This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Curiosity Kills the Cat - BBAB - 13% (4)
Gundam: The Battle Master - ABB - 17% (3)
Liberogrande - AAAA - 50% (4)
Master of Monsters: Disciples of Gaia - BBBB - 0% (4)
Punky Skunk - AABBBA - 25% (6)
Shutokou Battle Gaiden: Super Technic Challenge - BBB - 0% (3)
Probably one of the lowest-rated sets in a while, there wasn't even a single G vote, which is very rare. The highest rated game from both topics was only 50% that week.
Games for this topic:
Point Blank 2
Power Rangers: Lightspeed Rescue
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels
Superbike 2000
Tsuri Baka Nisshi
Yellow Brick Road
I was a bit late on creating this topic, but it's nice to see that people are still invested enough in these topics that they noticed pretty quickly. Nothing exciting happened, I was just off for a couple days and busy doing stuff and I forgot which day the topic was supposed to go up. It'll still close the same time it usually does so please try to get your votes in quickly.
As for this topic Space Hulk and Tsuri Baka Nisshi both look like interesting games, and we also have the second game in the Point Blank series. My old CRT is still working, which I maintain pretty much exclusively to play Point Blank.
Point Blank 2 - G
ReplyDeletePower Rangers: Lightspeed Rescue - B
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels - A
Superbike 2000 - B
Tsuri Baka Nisshi - A
Yellow Brick Road - A
In my opinion, Point Blank 2 is a slight downgrade from the original, but it's still pretty solid. Compared to the first Point Blank, the setup is very similar, just with new minigames. I feel like the minigames in this batch are not quite as good as the first game, there aren't too many real stinkers, but when I think of the minigames from the franchise that I remember really well, almost all of them are from Point Blank 1. The story mode is also a big downgrade in my opinion, not being nearly as interesting as the RPG adventure from the first game. Still, saying that this game is a little worse than clearly the best lightgun game of all time isn't exactly a major criticism, and pretty much any fan of Point Blank would want to own all 3 games just to have the extra stage variety.
I was surprised to find that Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue is a completely different game from on N64, but it's certainly not any better, in fact I think it's actually a fair bit worse than the N64 game, which was at least bad in a funny way. The Playstation game is a 3D beat-em-up, but easily one of the least interesting ones ever made. It was pretty clear immediately that the game was going to have issues when I tried to do a jump kick only to find out that no such move exists. Lightspeed Rescue has among the most limited movesets of any beat-em-up ever made, you basically just have a punch combo and a kick combo and a running kick and that's it, and even these few moves feel janky and bad to use. The stages themselves are long and immensely repetitive, with only a few enemy types and the same objectives over and over, not helped by the fact that the core gameplay is so uninspiring, and unlike the N64 game there's no real mission variety either. The production values are maybe a touch better than they were on N64, but the pre-mission intros don't have nearly as much personality as the comic book sequences from that game. The whole experience is just bland and bad.
Space Hulk is a strange game. It's an FPS / Strategy hybrid where you control a squad of soldiers in a Doom-like environment. You can press Select to pause the action and issue orders to your squad, like moving to a certain position or covering a certain location, though you have only a certain amount of pause time, if your command bar runs out the game starts moving again. You can also control a character yourself, though movement in the game is extremely slow and each fighter has only a single weapon, so you can't handle too much on your own, you have to have the allies cover you in order to survive (they're also generally far more competent at aiming than a human player could ever be). I suppose in a certain sense you could compare the game to Rainbow Six, which is also an FPS / Strategy hybrid, but this skews far more on the strategy side of things. In Rainbow Six, it mostly plays like an FPS and the strategy elements are minor, you can largely ignore the battle planning and handle everything yourself if you're competent, but in this game, the strategy elements take precedence and the FPS action is secondary, in fact you can do everything from the command window if you want and just let the AI handle the shooting if you prefer. However, there are a number of flaws. The first has to do with the interface. For how often you do it, issuing commands isn't nearly as straightforward as it should be. To issue commands to a character, you have to hit select, swap to that character, give them orders, then swap back to the unit you were controlling. If you simply close the orders screen after giving orders, you'll retain in control of the unit you last assigned orders to, and any input will override their orders, which is very unintuitive. The maps are also extremely boring. The entire game functions on a grid, and almost all maps are just simple corridors with occasional square rooms. The units themselves also take up an entire "tile" and they can't move past each other, which makes commanding the units significantly more annoying than it should be. Despite this, the game does have some interesting ideas and I kind of wish Rainbow Six had borrowed a couple of them, but generally I don't think it feels especially fun to play.
DeleteSuperbike 2000 sucks. It's another extremely dry and basic racing game with only a basic single race and tournament mode and nothing to unlock, and it also has terrible controls. Like many games of this type, your first adventure is to figure out how to turn off driving assist (it's buried in the tuning screen this time), but even with it off the game's controls are lousy. This game basically controls like the first version of NFS1 where the second you're going fast, your steering basically just stops responding altogether, which completely kills the sense of speed that superbikes are usually known for as you have to break heavily for every turn (or just cut across the grass, which is vastly faster on any S-bends). Though not without its issues, Moto Racer 2 is a vastly better game than this.
Tsuri Baka Nisshi is all right, but it's not quite as good as I hoped. For starters, this is one of the most simplistic fishing games of all time. The entire game revolves around your little fish finder, which tells you which depth to cast your line to. You then cast, thumb the line when it gets to the right depth, then hit up when a fish bites. You then reel the line in, while watching the tension gauge. If the tension guage gets too high, you press X to unthumb the line and stop reeling until it gets low, then repeat, though this is only an issue with big fish. When the fish is at the top, hold up. That's pretty much the whole game. There's no bait and tackle selection or anything like that, it's just cast and reel, and whether you win or not is mostly luck. There are a few different types of stages, on some, you need to hook the biggest fish, while on others, you have to catch a lot of fish. The former is generally much more fun, as you have to do more actual fish fighting there, but landing a big fish is still completely up to RNG. When you have to catch a lot of fish, this is 100% luck, as whether or not the right fish bites (which you have no control over) determines whether or not you get any points. There is a somewhat cute story mode with various comic-style shots of Tsuri Baka's daily life, which is kind of cool, and in one mode Tsuri Baka's wife will make food out of the fish you catch, which is neat, but I wish the gameplay had a bit more nuance to it.
DeleteYellow Brick Road is mostly the same as on Saturn. As with the Saturn version, this is a pretty decent first-person adventure game except for the fact that it's way, way too short, feeling more like a demo than a full game. Compared to the Saturn version, the PS1 version runs slightly worse, being a bit slower and having a slower cursor where you have to hold down a button to speed it up, but it's not quite enough of a downgrade to push it into B. Considering that the full trilogy of games was out by 97, one wonders why they put out only this one version and didn't simply wait for the PC games to be done.