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Last Topic's Ratings:
Afraid Gear - BA - 25% (2)
Klonoa - GGGGGGGGGGGGG - 100% (13) (2 SR)
Formula Circus - BB - 0% (2)
NBA Hoopz - AGA - 67% (3)
Strike Point - BBB - 0% (3)
Suiko Enbu - AG - 75% (2)
A heck of a turnout for Klonoa. We haven't had a turnout like that for some time, good to see that the big names can still get people to come out and rate.
Games for this topic:
Block Kuzushi, The
Boxer's Road
Clock Tower (US)
Destruction Derby 2
Dragon Valor
Team Buddies
There's a million games on PS1 with similar names to Block Kuzushi, this is the one that's part of the simple 1500 series and is just called Block Kuzushi, and does not have any licensed characters associated with it. In other confusing title news, we also have Clock Tower 2, which is known as just "Clock Tower" in the US, and is not the US game called "Clock Tower 2", nor "Clock Tower: the First Fear". Whew. Hopefully everyone followed all that.
Block Kuzushi, The - G
ReplyDeleteBoxer's Road - B
Clock Tower (US) - A
Destruction Derby 2 - B
Dragon Valor - G
Team Buddies - B
I was a bit worried about reviewing The Block Kuzushi because there's a million Breakout style games on PS1, and really, how much can you do with that formula? Quite a lot, it turns out, as The Block Kuzushi immediately manages to feel quite different from any other breakout game that I've played. For starters, compared to a game like Arkanoid, powerups are not a big part of The Block Kuzushi. A few exist, but the game mainly revolves around the paddle pulse mechanic. Pressing the button before you hit the ball allows for a stronger shot, which is not a mechanic unique to this game, but this also allows the ball to go through a few blocks at a time. Even more potent is the hook shot, which is done by moving the paddle left or right and pulsing just before the ball hits. This causes the ball to be hit on an arc with a lot of power, going through tons of bricks at once. This move must be used cautiously, however, poor use of this move can easily send the ball arcing towards the bottom at a steep angle from which you can't possibly recover it, but when used well it can clear stages out in a hurry. There's also a neat combo mechanic where you get extra points for breaking a lot of blocks in a row, which helps reward you for getting the ball "stuck" in a spot where it hits a ton of bricks in succession (this is always a good thing in any breakout game, but it's nice to get extra points for it). About the only thing you could complain about with this game is that there's not a lot of flash, the presentation of the game is very basic, but the gameplay is very solid. I'm consistently impressed with the way the developers of the Simple 1500 series usually manage to put an interesting twist on basic gameplay concepts.
I spent a while trying to figure out if I just didn't understand Boxer's Road or it was bad but I think it's fairly clear upon closer analysis that it's the latter. It's another one of those boxing games where you have to choose your boxer's schedule, though it's more involved than most, as you must figure out how your boxer will spend every day, in terms of what they will eat, what exercises they'll do, and when they will rest, Monster Rancher style. Obviously, Monster Rancher is fun, so there's some potential to this concept, but it's not nearly as streamlined, with you having to choose many activities and 3 meals each day, which bogs down the pacing substantially and makes it not fun to tinker with the schedule. When you actually do get to box (which is rare), the game is also slow and clunky, with punches feeling very imprecise and just generally bad to use. Overall, it just doesn't really feel polished enough, it was a very early release so it might have been somewhat rushed for launch.
Clock Tower is kind of a mixed bag that makes some improvements to the SNES original but also a few missteps. The most obvious change is that the game is now 3D, though the point and click interface of the original game is preserved, so it actually plays fairly similarly to the original. The PS1 version does offer a few improvements to the overall gameplay. The biggest one is that running no longer tires you out, so you're free to run to your heart's content, which does a good job of speeding up the gameplay. The 3D angles for rooms also generally make targetting interactables easier, which is a plus. Unfortunately, besides the interface improvements, I feel many aspects of the game have been downgraded. The biggest decline in my opinion is to the game's pacing. In the original Clock Tower, there's a short opening, then the game gets underway and you have to fight for your life until you either perish or complete the game, as it should be. Clock Tower PS1 is instead divided up into 7 segments, the prologue, Intermission 1, Chapter 1, Intermission 2, Chapter 2, Intermission 3, and Chapter 3. The prologue and intermission sections are dull text-based sections where you have to walk around and talk to a bunch of people, looking for specific dialogue triggers to advance the plot, which really have no business being in a horror game. Imagine if after you finished the first floor in Rez Evil 1, all the characters decided to take a lunch break in the dining room to discuss how the game is going so far and fill out some paperwork. This greatly harms the game's replay value, which is really bad as one of the game's main selling points is that the gameplay segments are somewhat randomized and the game has many possible endings. Thankfully, the chapters where the core gameplay occurs are mostly competent. Compared to the first game, the action in these sections has become somewhat more formulaic, but it still works. During the chapters, your goal is mainly to find a handful of key items while not being killed by Scissorman. The areas are fairly small and rooms don't have many interactables, so it's not difficult to find the items by simply checking everything. However, every now and then Scissorman will appear, and you'll have to lose him before you can continue investigating. These sections where you have to lose Scissorman are the best parts of the game. The key to losing him is to find either some weapon you can use against him, or some place to hide, but the clever part of the game is that any given way of losing Scissorman will only work once or twice. For example, in the first stage, one way to lose Scissorman is to jump into the elevator. Unfortunately, the second time you do this, the power to the elevator gets cut and you can't use it anymore. You can also try to hide in the bathroom, but if you keep doing this he'll figure out where you've gone and catch you. The feeling of gradually running out of resources (in this case, potential escapes) is key to horror games and I think this game pulls it off a significantly better than the original, where most methods of escaping would either always work or never work. The biggest problem is that there are only 3 of these "action" chapters, and they really aren't very long or big, I suspect all 3 areas would fit very comfortably within the mansion from the original game. If only they had axed or greatly simplified the intermission sections and added 2 more chapters or something.
DeleteShockingly, Destruction Derby 2 is actually way, way worse than the original. The original game had garbage controls, but it had tracks that were very specifically designed around its garbage controls to cause a lot of wrecks and so on, so it actually kind of works. Destruction Derby 2 takes the same terrible controls and applies them to a more standard Racing game, resulting in a product that just doesn't work at all. Because the tracks are so much larger, cars are now vastly more spread out and thus big pileups almost never happen, and the racing gameplay is so terrible that there's certainly no enjoyment to be had from that aspect of the game either. There is a mode you can play where the cars are in an arena, but even this is only barely functional due to how poor the controls are. If you want to play a game that takes this concept and does it properly, check out Dirt Showdown on PS3, this one is a complete failure on every level.
DeleteDragon Valor is a very interesting game with a number of really unique mechanics. For starters, it's kind of a hybrid of a beat-em-up and an RPG, though it leans much heavier on the RPG side compared to something like River City Ransom. You'll travel through 3D areas, fighting enemies, collecting health and money, finding permanent health, attack, and armor upgrades, and conversing with a bunch of different characters. Something very interesting about this game is that there's a ton of branching paths to the story. Not only can you frequently choose one of several stages to tackle, the game also has Phantasy Star 3's generation system, where your actions determine who the main characters marry, and thus who you play as in future generations (with these characters having slightly different movesets from each other). It's a pretty interesting setup, and the game's story is actually fairly decent. However, the game's combat is something that definitely won't be for everyone. Dragon Valor is basically "IFrames the Game", every character in the game (including your character) has access to a truly ridiculous amount of invincibility on most of the things that they do. For starters, whenever anyone gets hit, they get a lot of invincibility. Sometimes you can do a basic combo, but other times enemies will become invincible after a single attack, necessitating the use of single, powerful attacks against them. Many enemies have attacks that make them invincible (some enemies have this on EVERY attack), and some enemies also have long stretches of invincibility where you just have to dodge. Speaking of, you have a backflip move that is very invincible and you can do it twice in a row, but it has a fair bit of recovery where you're vulnerable, and you can also block physical attacks from the front to gain some invicibility. Essentially, the game revolves around figuring out when each enemy is vulnerable and taking advantage of it, which definitely feels weird at first. For a long time, I was leaning A, because I feel that the invincibility somewhat interrupts the game's flow and makes fighting early enemies feel repetitive, but as you get farther in the game the system kind of starts to come together and there's a number of quite interesting boss fights that use the mechanic in interesting ways. For example, one of the bosses is an alchemist who throws potions. He actually has almost no invincibility whatsoever, but if you try to attack and he tosses a potion you'll trade hits and you'll run out of health first, the trick is either to bait him into striking you with a physical attack, then use your blocking invincibility to blow through whatever he tries to do next, or just dodge until he runs out of potions to throw, then combo him when he tries to grab more. Overall, I can definitely see how this game wouldn't be for everyone, but I appreciate its ambition.
Team Buddies is weird and hard to rate but I think it's not very good. It's a somewhat difficult game to even describe, it's a top down shooter, but a competitive one that pits multiple teams against each other. The game's gimmick is that each team has a little construction square which can be filled up with little boxes you can gather. Stacking the boxes in various combinations allows them to be opened to give various weapons. You can get little things like an Uzi or Grenades with a few boxes, but stacking more allows you to get powerful weapons like the bazooka, vehicles like the tank, and even summon extra allies to join the fight. This mechanic, while interesting in theory, simply doesn't work all that well. Gathering the boxes is slow and boring, and most of things you can create aren't actually very good, particularly the vehicles, which are so slow and unweildy compared to being on foot that they're almost never worth it to put together, and you can easily be attacked while trying to build things, which can easily scatter your boxes. The vast majority of the time, you'll just want to order your allies to make you a bazooka, then start cranking out extra allies while you go on a rampage against the enemy base. Speaking of, each player has a base that can be destroyed permanently, which destroys their construction site, preventing them from making new weapons or allies, which essentially dooms them, so rushing their base tends to be an overly strong strategy regardless of which ruleset you're playing under. Another big problem with the game is that despite being called Team Buddies, the game only supports versus play, there's no option to have a friend control another character on your team, despite the fact that you almost always have one available. Having access to co-op and 2-on-2 for multiplayer would have improved the game drastically, as the AI is quite bad, and likely would have bumped the game up to A. As it stands, even though there's a decent number of unlockables for single player I don't feel the game is really fun enough for this to be worth much of anything.
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