This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
4-4-2 Soccer - BBBB - 0% (4)
Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare - GGGGGA - 92% (6)
Breakout - AGGG - 88% (4)
Glocal Hexcite - GAG - 83% (3)
Tekken 2 - AGGGGAGGGGGG - 92% (12) (2 SR)
Vanishing Point - GBBA - 38% {4}
A pretty high rated topic overall. I expected to see Tekken putting up good numbers, but Alone in the Dark was a pleasant surprise after the previous game.
Games for this topic:
Break Volley
Crime Killer
Dance Dance Revolution (US)
Theme Hospital
Treasures of the Deep
X-Files, The
Note that the DDR game is the one that's just called "Dance Dance Revolution" in the US, as I believe the US and Japanese versions slightly differ. I've also been interested to check out Theme Hospital for some time, as I am a fan of the spiritual successor Two Point Hospital.
Break Volley - B
ReplyDeleteCrime Killer - A
Dance Dance Revolution (US) - A
Theme Hospital - A
Treasures of the Deep - B
X-Files, The - G
Break Volley sucks. The biggest problem is that it's actually barely even a game, it's gameplay is so simple that it almost resembles an early version of Wii Sports. It's a volleyball game that uses only a single button, which does everything. You press any button to bump the ball, then any button to volley, then any button to spike. You can not aim the spike, and you can't move your players when the ball's not on your side of the court, which removes any kind of nuance to defense. You just press the button to dive for the ball and hope the person on your side gets it, and then you similarly hope that the opponent won't return the ball when you spike. That's literally all there is to the game. There's a mode where you can make your own team and power them up, but with the gameplay being so simple there's nothing interesting about it. Volleyball is a hard sport to translate into a game, especially the variant that uses a full team, but the nuance to the game comes from positioning and trying to find holes in the enemy defenses with spikes, which is just completely absent here.
Crime Killer is decent. The game is fairly unique and has a decently fun gameplay loop, but is held back from greatness by a couple of major problems. The gist of the game is that it's a vehicular combat game, not entirely unlike Twisted Metal, but instead of casting you as a competitor in an insane destruction derby you instead full the role of a futuristic police officer. It's no less violent, though, there's some funny tounge-in-cheek humour about how the media is always complaining that the police are psychopaths while you blow some poor schmuck and a few innocent civilians to kindgom come over an unpaid parking ticket. The core of the game is that you'll drive around the city, receiving orders for lawbreakers to terminate (or occasionally just pull over, you have a second weapon that merely stuns opponents), who you'll then hunt down using the in-game map. They're not usually prepared to come quietly, though, so they'll at the very least try to speed away from you if not fire back the entire time. The controls are absurdly tight, you can pull a 180 on a dime, but this is actually often necessary (the criminals also drive like maniacs) and generally they work well enough. Very occasionally the game will mix things up with orders to simply pursue and monitor targets or hit stationary targets like bombs, but no matter what you're doing there'll be no shortage of maniacal driving and blowing stuff up. Unfortunately, there are two major issues with the game. The first is a technical one. While the game's framerate is rock solid, its draw distance is atrocious. Cars pop in and out of vision constantly, which makes avoiding hitting traffic nearly impossible (thankfully, this doesn't do any damage, it just slows you down) and making it hard to track pursuing cars since if they get about 30 meters ahead they just disappear. This is especially problematic when fighting cars that fight back, as their weapons tend to have short range while yours don't, so the most ideal way to combat them is to keep your distance, but this causes you to lose sight of them easily. The second, and probably even bigger issue, is that levels in the game go on way too long. The first two stages aren't too bad, but the third level takes like 30-40 minutes, and near the end there's a section where you have to destroy 4 bombs within a time limit, and then afterwards you have to fight a squad of powerful armored trucks. Should you fail to get the bombs in time or get blown up by the trucks, you have to start the whole level over again, which is absurd. Thankfully, health pickups are common and regenerate so running out of health isn't a huge issue most of the time, but the game would have massively benefitted from either the missions being shorter or some mid level checkpoints. It is still kind of a fun game though, I just wish this had come out next generation because it probably would have been much more polished.
DeleteThe first Dance Dance Revolution shows a lot of potential but one major issue makes it not nearly as fun to play as later games in the series. Despite this being the inaugural title, almost everything you'd expect from DDR is here. The arrow-based interface still works exactly the way it does in modern titles, complete with you being able to use both the dpad and the buttons if playing on a controller. You can still choose your difficulty level for each song, and the overall challenge level is about the same as modern games. The major difference is that compared to every other DDR game, this game is WAY pickier on timing. I'm not sure exactly how much smaller the range is, but it's extremely notable when compared to its sequel, Dance Dance Revolution Konamix. This makes it almost impossible to maintain combos and generally makes the game quite a bit less fun to play. It's really not THAT big of a deal, but in a franchise with a billion games that only barely change from entry to entry, it's a noticeable enough downgrade that I'd probably recommend to just stick to the sequel.
It's hard to know what to do with Theme Hospital. For a game that's 26 years old now, it's actually remarkable how much it has in common with Two Point Hospital. All of the basics are there, you still position rooms, place furniture in the rooms, hire the four types of staff members to work there, even the general presentation and voice acting are very similar to Sega's follow-up. In a certain sense, it is kind of impressive how much they got right there and particularly upon the game's launch in 1997 I think this would have been quite impressive. At the same time though, Two Point Hospital is also a drastically better game, primarily because of how brilliantly it addresses all of this game's flaws. One of the biggest issues with Theme Hospital is that it doesn't actually feel very interactive. When you start each hospital, you have a lot of money to set up a bunch of different rooms. The rooms you'll need to build at the beginning are pretty much the same every time - reception, GP's office, general diagonstics, ward, pharmacy, toilet, and staff room. Compared to Two Point Hospital, there are vastly less items you can place in rooms, which means they'll look pretty much the same every time. After you've got the basics set up, you then have to wait for research to unlock things before you can do much else, which is easily one of the worst parts of the game, because unlike in Two Point Hospital, you have absolutely no control over what they choose to research, so they may waste much of their time researching upgrades to rooms you rarely use rather than new rooms or upgrades you drastically need. And that's if you can even get a researcher in the first place, Doctors with special qualifications are rare and you can't specifically seek them out the way you can in TPH. At any rate, once you get research set up, you mostly just wait. Every now and then you'll get to build a new room, but the lack of objects to place inside rooms limits your ability to upgrade the rooms you already have, making for a largely hands-off experience where most of the time is spent just watching the hospital run. The other issue is that the interface on PS1 simply isn't great. I did adjust to it, pressing square is a useful shortcut while building rooms, but obviously it doesn't play nearly as well as it would with a mouse. The levels also generally feel kind of short and uninspired, the brilliant progression mechanic from TPH where all of your hospitals exist at once and you can bounce back and forth as you unlock upgrades is nowhere to be seen here, not that I really expected it to be, but most levels are very short and feel like they're over too fast. Overall, it was still clearly a very influential title and I think you could probably make the argument that the PC version is G, but I don't think the PS1 version quite makes it there.
DeleteThere's an interesting comparison to be made between Treasures of the Deep and Crime Killer here, in that they are games that share most of the same flaws. Both games have overly long missions and poor draw distance, but at least Crime Killer's core gameplay loop is fun, while Treasures of the Deep's is not. Despite what you might expect, Treasures of the Deep is not really an underwater exploration game, it's more of a naval combat game. On each mission you're tasked with retreiving some kind of artifact, which requires you to swim to the end of a trench, blasting tons of enemies along the way, like sharks, rival divers, and enemy subs. As with many other PS1 games, the draw distance here completely sucks, which makes it almost impossible to find and engage targets before they hit you (you do have a sonar, but it shows tons of irrelevant things like fish as well, making it very hard to pick out enemies). When you do find a target, you basically just spam your primary attack, you have subweapons, but they explode and explosions can also damage you a ton, so these are almost never worth using. Even once you get the hang of combat, you can see everything this game has to offer in a few minutes. The trenches are long, but almost completely featureless, there's only a very small handful of enemies, and the entire game just feels very slow-paced and unexciting. There are various ways to earn money that you can use to buy consumables and upgrades, and even upgrade your sub, but with the core gameplay being as dull as it is it doesn't really hold any appeal.
DeleteI'll be honest, I've never been a fan of the X-Files, so I didn't really have high expectations going into the X-Files game, but it was far better than I expected. It's an FMV game, similar to Fox Hunt, but vastly better. Unlike Fox Hunt, which was largely nonsensical in its puzzle design, X-Files plays more akin to something like Myst, save with a ton of live action footage and voice acting. There are dialogue trees, puzzles to solve, some occasional action sequences where you can die (save at least somewhat often), and a lot of the other stuff you'd expect from a game of this type. Something I have to praise immediately are the game's production values and technical aspects. In many similar games, transitioning between scenes takes ages, killing all sense of exploration, but it's very snappy here, even when loading up video scenes the game is very quick, which for once results in an FMV game where the technology doesn't feel like it gets in the way. The production values are also fantastic, the acting is very well done, comparable in production values to the TV show (many of the actors also reprise their roles from the series) and generally the entire thing feels very slick. You might be able to take some issue with the puzzle design, there's a fair bit of pixel hunting here, and in particular there's some scenes that are dark where you have to use either night vision or a flashlight to light up the area and these don't work well on PS1 as the analog control just isn't as good for it as a mouse. Still, it's generally a pretty good experience. The story is legitimately well-told and can be pretty gripping at times and it really does feel like quite an impressive technical achievement for PS1.