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Last Topic's Ratings:
Darkstalkers 3 - GGGGGGGG - 100% (8)
Fox Junction - AA - 50% (2)
Gegege no Kitarou: Gyakushuu! Youma Daichisen - GGG - 100% (3)
Motocross Mania 2 - AA - 50% (2)
Mushi Tarou - BB - 0% (2)
NBA Hoopz - AAGG - 75% (4)
A very strong showing for Darkstalkers 3, it even managed to win me over. When all is said and done for the PS1 GAB, I'll be curious to see what percentage of Capcom games made the high range, I feel like it's extremely high.
Games for this topic:
Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 2
Haunted Junction
Naniwa Wangan Battle
Prism Court
Threads of Fate
Tiny Toon Adventures: Plucky's Big Adventure
Threads of Fate is a game I wanted to play for a long time. I remember my friend got it back on PS1 and I thought it looked really cool, but for whatever reason we either never played through it or I wasn't there (maybe I was on vacation or something, it was a long time ago). Then for whatever reason I never played it myself despite always intending to. I am curious to see what I missed out on for all of these years, hopefully it isn't now horribly dated or something.
Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 2 - A
ReplyDeleteHaunted Junction - A
Naniwa Wangan Battle - A
Prism Court - G
Threads of Fate - G
Tiny Toon Adventures: Plucky's Big Adventure - B
Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 2 is a pretty interesting collection, comprising Paperboy, Millipede, Crystal Castles, Roadblasters, Marble Madness, and Gauntlet. Right off the bat, there are some pretty big names there, and they're a little newer than you typically see in collections like this. Something that has to be noted is that 5 of these 6 games have NES ports (only Crystal Castles doesn't), and for the most part, they're generally accurate to or superior to the arcade versions. Of all the games in the set, the one that compares the most poorly is Paperboy, where the NES version is drastically superior in pretty much every way (it's hard to overstate how much better the sound is in that version in particular). NES Gauntlet is also a pretty big expansion over the arcade original. On the other hand, Marble Madness, Roadblasters, and Millipede are all just as good as the NES version, and Crystal Castles is an interesting title, even if the controls do feel a little wonky. Probably the most regrettable thing is that the amazing FMV interviews from the previous version are absent this time, replaced with simple scans of production material and some photographs. These are not terrible but they're not nearly as interesting. I also really wish the Playstation version had included Vindicators (which is in the PC version) as that game is really cool and the arcade version is quite different from the NES version. In any case, it's still a decent collection, if one with a few flaws.
Haunted Junction is a fairly straightforward puzzle game. The gist of it is that you control a character in the middle of a circle. You have a stack of coloured balls around you in a vaguely cross shaped pattern which you can rotate 90 degrees at a time in the hopes of lining up 4 balls of the same colour as balls drop in from the sides. The goal of each stage is to clear the pentagram piece, which is a 2x2 piece that will be a certain colour, so you'll need to match 3 balls of the same colour to it to clear it. On later stages it starts of buried most of the time, but it's still never particularly hard since you really only ever care about 1 corner of the board and can freely ignore most of the rest. In some modes they drop more than 2 balls at a time, which makes things a little more complicated, but it's generally a pretty straightforward and easy game. It's not terrible or anything, it just feels like there's not really a lot to it.
Naniwa Wangan Battle is an all right game. It nails pretty much all the fundamentals. Controls are all right, there's an acceptable amount of tracks (there's 4), there's a lot of cars to choose from, visuals are decent, and you can upgrade you car with prize money won from races. The only real issue is that it's not really great in any respect. The racing engine is just okay, handling is a little loose, though it's manageable, and collisions notably suck, with you sort of randomly stopping dead or going through the other car awkwardly. The car upgrading is also a bit annoying, while there are a ton of parts to choose from this is one of those games where you can't see how any given upgrade is going to affect your car until you buy it and go back to the status screen, which is annoying. Probably the best aspect of the game is the tracks, even though there are only 4 of them they feel quite distinct from each other and the track visuals are pretty good. This is certainly not a bad game, the competition on PS1 in this area is simply pretty stiff, for example Option Tuning Car Battle 2 is a way better game than this.
Prism Court is not what I expected, but it's a pretty interesting game. This game is kind of a cross between a visual novel and a volleyball version of Player Manager. You play as the coach of a high school girl's volleyball team, with the game's gameplay being split between choosing the girls' training regimen, providing advice during volleyball matches, and learning about the girls' backstories and helping them with their various personal problems. We'll talk about the training first. Each week you can choose one of the six girls and pick 3 drills for her to focus on that week. You have the choice of basic drills to improve base stats, volleyball skill drills to improve their performance in various areas, and special skill drills that can allow them to use special moves and also make various characters like each other better. Although you can train any character in anything, they all have certain areas where they excel, and this is particularly important because each character has three specific stats that affect their level progression (ie, Sanae is Int, Tec, and Toss (aka serving). Levelling up gives you more HP, which lets you train longer without resting and have more stamina in matches, so it's pretty important to try to get some level ups early before you branch out too much. Notably, you can only set the schedule for one of the six girls each week, the other teacher will set the drills for the other 5. The AI does a reasonable job, but they have a tendency to work the girls too hard, which sometimes causes them to get sick, so I often choose to work with whomever needs a break so I can make them rest. It also seems like whomever you work with a lot starts to like you more as I started seeing a lot of Sanae's scenes after training her a fair bit. After training for the week it will be Sunday, and unless you have a match you can choose to visit some location, where you might meet one of the girls. This sometimes gives dialogue options, though I'm not convinced they really matter, and sometimes you can learn new special skills and such through these events, but in general I think they're mostly just for the story. When it comes to the actual matches, since you play as the coach you have limited control over the actual game. Essentially, what you can do is give advice to the girls between points, generally related to what they should focus on in terms of offense and defense. For example, one time I had one of my girls who was hitting the ball out too much, so I told her to "conserve your energy" and that largely fixed the issue, though when a girl is serving (assuming it's not someone who always hits it out) telling them to "go all out on the attack" seems to generally work well. There's also a command to "focus on your footwork" which is helpful if they're dropping volleys and such. Both sides tend to make quite a lot of mistakes, especially early on, so often the strategy on defense seems to be just to kind of hold back and hope the other side screws up so you get to serve. You can also call a time out, which notably restores the stamina of your players quite a lot, so you want to do this at the halfway point or if you're starting to get into trouble. It's generally a pretty interesting setup and I like that it generally plays pretty fast and isn't overly complicated, like for example compared to Hyper Securities it's way faster and the impact of your decisions is much more obvious. I also kinda enjoyed learning about the backstories of the girls (though you can't see them all in one playthrough I don't think, there's not enough time), the game is generally pretty well-written and has decent production values. Overall, this is probably one of the better games to attempt something like this, the only real downside is there's so much text, so using google lens takes a long time.
DeleteWell, I wasn't punished by waiting a long time, because Threads of Fate actually still holds up really well. It's quite an unconventional title by Square's standards in many ways, I've heard it compared to Brave Fencer Musashi, but it's actually very close to being a pure 3D action game, it's very linear and the RPG elements are minimal. Luckily, the action is pretty good, it's got a standard jump + 2 attack buttons + menu setup that works well, and the controls are smooth and responsive, which makes fighting enemies feel fun even without the appeal of levelling up. One of the most notable things about the game is that there's two playable characters and they work quite differently. Rue has the ability to transform into defeated monsters, which is really cool, particularly because the game lets you use it pretty liberally (it does consume MP, but not very fast and enemies frequently drop more of it). The monsters are actually quite different from each other, besides having their own attacks, they also have different properties like how high they can jump and how fast they move, as well as different levels of resistance to various attacks. The only thing that's kinda lame is you can only remember four transformations, with the oldest one being lost when you get a new one. You can return to previous areas, so in theory you can get them back, but it would be nice if you could just choose which ones you wanted to use. Mint on the other hand is a magician, where her secondary attack button is used to cast spells. Mint's spell list is surprisingly massive, with her learning both new elements and new spell types throughout the game, which she can combine to create a ton of different spells, and unlike Rue she can swap between spells whenever she wants. However, there is a big drawback to playing Mint, which is that her spells have cast time and lock her in place while being used. I suppose this makes her play differently from Rue, as she has to focus on creating distance between herself and the enemies, but in general I don't find her as fun to play as Rue because a lot of the "fluidity" of the combat system is lost when playing her and I wish they had just made her spells instant cast. Still, it's nice to have the variety, and the way their stories are intertwined is pretty cool. It should also be noted that this is quite a good-looking game, the visuals are nice and the in-engine cutscenes are pretty expressive and funny for a PS1 game. While there's no voice acting, the story is well-told and despite playing a bit differently it's still got tons of that old-school Square charm. Apparently the biggest criticism of this game back in the day was its length, being only around 10 hours per character, but I don't really see that as a negative, it makes it a bit less of a commitment to get into compared to longer games and I'd rather have a game that's consistently fun for 20 hours than one with a lot of padding.
DeleteI had slightly higher hopes for Plucky's Big Adventure after seeing it was an Adventure game and not a bad platformer like the previous games in the series, but it's actually still pretty bad. For starters, one of the biggest issues with the game is that it's actually not big at all. The game world is quite small and there aren't generally too many things to interact with. By far the most annoying part of the game is the fact that you can only carry 2 things at a time, necessitating you to go back and forth to the locker constantly to swap items out. This also includes frequently passing Max and Elmyra, who are trivial to dodge but talk to you every time you pass them, which slows things down further. Like pretty much every game of this type, some of the puzzles make no sense whatsoever, sometimes requiring you to interact with things multiple times or combine items that don't go together in any obvious way, but the game is also really short and you'll probably finish it within 30 minutes to an hour. As you might expect, it has no replay value, and it's also not particularly funny either. The game has absolutely no voice acting and the sound effects and music are also pretty limited, so in many ways it just feels kind of dull. Even if you're a fan of the series there's very little reason to play this.
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