This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Gun Frontier - BBB - 0% (3)
Heiwa Pachinko Sou Shingeki - BB - 0% (2)
Machine Head - GB - 50% (2)
Resident Evil - GGGGGAGG - 94% (8) (1 SR)
Side Pocket 3 - AA - 50% (2)
Super Tempo - AB - 25% (2)
I'm actually kinda surprised Super Tempo only got 2 ratings and rated that low, it feels like a game people would have known about, if only due to its visuals.
Games for this topic:
Assault Suit Leynos 2
Double Switch
F1 Challenge
Gebockers
Princess Crown
Riven: The Sequel to Myst
Assault Suits Valken and Assault Suit Leynos are made by the same company, yet the former has the word suits pluralized while the latter does not, which always throws me off. I think it sounds better with the plural.
Assault Suit Leynos 2 - G
ReplyDeleteDouble Switch - B
F1 Challenge - B
Gebockers - A
Princess Crown - G
Riven: The Sequel to Myst - B
Assault Suit Leynos 2 is a sequel to Target Earth on Genesis, but it's drastically superior in pretty much every way imaginable. It takes all of the improvements from Cybernator and goes even further with them, featuring much better control, far superior jump jets, and a more zoomed out perspective, and also brings back the mech customization from Target Earth, for a game that's far better than any of the games in the series before it. Speaking of the mech customization, it's actually very elaborate now, besides just customizing weapons you can change out your armor and allocate power to various systems in a manner that feels more like something out of Front Mission rather than an action game, though it's cool to experiment and see how it affects your performance in game. Like in the Genesis game, how well you do in the missions allows you to unlock better weapons, which helps give the game more replay value, though it can also kinda screw you over if you do poorly (you can opt to retry a completed mission to get more points, which is usually advisable if you didn't get many). There's not really too much else to say here, this is a pretty kickass game and if you liked either of the two previous games in the series you should definitely give it a shot.
Double Switch completely sucks. It's basically a more complex version of Night Trap, which also kinda sucked, but the added complexity makes it way worse. The concept is nearly identical to Night Trap, you have to switch between different rooms and trap intruders as they appear, though there are now multiple traps in each room which are assigned to different buttons, which is one of the biggest issues, as you have no idea which trap an intruder will actually activate until they're basically on top of it, necessitating a ton of memorization. There are also far too many intruders, which guarantees you never have time to watch any of the scenes or do much of anything, as you need to be constantly trapping people or you'll lose the game. If you compare something like Psychic Detective, what made that game much better was that the amount of things you actually had to do was fairly low, giving you a fair amount of time to listen to the scenes and the freedom to make different decisions, but here there's virtually no freedom whatsoever and it results in a boring game.
Princess Crown is an interesting but weird game that feels very modern for its time in some ways but also shows its age in other way. For starters, the game is absolutely gorgeous. The sprites are huge and very detailed, the animation has a ton of frames and looks great, and the backgrounds are fantastically detailed. The towns are a particular highlight, pretty much every one has unique visuals and the villagers are amazingly well-animated for NPCs, it makes the towns feel lively in a way that you almost never get out of 2D games like this. And despite how amazing it looks, it also runs flawlessly on Saturn with no slowdown that I saw anywhere. In terms of the gameplay, here's where it's a little more dated. It's a 2D action RPG with a stamina bar and various types of attacks and combos, which probably sounds familiar as there are a fair number of such games these days, but this was one of the first of its kind and you can tell they hadn't quite figured everything out yet. One of the biggest issues is there's no concept of hitstun and enemy attacks don't have any reasonable recovery frames. You do have some attacks that somewhat resemble combos, but at any time, the enemy can cancel out of their hitstun frames into an attack. You can mash the dodge to get out, but it still feels pretty janky, and if you did either a jump attack or a dash attack you just get hit as you can't dodge out of those. You kind of just have to treat it a bit like Secret of Mana and assume that some damage is functionally unavoidable and heal accordingly. Speaking of which, items are extremely crucial to combat, not just in terms of healing, but there are also tons of attacking items and these are extremely vital to combat as these are often much safer than your standard attacks. Items are incredibly common (almost every time you hit a monster they'll drop something) and you have very limited inventory space, so you're encouraged to use these extremely liberally, which can be fun, but they tend to dominate the game's combat system a little too much IMO, the balance will be better refined in later titles in the series. Still, it's undeniably an impressive achievement for its time, and the ability to play as some additional characters after finishing the game remains a cool addition. It's probably somewhat towards the lower end of the G range, but it's still safely G.
DeleteRiven is quite literally just Myst 1.5. Despite spending over 3 years in development, if you were expecting any improvements over Myst, you won't find them here. The engine is completely identical, which now leaves this game very far behind most of its competitors like Atlantis, which typically feature the ability to pan and rotate the surroundings, leaving Myst's still-screen presentation feeling very basic. In fact, it feels like there are usually even less screens available than before, in a lot of places you can only look towards surroundings that actually matter, if you try to look in a direction that would just be a wall or what not you usually just skip past it and turn to the next important direction. Perhaps this might help streamline things a bit, but it removes some of the immersion (which is already pretty lacking) and the puzzles are still needlessly cryptic. About all you can say for it is that the Saturn version runs well, though it still feels slow to play. This game just feels like way too little, too late, nothing about the story or world design is particularly interesting and since Myst came out there's been tons of games that have gone much further with the concept than this.