This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Burger Burger - AA - 50% (2)
Fade to Black - AGBB - 50% {4}
Street Racquetball - BB - 0% (2)
Test Drive: Off-Road 2 - GG - 100% (2)
Uprising X - GBA - 50% {3}
War Gods - BBABBAB - 14% (7)
This was a super contentious week, both topics had 2 squiggle bracket games, which I don't think has ever happened before.
Games for this topic:
ECW Hardcore Revolution
ET Interplanetary Mission
Muppet RaceMania
Puyo Puyo Tsuu Ketteiban
SeaBass Fishing
Tiny Tank
I hope this Muppets game is good, I love the franchise and it'd be great to have a good Muppets game, though the fact that I've never heard anything about it worries me.
ECW Hardcore Revolution - A
ReplyDeleteET Interplanetary Mission - B
Muppet Racemania - B
Puyo Puyo Tsuu Ketteiban - G
SeaBass Fishing - B
Tiny Tank - A
As I mentioned when we covered it for N64, ECW Hardcore Revolution is basically just a reskinned WWF Attitude, with slightly lower production values. One thing I missed last time is that the commentators don't even have the names of all the wrestlers recorded, for some of the characters they'll just say "player 1" or "player 2", which is lame, and to be honest, most things in the game kind of feel lame in general, with the wrestlers generally having few moves with a lot of repetition. Despite that, this is still at least kind of a solid engine, and most of the ECW games are pretty bad, so if you're a fan this is one of your only options. It's really just too bad they didn't base this on WWF War Zone instead.
ET Interplanetary Mission is a strange game. For starters, I have difficulty identifying this game's intended audience. It's an isometric action game with some simple puzzle-solving elements, most of which involve using ET's telekinesis to move objects. The first few levels are super easy, with exceedingly simple puzzle elements and enemies who do basically no damage whatsoever, but the game ratchets up the difficulty very fast, on the fourth stage you encounter wizards who are extremely fast, do a ton of damage, and can't be harmed by attacks, and it only gets tougher from there. Various elements of the game don't feel all that well thought out, for example ET has 99 health, but health pickups only restore 1, and some enemies do 30 or more damage, so refilling your health takes forever, and many enemies can trap you in corners for an instant kill. The game also does very little with the ET license, ET does have voice acting, but the game has nothing to do with the movie (it has almost no story whateover, for that matter), and the presentation is also very drab, with tons of levels based around very few art assets and no real music to speak of. I suppose you could look into this game if you really want a challenge, but even when it's tough it never really feels exciting or fun, so I wouldn't really recommend it.
Muppet Racemania hurts. It's clear that this game was made with a ton of love for the franchise, there's a ton of playable characters, they all have the right voice actors, the settings are all taken from the movies, it's full of funny video clips, Stantler and Waldorf are constantly trolling you, and it's even got some pretty solid music. Unfortunately, the element that was missing was any understanding of how to make a good racing game. For starters, there's the controls. This game controls in an extremely wobbly and loose manner that just feels bad. I played this for quite a long time and I did kind of get used to it, but it's certainly not a good driving engine. There's also no powerslides and most tracks have shortcuts that are vastly too strong, so victory basically just comes down to taking the shortcut on every lap. There are also special powers for each of the characters, most of which freeze you in place for a really long time, and these are super obnoxious, particularly when they show up in on one races. That being said, the racing is kind of tolerable and if the game was only racing you might be able to make the argument for a low A. Unfortunately, racing is only about a quarter of the game. After finishing each track, you can play "adventure mode", which is clearly based on Crash Team Racing and Diddy Kong Racing, but doesn't in any way understand what makes those games work. In Muppet Racemania, you just drive around an empty course with a generous time limit and pick up all the powerups on the track to get unlockables. It's every bit as boring as it sounds, and must be done multiple times per track as you can only collect one type of object per run. This is probably why the game controls the way it does, the twitchy controls do allow you to spin 180 on a dime, but this mode isn't very fun so it barely matters. Then there's also the battle and stunt courses, which make up half the tracks in the game. This game's battle mode is completely atrocious, the powerups in the game suck and the controls are far too twitchy for this kind of mode to work properly, plus the AI all gang up on you as per usual. The stunt tracks aren't much better, here you're given a kind of obstacle course to get through that forces you to rely on the jump move, making this play like a godawful platforming game. If only this game had been given to a competent studio like Rare or Naughty Dog this might have been a masterpiece, but as it stands only the hardest of hardcore Muppet fans will be able to endure it for more than a few minutes.
DeleteThere's almost nothing that can be said about Puyo Puyo Tsuu that we haven't said already. Along with Street Fighter 2, this is the oldest game in existence to still see heavy competitive play, and it's also one of the most re-released games of all time. The mechanics are simple but endlessly replayable and the game gets pretty much everything right here. This version doesn't really offer a lot that any other version doesn't, compared to the 16-bit versions the little scenes before the battles are more intricate, but no one is playing the game for that, and the enemies still don't have unique attack callouts. In terms of modes, it's the exact same as Puyo Puyo Tsuu Remix on SNES, so there's no reason to upgrade if you have that version, but it's a perfectly fine port if you don't with no significant load times or other issues to speak of.
We already covered the Saturn version of Seabass Fishing, but my opinion has soured a little on it since then. As before, it's a super simple fishing game one-button fishing game without a lot of depth. Compared to the Saturn version, I feel like this version feels worse to play, in particular fish seem to snap out of the line for more often and arbitrarily in this version. Whether the mechanics were tweaked for the localized Saturn version or this is simply the fact that the PAL version of the game runs slightly slower isn't clear, but either way it feels worse to play. We've also seen a lot of better fishing games recently, particularly the excellent Murakoshi Masami no Bakuchou Nippon Rettou, which leaves little reason to fumble around with this one.
DeleteTiny Tank is all right. It's a pretty basic shooter with good controls but serious technical issues. For starters, this is not really a tank game. With tank games, you typically expect tank controls, tanks are usually slow and accuracy is paramount. None of that is the case here, Tiny Tank has very standard 3rd person shooter controls, and you even have dedicated side dodge buttons that perform a totally unrealistic roll maneuver. Accuracy is also pretty much a non issue too, you can shoot super fast and the game has generous autoaim so you usually just spam, but this does leave you free to focus on dodging so this isn't a terrible core design and we've seen other games do this well. And the game does have some cool moments. While not a complex game by any means, the game has kind of a nifty system where you can take weapons off your defeated opponents and add them to your tank for more firepower, and there's something satisfying about blowing everything up while heavy metal music plays. Unfortunately, as alluded to earlier, there are some serious technical issues here, and it's not limited to a glitch causing machines to rebel against humanity for the thousandth time, but rather the fact that the game's framerate quite literally tanks pretty much any time you do anything, often slowing the game down to less than half of its default speed. The slowdown is so constant that it negates most of the skill to the game, since enemy projectiles tend to get lost in the slowdown and the inconsistent speed of the game makes dodging incoming fire a nuisance, turning it into a game where you mostly just spam shots and watch things blow up. The game also isn't nearly as charming as it thinks it is, Tiny Tank has a kind of Gex-like personality where he constantly wisecracks throughout the stages, and it wears thin pretty quick. Overall, it's an all right game, but it could have been a lot better with some more optimization, with the size of the game's stages there's no reason why this couldn't have run at full speed.