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Last Topic's Ratings:
Croket: Kindan no Kinka Box - BB - 0% (2)
Egypt 1156 BC - GBB - 33% (3)
Lake Masters 2 - BB - 0% (2)
Mega Man X5 - AGAAGGBABBBA - 46% {12}
Racingroovy VS - BB - 0% (2)
Suzu Monogatari - AGA - 67% (3)
Mega Man X5 is now the game with the largest number of ratings to get the squiggle bracket. Does this make it the most divisive game of all time (or at least to this point in time)?
Games for this topic:
Alexi Lalas International Soccer
Asuncia: Majou no Jubaku
Enen Angel
Ford Truck Mania
Return Fire
Rise 2: Resurrection
Asuncia looks like a pretty interesting game. I suppose Rise 2 is probably a lot more well known, but I prefer to be optimistic.
Alexi Lalas International Soccer - B
ReplyDeleteAsuncia: Majou no Jubaku - A
Enen Angel - A
Ford Truck Mania - G
Return Fire - B
Rise 2: Resurrection - B
Alexi Lalas International Soccer is another pretty poor soccer game. The first thing that is immediately apparent about this game is that it's a low-budget affair. The game has very few modes by comparison to most games of this type, there's no commentary whatsoever, and the animation is of extremely low quality. This could be excusable if the gameplay was good, but it's not. The biggest issue is the game's camera, which is simply terrible, there's no camera option that frames plays even moderately well so you'll almost always be passing to people who are offscreen and you have no idea if they're open or not. Defensively, slide tackles are okay but almost never get the ball, and the steal is nearly useless due to its poor range, so a lot of the time it just feels like chaos where you do slide tackles until someone on your team gets the ball. At least it runs okay in terms of performance, but there's really nothing here that's worth caring about.
Asuncia is a weird and interesting game that is difficult to even describe. For starters, it's not a strategy RPG. It describes itself as one, but it's really a turn-based RPG with a ton of additional mechanics. Each stage takes place on a randomly generated map that's initially under fog of war. Somewhere on the map are a handful of towns, some teleport points, some dungeons, and a boatload of monsters. The monsters can move, and will try to attack the towns, so locating and protecting the towns is usually your first priority. When you encounter an enemy, it plays out like a traditional turn based battle, but there are twists here too. Every time you defeat an enemy, you get a card, depending on the enemy's colour. If you collect a bunch of these cards in a specific order, you get bonus points, for example, blue blue red green might be a combo (you can view these combos at any time). Though you can't control what enemy colours appear in a fight, you can actually run away from a battle after killing some of the enemies to optimize your combos, but this gives the enemies more time to attack the towns, and the stages also have a time limit, so you can't spend too much time fiddling around with combos or you'll have issues. Once you've put out the immediate fires you can start exploring the dungeons, which you can either explore thoroughly to try to get more combos and find treasure chests, or just rush the boss and get out if the time limit is low, as apparently you need to beat all dungeons to get the game's best ending. At any time, you can return to a town to heal, though this wastes precious time, and you can also buy items and change your party here. Speaking of your party, they also don't level normally, they can only be levelled by increasing the power of their weapon in certain towns, or by using certain items to increase their max hp or mp. You clear stages by wiping out every enemy on the overworld, and any time left over is converted into bonus points, and you also get points for keeping the towns from being destroyed and exploring the dungeons. If this explanation was hard to follow, it's because there's clearly a ton going on here, though it's actually not as confusing as it might sound and the core gameplay is actually somewhat simplistic, but the added systems help keep it interesting. The only issue is that although virtually everything in the game revolves around getting a high score, as far as I can tell the score has no gameplay impact whatsoever. Being thorough in your exploration does yield more money and items and those clearly matter, but lining up the score cards to create combos seems pointless without the score having any tangible impact, particularly because it takes time you could be using to get more treasure chests. You can replay stages after beating the game in the "battle mode" to try to get a high score, and you can use different characters here than what would normally be available (like the maps, the characters you get to recruit throughout the game are also random, but any character you've ever had can be used in battle mode), but without any kind of target to hit I don't know how motivated people would be to try to optimize this. There's definitely some interesting ideas here, but it doesn't feel like it quite comes together.
DeleteEnen Angel is another one of those really weird games that's going to take me a while to even describe. It's sort of an action puzzle game of sorts that takes place on a series of rings, each being made up of tiles. As your character moves across the rings, he changes their colour, QBert-style. You do not control the character directly, instead what you can do is rotate the rings. There are various arrow tiles on the rings that will move you back and forth between rings, and by rotating the rings around you can use these to reach every tile and colour them all in, which is one of the ways you can win a stage. There are also enemies on the levels, though many of them aren't directly harmful to you, and can even be helpful sometimes. For example, the enemy on the first stage simply launches you up if you contact him, and you can then rotate the ring underneath yourself to move to another spot. Another way to clear each stage is to kill all enemies, which is done by either bumping them using an arrow tile (though they can also kill you this way) or by landing on them. Generally, beating stages by killing all enemies is easy, but the true goal of the game is not to simply complete each stage, but to collect the hidden toy in each level. When you have coloured about half the tiles, two cards will appear on the stage. You have to collect these cards extremely quickly to get the toy, if you do not get both in time they will vanish and you'll have lost your chance to get the toy until you try again. Thankfully, the game has infinite lives and stage select, so if you miss a toy you can easily go back for it, but it's also quite frustrating nevertheless if you're like a second from grabbing the second card and it vanishes, or if you accidentally kill the last enemy and beat the stage before you want to. The game also quickly gets kind of repetitive, there are an absolute ton of stages and they all follow the same general pattern, so although the game would theoretically take long to 100% I doubt many would have the patience for it. It's still kind of quirky and cute, but gameplay-wise I think it's just ok.
DeleteI was initially kind of underwhelmed by Ford Truck Mania, and to be honest I still am, but I also can't deny that it does a lot right. It is almost exactly what you'd expect from the title. This is a game in which you race ford trucks on offroad courses. There's a ton of elevation changes, you will sometimes drive through mud, water, over jumps, etc. It controls fine, and it looks reasonably decent, there are weather effects and your truck can get covered with mud, generally it's a reasonably solid product. Compared to something like TNN Hardcore 4x4, this is certainly drastically better in every way and doesn't really have any major flaws. By far the most impressive thing about this game is the number of tracks, there's 36, which is an absolute ton for a game of this type. The truck selection is a little more underwhelming at 12, of which only 4 can be chosen for each race class, but it still gets the job done I guess. There is a career mode which goes through all 36 tracks and is key to unlocking everything in the game. There's also a track editor which is fairly decent, you can make custom tracks pretty fast thanks to a good UI and they feel kind of fun to race. That's pretty much it. In many ways, the game's presentation is kind of muted, and the package feels somewhat barebones even though there is actually a fair amount of content there. This is definitely not really a game that has a lot of style, but it is a mechanically competent game with a decent amount of content that has few competitors on PS1. It's not something I would heavily recommend, unlike Ford Racing, but there's also not really many bad things you can say about it. I guess it's just kind of a workhorse game that gets the job done, like the trucks it was based upon.
It actually boggles my mind that Return Fire was apparently popular, to me there's almost nothing good about this game. This is an overhead tank combat game similar to the Gen 2 games Combat and Armor Battle, though I think it's actually worse than those games in a number of ways. This game has two unique features, which is that there's 4 different vehicles to control, and that there's also a capture the flag element, but neither improves the game in any way. We'll start with the vehicles. The best vehicle is easily the APC, which is bad because it has by far the least nuance, but we'll start with the Tank because it's a useful point of reference. The tank is pretty standard. You can move in all directions and swivel the turret using L and R. This has the potential to be fun, but it is too slow and the turret swivels too slowly for strafing targets to be effective (anything that fires on you will still hit you anyway if you try to strafe shoot), so you'll just point towards things and mash the fire button for as long as your shield holds out. The APC is a tank with no turret that is also even slower, but it hits harder and has more armor so it's by far the best vehicle. The helicopter is slow and cumbersome and has basically no armor and does nothing well. The jeep has 1hp and is useless in terms of combat, and also has by far the worst steering because it has some odd system where it tries to snap to roads but it barely works, but you have to use it to grab the flag. Speaking of, this is also a capture the flag game, but a terrible one. To win each map you have to reach the enemy's main base, blow it up, then go back and get the Jeep and get their flag. Already this sucks. There's absolutely no reason to force the use of the Jeep to get the flag, it just unnecessarily drags out fights and the Jeep controls like crap and can't take any hits, so you have to clear out everything beforehand. The bigger issue is when it comes to clearing stuff out, there's only one enemy type in the game, which is a stationary turret. Technically if you sit still long enough the enemy will send a helicopter to attack you, but this only seems to happen if you AFK for like 20 seconds, it never occurs in normal gameplay that I've seen. In any case, the dull nature of just taking down turrets one at a time before returning to heal makes the single player mode virtually unplayable, there are like 100 maps but they're all the exact same and the game gets boring in like 5 minutes. But this is predominantly a multiplayer game after all. The problem is I don't really think the multiplayer is any better. The issue here is that you can't attack and defend at the same time, because you can't quickly jump around the map to access different vehicles or anything. This means you either just sit there and wait for the enemy and then duke it out until someone has no vehicles left, or you both attack each other's bases at the same time and see who can destroy it and steal the flag faster. Either way, the first map (which is basically just a straight dogfight ala Combat) is the only one you'd ever care to play as the game lacks the nuance for any of the other maps to be interesting. Overall, I really don't see what anyone sees in this game. If you want a game that plays something like this, Battletanx or Mass Destruction are a million times better.
DeleteAmazingly, Rise 2 Resurrection is even worse than the already atrocious Saturn version. Everything about it sucks just as much, but it now also runs way slower. I don't know if there's a ton of slowdown or what, but it now constantly eats your inputs, so you can't even perform your handful of basic actions properly, it's shocking how many times I would hold down back and press kick and just not do any attack at all, even when just holding down + kick I frequently do standing kick instead. When even doing normals doesn't work properly in a fighting game you can probably guess how bad it is. At least in the Saturn version you can kinda button mash but this game is barely even functional on a basic level. The loading times are also bonkers long, but realistically watching the load screen is more fun than playing the game so maybe this is a good thing. This is another one of those games that would get a grade below B if one existed.
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