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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bottom of the 9th - BBB - 0% (3)
High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge - AG - 75% (2)
Rabbit - GAG - 83% (3)
Rampage World Tour - BBAB - 13% (4)
Rox - BB - 0% (2)
Valhollian - GG - 100% (2)
Actually not a bad reception to this set, despite not really having many well-known games.
Games for this topic:
Destruction Derby
Galactic Attack
Jung Rhythm
Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge
True Pinball
World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
A couple PS1 ports this time, and another title in the Darkstalkers series. It's very weird how the first two games are split between the two consoles, so I guess it's lucky that we're doing both PS1 and Saturn at the same time so we can do the series in order.
Destruction Derby - B
ReplyDeleteGalactic Attack - A
Jung Rhythm - A
Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge - G
True Pinball - G
World Cup Golf: Professional Edition - B
Destruction Derby is another terrible Saturn port. As I mentioned when we covered this game on PS1, I kind of like it, but the Saturn port is drastically worse than the PS1 one, running at maybe half the framerate, making it feel extremely choppy. In a weird way, having the game run slower actually kind of helps with the game's controls, which were always kind of twitchy, but much of the excitement is lost when the game runs this slowly, and there's also a fair bit of graphics pop-in as well and the entire game also runs letterboxed. Get this one on PS1 if you're going to play it.
Galactic Attack basically just proves what I was saying when we covered Raystorm about how shmups should never be 3D, as it is a drastically better game. One thing I wasn't expecting is how similar they are, in a certain sense Raystorm almost feels like an ill-considered 3D remake of this game, all of the mechanics are the same and there's even some very similar set pieces, which really help you compare how much better the game works in 2D. For example, the second boss between the games is very similar, having many of the same attacks (including the fire four projectiles that arc toward you move), but these attacks are vastly more readable in 2D. One thing I still feel is an issue though is that the game feels very claustrophobic, almost as though the screen was supposed to be larger than it is. I don't know whether the aspect ratio was altered for Saturn or if this is just because the sprites for the ship and the enemies are really big by shmup standards, but it feels like you get cheap shotted by enemies firing at you from point blank range a lot more than in most shmups. There are also a fair number of enemies with laser-type attacks that cross the screen in one frame that aren't telegraphed (the third boss has one of these, for example), which makes it feel like this game requires more memorization than most. I think I'd still say that this is only an average quality game, even with how much of an improvement it is over Raystorm, so perhaps inexpertise with the genre was also part of the reason Raystorm was so bad. It's decent, but nowhere near on par with something like Sonic Wings Special.
Jung Rhythm is a Parappa the Rapper clone. In a certain sense, it's kind of impressive how accurately they were able to copy it for being a small studio, the gameplay is basically identical and it also has the same kind of madcap cutscenes between levels, but the songs aren't nearly as catchy, which is a very key part of the experience. In a lot of ways it feels kind of like Parappa 2, where it gets the basics but the soul of the game just isn't quite there. It's still decent but it's not the masterpiece that Parappa is.
DeleteDarkstalkers 2 is solid. The Darkstalkers series is basically a prototype for the VS series, featuring similar chain combos but not yet having many of the features you'd expect from the VS series, like air combos or assists. Darkstalkers 2 in particular has kind of an unusual combo system where every character has access to a chain combo system that goes LP LK MP MK HP HK, allowing you to interrupt each button with any button that comes later in the sequence. What makes this atypical is that if you perform such a combo, you can no longer special cancel, which makes many special moves feel somewhat pointless and feels strange coming from the VS series in particular. You can do jump in -> one normal -> one special move, but these combos feel unreliable, particularly because hitstun in this game is quite short, and the damage is rarely any better than a chain combo anyway, or you can also use special moves for reversals, which can punish opponents who commit too hard to moves with a lot of recovery. This does have the effect of making the game fairly easy to learn, as you basically just need to be able to input the chain sequence and you can play most of the cast, and I feel like generally this game feels somewhat more simple compared to many other fighting games of the era, with neutral mostly revolving around correctly jumping a fireball or punishing a bad special move. It does make this game somewhat suitable as a game for beginners, which seems to be complimented by the fact that this game's computer AI is quite weak, most of the opponents throw out tons of unsafe special moves in neutral, as if to teach you how to punish moves. One last thing I have to mention is that this is a great port to Saturn, the game looks fantastic and runs perfectly, which was in no way a guarantee at the time.
True Pinball is pretty much the exact same game as on PS1. It's very similar to the Pro Pinball series, except you get all four tables on one disc, which is an obvious improvement, particularly on Saturn, which didn't get all four of the Pro Pinball games. As with Pro Pinball, these modern Pinball machines have a lot more going on compared to older tables, with LCD displays, multiball, and tons of different events, so there's a lot to do here even with only four tables. For pinball fans this is an easy recommendation that can last you quite a long time.
DeleteI always talk about how awful most pre-Mario Golf Golf games are, but World Cup Golf might actually be one of the worst of the lot. The game features sort of a unique engine, where the entire game is made using prerendered graphics. When you hit a shot that goes somewhat along the intended path, the game shows a cutscene with your ball overlaid on it, which sort of works (you can almost never see where your ball lands), and wherever you hit from, you're shown a prerendered shot of that part of the course. Visually, it looks all right (still worse than any true 3D game), but the big issue here is absolutely zero consideration was given to the game's playability. For starters, the interface is absolute trash. To even aim your shot, you have to go into a menu, and I was never able to figure out how to change clubs. The pre-rendered nature of the game also makes it effectively impossible to determine the slope of the course, once again you can go into a menu and select "magnifying glass" like icon and run that over the course for some very basic slope information, but it's slow and woefully inadequate. Overall, it just feels like 100% of the work in this game went into the presentation and at no point did they consider whether or not it was actually fun.