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Last Topic's Ratings:
Baku Baku - AAGA - 63% (4)
Doraemon: Nobita to Fukkatsu no Hoshi - BB - 0% (2)
Hexen - GAGAA - 70% (5)
Samurai Spirits: Zankuro Musouken - AAA - 50% (3)
Terra Cresta 3D - AB - 25% (2)
Top Anglers: Super Fishing Big Fight 2 - BB - 0% (2)
I was actually kind of surprised that this topic didn't rate too well, I figured that Samurai Shodown would carry the topic pretty easily. I guess that franchise has just always been kind of niche.
Games for this topic:
Crows: The Battle Action
Donpachi
FIFA Soccer 97
Mega Man X4
Scorcher
Time Commando
I've been a bit under the weather lately, so I'm getting myself a Christmas present of Mega Man X4, which is a game I've already played very extensively but I can always find time to play again. Also, note carefully the name of the beat-em-up in this topic, it is not "Crow: City of Angels" despite the similar name. It looks kind of interesting though.
Crows: The Battle Action - B
ReplyDeleteDonpachi - G
FIFA Soccer 97 - B
Mega Man X4 - G
Scorcher - A
Time Commando - B
Crows is a pretty bad beat-em-up. It starts off promisingly enough with a combo editor that lets you make unique combo strings out of different moves, but unfortunately you can't actually use these combos during normal gameplay, they are instead used solely for desperation moves that consume health to use and don't even link well, being easily interrupted by opponents. Stripped of that mechanic, you're left with an extremely basic and stiff beat-em-up with extremely few moves available to the characters and pretty much no combo potential. Levels are short and extremely repetitive and there's also no story to speak of, the only good thing about it is that the visuals are somewhat decent, but it's a very low tier beat-em-up by almost any standard.
Donpachi is a more interesting game to rate than I expected. When we covered the game on Playstation, I noted that it was a decent game but had a lot of cheap deaths. It turns out this is because the Playstation version does not give the option to play the game in the right resolution, unless you play in Tate (rotated) mode, the screen is significantly smaller visually, which makes incoming bullets much harder to avoid than they're intended to be. The Saturn version displays the game in the correct resolution even when playing with the monitor in the default orientation and the game plays far better this way, when going back to the PS1 version afterwards it feels extremely claustrophobic by comparison. It's not all good news though, for some reason the Saturn port has a ton of load time, both at the beginning and between levels, which is annoying and isn't present on the PS1 version, but it's probably worth it for the better gameplay. Playing the PS1 version in Tate mode is probably the best possible Donpachi experience, but since almost no one has access to this the Saturn version is likely to be a better option for most.
FIFA 97 isn't really up to the standard that we'd expect from the series. Some of what makes the games what they are is present here, but it's nowhere near what it will become. For starters, although the commentary is pretty solid, the visuals are extremely drab and basic, with totally nondescript players and virtually no camera work to speak of. It's worth noting that compared to the already not-great looking PS1 version, the visuals have been downgraded even further here, with the player models being even further homogenized across the board and some reduction to the quality of the animations, but the PS1 version still isn't a pretty-looking game by any stretch. In terms of the gameplay, it's also fairly stiff. I always say the mark of a good soccer game is how good passing feels, and it doesn't feel that great here, it often feels like the game doesn't select the right player when you try to pass, and the general movement also feels stiff and slow. All of these problems are completely sorted out over the next few years, in particular FIFA 99 is a very solid game, but unfortunately Saturn doesn't have any of them, FIFA 97 is the last FIFA game it got. I still wouldn't really recommend it, though, there's at least one drastically better Soccer game coming for Saturn that we haven't rated yet.
Unlike the other games in this topic, Mega Man X4 is virtually identical to the PS1 version. As with a few other franchises, this is another case where Saturn got a port of one of the first games of the generation, but didn't get the later ones, but in X4's case this is no big issue as X4 is drastically better than X5 and X6. The Saturn version is virtually identical to PS1, I feel like it might load just a hair faster but that could be a placebo. In any case, this is one of the best action platformers ever made and one of the top games in the series and having it on Saturn is very welcome. The only thing you could really say is that this game has been ported a ton of times, so there's not a ton of incentive to track down this version, especially because it tends to be somewhat expensive compared to the other versions of the game.
DeleteScorcher is a tragedy. It's a futuristic racing game that bares some resemblance to Wipeout, but with tracks that have more three-dimensionality to them. It doesn't make the best first impression, but once the power turn is remapped to the shoulders the game controls decently and it starts to feel pretty fun. You have to know the tracks well as boosting at the right time can easily send you flying off the course, but as you get the basics down and start zipping through the tracks, grabbing boost powerups and hitting speed arrows and moving along at a good clip, the game actually starts to feel pretty fun, and there are some cool moments in the track design like when you drop through a hole in the second track into a pipe. Then you hit the third track and it all goes to hell. The third track has no walls and has all kinds of holes in the course that you have to jump over (the game has a manual jump button), playing much more like the classic DOS game Skyroads than a racing game. This stage also has a loop that only barely works, and even if you do practice it enough to beat it the later stages aren't much better. If they had just stuck to the kind of design they used on the first two tracks this game would be an easy G, and it really makes me wonder what the hell they were thinking. Despite that, I still don't hate it, it's just a huge missed opportunity.
I kind of liked Time Commando on PS1, but the Saturn version is a massive downgrade in every way. It looks vastly worse and runs at maybe half the speed of the PS1 version, completely stripping the game's combat of any of its nuance and its visuals of any of their appeal. About the only good thing you can say about the Saturn version is that it's much easier, but I still wouldn't recommend playing this version even if you thought the Playstation version was too challenging, it's just far too much of a downgrade to be worth playing this way.