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Last Topic's Ratings:
All-Star Baseball 97 Featuring Frank Thomas - AA - 50% (2)
Jungle Park: Saturn Island - BB - 0% (2)
Lode Runner: The Legend Returns - GGGA - 88% (4)
Sega Ages: Galaxy Force 2 - AAG - 67% (3)
Shellshock - AAGA - 63% (4)
Virtua Fighter 2 - GAGAAAG - 71% (7) (1 SR)
I was really surprised that Virtua Fighter 2 only barely made the high range, I expected my vote would definitely be an outlier. I guess competition for fighting games on Saturn is very strong.
Games for this topic:
Albert Odyssey: Legend of Eldean
College Slam
Denpa Shounenteki Game
Hebereke's Popoitto
Loaded
Primal Rage
I was going to say that I was looking forward to Albert Odyssey because I kind of enjoyed the Genesis game, but upon looking it up it turns out that was actually Arcus Odyssey and the two games are totally unrelated. I also have no idea what's going on with Denpa Shounenteki Game, but from that box art I want to find out.
Albert Odyssey: Legend of Eldean - A
ReplyDeleteCollege Slam - A
Denpa Shounenteki Game - B
Hebereke's Popoitto - B
Loaded - B
Primal Rage - B
Albert Odyssey is a decent old-school JRPG. For starters, this was originally a SNES game, and it definitely still feels like one, but in a certain sense the high-quality spritework has actually held up much better visually than many early 3D games. The town and field map visuals in particular are quite excellent, with some good use a shadow, lighting, and parallax, resulting in one of the visually best-looking RPGs of the generation. The music is also quite good, with excellent quality CD audio, and although voice acting is sparse, when it does appear it's also pretty decent. When it comes to gameplay, it's very routine, unfortunately. This is a super basic JRPG with zero customization in the vein of games like Final Fantasy 4, and it definitely feels pretty primitive by now. Random battles are very common, battle animations are long, and enemies frequently block during battle, which, when combined with the lack of nuance or challenge to the game tends to result in dungeon areas feeling like a slog. The game's translation is quite amateurish as well, this is another one of those translations where they decided to spice up the original Japanese text by adding a bunch of now dated pop culture references, which are rarely funny and rob the game of much of its drama. It definitely has some charm, but it doesn't stand up against more modern games like Lunar or Suikoden, which offer both significantly more depth and a better-told story.
College Slam is basically just a worse version of NBA Jam TE. The game is intended to be "NBA Jam TE with College teams", but the problem is it doesn't actually have the license to any of the players, so all of the players on each team are just generic players named only by their position. As you might imagine, this makes the game feel substantially drier compared to the real NBA Jam, and it also doesn't help that this version of the game has no in-game music for some reason. The game mechanics are still solid (it is still NBA Jam TE after all), but the diminished presentation definitely takes it down a peg compared to the real thing.
Denpa Shounenteki Game is super weird, but it's also clearly really bad. It's a very weird minigame collection, a little bit similar in concept to Bishi Bashi Special 2, but not nearly as good. As in that game, you can enter your name and select a character and then partake in some wacky minigames, but there aren't many of them and pretty much none of them are any good. About the only minigame that has any depth to it at all is the chiseling game, but it's very dull and takes forever to play, and none of the others stay interesting for more than a few seconds. Just play Bishi Bashi or Mario Party if you want something like this.
DeleteHebereke's Popoitto is essentially just a bad Dr Mario clone. It plays almost identically to Dr Mario, except that the viruses (here called Popoons) move back and forth inside the field. To lock them in place, you have to put a piece on top of them. This mechanic essentially just sucks, it makes it vastly harder to build combos compared to Dr Mario as pieces can continue to move even when other pieces are clearing, and it just generally adds an unnecessary degree of RNG and frustration to a formula that can already be pretty frustrating. The game also has a severe dearth of modes, when playing alone you can only play the standard stage clear mode, the versus mode can only be played with a second player (I don't blame the AI with not wanting to put up with this game's mechanics either). About the only thing you can say for the game is that it does look pretty nice, but that's not much consolation when there's barely anything to do and what is available isn't very fun.
When we reviewed Loaded for for Playstation, my biggest complaint about the game was its atrocious framerate, so in theory if that was fixed for the Saturn version it could be a fair bit better. Unfortunately, it wasn't, in fact, the Saturn version might actually run even worse. Either way, it boggles my mind that they thought this game was releasable in its current state. It's very obvious to me that the game simply should have used fully 2D graphics, as there are a lot of PS1 and Saturn games that can put tons of stuff on the screen at a good framerate using sprites. It's not like it's a good-looking game in any capacity anyway.
Primal Rage is another game that takes after Mortal Kombat, so it's not too surprising that it's bad. To its credit Primal Rage does attempt to make some improvements over Mortal Kombat. Blocking is done by holding back or downback (thank god), there's a guard bar that can lead to dizzies, and the characters are legitimately different from each other instead of the entire roster being clones. Unfortunately, a number of terrible decisions hold it back. The most prominent one is the way you do special moves in this game. Unlike pretty much every other fighting game in existence, specials in Primal Rage are performed "backwards", they require you to start by holding 2 or more buttons, then inputting a joystick motion. Even if you're able to get past how incredibly janky this feels, the detection is also atrocious. I was using a simple "hold down 2 buttons, press Down Up" special, and I'd guess it came out properly maybe 30% of the time. You also cannot block or attack while holding buttons either, which makes specials feel almost totally pointless. Even normal attacks feel extremely stiff and janky, and the game's hitstun data seems to have been created almost entirely at random, so it still feels very bad to play. I seriously can't believe these games were ever popular.