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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
5 Star Racing - AAB - 33% (3)
Death Wing - AA - 50% (2)
Planet of the Apes - BBBGB - 20% (5)
Qix 2000 - AGAA - 63% (4)
World Tennis Stars - BB - 0% (2)
Z - BB - 0% (2)
A pretty poorly-rated one overall. A funny thing to note is that there's now a game starting with 0, 2, 3, 4, and 5 in the B range. Will there be a B-rated game that starts with 1? Actually probably not because there aren't many games that start with 1 on PS1.
Games for this topic:
Colony Wars Vengeance
Live Wire
Table Hockey: Highschool Kimengumi
Mad Stalker: Full Metal Force
Toyota Netz Racing
X-Men: Mutant Academy 2
As mentioned before, Table Hockey: Highschool Kimengumi is not quite the same as "The Table Hockey", please make sure you're reviewing the correct game. Live Wire also looks like something of an interesting title.
Colony Wars Vengeance - A
ReplyDeleteLive Wire - B
Table Hockey: Highschool Kimengumi - B
Mad Stalker: Full Metal Force - B
Toyota Netz Racing - A
X-Men: Mutant Academy 2 - G
Colony Wars Vengeance initially seems promising but as you get further into it it reveals more and more issues. The core of the game is actually pretty solid. It's a space dogfighter with good presentation and control. Flying around space and firing your weapons on enemy craft feels good, the control is responsive and the weapons have a nice feeling of impact. The shield / hull system (complete with corresponding weapons) also feels intuitive. The main problem with the game is the mission design. In the first game, most missions simply revolved around destroying all targets, but there's been a significant effort to diversify the missions this time around. Unfortunately, a general lack of understanding of mission design renders most of these missions worse than the original. One of the biggest issues is that now that destroying all enemy fighters is no longer the focus, on most missions they spawn infinitely and instantly, making it completely pointless to shoot them. This does not play well with the game's general design, as your craft is very fragile and cannot withstand sustained fire, so you can't really ignore the enemies if they're attacking you, you kinda just have to hope they get distracted or target your wingman while you do the mission objective, which is lame. The mission objectives themselves are also often uninteresting, typically destroying a massive structure, which just comes down to sitting in one spot and shooting it over and over as they have massive amounts of health but no defined target points. The biggest problem, however, is that many of the missions are also timed and the time limits are often preposterously short. This further exacerbates all of the game's problems as you must absolutely disregard your own safety to blitz the objectives constantly, as there is absolutely no time to do anything except dump lasers into the objective if you hope to finish in time, and it basically comes down to luck if you take too many hits and die or not since you can't spend even a second attempting to evade fire. Besides being effectively totally dependent on RNG, these missions are simply dull. Dogfighting enemy fighters is the fun part of the game, flying to a target, sitting beside it and shooting lasers until it breaks, then flying to the next one in the hopes that you can finish with 3 seconds to spare is not, and far too many missions play like this. It is worth noting that the game does allow you to fail many of these missions and this causes the storyline to branch, so perhaps the intention was for some of these missions to be lost, but it's still poor gameplay. The game is fun when you're playing more typical missions, but sadly these missions are not as common as you'd like and the annoying missions tend to take up most of your time. There are also a couple other issues, like the overreliance on the leech beam to stay alive and the fact that the craft upgrading system is very barebones, but these would be more forgivable if the mission design was better.
Live Wire completely sucks. This is another strong contender for the title of "worst game on PS1", as this game does virtually everything wrong and is one of the least fun games I have ever played. The basic gist of the game is that you play on a grid and you have to claim squares for your colour. To do so, you have to go around all four edges of the square to paint them so the square becomes yours. This right here already dooms the game to not being fun. See, you would obviously think that you could grab multiple squares at a time by outlining a group of them, which would add a risk / reward mechanic and give the game some degree of strategy, but you can't. You absolutely must line all four edges of each individual square, so there's absolutely no nuance to the movement in the game. You would also think that you could probably steal a square that an opponent has already uncovered by lining over it, but you can't do that either, so there's really no depth to the mechanics at all. The controls also suck. They are weirdly camera relative and it's never intuitive to go where you want to go. This can be improved a little by putting the game on the third person camera setting, but it's painfully obvious that this game should have had a top view camera and it doesn't. The flaws with the game don't end there. As per the mechanics above, each player will move outwards from their starting spot, slowly claiming squares because you can't do anything else, but there are also enemies and powerups. Enemies roam the grid and you basically can't do anything about them. They get in the way but because the controls suck it's very hard to back away from them so a lot of the time you just get stuck. The powerups are even worse. They are hidden under random squares and have huge effects, like being able to unmark a ton of squares in an area, which can easily put you from being in the lead to having almost no points at all. About the only thing that matters in terms of winning the game is that you're the one who finds the powerups, which is pure luck. Another hilariously dumb thing is that the game ends when there are no squares left to mark, so inevitably all players will converge around the last handful of squares at the end. However, if all four players spin around a single square, nothing happens since no one can line all four sides! The AI will usually just give up and let you have it sooner or later, but against a real player you'd just have to wait for the time to run out. And that's basically the whole game. I don't know if I've ever seen a game that was as poorly thought out as this one, with a few rule tweaks this might have been a fun concept, but I question whether or not it was play tested at all.
DeleteTable Hockey: Highschool Kimengumi is essentially a repackaging / pseudo sequel to The Table Hockey. Playing it again, I was initially having a hard time remembering why I disliked the original so much, until I played a bit more and then I remembered exactly what was so lame about it. The basic mechanics of the game are unchanged from The Table Hockey. The viewing angle still sucks, and the basic paddle control doesn't really work, you're totally reliant on using the Circle button to hit the puck, which results in the game involving very little skill. Compared to the Table Hockey, the biggest difference is there are now characters with unique abilities and a storyline. This is actually a good change as it does give the game some more replay value, and if the game was a little bit more fun this might have actually been able to carry the game, and in extremely small doses it actually kinda works. Make no mistake, the character powers are totally unbalanced and many of them are degenerate, and the ones that are fun also don't really benefit the person using them (like the first character's multipuck move), but this is the least of the game's issues. A far bigger issue are the powerups, which can't be turned off. There's a few of them, and almost all of them suck, though special mention has to go to the invisible puck which literally removes all skill from the game and appears way too often. The quake powerup that makes the walls bounce the puck in random directions also totally sucks and one or the other of those powerups will be on at least half the time. Games also go on way too long, it's first to 7, which is fine, but you have to win 2 sets to win the match, which is totally unnecessary and just drags the game out way too much. It's really too bad they didn't make a new engine for this game because I feel like it had a bit of potential but the core from The Table Hockey just isn't really redeemable.
DeleteMad Stalker is a little better than the previous two games but I think it's still B. The game is an incredibly simple beat-em-up that takes place on a single 2D plane with no ability to move into or out of the screen, similar to SNES Power Rangers. This game has even less nuance than that game though, being an almost pure button masher. You have two attack buttons and can use some specials, but generally the name of the game is to keep attacking because this game has extremely long hitstun and basically any entity (yourself included) can easily stunlock anything to death, so the entire game basically revolves around getting the enemies lined up on one side and then obliterating them with a single long combo. Should any enemy ever escape, they can spam full screen projectiles that hit instantly and other degenerate things to make your life a nightmare, so taking some damage is almost always unavoidable, but luckily health pickups are common. It still feels extremely simplistic and nuance-free in any case, and it gets repetitive extremely fast. Developers were definitely still figuring out beat-em-ups in this era, there are a few good ones but no shortage of ones that repeat the problems of the past, but unfortunately this is firmly in the latter camp and it's not even one of the better ones.
Toyota Netz Racing is a weird product. For starters, if you notice upon playing this game that it looks or sounds familiar, that's because it's essentially a cut down version of Advan Racing, right down to having the same music. It is, however, only about a quarter of Advan Racing. The Gran Turismo-like mode from Advan Racing is completely gone, only the Quick Race mode remains, and it also has much less content than Advan Racing did, with only a handful of cars and half as many tracks. Apart from that, the gameplay is completely identical, right down to the music. It turns out that this is actually a promotional game that was given away by Toyota if you came in and test drove one of their new cars. The game still plays really well, the handling engine from Advan Racing is still great and visually it still looks really good, as free games go you could definitely do a lot worse, though there's also no reason to play this if you have access to Advan Racing, I suppose it sort of acts like a demo disk for that game, albeit a much more fully featured one than most. It makes it a bit difficult to rate, clearly there's not a lot of content here and Advan Racing is much better, but as a racing game with 4 courses it's actually still not terrible due to its good fundamentals, for example this is clearly still significantly better than 5 Star Racing from the last topic. I could actually see the argument for G if you give a lot of weight to the fact that this was literally a free promotional product, but I think it's basically just a high A. It really does go to show just how far ahead the good racing games were in this generation that a demo disc for a good one is better than a lot of the other games from this gen.
DeleteI somewhat hinted at my opinion of X-Men Mutant Academy 2 when we covered the first game, though after going back to it my opinion waivered a lot more than I expected. As a sequel, X-Men: Mutant Academy 2 is actually drastically different from the original in many ways. The big change is that apparently the producers told them to make it like Marvel, because the game now has both Marvel style chain combos and air combos. This massively changes the game, as every character can now shave off a ton of life off pretty much any hit whatsoever, whereas in the first game where there are only limited target combos and not all normals cancel the reward off landing a button is often a lot less. To be honest, I'm not particularly a fan of this change, largely because it feels like it was shoehorned into a game that wasn't designed for it. Rounds now go by super quick since any hit does a ton of damage, and it almost completely overshadows footsies and most of the game's unique mechanics, like the now largely trivial counter and super systems. However, Marvel is popular and there is something kind of satisfying about pulling off a long combo so this doesn't really doom the game by itself. The big problem is that this game has very poor input detection, owing largely to a single, extremely critical input bug that pretty much defines the entire game. The biggest problem with this game is that if you input downback, neutral, and a button, the game reads that as QCB. This may not sound incredibly problematic on its own until you realize that downback is needed to crouch block. This means if you, say, low block a string, then do crouch LK, stand MP, you will instead get crouch LK, QCB + MP. It's hard to overstate how much this harms the game given the massive focus on chain combos. Most characters can route around it by just ignoring standing buttons entirely (ie, as Cyclops, just use cLK, cMK, cRK, QCB + RK), but for the characters whose crouch FP and crouch RK are both uncancellable you're going to have a bad time. For example, Wolverine has to do cLK, cMK, stand FP, but his super 2 is mapped to QCB + FP, so if it's stocked you will usually get it instead, which you kind of just have to live with (hopefully you hitconfirmed the cMK because the super is very unsafe). If this issue was fixed, the game would be an easy G, and generally my rating switched between A and G depending on how frustrating the last character I used was to play because of this issue. Control issues aside, there are some strong points about the sequel. The biggest one is the roster, which is massively increased over the first game, up to 18 characters from 10. They all look great and have their 90s voice actors too, which is a real treat for X-Men fans. There's still a pretty solid selection of modes and unlockables and I like that they put the super commands on the loading screen now. Overall, it is probably just barely G, but I wish they had stuck closer to the original mechanics and just added the new characters. Even when the game's inputs are working I still feel like the fighting has less nuance compared to the original.
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