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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Break Volley - BB - 0% (2)
Crime Killer - AAB - 33% (3)
Dance Dance Revolution (US) - AAGAG - 70% (5)
Theme Hospital - BGAAG - 60% {6}
Treasures of the Deep - ABGBGG - 58% (6) (1 SR)
X-Files, The - GBGGA - 70% {5}
What a divisive topic, I've rarely seen the votes vary more than they did with this bunch. I always appreciate when people give a little blurb with their rating because it gives some interesting insight into the factors that influence people's perception of different games.
Games for this topic:
Break Point Tennis
Driver
Galeoz
King's Field 2
Reverthion
Versailles
A quick clarification, this is the game that is called King's Field 2 in Japan, and "King's Field" in the US. It is not the game which is called "King's Field 2" in the US, that's King's Field 3. I'm also looking forward to finally trying Driver, though I have vague memories of seeing my cousin play the computer version a very long time ago.
Break Point Tennis - B
ReplyDeleteDriver - G
Galeoz - G
King's Field 2 - B
Reverthion - B
Versailles - A
Break Point Tennis is a classic bad Tennis game. Like many bad Tennis games, swinging your racket takes forever and locks you in place the entire time, making the game feel extremely stiff. This game might actually have the slowest swing of any Tennis game ever made, you have to press the button almost a full second early when serving (this is probably why they don't count it as a fault if you fail to hit the ball). The game is also extremely barebones beyond this, with barely any players and no real progression to speak of, not that you'd want that with how poorly it plays.
It's not at all difficult to see why Driver is popular. The game is incredibly ambitious for its time, being one of the first open-world driving games. In many ways, the game kind of feels like a prototype for GTA3, you do many of the same kind of missions, though you never leave the car, you just drive from one key mission point to the next and the rest happens through cutscenes. The first thing that must be commented on are the game's production values, which are incredible for their time. The game's cities are pretty huge and full of traffic, cars, and landmarks, the visuals and draw distance are great, and the game also has a pretty cool sense of style (for example, the menus take place inside the character's apartment, which changes with each city). There's also a lot of cutscenes with full voice acting, both of which are well-made. It feels very advanced for the platform, almost feeling more like a PS2 game. The gameplay has a few issues, but is generally pretty solid as well. By far the worst aspect of the game, strangely enough, is that first mission, which is a driving test of sorts. You have 1 minute to complete a ton of poorly-explained objectives, which is extremely difficult and frustrating. The vast majority of the moves they make you do here and never necessary or useful throughout the game, so it makes you wonder what they were thinking with this mission. Thankfully, after this is over, the missions show much better gameplay and variety. Many missions require you to drive fast to a certain destination within a short timeframe, and these are by far the best parts of the game. There are other missions that require you to reach a location "stealthily", and these are the worst parts of the game. If you get the cops on you, they're very hard to shake off, you basically just need to find a a super long straight like a bridge in order to lose them, so if you keep running into the police these missions can take ages. The correct way to do them is to drive slow and watch your scanner for cops, then avoid them, but this is fairly dull. Thankfully, the game rarely gives you a time limit with missions like these, which would be extremely frustrating. As for the driving control, it's generally pretty decent. It's very twitchy, but I suppose it probably needs to be given all the weaving through traffic you need to do, and it generally does its job. Overall, it's a very impressive game for its time. It can occasionally be frustrating, but at least you can instantly restart any mission with no penalty if things go awry.
Galeoz is decent. Technically you control a tank of sorts, but it plays a lot like a mech shooter. Movement is very simple, you have accelerate, brake, and strafe controls, and you have a regular weapon and occasional consumable weapons like missiles. Your weapons have pretty strong autoaim, so there's not a lot of focus on accuracy, for the most part you just have to drive fast, find bosses, then strafe around them to blow them up, but it works well enough for the most part. Something I'm impressed by is that despite its age (this is a very early PS1 game), it runs and looks decent, with acceptable draw distance and a very solid framerate. Levels also vary a decent amount, they tend to alternate between being linear vs more open missions, and some of them are cool, like the one where you have the blow up a power plant and then escape before it explodes. It's not a masterpiece or anything, but I feel like it was a pretty decent early title for the platform.
DeleteKing's Field 2 is terrible, easily the worst of the three King's Field games. Compared to the first game, it's a bit more ambitious, with a larger world and a new engine that allows for more complex graphics, but unfortunately it's so hideously unoptimized that it pretty much destroys the game. By far the biggest problem is the framerate. King's Field 2 normally runs about 20FPS, which is a little on the slow side, but tolerable, however its framerate is totally uncapped, causing it to fluctuate wildly depending on the surroundings and the number of enemies in the vicinity. You might be chugging along at 20FPS, only to kill an enemy and have it jump to 35FPS, then kill one more enemy and suddenly the game is running at 60FPS. And don't bother thinking the game might have some kind of sensible variable frame rate implementation where the underlying game runs the same speed even if the framerate changes, it just suddenly becomes turbo fast with no real warning every now and then, which completely throws off the timing-based nature of the gameplay. The problems don't stop there though. Compared to the first game, you can now attack somewhat faster, but unfortunately it's come at the expense of hit detection. Even once you get rid of the crappy dagger you start with, hit detection is wildly inconsistent, with your attacks frequently going right through enemies while dealing no damage. The combination of inconsistent framerate and terrible hit detection pretty much butcher the timing and kiting based gameplay of the original, forcing you to instead adopt another strategy, backstabbing. While the enemies in this game can attack lightning fast and butcher you in seconds (unlike you, their attacks don't need to recharge), they still have to deal with tank controls just like you do, so if you can get behind them you can stunlock them to death with relative impunity, you just have to make sure another enemy doesn't sneak up on you while you're doing it. Getting behind them is no picnic, though, due to how absurdly slow you can turn, it results in a weird dance of turning and strafing as you try to get behind your prey. Suffice it to say, it's not very exciting or fun and it gets repetitive real fast. I'd recommend just skipping this one and moving on to the sequel, which is drastically better in pretty much every way.
Reverthion is pretty bad. It's a mech fighting game, similar to Lost Legion UX and Virtual On, but it's much worse than either of them. One of the biggest issues is the controls, rather than having tank controls, it maps rotating the machine to diagonals, which feels very awkward. There are special moves in the game that I was never able to figure out how to do, but it barely matters because of how simple the game is. Probably the biggest issue is that there's basically no hitstun, so nothing combos. Using the first vehicle for example, it would be cool if you could land some shots and then do your dash attack, but they can mash roll to get out of this because there's no real hitstun when attacks land. The best crafts are those who have a move that just makes them invincible (and do damage to anything nearby) with no penalty or vulnerability window whatsoever, which makes it feel like the design of the game isn't very well thought-out. It's playable, but there's really nothing interesting about it.
DeleteVersailles is a nice-looking game but it doesn't have a lot of substance. It's a first-person point and click adventure game similar to Myst, though with a fairly impressive engine where each scene is rendered with a kind of fish eye lens that lets you look around in all directions. This is a huge improvement compared to the static scenes featured in Myst and similar games, and the game's elaborate setting (the palace of Versailles) takes full advantage of it. However, the plot of the game and the puzzles are all very basic and not particularly engaging. Very little in the game is actually interactable, so most of the game just involves wandering around, looking for something you can interact with, stealing whatever isn't bolted down, and then using it on everything until something happens. This is not atypical for the genre, but the puzzles feel particularly obtuse here. For example, I spent a long time in the first area trying to open a chest, as the one key I had didn't work. It turns out the correct method of opening the chest is actually to use a pair of scissors on it, though nothing would lead you to this conclusion. Innocuous actions, such as picking up an item, often cause NPCs to move or say different things as well, rendering the game's progression largely incomprehensible. Still, the focus is probably intended to be on the exploration and the proceedings (there's quite a lot of attention given to the goings on in the palace) which are pretty neat, I just wish they had put more work into crafting an interesting narrative around it.