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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Balloon Kid - GGGAAG - 83% (6) (1 SR)
Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World - AABB - 25% (4)
Dragon Slayer - BGAA - 50% {4}
Flipull - GGAAAG - 75% (6)
Janken Man - BAAA - 38% (4)
Paperboy (GB) - BBABB - 10% (5)
I was quite happy with all the ratings this week, especially 6 ratings for Flipull, which I had never even heard of before the topic.
Games for this topic:
4-in-1 Volume 1
Elevator Action
Gem Gem
Serpent
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan
Wave Race
I owned Wave Race at the time and played quite a bit of it, but I was surprised to realize I actually remember almost nothing about it other than that I wasn't a huge fan. We also have the first of the Sachen games here. Sachen created about 30ish Gameboy games, which they eventually packed into a series of 4-in-1 packs. Some of the games were previously released separately, and you might be wondering why we're not covering them that way, it's because as far as I can tell, only about half of their games were released outside the combo packs, and even then it's not clear if some of the releases were ever available commercially, so this just seemed to be the most sensible way to handle it.
4-in-1 Volume 1 - G
ReplyDeleteElevator Action - G
Gem Gem - B
Serpent - G
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan - A
Wave Race - B
4-in-1 Volume 1 is a collection of Duck Adventure, Street Rider, Trap and Turn, and Vex Block. Duck Adventure resembles Lode Runner, it has the same concept of removing the block in front of you, except that you do this again to kill the trapped enemies and this is how you win each stage. This is sort of tolerable but Lode Runner is clearly better and it gets repetitive fast due to the limited stage design. Street Rider is almost identical to Rally X. The biggest difference here is that you move at about a third the speed. This is obviously pretty lame. One of the items you have to collect on each stage is actually a flag that makes you fast for a while, with this the game actually plays pretty well (this is clearly the speed the game should move at), but it only lasts for 30 seconds and then you're back to being slow as dirt again. You can also leave behind an oil slick (I assume) that can cause the enemy racers to spin out, which makes this game pretty easy overall. Trap and Turn is just Reversi. It works exactly how you'd expect, though there's no 2-player support, you can only play against the AI. The AI is decent (and I like that they actually take their turn very fast), so this is a solid title, even if it's likely to be one you've played before. Vex Block is Klax, though embarrassingly for Hudson, it's significantly better than the actual Gameboy version of Klax. Sure, it doesn't look quite as fancy, but it has 7 columns to Klax's 5, which is a huge upside for a game like this, and it also includes a special block that is a wildcard that actually enhances Klax's gameplay quite a bit. This one is actually pretty solid. So looking at the whole package, you've basically got 2 games that are mediocre and 2 games that are pretty decent. I feel like this is actually a pretty solid package overall, with all of the titles being reasonably well-suited to short play sessions, and having 4 of them in one cart is obviously space-efficient for when you're travelling. The only real knock against this is that it came out in 1997, which is pretty late in GB's lifecycle, though who knows if that's really true as GF doesn't have any solid release date for these games, so I won't consider that too heavily. I still feel like I probably would have gotten a decent amount of mileage out of this if I owned it back in the day.
Surprisingly, Elevator Action isn't just a port of the NES version, it's actually a full remake of the original game that features significantly upgraded mechanics, making it play more like a midpoint between the original and Elevator Action Returns. The basic idea is unchanged from the original: Open enough of the ! doors to find the secret documents, then get to the bottom of the stage to escape. However, stage layouts now vary, there are multiple enemy types, you have health and can take multiple hits, there are weapon upgrades, and the controls are generally much smoother. Oh, and of course the graphics and music are better too. Unsurprisingly, all of these upgrades make this game play quite a lot better than the original, but I like that it still preserves the feel of the original game. The titular "elevator action" is still pretty fun, especially as you have some new options at your disposal. You can now leap out of elevators, so if an enemy is waiting for you on the floor below, rather than just waiting and shooting them you can now hit them from above with a jump kick. You can also now jump down a story through an empty elevator shaft, bypassing the elevator altogether, but if you fall more than one story you'll die. A risky technique to be sure, but very satisfying if done correctly as it allows you to progress through the building much faster. About the only thing that's not super great is the weapon system. You get weapons simply by going through doors, including the ! doors which are mandatory since they could have the documents, and when you find a new weapon it just replaces whatever you currently have. This is great if it's the shotgun or SMG, both of which are upgrades to your pistol, but you can also get the Grenade, which is generally kind of a downgrade. Sure, it can kill multiple enemies at once, but it's slow and it's quite hard to hit the dogs and robots with it, so it's kind of a handicap until you can get rid of it (which usually won't be too long, but still). Other than that though this is a really solid update to the original and a fairly impressive title for how early it came out.
DeleteGem Gem is a weird title but generally it's not very fun. It's sort of a weird puzzle / RPG hybrid but it's pretty poor at both. The basic gist of the game is that the game is made up of tiles, with each tile having exits on certain sides, sort of like Mawatte Mucho which we covered for PS1 a few weeks ago, but much slower-paced. Instead of the action mechanics of Mawatte Mucho, the game instead has occasional random encounters. These are terrible. They're based on rock paper scissors, where whomever loses the exchange takes damage. Obviously, this means that battles are 100% RNG-based and there's absolutely no skill or strategy to them, you might as well just spam Rock over and over because it's not like the AI adapts to it, but occasionally you'll lose a battle and be back to where you last saved (save often). Your health fully heals after every battle so there's no strategy there either, just hope you win via RNG and you get to keep going. Obviously, this mechanic sucks and drags the game down, the problem is, the rest of the game isn't really fun enough to make it worth it. The maps are generally not hard to solve, and you can sit still and examine the map for as long as you need to until you see the path, so it gets quite dull and repetitive quickly. In general, it just feels like a mix of two gameplay styles that are both pretty bad and don't work well together, this one probably needed to go back to the drawing board.
Serpent is a fairly simple game but it's not bad at what it does. The basic idea of the game resembles Snake, but it's a VS game where the goal is to trap the other snake. You don't instantly die by hitting a wall, you have to be trapped so you can't move for a while, so you can actually hit walls for a little bit to stall out your movement, which is sometimes useful when trying to trap someone. In general, this idea is decent, it takes a familiar idea and adds a new strategic twist on it. An extra nuance is that you can also get powerups. You create powerups by making a box with your tail, and then the powerups appear inside it, though obviously you don't want to trap yourself doing this. One thing to note about the game is the controls are weird. You would think you would just steer with the DPad, but for some reason the controls are that Left turns left and A turns right. B fires missiles, and I don't think any of the other buttons do anything. It's not that difficult to adjust to it, but it feels like a strange choice. There are two modes available, but they're basically the same, only that mode B adds some mini-snakes that kill you if you touch them, generally I think this is unwelcome to I prefer to stick to mode A. There are four levels of difficulty, but the AI doesn't really get much smarter on the hard one, they just cheat (they get to escape death twice per round on the hardest difficulty). Still, it still mostly works, and if you can trap them once you can usually do it again, sometimes immediately. There isn't really that much more to the game, but I feel like this concept has decent replay value, and it would also probably be a solid multiplayer title. I can see the argument for A simply because there's not a ton of content here, but I think this is a decent fit for a handheld game due to its replayability.
DeleteTMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan is a pretty basic action game that actually reminds me a lot of Castlevania: The Adventure. Like in that game, you move sideways SUPER slow, but thankfully this game involves very minimal platforming so it's not nearly as much of a problem, it just has a tendency to make the action fairly basic. Except for bosses, all enemies die in one hit to either your basic melee attack or jump kick, so it mostly just consists of slowly moving right and swatting away enemies as they come at you from offscreen. This is functional and the boss battles are not bad, but it's undeniably a very simple game, not helped by the fact that all four turtles play identically (they effectively function as your lives, as they do in TMNT1 on NES). Occasionally you can find little bonus games you can play with Splinter which can refill your health, though beyond this there isn't a lot to mix up the experience. This is probably a game you could beat on your first try and not one you're likely to ever come back to, so I could see the argument for B, but it's at least reasonably tolerable while it lasts.
Coming back to Wave Race, I was surprised to find that I remembered almost nothing about it, but it does match my memory that it wasn't generally very good. For starters, absolutely nothing about this game feels like you're racing Jet Skis. The game has no wave mechanics (some "arrows" exist in the water that are probably meant to be waves, but they just push you in a direction), instead it sort of plays like a slippery Micro Machines but with Excitebike's boost system. Obviously Micro Machines is a good game, but a lot of that has to do with charm and track design, which are totally absent here, this is a very dull game in terms of presentation. The game offers two modes, circuit, which is the main racing mode, and Slalom, which is a really weird mode. Circuit is serviceable but dull. It never really feels very fast and you spend most of your time just bumping the other racers. In Slalom, you can go anywhere on the track, and the goal is to be the first to reach certain gates (which are shown on a map) to get points. One AI racer will always go a different way from you and get a ton of points while the other two generally chase you, which typically allows you to get about half the flags on the map unless you mess up, so it's generally pretty easy to win, but it's also not very fun. Another annoying mechanic in the game is that with each successive class, the game gets longer because it takes all of the previous tracks and adds more, which causes the later circuits to take an annoyingly long time, though a lot of the reason this feels so bad is likely because the core game just isn't very fun. There's not really much else to say about it than this, it's very repetitive and the track design is fairly bad. It's probably best to just forget this entry ever existed and stick to Wave Race 64 and Blue Storm, which are both good games.
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