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Last Topic's Ratings:
Asuka 120% Special Burning Fest - AGA - 67% (3)
Castrol Honda Superbike Racing - AGA - 67% (3)
Galaga: Destination Earth - AAB - 33% (3)
Love Game's: Wai Wai Tennis - BB - 0% (2)
Monster Race - GG - 100% (2)
Smurfs, The - BBB - 0% (3)
Not a ton of ratings last time, but I guess there were quite a bunch of imports in this group. I do hope more people will eventually look into Monster Race, though.
Games for this topic:
Crash Bash
Fox Sports Soccer 99
Kamen Rider
Murakoshi Masami no Bakuchou Nippon Rettou
SCARS
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
I'm interested to go back to Crash Bash, which I remember liking when I was younger, but my friend totally hated it so we never got all that far into our co-op run.
Crash Bash - A
ReplyDeleteFox Sports Soccer 99 - B
Kamen Rider - G
Murakoshi Masami no Bakuchou Nippon Rettou - G
SCARS - B
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear - G
Crash Bash is a decent game with some flaws. At its core, it's a minigame collection, but one with relatively few games, with only 7. Instead, it focuses on a fairly fleshed-out single player mode and having multiple rule variations of its games. Another unique twist is that the playable characters have somewhat differing abilities that affect how they perform at the various games, and there are also bosses in the story mode, which play somewhat like the minigames. By far the game's biggest issue is also what was intended to be its biggest strength, which is the story mode. Simply put, the story mode is fairly tedious and wears thin quickly. One of the biggest offenders is that to earn the trophy for each game, you have to be the first to three rounds. For some games that are relatively fast, like Polar Panic, this is completely fine, but for slower games like Ballistix this is an unbearable slog. Adding to the repetition, after you win the game you can try the two challenges, which are just the same thing but with a handicap or some restriction, though thankfully you only have to win these once. As for the minigames themselves, they are a number of decent ones, but there are also some stinkers. Ballistix is basically pong, and is by far the low point of the package IMO, it takes far too long to play and a lot of the later levels have a ton of shots that you essentially cannot defend against, adding a lot of luck. Polar Panic and the racing game are the best ones, being nicely paced and pretty fun to play, and the others are okay but nothing spectacular. I think if this game did a better job in terms of variety, possibly by having a few more games and mixing the games up more, it would probably be a lot more fun to play, but as it is it takes immense dedication to finish the game. It also really sucks that you can't even play all the games multiplayer until you get very far in the story mode, drastically hurting its value as a party game.
Fox Sports Soccer 99 (aka Actua Soccer 2) is one of the worst soccer games ever made. It's a complete failure on the most basic level, it doesn't get the basics of the sport down. Defense in Fox Sports Soccer simply doesn't exist. In most Soccer games, when you have the ball, you move slower, giving defenders the chance to catch up and forcing you to use passes to advance. This is not the case here, you run with the ball so fast that defenders have basically no chance to ever catch you, and slide tackles are slow and ineffectual, moving slower than regular movement and rarely stealing the ball even when they do connect. Even if you do line up a perfect slide tackle on an approaching player, the game will usually decide it's a perfect time to switch you to a different player just as you're about to tackle, as player switching is completely automatic, uncontrollable, and always picks the wrong player. About the only way to actually create a turnover is to pass, so the optimal strategy is just to run the ball all the way down the field and take a shot, then hope the keeper doesn't save it, then watch as the opponent team runs the ball all the way up your field and hope your keeper gets the save. That's literally about all there is to the game. There's no point ever bothering with crosses or anything like that, and turnovers are almost nonexistent, it's just a duel between the two AI-controlled keepers for the match. Absolutely avoid this one. If there was a grade lower than B this game would get it.
I wasn't sure what to expect from Kamen Rider, but actually, I quite like it. Gameplay-wise, it's a fairly simple 3D fighting game that plays a fair bit like the N64 game Flying Dragon. Each character has a bunch of different strings, many of which lead to juggles, and tick throw setups are super strong. It's nothing super advanced, but it plays much better than a lot of other early 3D fighters. What really sets the game apart though is the love for the source material. We've seen a lot of really godawful licensed games (ie, Ultraman, Beast Wars), but you can tell this one was made by a team that was passionate about Kamen Rider. For starters, there's a story mode which tries really hard to recreate the show. There's cutscenes, each fight follows roughly the same pattern as the show (first, you have to beat up some guys out of costume, then transform, then fight the boss in two phases, complete with narration and theme music), as you play the game you can unlock trading cards from the show, and even the game's animation and physics feels like it does a good job of capturing the cheesy tokusatsu style. I feel like you really couldn't ask much more than this for a fighting game based on a TV show, I just wonder if the later releases in this series will maintain this level of quality.
DeleteI had high hopes when I saw that Murakoshi Masami no Bakuchou Nippon Rettou is developed by the same company that made the N64 Nushi Tsuri games, and it doesn't disappoint. Not too surprisingly, it plays quite a bit like Nushi Tsuri 64, which is a good start because that game is good, though it has a very different progression system. Unlike Nushi Tsuri, this is a fairly linear game, it's divided into stages that take place in different parts of Japan. On each stage, Murakoshi will task you with catching a certain number of a given type of fish. Something that's pretty cool is that each level begins with an introduction from the real Murakoshi where he explains the basics of catching that type of fish, which is a neat touch. You're then taken to the pro shop to prepare for the stage, but if you don't know anything about fishing, it's not a big deal, because Murakoshi will set you up with the right kind of tackle for the job, all you have to do is listen to what type of lure he tells you to buy in the video (there's also pictures in case you can't understand Japanese). Each area consists only of a single screen on which to fish, so finding the fish you want is not hard, but you can also ask Murakoshi for advice if you get stuck (sometimes they like to hide in specific areas, like the shadows). As far as actually catching the fish, it's quite simple, having almost the exact same system as Nushi Tsuri. After you cast the line, you just start reeling it in slowly with X, and Fish will try to strike, you press Down to hook them, then just pull them in when they're not running, keeping an eye on your tension guage. As noted, for each stage, only one type of fish counts, but this isn't as annoying as in other fishing games because you can see underwater, so you can tell if the fish that's going to bite is the right one. Even if you hook the wrong fish, you can still sell them to the pro shop to make money, so it never feels too bad. The presentation of the game is great too, the visuals look fantastic, the camera work during the fishing segments is quite good, and it even has some decent music for the fish fighting. Overall, this is another solid fishing game from Victor. I don't know why no one else could quite figure out fishing games the way they did during this gen.
SCARS still sucks. It's pretty much the same as the N64 version, except that the presentation has taken a big hit, it looks way worse and has also lost some voice acting and sound quality. It still suffers from the fundamental problem of being a heavily rubber-banded combat racer where racing skill is basically nonexistent and races take far too long. I feel like the speed of the game on PS1 is maybe a little faster, which helps a touch, but it's still not at all fun to play and there's way too many good racing games this gen to bother with it.
DeleteRogue Spear is a huge upgrade over the original Rainbow Six in pretty much every way. Like the original, the gist of the game is that you have to infiltrate various locations, rescue hostages, and eliminate terrorists, but you have to be quite cautious and disciplined because you die in only a few shots and it's easy to fail missions by having hostages killed or triggering other failure conditions. The original Rainbow Six on PS1 was a disastrous port that had horrible controls and visuals and was almost completely unplayable, but thankfully Rogue Spear is handled far better. For starters, the controls are completely fixed, it now has a pretty modern dual-analog setup that feels just fine to use, particularly given the fairly generous auto-aim, so you can now appreciate the gameplay much more. The visuals have also been improved a lot, while still nowhere near on par with PC it looks perfectly fine for a PS1 game and runs pretty well, some minor slowdown is present in big areas but it's nothing gamebreaking. Speaking of the gameplay, it's pretty good. Before each mission, you'll receive a pretty well-produced briefing along with some tactical advice and can set up your loadout and characters, though the defaults are usually fine if you just want to get into the action, every part about this feels well made and I think the story is actually fairly interesting. Most missions are fairly short, though they can be very easily lost by making mistakes. Thankfully, the game allows you to instantly restart a failed mission with no load time, which is a godsend and helps turn what could potentially be a fairly frustrating experience into an enjoyable one. Your squadmates have improved a lot compared to the original game too, they'll now accompany you on the mission and can take out a decent number of enemies on their own, but if they run into trouble (or you know they're about to) you can swap to controlling them instantly, which is cool. Escorting the hostages is definitely a little on the janky side, their pathing is not great, sometimes I will reach the extraction zone only to realize I lost the hostages halfway through the stage, but this issue is also present on PC. Speaking of, the PC version definitely looks a ton better, a lot of visual detail has been sacrificed on the PS1 version, and the settings of some stages has even been changed (for example, on PS1, the 4th level has a kind of "snow base" aesthetic, whereas on PC it's an urban location). This has little gameplay impact (beyond the better draw distance of the PC version), but some stages actually have some cuts, for example at the beginning of stage 5, the plane stage, on PC you start the mission further away and have to use a truck for cover to get close, this part is absent on PS1 and instead you start right near the plane. I could maybe see the logic for rating the PS1 version as A due to the various downgrades, but honestly I think it's still a pretty solid option for the console, and I appreciate the drastically better effort on the port this time. Even on PS1 it's still very clear that this is a good game.