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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Barbie: Gotta Have Games - BG - 50% (2)
Extreme Pinball - AA - 50% (2)
Kingsley's Adventure - GGGAB - 70% {5}
Reel Fishing 2 - BB - 0% (2)
Satomi no Nazo - BB - 0% (2)
Touge Max G - GA - 75% (2)
Kingsley's Adventure becomes (I believe) the first game to get the highest possible squiggle bracket score. (For reference, 30 is the lowest possible and quite a few games have gotten it).
Games for this topic:
BattleSport
Megatudo 2096
Noon
ParanoiaScape
Running Wild
TearRing Saga
Running Wild is another one of those games that I played a bit of a long time ago, liked quite a bit, then got distracted from and never came back to, which always worries me that it may have aged poorly in the meantime. Paranoiascape also looks like an interesting game, and there's a fan translation available for TearRing Saga.
BattleSport - A
ReplyDeleteMegatudo 2096 - B
Noon - B
ParanoiaScape - A
Running Wild - G
TearRing Saga - G
The PS1 version of BattleSport has some big upgrades over the Saturn version, but also an immense downgrade, so overall it's probably about the same. First, the basics. This is sort of a cross between a tank game and basketball. The objective is to get the ball, then shoot it into the goal, while preventing your opponent from doing that by blasting them to bits with weapons if they ever get the ball so they drop it. There's a large number of crafts and stages so it has decent variety, but it's also kind of a janky game in many ways. Compared to the Saturn version, the PS1 looks way better and runs at double the framerate, being 60fps instead of 30 (except in multiplayer, which is 30fps on both platforms). The PS1 version also loads near-instantly, whereas Saturn takes forever to load pretty much every menu. However, the gameplay is arguably more refined on Saturn. On PS1, you drop the ball if you get hit by any missile, whereas on Saturn you usually have to get hit a few times. More importantly, on PS1, when the ball gets away from someone, it goes flying at a million miles an hour and is insanely annoying to track down, this is already a problem on Saturn but it goes at least double the speed here, resulting in vastly more downtime anytime anyone loses the ball. It's a shame, if this game had the Saturn version's physics it might be G, but it's just not quite fun enough to make it there despite having a lot of content.
Megatudo 2096 is an ambitious game, but it's effectively totally broken on every level. It's a 3D mech fighting game, similar to stuff like Virtual On, but shown from a really weird camera angle. Each mech carries 2 weapons which they can switch between, a gun and a melee weapon, and they also have motion activated special moves which are unique to each character. The issue with this game is its movement, notably, the "glide" mechanic. You can hold down R1 or R2 to do a kind of circular dash that effectively makes you completely invincible. It moves extremely fast, it's not tied to any kind of resource so you can do it forever, and there's no way to lead your shots so you can't hit someone who's doing it (you always just aim at their current position, but they'll be moving so fast that you'll never hit). You can even fire while doing it. The AI does not abuse this that much, but you can easily win the entire game by just spinning and shooting and you'll even get a perfect on most rounds, about the only threat is the camera possibly causing you to hit a wall and get momentarily stuck. The game does have a resource meter, but it foolishly uses it for special moves and not the glide dash, if this was on a very limited resource the game would probably work fine, but as it stands it's barely even a game. Even if it wasn't so busted, the game seems very unbalanced anyway, as many characters have special moves that are almost unavoidable (except via the glide dash obviously) and you still take a lot of damage even if you block. It just seems like another one of those games where they just didn't really understand how this type of game needed to work.
It goes to show how bad Megatudo is that after it Noon actually feels almost functional. This is pretty much the same fundamentally broken game as on Saturn, it's intended to have some strategy to it where you can make combos and such, but the ability to crush blocks and smack the opponent around whenever you feel like it prevents it from having any kind of depth. You just pick a character with a cheesy power and spam it as often as humanly possible, same as on Saturn. Too bad they never attempted to refine the gameplay here because I feel like there is the gist of a good idea here, it just needed a lot more work.
PS1 has a lot of weird games, but ParanoiaScape might take the crown for the weirdest game on the console. I completed this game in its entirety, and I still don't even really know how to describe it. I guess I'll start with the mecahnics. It somewhat resembles breakout, you have a paddle and a ball, though the paddle is essentially made up of two flippers so there's also a bit of pinball here. The game is 3D, and you can move the paddle left, right, forward and back, though if the ball gets too far behind you you lose a ball, and if you run out you have to continue. On some levels, the goal is just to get the ball to the end of the stage (the stages are basically all long tunnels), but on many stages you have to beat a boss first, which always involves hitting the ball (or a projectile they fire at you, as sometimes the ball is unavailable) into them. The game's visuals are totally wacked out. Eyeballs and mouths all over the floor, walls, and everything really, a lot of levels are set inside the human body, enemies often have digitized faces on them, and there's a lot of giant bugs. That description in no way does it justice, but I guess you could say the visuals are very distinctive. The game doesn't really seem to have much of a story and it bills itself as being "surreal", so I think the point in many ways is just for the game to be really weird. It's a very difficult game to rate, I wouldn't say it's especially fun, though it's also not particularly painful to get through either (you get unlimited continues and a lot of balls per continue), so if you want a very bizarre experience that'll take about an hour feel free to give it a go.
DeleteAs I mentioned in the intro, Running Wild was one of those games I played a little bit of a long time ago and liked it, but got sidetracked from it and never finished it. It's often the case that by the time I get back to these games they've not aged particularly well, but this is not at all the case here, I'm actually shocked at how much fun Running Wild still is. The gist of it is that it's a racing game where you run on foot as various giant animal characters. Stages are full of boost arrows, powerups, and hazards, and you have to run and jump your way through it all as fast as you can and ideally without getting hit too many times. I suppose it is in some ways a fairly simple game, there's no real attack items, most of the things you can pick up either just make you fast or let you avoid hazards for a bit, but thanks to a combination of immaculate control and great presentation it stays engaging and fun. I particularly enjoy the game's announcer, who is exactly the right combination of cool and stupid to match this game's general atmosphere. If you were going to have one complaint, it might be that the game has relatively few courses (there's only 6), but they're all pretty fun and reasonably distinct from each other. There's also a decent amount to unlock and it's a very solid multiplayer game, unlike almost all games from this generation it holds its framerate perfectly even in splitscreen, and with the horizontal split option it plays just as good as single player. This is just a really solid game on pretty much every level, if SRs weren't so scarce on PS1 this could be a reasonable contender.
We've reviewed a lot of clones over the years, but TearRing Saga is in a class of its own. This is not simply a clone of Fire Emblem, it literally is a Fire Emblem game. Every concept from the main series appears here, the levelling system, weapon durability, the weapon triangle, all of the weapons are the same and have the same names, permadeath, skills (most of which have the same names and do the same things), character endings, talking to characters to recruit them, etc. It was made by the original creator of Fire Emblem and it was so identical to the Fire Emblem games that Nintendo actually sued them over it, but lost, so here it is, the real Fire Emblem 6. The first thing to note about this game is that the production values are really good. Story and writing are top notch (as is typical for the series) and the visuals and music are both really good. Certainly, compared to the GBA Fire Emblem games (to which this game is essentially a contemporary) the visuals are a fair bit stronger. The game is also somewhat more complex compared to FE6-8 as skills were removed from those games, making it feel more in line with FE9 gameplay-wise. Most Fire Emblem games have some kind of unique mechanic and that returns here, in the form of the dual protagonist system. The game has two main characters and at certain points in the game they meet up and can trade items and characters with each other. As you might imagine, this can affect the availability of certain events, as well as just making certain battles harder or easier. Interestingly, one of the characters also plays like Fire Emblem Gaiden (they can freely move around the map and do skirmish battles) while the other plays like traditional FE (their chapter progression is totally fixed), which is kind of an interesting mechanic. Probably this game's only real downside is that it is a classic Fire Emblem game, and that means random levellups that can easily screw you over. Also, although this game does have supports, they work like they did pre-FE6 (being generally fixed but increased via certain, sometimes optional events), which means no support conversations. Still, it's undeniably a really solid game and a huge steal for PS1, especially considering Nintendo didn't get any more games in the series until GBA and you can fairly easily make the case that this game is better than the GBA games.
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