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Last Topic's Ratings:
Black Fire - BBB - 0% (3)
Congo the Movie: The Lost City of Zinj - BBBG - 25% (4)
Ninja Jajamaru-kun: Onigiri Ninpouchou Gold - AAA - 50% (3)
Real Bout Fatal Fury - GGGG - 100% (4)
Virtual Hydlide - ABBBB - 10% (5)
Zap Snowboarding Trix - BB - 0% (2)
I still think people were way too hard on Congo the Movie, but at least RBFF was there to carry this topic.
Games for this topic:
Cotton 2
Cube Battler: Story of Anna / Shou
Gale Racer
Greatest Nine 96
Robo Pit
Spot Goes to Hollywood
There are two versions of Cube Battler, but they appear to be essentially the same game, in a Pokemon Red / Blue kind of way.
Cotton 2 - G
ReplyDeleteCube Battler: Story of Anna / Shou - B
Gale Racer - B
Greatest Nine 96 - G
Robo Pit - G
Spot Goes to Hollywood - A
Cotton 2 is really good. The original Cotton was a great game already, so how do you take a good game and make it even better? Well, taking some more cues from Twinbee is a good start. True, you could already bounce powerups to change them in the original game, but it was pretty simplistic in terms of how it worked, and juggling the crystals was pretty simple most of the time. Here, while you can still juggle crystals to get spells, you can also grab the crystals with the new catch move and throw them at enemies to create combos, then regrab the affected enemy to create even more combos, earning tons of points and powerups along the way. Like in Twinbee, focusing too much on trying to juggle crystals and set up combos usually gets you hit, but that's what makes it fun, it creates a fun risk/reward dynamic that helps give the game far more replay value than it might have otherwise. Another thing that's changed is that the presentation has seen a huge bump. The first game wasn't ugly or anything, but it made no secret of the fact that it came out in 1991. With this game being made in 1997 the graphics and sound have advanced tremendously, resulting in a very colorful game that just looks great on Saturn. It boggles my mind that Panorama Cotton seems to be the only game that people remember from this series with how good the two horizontal games are.
Cube Battler is one of the weirdest games I've ever played. It's incredibly hard to rate, but honestly I think it's B. Gameplay-wise, it's a puzzle game that bares some resemblance to the SNES games Pieces. Instead of putting together a standard Jigsaw puzzle, you're instead assembling a picture of your character, and when the puzzle is complete, you win. You can also choose to attack the other character, which causes one of your squares to flash red. If you put a piece in that square, your character does an attack, which causes the opponent to lose a few pieces if it hits, and deals damage, and you can also win the game by depleting your opponent's health. However, the opponent can hold a button to block, which causes them not to lose any pieces and to take only a small amount of damage, and this is very simple to do as the characters call out their attacks in anime fashion, making them super telegraphed. Attacking doesn't cost anything, and neither does defending, except for the fact that they very marginally slow down how fast you can complete the puzzle. You can also rotate pieces to get the block you need or link up blocks, allowing you to place several at once, but this also takes a little time, and when attacking you can move the red square, again at the cost of time. The problem with the game is that blocking is way too easy and strong. Attacking wastes quite a lot of time, if the opponent simply blocks at the last moment they'll gain like a +2 piece advantage, and it's trivially simple to just wait for the attack callout to block, meaning that it's basically never a good idea to attack. This leaves an overly simple game that just doesn't really feel like it was balanced properly. However, the fairly bad puzzle gameplay is actually only a very small part of the game. The gameplay is essentially just a vehicle for an anime OVA, between matches there are extremely extensive anime cutscenes to tell the story. These are of fairly high quality and you spend much longer watching the cutscenes than you do playing the game. The two versions tell different versions of the story and if you mainly wanted to watch it for the anime aspect it might not be terrible for that, I just wish they had put more actual effort into the gameplay portion.
Gale Racer sucks. It essentially plays like a 3D version of Rad Racer, but I think it's actually much worse than that game. Like Rad Racer, this game features absurdly simple track design, there's only 2-3 lanes at any given time, and traffic is the only real obstacle. Unlike Rad Racer, you can't even go off the track (if you touch the edges, you bounce back and lose speed), and the visuals are extremely bland, with almost no scenery whatsoever and lousy draw distance. The game does not feature an "outside" camera, you're forced to play it in first person, which makes it much harder to play, and the controls aren't particularly great either. It kind of boggles my mind that this game was released when it was, I actually think this feels even worse than Race Drivin'.
DeleteGreatest Nine 96 is another fairly standard Baseball game, but it's solid. It's very much in line with most 16-bit Baseball games in terms of gameplay, there's no manual batting control or anything, but it's got good controls and very solid overall game balance. It's something that's easy to take for granted, but this game has very good balance between offense and defense. It's not unreasonably hard to make contact with the ball or get on base, but it's also fairly common to hit pop flys or even hit into double plays, so actually scoring runs is uncommon enough to make it worth considering risky plays when you have a scoring opportunity, just like in real baseball. The presentation is surprisingly solid too, despite this being an early title it has a pretty substantial amount of voice acting and some decent music as well, and I kind of enjoy the Japanese announcer, it's an interesting change of pace from western games. Overall, there's nothing tremendously unique about this game, but it basically does everything right for a game of its type.
Colour me surprised, but the Saturn version of Robo Pit is a huge upgrade over the Playstation version. So much has changed that it almost feels like a totally different game, so we'll go over the basics again. This is a robot battling game that bares some resemblance to something like Virtual On, where two robots duke it out in 3D, using various attacks to deplete each other's lifebar until only one remains. Unlike Virtual On, you can create your own robot here, choosing its head (which functions like a body in most games) and legs, as well as which weapons it has on each arm. You then battle various opponents to move up the ranks, with each win unlocking new parts and also gradually levelling up your robot's stats and weapon proficiencies. It's a fun concept, but the Playstation version was plagued by balancing issues, which are actually almost completely resolved in the Saturn version. On Playstation, the game runs very fast, which makes it very hard to avoid attacks or aim, and attacks do very little damage, making it feel like matches are basically mostly a slugfest which come down to who lands more special attacks, which are almost the only way to deal real damage. For starters, on Saturn, the speed of the game is quite a bit slower. This is not to say its framerate has been reduced, the framerate is fine, but the actual speed of the game is slower, particularly in terms of the movement of the robots. This makes it now much more feasible to react to and avoid incoming attacks, but to compensate, attacks deal vastly more damage when they actually connect, probably 5-10x as much as they do on Playstation. Super Moves remain very powerful, but at least due to the slower speed of the game they now feel somewhat reactable, and with weapon attacks doing so much more damage you're likely to only get one per battle. Overall, the gameplay feels vastly improved, it now actually capitalizes on its fun concept pretty well. The game has seen other upgrades beyond this, for example the menus got a huge graphical facelift, with the Robot Creation having a much slicker interface that shows all of your part choices in a much more visually appealing way, and there's also the addition of a new first-person mode which you can use while playing the game, which is fun. It really makes me wonder what happened to the PS1 version of this game, because the Saturn version is actually quite a solid title. A good example of why you have to make sure to check every version of every game.
DeleteOn the other hand, Spot Goes to Hollywood is pretty much identical to the PS1 version. Like that version, the presentation is quite good, both the visuals and the music are pretty top notch, but I feel the gameplay just isn't quite up to snuff. I feel like a lot of this just chalks up to weaknesses with isometric platformers as a genre, the controls never really feel all that precise, and the levels, while pretty, start to feel repetitive after a while due to the limited options that this type of level design provides. I really wish they had just made this more of a conventional sequel to Cool Spot, which was a great game, there was really no need to reinvent the wheel here. It's still decent, but it feels like a missed opportunity.