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Last Topic's Ratings:
All Star Racing 2 - BB - 0% (2)
CodeName: Tenka - BGGAA - 60% {5}
Fisherman's Bait: A Bass Challenge - BB - 0% (2)
Loaded - GABBBBB - 21% (7)
Tsun Tsun Kumi: Suuji de Puni Puni - GA - 75% (2)
Vagrant Story - AGGGAGAAGGA - 77% (11)
Not really too far off what I expected, though it's interesting to compare the reception between Parasite Eve and Vagrant Story, as I consider them to be somewhat similar games (Parasite Eve rated slightly higher).
Games for this topic:
Burger Burger
Fade to Black
Street Racquetball
Test Drive: Off-Road 2
Uprising X
War Gods
It's probably not something anyone has ever heard of, but I've wanted to check out Burger Burger ever since I created the list of games for PS1. I don't know much about it, but its box art looks neat and I enjoy cooking-themed games. Fade to Black also looks like an interesting title.
Burger Burger - A
ReplyDeleteFade to Black - A
Street Racquetball - B
Test Drive: Off-Road 2 - G
Uprising X - A
War Gods - B
I was concerned that Burger Burger might be too complex, but if anything it almost feels too simple. The gist of the game is that it's a simple strategy game about managing a burger chain. The main gameplay basically has three components, designing your menu, opening new stores, and doing research into upgrades. Designing your menu is kind of cool, you can make your own burgers using a simple but fun interface that lets you choose all your ingredients and see the burger assembled visually. You can also create combo meals to help move more product. Choosing a location for your store is fairly simple, there are many potential store locations on the map, but generally it's best to be positioned near the train stations (which the game actually tells you). Periodically rival burger joints or other non-burger businesses open up, which can alter the viability of any given location, which is kind of an interesting mechanic. Afterwards you can do some research to do things like reduce ingredient costs or raise sales, then you just sit back and let the money roll in. This is actually the game's biggest issue, it tends to be mostly waiting, you don't actually do a lot most of the time. You can press R1 to skip ahead to the next interesting thing that happens, which is a godsend, but the fact that this feature is so useful shows that there's really not a lot going on in the game most of the time. I think one of the biggest culprits is that creating new burgers costs quite a bit of money, and money is very precious early on, so you can't really tinker with your menu too much even though that's the most interesting part of the game. In many ways, this game kind of reminds me of Pet Pet Pet, but there's so much more going on in that game. You have to decide which products to stock, you have to decide which animals to purchase, you have to introduce guests to animals you think they'll like, etc. Burger Burger just feels like a much more basic affair by comparison. There is a Game Boy version of this game, which might be a bit better, I feel like this kind of game would probably benefit from being portable.
Fade to Black is quite different from what I expected. It's a sequel to Flashback, but it's not a cinematic platformer, instead being a third-person shooter. The presentation is pretty good for its time, with good texture work and model design, but the gameplay has a lot of issues. For starters, the controls are terrible. One of the most important aspects of a 3rd person shooter is the ability to shoot and move at the same time, but you cannot do that here, as you must first enter combat mode in order to use your gun. This locks you in place, save for ducking and an extremely slow sidestep move that is virtually never useful, so pretty much every encounter boils down to trying to shoot everything before it depletes your health, then running back to the nearest recharge station to get your shields back, though this can easily be fatal if you don't know exactly where the enemies will spawn as you get very little health. The jumping control is similarly bad, the jump is very finnicky about when it will even come out, though thankfully you don't need to use it that often. The levels are also extremely labyrinthine, pressing a switch will often activate an elevator god knows where, so you have to either scour levels endlessly or use a guide (I had to use a guide several times on the first level alone). There are also numerous ways to softlock yourself, for example if you waste the mines on the first stage you won't be able to kill the warden with them (and sometimes, hitting him with the mines simply doesn't work, which initially caused me to suspect this wasn't the solution). Despite all these flaws, the game does still have some appeal, and I suspect it would be G if it at least controlled a little bit better.
Street Racquetball is pretty bad, probably one of the weaker games in the Simple 1500 series. I do appreciate how they always attempt to include some progression in these games, with the game having a decent number of characters and courts to choose from, but the core gameplay simply isn't very good. The basic gist of the game is that it's sort of like a 1-court version of Tennis, where the player have to take turns hitting the ball from the same side of the court. The biggest problem with the game is that it's simply far too easy to hit the ball. You get something like three bounces before the ball is considered dead, and the court has a back, so even if you miss the ball and it gets past you, you can usually still hit it long before you lose the point. About the only real way to score is if someone hits the ball out of the court or if someone gets a drop shot (which then lands right by the wall and doesn't bounce at all), but the latter cannot be performed consistently, it just sometimes occurs when you hit the ball close to the wall. This leads to super long rallies that just don't feel very exciting and the game also has very little strategy. Despite the game's simplicity, it also has some slowdown, on the first 2 hits of each rally there's some pretty substantial frameskipping, which would be a big issue if hitting the ball wasn't so trivial.
DeleteTest Drive Off-Road 2 is a huge improvement over the first game. The first thing that's instantly noticeable is that the game's engine is way better. The first game ran at a spotty framerate and had lousy draw distance, but this has been greatly improved in the sequel, the game now runs at a rock solid framerate and has very respectable draw distance. The first game also had an annoying system where you could miss checkpoints if you didn't exactly stick to the intended course and this is also fixed, checkpoints are no longer missable, and courses feel much more diverse and interesting in general. In terms of progression, the game sports a decent system where vehicles are divided into classes (like Trucks, SUVs, Hummers, etc) and you earn money for racing which can buy new cars. In terms of the basic gameplay, it's not really too complex, the game mostly revolves around avoiding obstacles and trying to drive on the best terrain. This usually means sticking to the middle of the track, but there are some instances where it is used cleverly, for example a section on one of the tracks has you drive through a river, and while you can drive through the water, it's faster to try to stick to the riverbank, though this forces you to weave through trees. About the only real issue with the game is that the tracks are super long and the AI is a bit spotty. Races last about 5 to 6 minutes, and while the courses are quite diverse and interesting this is a long time for a single race, especially when you have to do four of them in a row to complete a series. The AI is all over the place, too. Most of the time, they're atrocious and you'll win by a mile, but on some courses they randomly decide to be super fast and you'll need to be perfect to get anything other than dead last (perhaps this is to encourage you to grind out the better cars). In any case, it's a pretty solid game. It wouldn't be one of my top picks for the system (racing on PS1 is a crowded field) but it's a fairly unique game that plays pretty well.
Uprising X is not bad. It reminds me a lot of Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs, though IMO it's somewhat better than that game. Like Battlezone, it's a tank game which also incorporates some basic base building. The first thing that needs to be addressed are the controls. The controls in this game are actually pretty decent, sporting dual analog control for movement and aiming, with one huge catch. The two sticks are backwards and there's no option to reverse them, movement is locked to right stick and aiming to left stick. On an emulator, of course, you can reverse this, and you can even reverse the vertical aiming (it's reversed and there's no option to change that either), but this would be annoying on a real system, particularly because if you want to use the button controls, you can fully customize them, but the game plays way worse this way. Once you get past the controls, the rest of the game isn't too bad, like Battlezone the maps are objective based, but they're short and the game is pretty fast-paced in general. One thing I like is that the building interface is super simple, you just press L1 / L2 to take control of the citadel, tell it what to build (which takes like 2 seconds since there's only a couple choices), then you're immediately back to gameplay, which feels like a good fit for the game's pacing. About the only other real issue are the graphics, which are very basic and draw distance isn't too great, but at least the framerate is very solid.
DeleteWhen we reviewed War Gods on N64, my rating was super short and it was basically "everything about this game is terrible". The PS1 version is actually even worse, as in addition to everything that already sucked about the N64 version, it also has load time and looks worse. I guess you could say at least you have a better controller here for fighting games, but by the same token you also have a million better fighting games on this system to choose from.