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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bombing Islands, The - AGA - 67% (3)
FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 - GG - 100% (2)
Ling Rise - G - 100% (1)
Sim Theme Park - BAG - 50% {3}
Time Crisis - GGGGGBBG - 75% (8)
VMX Racing - BBB - 0% (3)
Seems I was wrong about Time Crisis, it actually got quite a lot of votes. I think the fact that I don't post the ratings in the PS1 topics makes the vote count look a lot smaller than it really is.
Games for this topic:
Croc
Destrega
Engacho
Last Report, The
Hot Wheels Turbo Racing
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 4
Engacho has one of the craziest box arts of all time, I defy you to not want to play this game after looking at it. I also think The Last Report looks interesting.
Croc - A
ReplyDeleteDestrega - G
Engacho - A
Hot Wheels Turbo Racing - B
Last Report, The - B
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 4 - B
Let's get this out of the way right now. Croc is a 3D platformer. It has Resident Evil style tank controls (complete with the Rez Evil quick turn move). This is definitely not ideal and does result in the game feeling at times stiff and at other times slippery. However, I don't think it's a terrible game. I actually got used to the controls fairly fast and even though the game often requires precision platforming I was almost never missing jumps, probably because the level design and camera work are generally adequate and make lining up the jumps fairly easy. It also does certain mechanics fairly well that some contemporary games struggled with, like ledge grabbing and pushing objects. It's certainly not on par with Mario 64 (though it's interesting that this game was originally intended to feature Yoshi as I feel you can see some elements of Yoshi's gameplay design here), but it's not a terrible effort for its time.
Destrega is fun. In some ways it kind of feels like Custom Robo, but instead of having the complex mobility and momentum options of that game there's more focus on energy management, as you need your energy meter both to attack and defend and figuring out how much to spend and when is vital. It's quite unique in terms of gameplay, and there's a decent number of characters and stages available, making this a surprisingly solid multiplayer title. The voice acting is also completely hilarious, probably among the funniest of all time. I defy you to play the story mode and not grin like an idiot during the cutscenes. Eat your heart out Megaman X4.
Engacho is a very weird game, but not quite in the way I expected. It's a puzzle game, where you move around a board that is also occupied by some strange creatures. Every time you move, the creatures also move, based on your action. For example the one with a long tongue always moves the same way you do, while the snotty one moves clockwise in relation to how you move, and so on. Your goal is to maneuver them in such a way that you can get to the goal without them trapping you, which is more complex than it sounds. There's also a vs mode where you and an opponent take turns trying to get the opponent hit by the creatures. It's a unique concept, but it's a little slow to play and I felt it got a bit repetitive after a while. It was probably relying a bit too much on gross / weird humour to sell itself.
Hot Wheels Turbo Racing is kind of borderline between A and B, but I think that on a system with so many other good racing games it probably gets pushed down to B. The biggest issue the game has is that it's really just not very exciting. The tracks are fairly generic, the cars don't look that close to their hot wheels counterparts (in particular they're not nearly shiny enough), the controls are overly twitchy, and the races have far too many laps. I do sort of appreciate the effort to make it feel a little authentic to the license by including thin strips of track of bright colours (akin to the "orange track" that is often associated with hot wheels), but it makes the races feel somewhat overly limited in terms of movement.
DeleteThe Last Report is definitely not as good as I had hoped. The biggest issue with the game is the interface. The game window itself uses maybe half the screen, with the other parts simply being black (they're occasionally used for text choices and such). The scenes are all 3D prerendered shots that look decent, but are generally very zoomed out, making picking out individual details almost impossible, you basically just have to move your cursor over various areas until the icon changes to know something's there, which makes the game feel almost more like a hidden object game than a point-and-click title. The areas also have very little interactivity, with generally only 1-2 objects per scene, which makes the game feel fairly sparse. The plot of the game isn't really anything noteworthy, either, and the voice acting is only serviceable (the scene where the protagonist talks about his frustration over the death has particularly stilted delivery). There's not really much reason to look into this one.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms had some appeal back on NES, but it's kind of unacceptable that a decade and two consoles later it's still almost exactly the same game. In particular, the core features of the game are now starting to feel REALLY lacking compared to their contemporaries, for example the lack of a proper campaign mode and tutorial is quite noticeable now, and the graphics, particularly battles, feel comically archaic for the hardware. There's only so many times you can re-release the same game before you have to make some updates, and that number was passed about 5 years ago.