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Last Topic's Ratings:
Capcom Generation 3 - AGGAGAA - 71% (7)
Chaos Seed - GGG - 100% (3)
Clockwerx - AA - 50% (2)
Hokuto no Ken - BAB - 17% (3)
In the Hunt - AAAGGGA - 71% (7)
PGA Tour 97 - BB - 0% (2)
Capcom Generation holds on to the high range, albeit just barely. Will the whole series make it?
Games for this topic:
Baku Baku
Doraemon: Nobita to Fukkatsu no Hoshi
Hexen
Samurai Spirits: Zankuro Musouken
Terra Cresta 3D
Top Anglers: Super Fishing Big Fight 2
Baku Baku looks interesting, and we also have Hexen and Samuari Shodown. We also have Terra Cresta 3D, and very longtime GAB users might remember that I'm a fan of the NES game, so I'm curious to see what they did with it.
Baku Baku - G
ReplyDeleteDoraemon: Nobita to Fukkatsu no Hoshi - B
Hexen - A
Samurai Spirits: Zankuro Musouken - A
Terra Cresta 3D - B
Top Anglers: Super Fishing Big Fight 2 - B
Any fan of puzzle games will immediately notice that Baku Baku feels similar to play, which is because it's almost exactly the same as Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo. I can't really fault it for this, however, because Baku Baku came first, it's actually Puzzle Fighter that's the copy. Compared to Puzzle Fighter, Baku Baku is slightly more simplistic. The basic concept of making matches of similarly coloured blocks and then clearing them with special blocks remains, though in this case, the blocks are food and the clearing blocks are animals, who then eat all the food they're connected to. The concept of making power gems is not present here, and two animals won't destroy each other, so there's not quite as much nuance as Puzzle Fighter, but it also doesn't have the dumb mechanic where you do drastically more damage when your stack is close to the top, so it feels a bit more balanced. The presentation of the game is pretty nice too, with decent sound effects and music. There may not be a ton of reason to seek this out if you've already played Puzzle Fighter to death, but it's still a very solid title in its own right.
Doraemon: Nobita to Fukkatsu no Hoshi is another one of those Saturn ports that takes a Playstation game that wasn't that great and adds a TON of slowdown to the mix. I honestly have no idea how this game runs as poorly as it does, it's not a good-looking game or anything, but as soon as you get to the second stage the game starts to consistently slow to about half speed. As before, the game's main standout feature is the ability to jump into and out of the foreground in a manner similar to Tomba, but it simply doesn't work particularly well, largely because you can't see the foreground when jumping towards it and thus those jumps are always blind, making for far too much trial and error. It's too bad they didn't try to stick a little closer to the SNES games for their offerings this gen, because those ones were pretty solid.
The Saturn version of Hexen is fairly similar to the PS1 version. Like the PS1 version, it's a pretty big downgrade from the N64 version, having worse visuals and having all the multiplayer options axed. Compared to PS1, it doesn't look as much worse, featuring significantly better textures than that version, but this comes at the cost of some occasional frameskipping. It's not terrible and I would say that this version is probably preferred to the PS1 version, but the N64 version is still obviously the definitive one if you have that option, since it runs at about double the framerate while also looking better and having multiplayer.
DeleteSamurai Spirits: Zankuro Musouken, or Samurai Shodown 3 as it is known in the US, is a fairly typical Samurai Shodown game. As with most games in the franchise, it's a lot less flashy than most fighting games, with little emphasis on combos. Instead, it focuses on powerful individual hits, particularly counter hits. This has the effect of making the game somewhat easier to learn, though I feel it also makes matches feel somewhat overly swingy, particularly as this game gives counter hit moves a huge damage bonus. A single counter hit C can do 50% in some cases, which feels a bit absurd. A new feature for the third game is that each character (of which there are only 12, which is actually less than the previous game) has two modes. The second mode has the same visuals but has access to different moves, somewhat similar to EX characters in King of Fighters. I'm personally not a huge fan of this system. For starters, special moves aren't a huge part of the game anyway, given the immense power of normals, and I think I'd prefer it if each character simply had more moves to use. For example, each character has only one super, and many of them are fairly bad, having access to the supers from both modes would help the game a lot, as offense in this game generally feels fairly limited. One area where the game does pretty well is the visuals, Samurai Shodown has always been known for its detailed spritework, and the stages are quite nice looking too. A cool touch is that if both players get knocked to low health on the final round, the stage transforms into a more pyschadelic version, which helps highlight the tension during these moments, but I feel like the generally slow and methodical pace of the game prevents these moments from feeling too exciting. It's not a bad game by any means, but when compared to Dark Legend, which has a number of similarities to it (such as the ability to fight armed and unarmed and the idea that single hits should get a lot of reward), I find Dark Legend to be a drastically better game in pretty much every respect, largely due to having a far more interesting combo system and giving each character a completely different moveset when not having their weapon.
Terra Cresta 3D kinda sucks. As the name probably clued you in, this is another shmup that uses 3D graphics. I've said it before and I'll say it again, horizontal and vertical shmups should never be 3D. It's not as directly game-ruining as in something like Raystorm, as the game is shown from a static angle that makes judging enemy positions easy, instead it results in an extremely dry and lifeless presentation which extends to almost every aspect of the game. The biggest issue with Terra Cresta 3D is that it's an extremely dull game. I don't think I've ever complained about a shmup being boring before, but this one is. For starters, Terra Cresta's signature mechanic, the ability to combine different ship parts together to make a super ship, is drastically reduced here, with there being only 3 parts instead of 5 in the NES game. This completely eliminates all strategy from the game, in the NES game it is sometimes ideal not to power the ship up to the max because certain special attacks are more ideal in certain circumstances, but in this game both powerups are just a straight upgrade so there's no nuance to it. The game is super easy, too, enemy waves are small and far between, and each powerup blocks a hit for you (on the NES version, you always lose at least 2 parts at once). Bosses also have simple and boring patterns and designs but take like a thousand shots to defeat, making these fights take far longer than they ought to. This game is playable, but it's not really any fun, and it's a big downgrade from the NES original.
DeleteSuper Fishing Big Fight 2 is a huge missed opportunity. The initial impression from the game is actually pretty decent. Similar to Shigesato Itoi #1 Ketteiban on N64, this is another fishing game where you can wander around areas in full 3D, on foot or in a boat, looking for good places to fish. When you successfully hook a fish, you fight them with a 3D camera that somewhat resembles Nushi Tsuri 64, and there's a decent system where the fish's stamina is displayed, and you have to manage that and the line tension while making sure the hook doesn't slip out. The problem is that finding fish is almost impossible. For starters, using the boat is mandatory, since you'll need the fish finder if you're going to have any hope of ever landing a fish. There are very few fish to be found, and the fish finder is quite imprecise, at best giving you an idea of a fish's proximity, but not its direction. Sometimes the game will give you a hint after you reel your line back in, and these are the most useful. Though they are in Japanese, google translate on my phone was able to handle them quite well, and I saw them so many times that I quickly came to recognize them even without the translation. These tell you things like that there are fish around but they're not interested in your bait, or that the fish would be interested but you reeled the line in too fast, which is very helpful, though most of the time you'll be seeing there "there's no fish here, check other areas of the lake" message. Thankfully, if lightning strikes and you do find a fish that wants your current bait, hooking them is easy and the fish fighting is decent, but in 40 minutes I only ever got 4 fish to bite. I think part of the problem is the bait system, there's a ton of options to choose from and in a game where finding a fish in the first place is nearly impossible, the last thing I need to be fiddling with is trying to find the right bait or lure (I eventually had some success with the crank lure). If this game could have been optimized a little better so you could get fish to bite a lot more easily it might have been decent, as there is some promise here, but as it stands it's far too dull to play for any length of time and I would have quit before I even hooked my first fish if I didn't feel like I had to figure out how that system worked.