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Last Topic's Ratings:
All Japan Woman Pro Wrestling - GG - 100% (2)
Armored Core - AGGGAAGGGGG - 86% (11)
Diablo - AGGGAGGG - 88% (8)
Hybrid - BA - 25% (2)
Love Love Truck - GG - 100% (2)
USA Racer - BB - 0% (2)
Pretty high ratings for this topic, I guess we should have done Armored Core earlier after all. Oh well, it's good to see this many ratings this far into the PS1 GAB.
Games for this topic:
Asuka 120% Special Burning Fest
Castrol Honda Superbike Racing
Galaga: Destination Earth
Love Game's: Wai Wai Tennis
Monster Race
Smurfs, The
We finally come to Monster Race, which was originally intended to appear like a year ago, but upon testing it out I determined I liked it enough to write a guide for it, which took like 6 months due to how massive of a game it is. The guide is done now, though, so you can check it out if you want to try the game. Also, I'm interested to try out Wai Wai Tennis, which looks at least superficially similar to Mario Tennis.
Asuka 120% Special Burning Fest - G
ReplyDeleteCastrol Honda Superbike Racing - A
Galaga: Destination Earth - A
Love Game's: Wai Wai Tennis - B
Monster Race - G
Smurfs, The - B
Asuka 120% Special Burning Fest is another one of those fighting games that is completely insane in terms of what they allow you to do, but it's fun. For starters, this is only a two button game, you have weak and strong attack and that's it, super is performed by pressing both buttons together, similar to EX moves in other games, and most specials also have simple motions, making it very accessible for newcomers. It's also very simple in terms of combo rules, basically, everything is cancellable and everything juggles. Sweep into Dragon Punch? It combos. Rekkas into super? It combos. Air throw into super? Ground super into juggle super? You'd better believe it combos. Anything you can think of that seems like it might work does work, and the absurd flexibility of the game is both fun to play around with and hilarious. There's also a decent number of characters and they have pretty substantial movesets despite the game's two button setup, and the game also looks and sounds pretty good and has great motion detection. I know this game has two more editions that add more onto it but this is already a pretty solid foundation.
Castrol Honda Superbike Racing is fine but there's nothing special about it whatsoever. It has godawful default controls and starts with steering and brake assist, but you can fix these in the options, leaving you with just a bog standard bike racing game. It never feels particularly fast and it's quite methodical, as going off the course slows you to a crawl and can make you fall off your bike, but once you get the hang of braking you can win easily and there's not much more to say about the game than that. It's another one of those games which only has a single race and a championship mode, there aren't even multiple bikes to choose from. It runs and looks decent but there's really nothing special about it. If only Moto Racer 2 had this game's performance, or this game had Moto Racer 2's sense of speed.
Galaga is an interesting title. Something I particularly like about it is when you start the game, it plays just like the original Galaga, from an overhead perspective. Then you clear out a few waves of aliens and the camera pulls behind your ship and then it starts playing like Starfox and it's like "surprise!". That was pretty cool, I've often thought more shmups should use that kind of transition because it's neat. However, it also exposes the game's biggest problem, which is that it plays substantially better in 2D than 3D. Galaga's core mechanic is that you can only have two lasers onscreen at a time, which means you can only shoot fast if your shots are actually hitting things. This is a fine mechanic for 2D, but in 3D it's much harder to line up your shots, which causes the game to feel unresponsive, it really could have used a homing attack or something for these segments. It gets a little better if you get the tractor beam and capture an enemy ship to use as an "option" as their shots are often much better than yours, but the 3D segments never feel like they work as well as they could, which is a shame because the horizontal and vertical segments are pretty decent.
DeleteI had high hopes for Wai Wai Tennis, but it doesn't live up to them. The game does sort of superficially look like Mario Tennis, and to its credit, it DOES get the ball hitting control right. If you hold left from the bottom left corner, you hit it up the line, just like in Mario Tennis, making it one of the only other games to have ever gotten this right. However, pretty much everything else about the game is bad. One of the biggest issues is that the swinging control is very stiff. Unlike Mario Tennis, you have to swing the racket very early and it locks you in place while doing so, causing the game to feel very stiff. This also makes netplay nonviable, which eliminates almost any semblance of strategy from the game, as the viability of baseline play is determined solely by the speed of the court, leading to rallies that either take forever or end instantly, depending on the terrain. There's a mode where you can create a character which is absurdly complex, but also totally unnecessary as the stats in the game barely matter and matches aren't fun to play. There are two more games in this series, though, so perhaps they can figure things out a bit for the sequel.
Don't let the name fool you, Monster Race is not a racing game, it's basically just a slight twist on the Pokemon formula. As the name implies, in this game, Monster battles take place in form of races, but you don't need to steer the Monsters or anything, they run the track automatically. The wrinkle comes from the fact that every track is made up of different types of terrain, like Grass, Rock, Swamp, and Hurdles, and different Monsters have different levels of proficiency with each terrain. You need to swap them in and out, relay style, to try to run the course as quickly as possible, but you don't want to switch too much because switching loses time. Monsters also have special skills they can use to give themselves a boost or hinder the opponent, and as they level up they'll get faster, gain new skills, and possibly even evolve. You'll travel across a huge world collecting new Monsters and entering racing tournaments on your goal to win the Very Best Cup. It's very similar to Pokemon, but it's just different enough to feel fresh and I think it's a lot of fun. If the game feels a lot like a Gameboy game, that's no accident, as the Playstation version of the game is actually a remake of a Gameboy game, having almost the exact same gameplay but drastically upgraded presentation. On Gameboy, the game was released in two versions, much like every other game of this type, but a unique twist is that the playable character changes between the versions, in Monster Race Okawari you play as the Rival character and it slightly changes the storyline. The Playstation version instead stitches the two versions into one, turning Monster Race Okawari into a "new game plus" of sorts, and also adds some extra postgame stuff, but more on that in a moment. This would seem to make the Playstation version clearly the one to play, as it looks drastically better, each Monster now has a suite of new animations that really help bring them to life, but there is one drastic change on the Playstation version that might make you prefer to play on Gameboy instead. On Gameboy, the enemy trainers effectively have no AI, they run their team in the order specified and only switch out when their stamina gets low, but on Playstation, the trainers have new AI and make smart switches to optimize their Monster's performance. Their levels and teams have not been adjusted at all to account for this (in fact, in many cases, their teams have actually been made stronger), which has the impact of making the Playstation version drastically harder than Gameboy. This is actually kind of unfortunate, because one of the strengths of the game is that there's a neat system that allows you to fuse two Monsters to make a new one, granting access to a ton of Monsters at early stages of the game and allowing you a tremendous degree of flexibility over your team composition, but on Playstation, the game is so hard that you either have to pick mostly top tiers or grind a lot in order to win. It's not all bad though. The Playstation version also adds a ton of new postgame content, which was one of the weaknesses of the original game. On Gameboy, there's a single postgame superboss for the 100th Monster and that's it, on Playstation they add two massive new postgame quests that really help make the end of the game feel meaningful, and the second quest of the game (the Monster Race Okawari one) is actually really cool, as they add some new Monsters near the beginning that you can use in fusion to get endgame monsters right off the bat. While it may not offer quite as much freedom as the Gameboy version, I still think it's really cool to see a game like this on Playstation and it's worth a playthrough on one of the systems if you like Pokemon.
DeleteThe Smurfs is a bog standard 2D platformer with a lot of polish issues. For starters, it's as generic as you can get, it's a standard "hop and bop" platformer with no unique or innovative mechanics. One thing that's immediately noticeable is that the controls are somewhat stiff, jumping feels slow and I had it eat my inputs a number of times. It's also often not clear what enemies you can jump on and which ones you can't, as many enemies are unsafe to jump on but offer no indication that this would be the case, and sometimes enemies of a given variety are unjumpable at one point and safe to jump another time. The game's level design is bad too, for example the second stage is an autoscroller, kind of like a Donkey Kong Minecart stage. One of the collectables is under a ledge at the beginning, but how do you get it? No, there's no trick to get down there, you simply get to the end of the stage, where you dismount, then walk all the way back on foot, then all the way back to the end again, which is just atrocious. There's a lot of blind jumps and other marks of poor polish on later levels too. Even though you do eventually obtain powerups like double jump that add a tiny bit more nuance to the formula, it remains uninspiring and unpolished throughout. The only cool part of the game are the loading stills, which use classic Smurfs artwork.
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