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Last Topic's Ratings:
Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon - GG - 100% (2) Kitchen Panic - BA - 25% (2) Mary King's Riding Star - BG - 50% (2) Motor Toon Grand Prix (US) - BBBGG - 40% (5) (1 SR) Project Horned Owl - AAA - 50% (3) Pro Yakyuu Nettou Puzzle Stadium - AG - 75% (2)
I was pretty surprised by how this one turned out, I thought Motor Toon Grand Prix was a pretty popular game. Of course, I never know what the reception to games will be, but I thought it'd pull in more votes at least.
Games for this topic:
4-4-2 Soccer
Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
Breakout
Glocal Hexcite
Tekken 2
Vanishing Point
This looks like an interesting set of games. Glocal Hexcite and Vanishing Point look like they could be cool, and of course we also have Tekken 2.
4-4-2 Soccer - B
ReplyDeleteAlone in the Dark: The New Nightmare - G
Breakout - G
Glocal Hexcite - G
Tekken 2 - G
Vanishing Point - B
There are so many terrible soccer games this generation that to refer to a game as "one of the worst soccer games of the generation" feels cliche, but 4-4-2 Soccer really is one of the worst. It's another extremely generic 2-button soccer game with dismal presentation, but it goes the extra mile by also having extremely stiff controls and terrible player switching mechanics. There's also no commentary whatsoever and generally the game offers nothing that every other soccer game doesn't do much better. I don't know what it was with this era and everyone putting out their own budget soccer game, but this is another one that's best avoided.
Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare is pretty solid. Things have come full circle for the francise, from the original game acting as an inspiration for Resident Evil, the newest entry now borrows very heavily from that franchise, but considering the disaster that was One-Eyed Jack's Revenge cribbing a bit from the masterpiece that is RE1 can easily be forgiven, particularly considering it does make some innovations of its own. Like RE1, you have a choice of two playable characters who will explore a creepy house and surrounding areas, looking for supplies, fighting monsters, and solving puzzles. As you would expect, the game features fixed camera angles and tank controls, but the controls have been polished tremendously compared to the previous game, it now basically looks and feels exactly like Rez Evil. The game's biggest innovation is its lighting system. You have a flashlight that you can use to light up the game's surroundings, highlight interactables, and scare the shadow monsters. When cast upon a wall or object, the flashlight lights that area realistically, which is actually tremendously impressive when you remember that the backgrounds are actually just 2D images and not 3D models. It's actually very impressive how seemlessly this works, and it really helps enhance the game's ambience, which is among the best on the platform and possibly even outdoes its inspiration. Another major feature is that the campaigns of the two protagonists are actually very distinct from each other, as compared to RE where the two characters usually run almost the same route. Unfortunately, the impressive technical specs of the game and the divergant paths do somewhat come at the expense of breadth, there are only so many areas in the game and since no character explores all of them you rarely have access to more than a handful of rooms between major story beats, causing the game to feel somewhat linear. It's still a decently lengthy game if you play both campaigns, but the scope of the game and the sense of exploration can't quite match up to RE. Still, while it might not be quite the masterpiece that RE1 is, it still comes fairly close, being probably the best of all RE clones (it's way better than TRAG, for example). You might also wonder how it compares to the Dreamcast version. That version runs at double the resolution and the prerendered backgrounds look fantastic, but they didn't re-render the cinematic scenes for DC, so every time the game displays a scene it reverts back to the PS1 resolution, which looks quite jarring, and it does this a lot (obviously, this is no issue on PS1 where the game's resolution remains consistent). So it could be seen as an improvement depending on how much that resolution switch bothers you, but it's not drastic in any case and the PS1 version is actually my preferred way to play the game.
I've said before that an important aspect of game creation is that you have to believe that your game is awesome. After all, if you don't think your game is great, who else is going to? There are many games that just feel kind of soulless where you can tell that the developers had no real passion for their game and were just there to get a paycheck. This is definitely not the case with Breakout. Breakout is an incredibly stupid idea, it's basically an epic adventure starring the paddle from Breakout, who has to save all his paddle friends from an evil paddle, armed with nothing other than his trusty ball and the will to break through anything that stands in his way. Levels vary a lot more than you'd think, on some levels you may be dismantling a simple structure, while on others you have to hit only specific blocks, or not hit specific blocks, or hit blocks in a certain order, and other simple puzzles like that. There are boss fights, multiple playable paddles, and a variety of powerups you can use. There are silly cutscenes between each level and even an adjustable difficulty system which raises if you beat many stages without dying. I don't know who looked at breakout and thought "what this needs is to be a globetrotting adventure game", but they actually kind of pulled it off and I salute them for it.
DeleteGlocal Hexcite is a pretty fun game with one major flaw. The game itself is fairly unique and bears some resemblance to classic board games like Chess. The game is played on a board made up of 7 hexagons arranged in a honeycomb pattern, and two players take turns placing pieces of various shapes. The rule for placing the pieces is that you can't split the edges of a piece, either an edge must be totally free or it must be totally covered. So, for example, if you have a triangle piece where all edges are length 2, each edge must either be completely locked in by other pieces or completely free, you can't have any edge half touching and half not. For each edge that you do lock in, you get 5 points, so filling in holes with your pieces is worth quite a bit. In addition, there's a point bonus associated with completing any of the hexes that aren't the middle one, some of the hexes are worth 10, and some are worth 30. The pieces dealt to each player are random (though the player who doesn't go first gets to choose 2 pieces to add to their hand), and you can see which pieces your opponent has, so you want to plan ahead to make sure that your opponent doesn't get the big bonuses for completing the hexes. It's quite satisfying to box the opponent into a situation where you know that no matter what piece they place, they can't stop you from completing a hexagon on the next turn, but you also have to be careful not to get yourself stuck with pieces you can't place at all, as once neither player can place any more pieces, each player loses points for whatever tiles they got stuck with, and big pieces cost you a lot of points. It's a pretty interesting game with some unique strategic considerations to it and after I started to understand it I found it pretty fun. The game's presentation is also cute, with decent music and voice acting. So what was the major flaw I mentioned earlier? The computer takes FOREVER to take their turn. I don't know if this is intentional or not, as the computer actually often loses points due to the placement timer (if you take too long, you start taking penalties), but it makes matches take a lot longer than they ought to. If played on an emulator with speedup this is tolerable, but it would be annoying on console for sure. Despite this I think the game is still G, particularly since you can eliminate this issue by playing against a human player, but it's a strange flaw to an otherwise cool game.
Tekken 1 showed a little promise, but had way too many flaws to be fun. Thankfully, Tekken 2 improves on it in pretty much every way imaginable and now mostly resembles what people would expect from a Tekken game. Speaking of, Tekken is pretty unique among fighting games, playing very differently from many traditional fighters. In Tekken, very little is truly safe, there's pretty much always some kind of response to whatever action the opponent could take, so reactive play is strong, but many strings can lead to deadly mixups that can do a ton of damage, and even getting up from a knockdown is a guessing game here, so you don't want to be too passive either. Compared to later games, damage output is super high here, which results in matches that are very swingy, with a player often being able to turn the whole match around from a single hit. This actually probably makes the game somewhat too volatile, and later games will tone down the damage output to some degree, but I suppose it helps make it more accessible to newcomers. Speaking of, this game has seen great improvements to training functionality, with a proper training mode and an ever-present command list, which help make the game much easier to get into, and there's quite a lot of content here as well, with an impressively large roster for its time and lots of unlockables for the home console version. I've always been more of a fan of Street Fighter, but there's no question this is a pretty solid package.
DeleteWe've reviewed many racing games that have a competent racing engine but are held back by their mostly nonexistent progression system, but this is one of the first times we've hit the reverse situation - a game with an incredible progression system held back by absolutely atrocious gameplay. There's an absolute boatload of content in Vanishing Point, with a ton of tracks and cars to unlock and customize, to the extent that when I started the game I figured it would be G, but then you start the first race and you try to turn and you instantly realize the game is B. This game has maybe the mushiest, worst-feeling handling system of any PS1 racer. Cars barely respond when you turn them, and there's also an awful auto-centering mechanic that feels incredibly unintuitive. Even after I started to adjust to it and won a number of races, the game never feels fun to play because the handling just feels so awful. I always say that you can tell if a racing game is good within the first 5 minutes and this is a perfect example of that. Actually, there may be more issues besides just the handling, the collision system is also awful, with your car spinning out at the drop of a hat, resetting you car takes so long it basically forces you to restart, and all of the races are time trials. Even though there are rivals on the track, they don't matter except to screw you over, which also feels lame. It's an absolute tragedy that this game handles so badly as it also actually has really good presentation in addition to having tons of content and an interesting progression system. I wonder how hard it would be to hack this game's handling engine and replace it with some actually competent controls, because there is a G level game buried under here, but it's buried so deep that I doubt anyone could put up with it. Incidentally, there's also a Dreamcast version, and while you could maybe argue that version controls a tiny bit better, it's still bad.