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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Battle Arena Toshinden Remix - AAABBAB - 29% (7)
Die Hard Trilogy - AGAA - 63% (4)
Full Car Mini Yontou Super Factory - BB - 0% (2)
Myst - GBGA - 63% {4}
Sol Divide - BGA - 50% {3}
Striker 96 - BB - 0% (2)
The low reception to this one caught me a bit off guard, in particular I didn't think so few people would have played Myst on Saturn.
Games for this topic:
Dejig: Tin Toy
Fire Pro Gaiden: Blazing Tornado
Linkle Liver Story
Swagman
Virtua Racing
Virtual Golf
There's a translation available for Linkle Liver Story, which has to have one of the strangest names of any game I've ever seen. We've also got another famous arcade racer conversion here with the Saturn version of Virtua Racing.
Dejig: Tin Toy - B
ReplyDeleteFire Pro Gaiden: Blazing Tornado - A
Linkle Liver Story - A
Swagman - A
Virtua Racing - A
Virtual Golf - A
Dejig: Tin Toy is an ever-so-slight improvement over Dejig: Aquaworld, but it still really sucks. Pretty much the entire improvement comes from the change in theme. This game is focused around puzzles based around antique toys (and not, as I originally thought, the Pixar short Tin Toy), which means there's a lot more colour diversity in the puzzles, making them significantly less obnoxious to complete compared to the puzzles from Aquaworld which frequently had massive sections that were just blue. That's not to say that large areas of solid colour aren't still common here, because they are, but it's at least a little better. Also a little better is the music, which has improved from "crime against humanity"-level to merely "totally atrocious". Each song is still only like 2 seconds long, but at least the instrumentation is less grating now. Incidentally, I realized why the music in the Dejig series is so bad, it's because it's an extremely poor attempt at a variable mix, the music adds more instruments as you complete more of the puzzle (I turned the music in Aquaworld off long before that point), which is a cool idea, but the loops are so short that it still sounds like garbage. Based on the somewhat increased playability of this game you could almost try to make the case that it's the lowest of low As, but the fact that I played it longer than Aquaworld allowed me to see more of its flaws, like the larger puzzles. You'd think the larger puzzles would just have smaller pieces, but oh no, it's much worse than that. The larger puzzles instead scroll, but the puzzle preview doesn't, obscuring the finer details in many parts of the puzzle and making it impossible to guage where pieces should go, making these puzzles especially tedious and unfun to complete. Overall, it's just still a crummy jigsaw experience that you shouldn't bother with.
Fire Pro Gaiden Blazing Tornado is not at all what you'd expect from a Fire Pro game. The typical Fire Pro engine with a million characters and character edit modes is totally absent here, instead this is Human Entertainment's take on something like Saturday Night Slam Masters, though it's not as good. Gameplay-wise, this is an extremely simple wrestling game. You have light attacks and strong attacks, and you can run. If you grapple, these do light and strong grapples and irish whips. On a downed opponent, these pick up the opponent, do a downed attack, and pin, respectively, and that's about the entirety of the game. Wrestlers have health bars, and you can't do strong grapple moves until they have less than half health, and pin when they have no health. As such, pretty much the entire game is "do light grapples until half health, then do strong grapples, then pin". Speaking of grapples, this is the only part of the game with any nuance, when a grapple is initiated, the wrestlers will pose for a moment before they grab. To get your grab to win, you have to input your grab the second they lock arms, if the opponent is quicker they break the grab. You can do different moves by holding different directions on the Dpad, but they tend to be fairly similar. Overall, it's an okay game, but there's really just not a lot of nuance to it. Compared to Slam Masters, for example, the lack of special moves really decreases the depth of the game, and blocking is kind of wonky too (you hold light attack to block). It's okay at best.
Linkle Liver Story is cute and I kind of like it, but it's not without its flaws. It reminds me quite a bit of Illusion of Gaia, though it's inferior to it in almost every way. Like Illusion of Gaia, it's a fairly linear adventure-style game played from a top-down perspective. The story isn't as deep as the one from IoG, but it has its own charm nonetheless, the biggest issue is with the gameplay. The worst part of Linkle Liver Story is attacking, your attacks are slow, have little range, and lock you in place, causing combat to feel stiff. Even once you get the ability to make different types of weapons, they still feel slow and janky. You do have a secondary attack where you can fire your little companion out as a projectile that does damage and stuns enemies, and this feels much better to use, but even when making use of the "stun enemy then melee attack" strategy the game feels very simplistic and combat gets fairly repetitive. It's also very easy, as you can take a million hits and healing is plentiful. It's also a fairly short game, with not a lot of enemy variety and few bosses, but it has nice music and animation and there's a decent amount of charm to the whole thing. It's no masterpiece, but if you enjoyed the Quintet games or 16-bit ARPGs in general it might be worth a playthrough.
DeleteAs when we covered it for PS1, I think Swagman is kind of cool, though it has some issues. It's sort of like an overhead version of Resident Evil, you explore a spooky house to find keys and solve puzzles, though it's a lot more simplistic and not nearly as well polished. One of the biggest issues with the game is there's a ton of instant-kill pits, frequently placed in places you can't see easily or right at the entrance of rooms, though thankfully you get infinite continues. The combat in the game is serviceable but not fantastic, hit detection sometimes feels a little wonky, and this makes the sections where you play as a monster less exciting than they could be and the boss battles in particular are brutal. You can eventually get two characters to swap between, which is neat as they have different abilities, and the presentation of the game is pretty cool, so there are some things to like here if you're patient enough. Speaking of patience, something I noticed is that the load times seem to be quite a bit longer than on PS1, so you might want to play that version instead, though I feel like the game feels a bit better on Saturn due to the lower number of games of this type compared to PS1. Either way, it's a decent game that might be worth a playthrough, but I think it just barely misses the G mark.
Virtua Racing on Saturn is a great port with a single fatal flaw. You probably know this by now but Virtua Racing is a classic arcade-style racing game that sort of acts as a predecessor to Daytona USA. Like many such games, in the Arcade it only had 3 tracks, which obviously poses a problem when it comes to home console releases as this means the game will have little content. Well, Time Warner Interactive saw right through that problem as they beefed up the track selection to a very respectable 10 tracks, and added in various vehicle classes besides, to give the game a pretty impressive amount of replay value. The game also runs and looks great on Saturn, with the only low point of the presentation being the soundtrack, which lacks any persistent music, playing only short ditties at checkpoints (this is not new to this version, it's always been like that). With how well the game handles on Saturn plus the great framerate, I would say this game actually has the edge on Daytona USA from a gameplay standpoint. So what is this one flaw that I mentioned earlier that holds this game back from greatness? In the grand prix mode, which makes up 90% of the game, every race is locked to TEN LAPS, which is just way, way too many. You can typically take first place within 2 laps tops, leaving you to frontrun for 8 boring minutes, which effectively kills all the replay value in the Grand Prix mode. When compared to the 32X version, even though that version has much less content, it plays a lot better, since the difficulty is tailored much better to its much more appreciable 5 lap limit. If there was a way to change the grand prix mode to be 3 lap races (even if this could be achieved by a cheat code or something) I'd instantly bump it up to G, but from what I've seen there's absolutely no way to change it, which is criminal.
DeleteGolf games have struggled more with the transition to 3D than you'd expect. Obviously, Mario Golf is the gold standard, which no Golf games this gen seem able to match (I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Mario Golf is secretly one of the best and most influential games ever made) but Virtual Golf at least makes a better attempt than most. For starters, Virtual Golf succeeds at one of the most fundamental aspects of making a 3D Golf game. Its engine is actually 3D! That sounds trivial, but a surprisingly large amount of Golf games from this era are still using pseudo-3D engines that just don't cut it anymore, and Virtual Golf's engine looks pretty great by comparison. It also does well in terms of the swing meter, which is intuitive and even provides a recommended level of power. So that's a pretty good start there. Unfortunately, it is held back by some other key issues. The first is the camera. The game completely lacks the "landing zone" camera that Mario Golf made famous, you can actually view your shot's trajectory, but you can't move the camera forward, so the best you can do is move the camera up and then angle it down to try to get a glimpse of the landing zone, but this is nowhere near as good as a freely controllable camera. Putting in this game also totally sucks, the game lacks any kind of putting grid or anything like that, making putting a total crapshoot, and it's also incredibly picky about the amount of power needed to sink shots, with putts dropping an inch short or skipping out of the cup constantly (the suggested power also seems to be totally useless here). There's not too much more to say about it than that, it's functional but imprecise due to the aforementioned issues and doesn't even come close to the playability of Mario Golf, but it's still probably in the upper third of Golf games from this era.