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Last Topic's Ratings:
Advanced VG - GA - 75% (2)
Arcana Strikes - GG - 100% (2)
Discworld - AA - 50% (2)
NBA Jam Tournament Edition - GGG - 100% (3)
Whizz - ABA - 33% (3)
Wipeout - BAAAA - 40% (5)
A pretty quiet one last week, but with the number of obscure titles on Saturn this will probably be a fairly common occurrence.
Games for this topic:
Amok
Fishing Koushien
Marvel Super Heroes
Prikura Daisakusen
Sankyo Fever: Jikki Simulation S
Warcraft 2: The Dark Saga
We've reached the 15th topic! It's not too much of a milestone, but it's a start. There's still quite a lot to go, but we've got a few notable games this time, I guess the question is just whether or not anyone played these games on Saturn.
Amok - G
ReplyDeleteFishing Koushien - B
Marvel Super Heroes - G
Prikura Daisakusen - B
Sankyo Fever: Jikki Simulation S - B
Warcraft 2: The Dark Saga - G
Amok is really solid. I didn't intend it this way, but there's actually some similarities to be drawn with Treasures of the Deep, as some missions in this game take place underwater, though this game is drastically better in every way. It's a kind of third-person shooter where you control a mech, picking up powerups, completing mission objectives, and generally just blowing up everything that gets in your way. The first thing I need to point out about this game is that the control is excellent. Unlike Treasures of the Deep, this game has little verticality, your gun will automatically aim up to hit targets vertically, similar to Doom, which lets you primarily focus on movement and evasion. The mech's controls are great, besides regular movement you can sprint and strafe and both feel very responsive. You're almost always outnumbered a million to one, so you'll be spending a lot of time strafe shooting enemies and making the occasional tactical retreat by sprinting backwards. Each mission typically has a few different objectives, though in most cases they involve destroying specific things on the map, though occasionally you have to pick up equipment or rescue prisoners instead. There's a fair number of powerups strewn throughout the levels, some of which are hidden, in a way that kind of reminds me of Doom's level design (the game also has a "secrets" counter), as some of the powerups you can find are permanent. Like Treasures of the Deep, the draw distance here isn't stellar, but enemy bullets are very highly visible and travel slowly enough that dodging them generally feels reasonable, and there's also a radar that both detects enemies from much further away and also highlights different points of interest in different colours, making it vastly more useful. Overall, this is just a really solid action game where I have pretty much no complaints about it. It's too bad the PS1 version got cancelled.
Fishing Koshien has great presentation and looks like it might have some interesting mechanics, but its core gameplay is so bad that none of it matters. The game starts off well enough, you get to create a team of different fishermen with different abilities, and there's a minigame where you reel in fish similar to a carnival game to determine who gets to pick their fishing spot first, but once you get to the actual gameplay it goes downhill quickly. I've often stated that the "golden rule" for making a good fishing game is that hooking a fish should be fairly easy, but fighting the fish should be nuanced, and this game perhaps runs the most afoul of that of any fishing game ever made. This game has easily the worst hooking mechanics of any game I've ever played. You can see the fish under the water, but they're the most apathetic fish in any game, they don't respond at all to your lure so if they ever decide to come near your lure is complete luck, and if you don't jiggle it at exactly the right time as they approach they'll either lose interest or get scared away. Even if they do nibble, you must press the button with absolutely perfect timing to hook the fish, or they'll swim away and you'll have to wait another 15 minutes for a bite. Even if you do finally hook a fish, the fish fighting as super simple, usually you just reel them in, possibly waiting a bit if they leap out of the water. And here's the kicker - like most other bad fishing games, this is another game where only Bass count and there's no way to know if a fish is a bass before you catch it. It probably won't be, so it's back to waiting another 15 minutes to hook a fish for you. The game does have good music, but even that is not enough for a game that tries my patience to this degree. You can kind of tell this was originally a SNES game because most fishing games from this generation have fixed at least some of these problems.
Marvel Super Heroes is a massive upgrade from Children of the Atom in pretty much every way. For starters, this game introduces the aerial and chain combo systems that Marvel is famous for. It's actually even slightly more generous with them than later games, for example most characters can link Air HP into Air RK which they don't allow in later games, but either way the combo system feels vastly better than it did before. The game also introduces the Infinity Stone system, which is kind of interesting, as you play you can gain access to the various infinity stones, which can provide certain buffs for a limited time, like health regeneration or super armor. Each character has one of the stones that they use particularly well, gaining an extra effect when using it, but all of the stones have the potential to swing the match. Since this system is abandonned in later games (except MvsC Infinite) it helps this game feel unique to play even when compared against later games in the series. Compared to the Playstation version, something about the Saturn version feels just a little bit off to me, I think it's actually that the Saturn version is a bit more zoomed in compared to PS1 (notice that the entire HUD doesn't fit horizontally, unlike the PS1 version). This tends to make the game feel slightly more cramped, though it doesn't alter the gameplay too much. The other thing is that Saturn has some nearly Arcade perfect versions of X-Men vs Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter which preserve the tag mechanic, unlike PS1, which might reduce the desire for people to go back to this game, but I think it's still a fairly solid game in its own right.
DeletePrikura Daisakusen is a hard game to categorize, it has some shmup elements, but also plays a bit like a run and gun game, but whatever you choose to call it, I'm not a fan. The game is an isometric action game where you fight your way through stages full of enemies. You have both a shooting attack and a melee attack, and holding the shoot button allows you to strafe. Stages are short and there aren't many of them, but enemies take a ton of hits and movement is very slow so it still feels slow to play. I think many of the game's problems stem from its isometric perspective. For starters, the screen is super zoomed in, your character probably takes up a good 10% of the screen, and the camera tends to keep you somewhere towards the middle of the screen, so you really can't see very far ahead of your character at all, god forbid when you have to travel up and to the left, where you can barely see at all. Combined with the game's glacially slow movement speed, this tends to result in you having almost no time to dodge most attacks. The isometric perspective also means there's a huge focus on diagonal inputs, which DPads never do all that well. You can opt to rotate the dpad inputs in the options, but IMO this doesn't really help that much since enemies come at you from all directions constantly, and your moves and shots are so slow that getting an attack in a cardinal direction when you wanted a diagonal will almost always cause you to be hit. This is made doubly annoying by the presence of the roll move, which is activated by double tapping in any direction, but the window for this is absurdly long so unintentional rolls are almost impossible to avoid while playing normally (the roll can also be performed with a button, but you can't disable the double tap input). Overall, the game just feels slow and clunky to play. It does look and sound pretty nice, but with Saturn's lineup of shmups being as strong as it is I can't see this being anywhere other than near the bottom. Even if you consider it to be more of a general action game with shooting elements, Amok is so much better than this that it would still be B.
Sankyo Fever: Jikki Simulation S is another collection of Pachinko machines. Compared to many other such collections, this one is somewhat more barebones, there's no "story mode" as you see in most games of this type, rather you can just play the machines at your leisure, giving yourself as many balls as you feel you deserve. I actually kind of don't mind this approach, but there's no question that there's less content here. In terms of the machines themselves, something that stands out a bit is that some of them are "ecchi" style machines, which feature movie segments of scantily clad girls when you spin the reels or progress the machine. Don't expect much titilation though, the resolution is very small and the video clips are incredibly brief, plus they're very tame by modern standards, but I suppose it's still an interesting piece of history. The game does allow you to view all the movie segments if you don't want to play through the game, which is nice, though I feel like it highlights the main problem with Pachinko, which is that the gameplay itself is completely mind-numbing, having all the depth of a slot machine but taking way longer. I wonder if these games had any audience in Japan or if they find them just as pointless as we do.
DeleteWarcraft 2 on Saturn is pretty much the same as the Playstation version. Like that version, it's a combination of Warcraft 2 and its expansion, plus some enhancements (such as the game being more zoomed out and the ability to queue units, which are both fantastic), but with no multiplayer and you have to play it with a controller. Compared to the PS1 version, the main differences I can see is that the visuals on Saturn seem to be somewhat higher fidelity, but the game's load times are about twice as long (I timed how long it takes to get to the starting menu between both version, on PS1 it takes about 12 seconds, whereas it takes 25 seconds on Saturn). Since missions in the game tend to be fairly long and there's no load time when a mission is in progress I'd probably give the edge slightly to the Saturn version, but individual preferences might vary. I was really hoping the Saturn version might have fixed the controls, but no such luck, you're still stuck using the same button to select and command your units. Still, this is a very content-rich game that easily dwarfs pretty much all other RTS games from this era. You might be able to make the case that Command and Conquer made the jump to consoles more gracefully, but this is still definitely one of your best options.