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Last Topic's Ratings:
Cotton 2 - GGGGGA - 92% (6)
Cube Battler: Story of Anna / Shou - BB - 0% (2)
Gale Racer - BBB - 0% (3)
Greatest Nine 96 - GAA - 67% (3)
Robo Pit - AGAGGA - 75% (6)
Spot Goes to Hollywood - AAA - 50% (3)
Interesting that both the PS1 and the Saturn topics had a game that rated very high, and two games that got 0%. The topics were almost duplicates of each other.
Games for this topic:
DecAthlete
Fighter's History Dynamite
Motteke Tamago with Ganbare Kamonohasi
Pro Pinball: The Web
Ronde
Thunder Force Gold Pack 2
I'm kind of intrigued by Motteke Tamago with Ganbare Kamonohasi, but I have absolutely no idea what's going on with it from the screenshots. Ronde is an unlocalized RPG, but there is a guide available for it.
DecAthlete - G
ReplyDeleteFighter's History Dynamite - A
Motteke Tamago with Ganbare Kamonohasi - A
Pro Pinball: The Web - G
Ronde - G
Thunder Force Gold Pack 2 - G
DecAthlete is solid. It's a Track and Field-type game, and it sticks relatively close to the original formula, but with significantly improved presentation and general quality of life improvements that make it feel much better to play compared to most of its competitors. For starters, the game's presentation is quite good. Besides the move to 3D graphics, there's also been an effort to give the game more personality, by making the player characters a variety of named competitors who have unique stats and voice acting. This helps make the game feel much less generic compared to the extremely dry presentation of games like International Track and Field. There have also been upgrades to the UI, for example the game now gives a short "how to play" sequence before each event, and the gameplay of the events has been diversified compared to older games, with a number of games that rely more heavily on timing compared to straight mash. Overall, it's still a fairly basic experience, but this is definitely the right way to update a classic experience like this. You can kind of see the beginnings of the Mario and Sonic at the Olympics franchise in this game.
Fighter's History Dynamite is okay but it's not quite as good as I expected. For starters, the game feels quite dated for its time. It basically plays exactly like Street Fighter 2 (and not Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo), with most characters having very small movelists and only very basic combos, and the game also lacks any kind of super meter. Its one unique mechanic is that each fighter has a "weak point", where if they take too many hits to a particular body part they'll be stunned. I do sort of like the fact that stuns are predictable and consistent, compared to other games where they often feel arbitrary, but what counts as hitting the weakpoint is quite generous, so you'll usually trigger it without any deliberate effort. The game's AI is also extremely dated, with the game using old-fashioned "button reading" style AI that forces you to play almost entirely reactively, particularly because the AI will always throw you on the first frame if you get within throw range and this game does not have any concept of teching, which makes playing against the AI not very fun. On the plus side, the game does have a decent selection of characters and it's a solid port to Saturn, it just has a hard time competing against newer games.
I had no idea what to expect from Motteke Tamago, but it's another Bomberman-like game, albeit one that plays pretty differently from most others. Like Bomberman, it takes place on a top view grid-like battlefield, but here, the goal is to collect and hatch eggs, then deliver them to your base to score points. You have only one method of attack, a dashing move that takes a while to build up, but if you hit someone, you can make them drop the eggs (or hatchlings) that they're currently carrying. You can also place a block which can block the opponent's movement, which they can destroy with the dash, but of course this forces them to waste their dash doing so and it takes a while to come back. After 20 hatchlings have been delivered, the match ends and whomever has the most points is the winner. Stages are divided into groups sharing a similar theme, and each group generally has some kind of hazard which can make you drop your eggs, for example, one group takes place in a city and you have to watch out for cars as well as the other players. The concept isn't too bad, but there are a couple issues that bring it down a bit. The first is that while playing single player, the game is three against one, which feels really unfair, not only do you have to have the highest score, you have to outscore all of the other players combined, and the fact that they all work together against you really makes the odds feel stacked against you. There's also the matter of what happens when eggs hatch. After you carry around an egg long enough, it will hatch into a smaller version of your character, which you can then deliver to your base for points. You can also deliver them to the opponent to make them lose points, which is an interesting idea for free-for-alls, but has little value in single player. However, if you lose your eggs after they hatch, the little hatchlings will walk around and can be gathered by any player. However, if you have hatchlings that aren't yours, you really can't do anything useful with them. If you deliver them to your own base, you'll lose points, and if you deliver them to the opponent's base, they'll gain points instead. I guess in a free-for-all setting this would be fine, since you can use them to take points away from another player, but in single player you have no choice but to either hurt your own score or boost the opponents', which feels lame. Overall, it's not a terrible title, but the single player experience definitely could have used some work.
DeletePro Pinball is a bit of an upgrade from the PS1 version. The most significant change is that the visuals are slightly upgraded, with the table looking noticeably smoother on Saturn. Whether it's from higher resolution art assets or a filter on the screen, it looks quite a bit better, and for a game where the appeal is the feeling of bringing the arcade experience home, it does help quite a bit. When we covered this on Playstation, I mentioned that I think Big Race USA is more interesting as a table, but Saturn doesn't have that game, so this becomes one of your best pinball options by default. It does go to show though why True Pinball's approach of releasing all the tables at once is superior, but this is still a solid title for your Saturn library if you're a pinball fan.
You wouldn't know it from the title, but Ronde is actually the third game in the Majin Tensei series. We covered Majin Tensei 2: Spiral Nemesis back on SNES, so I was interested to see how it made the jump to the next generation. It turns out this game is something of a black sheep in the Megami Tensei fandom, being considered to be memetically terrible by many, but I think it's fairly clear that this is undeserved. Sure, graphically, this game looks pretty bad. I actually think some of the area maps look pretty decent for their time, but the character graphics and battle animations are atrocious, and the cutscenes are little better. Still, the cutscenes are fairly short and battle animations can be turned off, so this doesn't impact the gameplay all that much. Thankfully, when it comes to gameplay, the title is pretty solid. Like Majin Tensei 2, it's a strategy RPG take on Megami Tensei, and the basics are fairly similar to the SNES game, though with a few additions. The first and most obvious change is the addition of verticality to the maps. Battle maps in Ronde are 3D, and height affects the accuracy of attacks, with some attacks preferring to be above or below the target. It doesn't have a huge impact on gameplay, but it's something. A bigger change is the new demon contracting system. In Majin Tensei 2, you can recruit demons to fight on your side as combat units, but they don't really change the game too drastically and you can probably make do with just the human units if you want. In Ronde, they have a more critical role in the game, as the human characters now need them to learn spells. By contracting a demon, you can have a human learn the spells it knows, and this also raises its loyalty, which lets you deploy it into battle directly, so it can gain experience and learn more spells for you to contract. It's a fun little gameplay loop that makes you care a fair bit more about your demon allies. Something else worth noting is that the game has some fairly significant tutorial content, after the first few stages your newly recruited demon allies will explain most of the game's major mechanics to you. While these explanations are rather long (I would guess the one before the second battle has at least 50 text boxes), I appreciate the effort to explain some of the mechanics which might otherwise be rather cryptic. Overall, I think this is a decent little game and certainly isn't nearly as bad as its reputation, it seems like there's some work being done on a translation for this game so it might be worth a look once it comes out.
DeleteI sort of spoiled my opinion of Thunder Force Gold Pack 2 when we covered the first one, but this is the better of the two collections. While the first collection had Thunder Force 2 and the Genesis version of 3, this one has the arcade version of 3 and Thunder Force 4. I think it's a fairly uncontroversial opinion that Thunder Force 4 is easily the best game in the series, so having that game is a huge boost to this collection. I think the Arcade version of 3 is a little worse than the Genesis version, but it's still a very solid game, and certainly much better than the dud that is Thunder Force 2. What really goes the extra mile though is that this version of Thunder Force 4 has some enhancements, not only is the frame rate improved, but they also added a second playable ship to the game, though it's fairly hard to unlock. Besides this, the collection doesn't really have a lot of bells and whistles, particularly compared to Capcom's efforts, but you really can't complain about the quality of the two games on offer here.