hurts it. If it ran as well as the PS1 version, I probably would have given it a G.
Full Car Mini Yontou Super Factory is another Bakusou Kyoudai game, and unfortunately it's almost exactly like the first PS1 game where you have zero control over the races, you simply watch the AI race for you. Your only input is setting up the car before the race, but there's nothing interesting about this either as even though there are tons of parts to choose from, the game does not inform you in any way how your choices will affect the car's performance. In the first PS1 game, you at least had a boost move you could choose to use (though there's no nuance to it) and your timing off the start line mattered, here you don't even do that much. The design of these games really boggles the mind, at the very least they could go with the standard slot car setup where you hold the gas but have to ease up on the turns rather than just completely automating the entire thing. As it stands, the only fun part of this game is watching the intro movie. You might as well just watch the anime this is based on if you wanted this experience, it's equally interactive and has much better production values.
Myst ended up being a more involved review than I expected. Given the exceedingly basic nature of the game, I was sure it would be pretty much identical to the PS1 version, but there seems to be one clear and significant difference between the two that actually has a major effect on the game's overall quality, which is that the Saturn version appears to load scene transitions noticeably faster than the PS1 version. Since almost the entire game is based around this, this has a huge impact on the overall experience, making the Saturn version feel much snappier and better to play than on PS1. However, I'm always very wary of basing game ratings on issues related to technical performance like load times or frame rates because emulators can process these inaccurately, so I looked up tons of comparison footage between the two versions and the fact that the Saturn version loads quicker does seem to be fairly consistent (perhaps it uses the Saturn's increased ram for caching or something like that). As pretty much every other aspect of the game is the same, this seems to paint the Saturn version as a clear winner in terms of which version you should play, though if anyone has different experiences with the load times between the versions I'd like to hear about it. Even with the better load time, I still feel the game is somewhat unnecessarily cryptic most of the time and I don't think the story or presentation is as good as many other games of this type (for example, all of the scenes are still, a little animation would have been nice), but it was still a fairly significant game and this looks to have been a decent way to play it.
DeleteSol Divide is a very interesting game. Gamefaqs categorizes it as a shmup, but I'm not sure if I agree with that. Sure, you fly and you can shoot, but there's also a major focus on melee combat as well, and stages are very short and have only a handful of enemies, most of whom take dozens of hits to go down, which doesn't fit the typical description of a shmup. Actually, the short and varied stages and simplistic yet nuanced gameplay remind me a lot of Golden Axe, which is good because I've always considered that game to be one of the best beat-em-ups. Something else that's pretty cool about this game is that for the home console version, they added a second mode to the game. The arcade mode is fast-paced and has co-op support, while the original mode presents a more RPG-like experience where you can earn persistent upgrades and save your game as you tackle a multi-floor dungeon, which really helps to give the game a lot more replay value. It really shows they had a lot of faith in this concept and the result is a very unique and interesting action game. Compared to the Playstation version, the Saturn version is untranslated but they otherwise seem practically identical. I feel like I experienced a tiny bit of slowdown on PS1 but none on Saturn, but you'd probably prefer to have the english translation for the original mode. Still a very solid pickup on Saturn if PS1 isn't an option.
Striker 96 is just bad. There's really nothing good to say about this game, it's incredibly basic, the graphics are poor, there's almost no commentary (the commentator has maybe 10 lines total), the passing control sucks, the shooting control sucks, the goalies are way too good, it has too much load time, etc. There's basically just no reason to bother with this, pretty much every other soccer game of the era is much better.