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Last Topic's Ratings:
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - AAG - 67% (3)
Fuuun Gokuu Ninden - A - 50% (1)
King's Field 1 - GGGA - 88% (4)
Tennis - BB - 0% (2)
TNN Hardcore 4x4 - BBB - 0% (3)
Zoop - ABBBAA - 25% (6)
I was surprised there were so few votes for Broken Sword. Apparently Zoop is much more well known? I'd never have guessed. At least there was pretty good turnout for King's Field 1.
Games for this topic:
3D Baseball
Advanced VG
Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey
Point Blank
Rush Hour
Sokoban Basic
I figured we probably should rate at least one Point Blank game while at least a few people still have working CRT TVs to play it on (real talk, this is the only reason I still have mine). Also, despite the fact that it's been available on a million different platforms, sometimes even for free, this will be my first time playing Oddworld.
3D Baseball - G
ReplyDeleteAdvanced VG - A
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee - B
Point Blank - G (SR)
Rush Hour - A
Sokoban Basic - G
I didn't expect a lot from the boringly-named 3D Baseball, but it actually really impressed me. In a certain sense, the game plays a lot like a 2D Baseball game, there's none of that fancy hitting or pitching zone stuff you have in some modern baseball games, but it completely nails all of the old-school mechanics while providing a fairly cinematic experience that never gets in the way of gameplay. The visuals and sound are both pretty good for their time, with a fairly chatty announcer and some background noise like crowd noise and even some cheers and jeers from the players, which helps the game feel pretty alive, and it also has some surprisingly solid animations, for example when making a close running catch I was impressed to see that my player did a little hop to grab the ball rather than just using the standard catch animation. This is just a very solid overall package and so far this is probably my top pick for a baseball game from this era.
When we covered Super VG on SNES, I mentioned that the game looked nice but it had seemingly insane frame data (as is the case with many old fighters). For this game, this has largely been fixed, minus a few buttons being a little nuts it now feels more in line with what you'd expect from a typical SNK-style game. However, it now faces far steeper competition from the likes of King of Fighters and Street Fighter Alpha, and it definitely feels a bit primitive compared to them, with very few moves per character and only a rudimentary "desperation move" system where you gain access to a super-like move at low health that you can perform infinitely. It maybe has the advantage of coming out fairly early and the graphics are pretty decent, but I feel like this is quite significantly outdone by even the original Street Fighter Alpha, let alone some of the later 2D fighters on the system.
In case you're not aware, Point Blank is a light gun shooter, but unlike most light gun games which are rail shooters like Area 51, this is more of a minigame collection. Each game presents you with a short little shooting challenge like "protect Dr Don from the vultures" or "only shoot targets of your colour", and you're given a score based on your performance. It's fast-paced and very varied, and the Guncon allows for far greater accuracy compared to past games, so it now really feels like it rewards good marksmanship. While the single player arcade mode is fun in short bursts and there's actually a fairly lengthy campaign mode, the real meat of the game is in its party mode. There are a variety of modes available, but most of them involve playing a series of 4 random minigames, and having your scores compared at the end. This is more nuanced than it sounds, because the game's scoring system is actually quite deep, grading you in 3 categories, number of targets hit, accuracy, and speed. So while you might be compelled to pull the trigger like a madman in some games so you can hit more targets, being accurate could also pay off, and in some games (usually those where you only get one shot to hit a target), going for a quick but risky shot could pay off big time (or blow up in your face). Plus, if you lose all your lives before the game is over, you're out, and there are some little tricks like stages having non targets that you can shoot to pad your accuracy. Even if you only have one guncon and have to take turns, it's still a ton of fun, a friend and I spent a lot of afternoons playing this series. Speaking of which, the 3 games are actually pretty much the same. The first game has the most robust single player mode, but has slightly less multiplayer options compared to later games, though really, they're all very comparable, you should just get all 3 if you like the series so you can play all the minigames, each game has some that are very memorable.
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee has pretty cool style and the cutscenes are really well done, but I'm not nearly as big a fan of the gameplay as I am of its presentation. At its core, Abe's Oddysee is a cinematic platformer, similar to Prince of Persia or Out of This World. Like many games of this type, it's basically divided into "steps", where every time you press a direction, Abe moves forward an entire step, and most actions, be it climbing a ledge, pulling a lever, picking up a grenade, or what have you, can only be performed from a specific step. As you might imagine, this feels quite stiff and is a complete pain to deal with in any situation that requires you to move fast, which happens fairly often because enemies and deathtraps are abundant. Abe also dies in one hit from absolutely anything, has nothing resembling invincibility frames on anything he does, and most enemies have guns or are much faster than you, so you'll die a lot. You do have infinite lives, but unfortunately there's an annoying checkpoint system where you'll go back to the last checkpoint you passed (which, as far as I can tell, are not marked in any way) any time you die with everything reverted to how it was at the time. Though there are many annoying segments, the game has a good sense of style and it's still somewhat playable so this would probably fit into A territory, but there's a big part of the game I haven't discussed yet, which is the ally characters. Just like in Megaman X6, the secondary objective of Abe's Oddysee is to save a bunch of hapless civilians, and just like in X6, it's a completely unwelcome addition that greatly harms the game. The basic idea is that the civilians must be instructed to follow you and must then be led to one of a number of safe zones, which are usually a few screens away, and just like in X6, they can be killed permanently if they get hit by anything before or after you interact with them. Annoyingly, only one civilian can follow you at a time, which makes the game's complicated communication system completely pointless, as a simple "follow / stay" button would work just as well, and there's almost always two or more civilians in each area, adding a needless degree of repetition to the experience. This is made all the more tedious by the checkpoint system, because if you die, any civilians you had rescued since your last checkpoint are reverted and must be saved again. The game is also full of trial and error, on many screens the moment you enter a civilian will quickly die unless you take an immediate action that you couldn't possibly know ahead of time (another trick X6 was very fond of), and the game does not provide any method of looking ahead into an adjacent screen that might mitigate this. Oh, and there are an absolute crapton of these civilians to save, too, especially if you do any of the hidden areas, of which there are also a ton, which really brings the game's pacing to an absolute crawl (Abe is supposed to be on the run for his life here but it certainly never feels like it). Technically, you can ignore the allies and just let them all die, and even for the good ending you only need half of them, but it's clearly a major part of the experience and one that I don't find to be any fun at all. There was a remake of this game relatively recently that addresses some of its issues, for example, multiple allies can now follow you at once, you don't get gibbed immediately by a single bullet, the camera does a much better job at allowing you to see things before they become relevant, thrown grenades show their trajectories and can be aimed with far greater precision, and the controls are also more fluid, so if you're going to play the game, you should obviously play that version, though they did increase the number of civilians to a ridiculous 299, aggravating the game's pacing problems even further, so you might want to just enjoy the cutscenes and skip the game entirely.
DeleteRush Hour is okay. It's a top down racer set in real world locales that in many ways reminds me of the delisted Steam game Real World Racing, but not nearly as good. One of the game's most obvious issues is with its controls, which feel oddly slippery for a game of this type, which starts to be a bit of an issue on some of the later tracks, though I feel like the biggest issue is actually just that the entire experience feels a bit dull. The main gameplay of the game involves trying to pass the rival cars, who are just as fast as you and drive near perfectly, so there's a lot of very slowly gaining on other cars while driving on long straightaways that just doesn't feel very engaging, particular when the turning controls aren't quite up to snuff for you to make up the time on the corners. Real World Racing featured somewhat similar designs but it had drafting, which I feel is very important for this type of game and it's completely absent here. There are some somewhat inspired moments in the track design, such as a part of the Yukon track where you go around a train and then onto a frozen river, though you then spend about a minute driving through fairly uninteresting farm country afterwards. Even the music is the most generic rock music possible. It's playable enough, but it doesn't really give me much reason to want to play.
DeleteAs its name implies, Sokoban Basic is a very basic Sokoban game. Unlike many other games based on the Sokoban concept, there are no gimmicks or anything here, just boxes, target zones, and you, pushing them. The presentation is equally simple, it is technically 3D but has no real reason to be, and there are no themes or anything for the stages, just the most basic factory graphics. One thing to note is that there are an absolute ton of levels, 280 to be exact, which start off about as easy as they could possibly get and eventually turn into giant messes with dozens of blocks, though I feel it does this gradually enough that beginners probably won't be intimidated, plus unlike many other games you can skip levels if you get stuck on any particular one. The best thing about the game though is that it has a level creator, and it's actually very intuitive and easy to use, you're given a grid and you just place your walls, boxes, and zones, and you're ready to start testing your level in minutes. You can also save up to 40 of your own levels, though it does take up a lot of space on your memory card, which is probably the biggest downside to the game. In general, though, I feel like this game has pretty much everything you'd want out of a Sokoban game, even if it doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles.