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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Mr Bones - BBBBAA - 17% (6)
Panzer Dragoon - AGGGGGGAAAGG - 83% (12)
Sega Ages: Columns Arcade Collection - GAAG - 75% (4)
Street Racer - BABBG - 30% {5}
Sword and Sorcery - AA - 50% (2)
Waku Waku 7 - GGGGGBG - 86% (7)
Great turnout this time, too bad it couldn't really help Mr Bones.
Games for this topic:
Image Fight & X-Multiply
K-1 Grand Prix: Fighting Illusion Shou
Matsukata Hiroki no World Fishing
Pandemonium
Theme Park
Virtual Casino
A couple more games we've already looked at on Playstation for this topic, though it looks like this version of K-1 Grand Prix is somewhat different from the PS1 version.
Image Fight and X-Multiply - A
ReplyDeleteK-1 Grand Prix: Fighting Illusion Shou - G
Matsukata Hiroki no World Fishing - B
Pandemonium - A
Theme Park - A
Virtual Casino - A
Image Fight and X-Multiply is a super barebones collection of these two games from Irem. Unlike many collections from this era (say, the Capcom Generations ones), there are absolutely no extras here, even the menus are incredibly basic. As for the games themselves, Image Fight is a relatively basic vertical shmup. The most notable thing about it is that you can gather two types of pods that function like options from Gradius, one which always fires forward and one that fires in the opposite direction from where you move. It's a bit of a weird game, when you pick up a weapon, it can block some very weak attacks but most things kill you outright, and you can't change weapons without destroying your current one or dying, though the game is also super hard for its time so the latter may not be a big ask. X-Multiply is pretty cool, it's a horizontal shmup where you ship has wiggly tentacle arms with cannons on the end, you can flail them about through your ship's movement to aim at various targets, which is a cool system that kind of reminds me of SCAT, but it's more nuanced here. Compared to Image Fight the difficulty of this game is also far more reasonable. There's not too much else to say here, the games run fine and they both have a dedicated autofire button, so if you're a fan of the games this is a fine way to play them, but compared to both the number of fancier compilations on Saturn and the boatload of shmups that the system has I don't feel this ranks among the top.
K-1 Grand Prix: Fighting Illusion Shou is essentially an upgraded version of K-1: The Arena Fighters on PS1, but thankfully the changes target almost all of the game's most significant problems and the result is a significantly better game. The biggest change between the two games is that Fighting Illusion Shou is a slower-paced and smoother game. Although the fighters have mostly the same moves, they have longer, smoother animations this time around, which does wonders for reactability. Blocking is almost worthless in K-1 The Arena Fighters because moves come out in just a few frames, but here blocking is much more consistent, which forces you to vary your offense significantly more and makes defensive play feel viable. Additionally, you can now attack immediately after performing a forward or backwards dash, which makes whiff punishes far more potent. The toe kick was an almost unstoppable move in the first game because it had so much range that nothing could punish it effectively, but now you can easily forward dash into a punch if it misses (it also has slightly less range than it used to), forcing you to be more precise about spacing it, though it remains a good move. Beyond this, the game also has more characters and also looks significantly better graphically. It's not all perfect yet, this is still not quite as good as K-1 Grand Prix on PS1, in particular stamina still kind of doesn't matter, it comes back too fast for you to ever really take advantage of an opponent on low stamina, and the characters still feel kind of samey, but this is a solid game. I think it's debatable as to whether it's a high A or G level game, but considering I think it's better than K-1 Revenge and Saturn has few similar games that are anywhere near as good, I would tend to lean towards G.
Matsukata Hiroki no World Fishing is probably one of the worst fishing games ever made. Actually, I should say it's two of the worst fishing games ever made, because this is actually kind of a collection of two games, but they're both terrible. The two modes to the game are Billfish and Black Bass. The former is barely even a game, you tow four rods behind a speedboat in the ocean, and you literally don't do anything at all until one of them gets a bite. You then play one of the most boring fish fighting games of all time where you can barely do anything except pull the rod back or reel a little bit as you very slowly pull the fish towards the boat. Catching a single fish in this mode takes like 15 minutes and isn't fun at all, though it does have some pretty good production values with the use of video clips. The Black Bass game is much simpler, in this game, you pick a spot, then cast your line and try to attract a fish, like in a more standard fishing game. However, it has effectively every problem that any other fishing game has - it's another fishing game where only one type of fish counts, and the fish are incredibly disinterested in your lure and rarely ever bite. Even when you do get a bite, the fish fighting is super simple, and the entire game feels kind of cheaply made, as opposed to the other mode, it mainly relies on static images and you can't actually aim your cast or anything. Overall, this package is just a huge dud. You really want to be playing Murakoshi Masami's game instead.
DeletePandemonium is pretty much identical to the PS1 version. As before, it's a 2.5D platformer that looks great and plays ok. The control is quite loose and slippery and the camera is often too zoomed in, making the game feel imprecise, which is never a great thing in a hop-and-bop game. There are two playable characters, but there's zero reason to ever use Fargus as Julia is way better. I feel like if you compare this to, say, Donkey Kong Country, DKC is obviously a vastly better game. Saturn has a bit less competition for 2D platformers compared to PS1, but I still wouldn't rate it any higher, IMO this is kind of a low A. This game pales drastically to Mr Bones from last week, for example, and that game has its own fair share of flaws.
Theme Park is a weird game in that it was massively influential when it came out, but the formula was so massively improved upon by later games that it's almost impossible to go back to it. One thing I can say about the Saturn version is that it seems to run better here than on PS1. In-game load time is nonexistent and it also seems to be easier to control the game speed, so this is the preferred way to play it on console, though obviously the PC version is still by far the best option. The control scheme remains quite clunky (it particularly bothers me that C is mapped to cancel, since it usually acts as confirm) and far too much is mapped to the shoulders. It's definitely possible to adapt to these issues, the bigger problem is really just that the core game hasn't aged well. I feel like one of the biggest issues with the game is it feels like there's very little room to actually express your creativity in park design. Pretty much all parks look the same, not helped by the fact that the terrain is always just a flat box. A key mechanic of these types of games is they're kind of a mixture of creativity and strategy, but I feel the creativity side just isn't really captured here. Roller Coaster Tycoon is so drastically better than this game that it became virtually impossible to go back after it released, but at least this did come out on the consoles fairly early.
DeleteVirtual Casino is an interesting effort but it doesn't quite pan out. It's a casino game with 5 games, Poker, Roulette, Blackjack, Baccarat, and a Slot Machine, which is an okay but not especially amazing collection, many SNES games had comparable lineups. What sets it apart is that it has a story mode, but "story" is used very loosely here, it's basically just a sequence of five stages, one for each of the games, where the goal is to make a certain target amount of money. The game blows its wad right away, as the first stage is Poker, which is by far the best of the games. This is a decent rendition of Poker, it's 7-card stud, which involves a decent amount of strategy, though the AI is super stupid, I think they literally always call raises until the final card is dealt, even if they can see via your open cards that you have something like 3 of a kind and they have nothing, and as far as I can tell they also never bluff if you check, so this is quite easy to win. Between stages, you get a little cutscene showing your busty character and the busty dealers walking around the casino, but they're very short and it's basically just fluff, there's no real story here. Unfortunately, this is where the fun part of the game ends, as the rest of the games are pure games of chance, except for Blackjack, which is so simplistic to play as to not be very interesting. You can cheese the games easily enough (for example, on Roulette, I just bet on a single number and reset until I got it), but there's not really much reason to bother. I feel like if this setup had instead been used for a generalized card game, with the other games being things like Hearts or Cribbage, it might have worked better, though with the AI being as dumb as it is maybe that wouldn't have been a great idea. At the very least, it would have been nice to also have Texas Hold'em, since Poker is by far the best part of the package. At least the visuals and music are decent, which probably gives it a bit of an edge over some similar games, but it's not something anyone's going to be running out to play.