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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Army Men: Green Rogue - AB - 25% (2)
Jeopardy - AAA - 50% (3)
King of Bowling 2 - AA - 50% (2)
Meta-Ph-List: Gamma X 2097 - AA - 50% (2)
Over Drivin' Skyline Memorial - AAA - 50% (3)
Urban Chaos - AAGA - 63% (4)
Our first topic in quite some time with no games in the high range. Even in topics where I fear this might happen a game usually manages to surprise me.
Games for this topic:
Curiosity Kills the Cat
Gundam: The Battle Master
Liberogrande
Master of Monsters: Disciples of Gaia
Punky Skunk
Shutokou Battle Gaiden: Super Technic Challenge
Curiosity Kills the Cat looks very interesting, I want to know what's going on with that one. I'm also hoping for good things from Shutokou Battle Gaiden, as some of the Japanese street racing games got a lot better as the era went on.
Curiosity Kills the Cat - B
ReplyDeleteGundam: The Battle Master - B
Liberogrande - A
Master of Monsters: Disciples of Gaia - B
Punky Skunk - B
Shutokou Battle Gaiden: Super Technic Challenge - B
Curiosity Kills the Cat is aptly named, because it's a game that looks interesting but really isn't worth it to play. It's a first-person graphic adventure game similar to Myst, albeit one featuring a dystopian setting with anthopomorphic animals. You might worry that the localization barrier would be significant, but the game actually involves almost no text. It's still extremely cryptic, though, not helped by its poor interface. The game uses a fairly standard point and click interface, but interactables have very small hit areas and are often hard to distinguish. It gets even worse when trying to use inventory items, as if you miss the interactable, it puts your inventory item away, often making you wonder if you're doing something wrong even when you have the right solution. At one point in the game I had to put a token in an arcade machine and it took me more than 5 minutes to properly line up the token with the coin slot due to a combination of the extreme pickiness of the hit area and the grainy visuals making it hard to see where the slot actually was. As such, you're clearly not getting anywhere without a guide, but even then it was still very hard to play. There's a spot in the game where you get taken to jail and have to find a pin to lockpick your way out. To escape, you have to solve a randomized combination lock, where you choose 1 of 8 directions, one of which will click, letting you know that direction was right, and you have to be right four times in a row (the combination doesn't change between tries). The problem is, the interface to choose a direction is just to click a few pixels from the middle of the lock. It's so absurdly imprecise that I was never able to escape the jail, I just reset the game and tried to put off being sent there for as long as possible. This allowed me to play the terrible arcade minigame, where you're required to beat 3 lame minigames to earn a prize, which is probably even worse than the lock puzzle. Overall, I feel like this one had some potential but it's really just too lousy to play to be worth it.
I was excited when I saw that Gundam: The Battle Master was developed by the same team as Gundam Wing Endless Duel on SNES, which is a pretty good game, but unfortunately it retains absolutely nothing of what made that game good. For starters, this is an extremely slow and bizarre fighting game that feels like the team behind it barely understood the genre. The entire game feels extremely slow and sluggish, and all strong ranged attacks are unblockable, which makes neutral feel terrible. Suits have extremely limited movesets, there are no supers, and barely anything combos, so most of the time you're just going to either spam your one good button or take pot shots. This game also has a super weird health system where your damage bar builds up instead of draining, and slowly empties when not being hit. When it fills up, you lose one point, and if you lose 4 points you lose the match. However, it takes a lot of hits to fill the bar even once, especially if there's a back and forth, which makes matches feel like they drag on forever. Overall, pretty much everything about this game just feels bad. I was surprised to see the bad reception to this game initially because I figured it'd at least be as good as Endless Duel but it's instantly obvious why people didn't like it.
Liberogrande is interesting. I was expecting it to be just another run of the mill Soccer game, but it's actually very, very different from pretty much every other Soccer title out there. The big change here is that unlike most Soccer games where you control the entire team, in Liberogrande you only control your team's Ace player, and the AI controls the rest, similar to the Be a Pro mode in some of EA's modern sports games. I was a pretty big fan of this mode in NHL '14 and it remains interesting here, having to work with your allies adds an interesting layer of strategy to the game and makes it feel very different compared to most other titles. There's only one major hitch here, and that's the camera. I think the intention is for you to only be able to see what your player would realistically be able to see, as the camera uses a super zoomed-in flat perspective of the field, but this makes it almost impossible to set up plays like crosses since it's so hard to get a good read on the field even if you use the radar. It's not totally gamebreaking and there are moments where it works well and the experience feels really cool, but I definitely think it's worth losing a little bit of immersion to have a camera that lets you view the field a little better. I wonder if they went that direction for the game's sequel.
DeleteMaster of Monsters is another one of those titles where the developers clearly didn't understand the genre on any level. The basic gist of the game is that it's kind of similar to Advance Wars. It's played from an overhead map, and you want to move your units onto certain tiles that you can use to get "ruling power" to summon units, with the goal of eventually wiping out the enemy's units. The difference here is that you have a master who is in charge of actually summoning the units, who is also a controllable unit themselves, and they must be positioned on certain tiles to summon monsters. The core idea isn't bad, but the game fails to deliver on it on almost every level. For starters, on a technical level, the game is a complete disaster. This is not a good looking game by any means, but it also has one of the worst engines ever on the platform, every time you press a button the game freezes for at least a second, and considering this is a game where you're going to be commanding an army of dozens of units, you're going to be pressing buttons A LOT. This makes the game feel so terrible to play that it's almost completely unsalvageable. Beyond this, the strategy side of the game just doesn't work either. You can summon an absolutely insane number of monsters (it's not at all unusual to have 15-20 on the field at a time), but they barely do anything. When they attack other monsters, most of the time they just miss, and when they do hit they usually do almost no damage. Alternatively, your Master can also attack, and the Master almost never misses and does tons of damage, so it's very possible (and probably even advisable) to completely ignore the monster summoning mechanic altogether, or at least use only a couple monsters and focus on powering those up while the master does everything else, which has the added benefit of allowing you to totally ignore taking over the map and just rush the enemy summoner on every stage. Even then, it still plays like garbage. There's a game on Saturn that does this concept a million times better, so if you'd like to see this concept done well keep an eye on the Saturn topics.
Punky Skunk is a weird title but I don't think it's very good. In some sense, it plays a little like a way worse version of Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse. Like Mickey, Punky Skunk also has costumes that change his moveset, but you can only use a transformation when it appears within a level, and most levels are just built around a single transformation. Another annoying aspect is that many of Punky's transformations either can't attack or can't jump, so you have to constantly change back to regular Punky, which takes a second or so, which feels very reminiscent of Balan Wonderworld. Inbetween stages, you play terrible minigames to earn extra health, which you can later find hidden within the stages, but the game isn't that hard and the minigames are so annoying that I'd usually rather just skip them. Stages are also very small and the level design never feels particularly inspired. This game was originally going to be for SNES and upon seeing there was a SNES version I immediately had a bad feeling because if it existed for SNES I would have played it somewhat recently and I didn't remember anything about it, which is obviously a pretty bad sign. It turns out the SNES version was cancelled, though even if it hadn't been I'd probably have forgotten all about it by now anyway.
DeleteSuper Technic Challenge isn't great, it actually might be a downgrade from Tokyo Highway Battle. Tokyo Highway Battle's biggest problem was that there were a million parts to buy but the game didn't adequately explain what they did. This problem has been sort of half solved. To apply parts in this game, you first have to buy them, then install them. When installing the parts, it shows you how they affect your car's stats, but why don't they just make it a one step process so I can see how the parts I'm about to buy will affect my stats? Considering that for some categories, you can equip all of the parts, while for others, the parts are mutually exclusive, this would save a ton of trial and error. The gameplay has a few issues too. The game is essentially broken down into three types of events. Circuit Races, Drag Races, and Drift Events. It's actually kind of cool to see Drift competitions here, as I think this is one of the first games ever made to feature them, but the scoring seems almost totally random, and they make you do three laps over the course, which gets repetitive really quick. Circuit Races are extremely tough to win, you'll need a very good car, to beat even the first opponent will require a nearly maxed out car, so the vast majority of your time will be spent grinding drift races, which gets old really quick. The controls also don't seem to work as well for regular racing as for drift races as the cars feel very loose (perhaps this is why they decided to feature drift races?). Overall, it just feels like a step in the wrong direction. When you compare the degree to which Option Tuning Car Battle was massively improved for its sequel it's hard to see this as anything other than a disappointment.