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Last Topic's Ratings:
Beast Wars - BABBB - 10% (5)
Blaze and Blade: Eternal Quest - AB - 25% (2)
Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling - AAAB - 38% (4)
Peak Performance - BB - 0% (2)
Spider-Man - GGGGGGA - 93% (7)
Uchuu Seibutsu Flopon-kun P - AA - 50% (2)
I was getting a bit worried about the vote totals last week, but actually, this topic did all right, in vote counts at least. The ratings were actually really bad, with only Spider-Man and Flopon escaping the low range.
Games for this topic:
All Japan Woman Pro Wrestling
Armored Core
Diablo
Hybrid
Love Love Truck
USA Racer
A pretty interesting set this week. I've heard a lot about Armored Core, but I've never played it, and I'm interested to see how Diablo holds up, particularly on PS1. Beyond this, I have no idea what to expect from Love Love Truck, but the box art sure makes it look like a heck of a good time.
All Japan Woman Pro Wrestling - G
ReplyDeleteArmored Core - G
Diablo - G
Hybrid - A
Love Love Truck - G
USA Racer - B
I didn't know what to expect, but All Japan Woman Pro Wrestling is actually pretty decent. By Wrestling standards, it's actually a very simple game, but I feel like its mechanics are fairly clever. One of the most unique things about the game is the way it handles grapples. Performing a grapple while the opponent is standing normally is actually a very low value action in this game, as you cannot perform slams against a standing opponent. You can irish whip or perform a strike from a grapple, but if they're healthy they'll usually just punch you out of it, or regain control before you can do a follow-up from an irish whip. Instead, to perform slams in this game you first have to stagger the opponent with strikes, then grab them while they're staggered, which results in a slam attack. I feel like this gives a good sense of rhythm to battles, in many games the balance between strikes and slams often seems to heavily favour one or the other, but here they work together nicely in terms of offense. The control scheme of the game is also very simple. Square and X are strikes, Circle grabs and pins, Triangle does submissions, R1 runs, and L1 taunts, and you activate finisher with L2 + R2, there's no complicated button sequences to perform moves or anything like that. You could probably argue that the game doesn't have a ton of depth, but it's still a pretty satisfying game to play. The presentation is quite solid, too, wrestlers have full FMV intros, and the sound is also pretty decent, with a mixture of voice acting, crowd noise, the announcer, and even music. It's just a pretty solid title overall even if it doesn't break a ton of new ground.
There's kind of a funny trend where whenever I'm looking forward to trying out a game, it usually tends to be bad, but if I'm not looking forward to playing a game because I think it'll be too much work, it usually turns out to be great, and this is once again the case with Armored Core. Being a From Software game and a series that's long been praised for its depth and complexity, I was expecting the game to be a bit of a slog and to take a long time to get into, but it's actually not like that at all, the game gets going right away, and from the moment you gain control of the mech it's obvious that it's a good game. Gameplay-wise, the game plays very similar to the modern Gundam games, with you having a boost bar that allows you to move quickly or jump, but needs time to recharge after use, as well as a mixture of lock-on and melee weapons to use to dispatch enemies. It's actually very impressive how much this game gets right for being such an early title, the controls and the general pacing of the action are pretty much dead on. It even runs really well, unlike the spotty performance of the King's Field series, this game generally runs great, holding its framerate at almost all times save for when there's a bunch of explosions going off. The draw distance is maybe not the best, enemies usually can shoot at you before you can see them, but the autotargetting helps with this, as does the fact that you have a fairly generous health pool. I was also impressed with the mission variety, the terrain and enemies encountered vary a lot, and missions are often quite open, allowing for different strategies based on your loadout and playstyle. For example, in one early mission that took place on a bridge, I was knocked off the bridge and I expected to be instantly killed by this, but it turns out you can walk in the water below just fine and I just had to jump back onto the bridge to continue the fight. The one thing that's a bit of a drag on the game is the mech customization system. In order to work at all, mechs are subject to two limits, their power consumption must not exceed the generator's power output, and their weight must not exceed the weight their legs can carry. This is fine in theory, but these two limits are very tight and when buying new parts, the game doesn't show you how they impact what you already have (you can press triangle to see their stats, but you'll have to go back and forth between menus to compare). This tends to make getting new parts not as interesting as it could be, for example I won a unique pair of legs from a mission, only to find out it had less weight capacity than the ones I already had and there was no way I could actually equip and use them with the loadout I had. I think it probably would have been a better system if those limits were soft limits instead, for example going over your power output could simply slow the regeneration of the boost bar rather than making the craft fully inoperable, but even if you decide to mostly ignore the customization of the mech, the core gameplay is good enough to carry the title. It'll be interesting to see how they improve the game with subsequent releases.
DeleteI would imagine everyone here probably at least knows the basics of Diablo. It was so influential that pretty much every game that plays anything like it is compared to it, if not outright referred to as a Diablo clone. What some might find surprising however is how much of what we associate with Diablo wasn't present in the original game but was in fact added in Diablo 2, for example there are no skill trees in this game, the only thing you can do besides regular attack and use potions is cast spells, which anyone can do if they find the appropriate magic tomes and have the necessary stats to read them. As such, it's a significantly more simplistic game than most games that follow it, but there's still a kind of timeless appeal to its mindless action. In any case, there are two main points to address when talking about Diablo on PS1: how does the game hold up after all this time, and how is the PS1 version compared to PC? For the first question, the answer is decently well. The game has undeniably aged to some degree, in particular there's simply nowhere near the level of depth that you'd find in Diablo 2, Titan Quest, or any other similar game. However, it kind of makes up for this with the fact that it's absurdly fast-paced by comparison to most similar games. If we compare Titan Quest for example, it's a great game, but there's a lot of just running through random farmlands and slaughtering thousands of Satyrs and other trash enemies. There's none of that in Diablo, its 16 floors have almost no downtime, with unique Monsters around every corner and bosses every handful of floors. There's also some replay value to the game as not only is the design of the dungeon random, there's some randomness to what quests and thus bosses appear in the game. It's not without its flaws though. One of the biggest ones is the inventory, which is absurdly small. You'll need to run back to town to identify and sell stuff near constantly, made doubly annoying by the fact that you have to sell different types of items to different NPCs who are quite spread out, and it incurs a fair bit of load time as well. The other big issue is the speed of the game. The game simply runs slow, in particular movement feels very sluggish compared to most similar games, but thankfully the PS1 version contains an option to double the speed of the game, which is an absolute godsend, this alone probably makes this the definitive version of the game (at least if not using mods) despite any other downgrades it may have. Speaking of which, the PS1 version also contains a few other changes from the PC version. For starters, it looks and controls somewhat worse. The controller mapping is not terrible, there's some autoaim where it will target nearby monsters and it works well enough, even when using projectiles, but there's no question the mouse control is superior. You also obviously can't play online, though local multiplayer for 2 players is included in its place. The PS1 version also has some enhancements. Besides the aforementioned game speed setting, they've also added the ability to unlock and play the different difficulty levels in singleplayer, which was only added in the expansion for the PC version, which, incidentally, is a no show here, this is the base game only. Music and sound thankfully seem to be totally intact, which is nice because the game has some pretty good sound and voice acting. Overall, while this is a very old game, it's still clearly a classic and this is a decent port of it, and it's way ahead of most other console-based Diablo clones.
DeleteHybrid is essentially a Doom knockoff with a couple interesting traits and a few issues. Gameplay-wise, it plays extremely close to the original Doom, complete with auto-verticality when firing. It's main claim to fame is that it has 4 playable characters, which all play decently differently, and that helps to add replay value. It has two major issues though that hold it back from greatness. The first is that the game's default movement speed is far too slow. There is a run button, but the running speed is how the game should run all the time, so you'll need to either tape a button down or dedicate a finger to holding one of the shoulders down the entire time, which feels awkward, and auto-run feature would have been greatly appreciated. The second is that the levels a huge and very labyrinthine and there's no map. I had to consult a walkthrough multiple times just to get through the first level because I kept getting stuck. It's otherwise not a bad game, I just wish it was a little more polished.
DeleteLove Love Truck is such a weird game that it's difficult to even describe, let alone evaluate. The gist of the game is that two people are going on a date on the Love Love Truck, which is kind of like a mix between a minecart and a rollercoaster. You pick one guy and one girl and how well you play the game determines whether they hit it off or not. For starters, they have to work together to move the cart, since it's one of those old trollies with a crank in the middle. There are also all kinds of obstacles that will come at you, generally requiring you to speed up, slow down, or duck to avoid them. The guy also needs to periodically reach out of the cart to grab gifts for the girl, which increases the heart meter (getting hit or failing to grab gifts decreases it). You can also make hamburgers for some reason, but if you combine the wrong ingredients or use mustard, you lose points. After each stage, the two characters will have a romantic heart to heart about their dreams for the future, or not, if you're playing the game poorly. After a few stages a pirate couple shows up to screw with your date, but if you can survive to the end maybe the two daters will make it work out after all. One thing I appreciate is that all of the pairings have unique dialogue. You choose between 1 of 4 guys and 1 of 4 girls, and they have unique post-stage dialogue and also each have two possible endings. As you might imagine, the game also supports two players, and plays best that way, the second player can also grab gifts and can react faster in situations where you have to duck compared to the AI (this is probably my one complaint about the game, the AI ducks very slowly after you do, often causing them to get hit). In a weird way, I actually think this might be a decent date game, it's about the right length and it's not too hard to play even for someone who's not too much of a gamer. Either way, it's a very charming game, and there's certainly never been anything like it before or since.
I actually kind of like some aspects of USA Racer but it's clearly not a good game. For starters, I was expecting this to be the exact same as Europe Racer and such, but it's not, they've actually changed up the presentation of the game quite a bit, the game is now divided into distinct circuits and there are different drivers you can race. One of the things I actually kind of like about this game is its presentation, the game looks decent and for its music it simulates a radio station, complete with people calling in and a DJ, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, the game is just terrible mechanically. It has an extremely lousy handling system where tapping the wheel results in a massive turn, which feels super unituitive, you'll always try to correct the turn and then end up swerving the other way. It is playable once you get used to it, but it always feels bad to control. It's really a shame because with competent controls this certainly at least would have been A.