This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Break Point Tennis - BB - 0% (2)
Driver - AAGGAG - 75% (6)
Galeoz - GB - 50% (2)
King's Field 2 - GGGABA - 67% (6)
Reverthion - BB - 0% (2)
Versailles - AA - 50% (2)
This was much lower than I expected, I always thought Driver was one of the biggest names on PS1. It just goes to show how important it is to playtest your tutorial!
Games for this topic:
Builder's Block
Global Domination
King of Fighters 97
Option Tuning Car Battle 2
Skeleton Warriors
Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey 98
This might have been the most difficult topic title I've ever had to write, I had to try like 10 times to find something that fit within the character limit. Option Tuning Car Battle 2 is one I've wanted to try out for quite some time, the original seemed like a cool idea but the polish wasn't quite there yet.
Builder's Block - G
ReplyDeleteGlobal Domination - B
King of Fighters 97 - A
Option Tuning Car Battle 2 - G
Skeleton Warriors - A
Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey 98 - G
Builder's Block is a strange game, but I kind of like it. For starters, the tutorial does a very poor job of explaining the game, so I'll give the basics. The goal of the game is to create large buildings by creating a square of blocks that are the same colour. For example, a given stage might require a 4x4 building to clear, so you have to find some way to get a 4x4 of any colour to win. You can clear out blocks by touching them corner to corner from the top, which will clear out all connecting blocks of that colour, and whenever a block comes to a rest, any touching blocks become that colour. If you clear out a 4x4 building, you can get a star tile (which eliminates a given colour), and a 5x5 gets you a moon tile (which turns all blocks to one colour). You clear a stage by clearing the trophy block that appears after you make a building that's big enough, though if you can make an even bigger building you get a ton of bonus points, which are key to your overarching goal to develop each city. The mechanics aren't too complex once you get the basics, but there's a surprising variety to the puzzles. Usually you want to get rid of all but a single colour, but sometimes you'll need to find ways to patch holes or slide blocks into place that require keeping colours around for a bit. You can retry each stage as much as you want (for a very miniscule score penalty), so it never feels punishing if you don't get the idea behind the stage on your first try. As you complete stages, you can watch your little city get bigger, until you finally finish it and move onto the next one, which is kind of satisfying if you do well. There's also an arcade mode, which uses the same rules but it plays vastly faster. I don't think this mode is quite as good, things are a bit too hectic to really plan anything interesting, but I guess it's nice to have extra variety. Overall, the puzzle mode is a pretty chill and unique experience among puzzle games which I'd recommend checking out.
Global Domination is a complete mess. This is another one of those games that starts with a very slick fully-acted FMV sequence that probably used 99.9% of the game's budget, as the game itself is virtually unplayable. Global Domination is ostensibly a cross between Missile Command and Risk, where you want to conquer territories by attacking them with missiles while shooting down enemy missiles. It's unbelievably basic, as shooting missiles simply involves smashing the square button over and over and hoping the opponent fails to block a few, but it still manages to be even worse than this due to its horrible campaign mode. There are a few other things you can do in the game, like launch fighters and cruisers, and as such the game's campaign mode is essentially a glorified tutorial teaching you how to use the various options in the game. Unfortunately, no one ever playtested it as many of the steps in the campaign missions are either explained incorrectly or outright impossible. For example, the third step of the first mission is to destroy Argentina's Cruiser. However, Argentina doesn't have a Cruiser. The actual win condition is to simply attack Argentina with missiles. The second level has a task to destroy a submarine, which they tell you is at Alaska, but it's actually at India, and even when sending my cruiser to India immediately, I was never able to convince it to attack (it usually just gets lost). Skipping ahead to later levels via use of a code wasn't any better, similar issues abound. It really makes you wonder how they put so much budget into these games for the FMV but none into the actual gameplay.
The King of Fighters 97 still suffers from the same problem as all other KOF games on PS1, which is that it has to load every time a fighter comes out, but it's enough of an upgrade in other ways that it's finally dragged itself into A. Besides just having new characters and moves, the biggest upgrade here is to the gameplay system. This is the first game where Advanced mode is available, which is a far better system than the original "charge power bar and do supers at low health" system from the previous games (you can still use this, though not many people do). The team battle mode is still pretty much unplayable due to the 10 second load time before every character, which completely ruins the flow of the game and just makes it a chore to play, but thankfully you can also choose to play the game like a standard fighting game where you pick one character and it's a best of 3 rounds, which does not suffer from this constant load time. When played this way, KOF97 basically just plays like a pretty good fighting game with a ton of characters. It's still clearly not the ideal way to play the game, but it's not completely terrible. Speaking of terrible, one thing about KOF97 that really sucks is its OST. A few stages basically just have atmospheric sound effects and it just sounds like garbage, which is one of the things that keeps this game out of G range (the other being that its sequel is just a lot better in general). I do appreciate the little bonus menu that they put into this game with concept art and such, though.
DeleteOption Tuning Car Battle 2 is one of those good sequels that improves on the original game in pretty much every way. There's actually almost not too much to say about this game due to how solid it is. With the first game, I noted that it had decent fundamentals but suffered from poor difficulty balancing, where the early races were virtually impossible until your car was substantially powered up, so the only way to get money was to repeatedly lose matches (you get a little money for losing). This is totally fixed, the difficulty curve now works exactly how you'd expect it to, the beginning races are now quite easy, and you can also now rematch races for extra money, though you probably won't need to. It does legitimately get pretty challenging at the very end, but by then you'll likely have mastered the game's driving mechanics so it doesn't feel unfair. Speaking of, the game's driving engine and camera are also significantly improved. The original game had the camera a little overly close to the car, which is fixed, and the handling engine also feels very smooth, it kind of feels like a more Japanese take on NFS. It's very arcade-style, so you'll be doing a lot of big drifts, and the camera actually pulls to the side when you do so you can appreciate your sick drifting skills, which has little gameplay impact but looks cool. As for the tuning, it's still a little on the simple side. There's a decent number of parts to buy, but you get money pretty fast so it's not hard to max out your car, it's really more the racing engine that carries the game than the tuning. One last interesting mechanic is that this game tracks your progression by car, similar to Rally de Africa, so you'll need to tune up and win all 15 races with each of the game's 20 cars to fully complete the game, but it's a good enough game that it might be worth doing.
Skeleton Warriors is a super basic action game. It makes an extremely poor first impression, as the first stage is almost certainly the hardest and worst stage in the game, it features a section similar to the riding sections from the Lion King where you move far too fast to see what you're doing, and the boss on that stage is hard too. Once you beat the first level the game becomes substantially easier. The basic gist of the game is that you're a swordsman and you fight skeletons and that's about it. You have a ranged attack, but it uses ammo, and you really need to conserve that for the bosses, so usually you'll just be using regular sword slashes. By far the best part about the game is your aerial downwards sword slash causes you to bounce, which is fun, sort of reminscent of Scrooge's pogo bounce. Every other level, instead of a boss there will be a biking segment, and these are the worst parts of the game. They play like Starfox, but are extremely slow and easy, it feels like you should travel about twice as fast as you do. Overall, it's tolerable but only just barely, it's maybe a very low A for how early it came out, but I wouldn't really recommend it.
DeleteWayne Gretsky's 3D Hockey 98 is much the same as the N64 version, but with a few minor upgrades and downgrades. As with the N64 version, it's essentially the NBA Jam of Hockey, with only 3 players per side, turbo, huge checks, flaming pucks, and Tim Kitzrow doing the commentary. Compared to the N64 version, the biggest downgrade is to the visuals, which don't look anywhere near as sharp as they do on N64. There's also some added load time. However, PS1 offers better control configuration (most notably, you can now reuse buttons when defending vs attacking, ie you can have Square be both check and shoot, which you can't on N64). It's still much the same game in any case, save for one very significant change. When we covered this game on N64, I noted that the game had almost no depth because the goalies are so bad that you basically just press onetimer and it's an instant goal every time. However, this is actually fixed on PS1, in the transition to the new engine they seemingly revamped the goalie AI, making them somewhat better. Not enough that you can now never score, but the onetimer isn't nearly as gamebreaking as it is on N64. I wanted to make sure I wasn't just misremembering the N64 version so I booted that one up, and it's night and day between the two versions. This definitely improves the PS1 version a fair bit, so I would actually probably recommend this one over the N64 version even though it looks worse.