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Last Topic's Ratings:
Crows: The Battle Action - AAB - 33% (3)
Donpachi - GGAG - 88% (4)
FIFA Soccer 97 - BABB - 13% (4)
Mega Man X4 - GGGGGGG - 100% (7)
Scorcher - AGAA - 63% (4)
Time Commando - BBBB - 0% (4)
Kind of what I expected, the big surprise was Scorcher, which I sort of expected to rate fairly low since it takes some time to get used to. Maybe this game was more well-known than I thought?
Games for this topic:
Fist
Gekitotsu Koushien
Lost World: Jurassic Park
Magical Drop 2
Mobile Suit Gundam Gaiden Vol. 2
Sega Ages: Power Drift
I've wanted to check out Power Drift for a long time, so I'm looking forward to trying it for this topic. You also can't really ever go wrong with Magical Drop. Should be a nice easy set to go through while we're all still recovering from the holidays.
Fist - B
ReplyDeleteGekitotsu Koushien - B
Lost World: Jurassic Park - B
Magical Drop 2 - A
Mobile Suit Gundam Gaiden Vol 2 - A
Sega Ages: Power Drift - A
Fist is a typical godawful 3D fighter. It has pretty much all the same problems as most other 3D fighters, it's way too floaty, there are barely any moves, and there's virtually no depth to offense, plus a whole lot more, like having block mapped to a button and having no special moves. Since it's a 2-button game with no specials, each character has maybe 10 different moves, and there's absolutely no way to mix up your offense or any creativity to the game in general. Even though I'm not a big fan, Virtual Fighter 1 is vastly better than this.
Gekitotsu Koushien is the worst baseball game of all time, no questions asked. Almost everything about it is the worst ever. For starters, it looks terrible and has probably the worst camera work in any baseball game ever. When the ball is hit, the camera barely moves at all from the batting position, making it almost impossible to read the positions of the players. The controls are also completely nonfunctional. The batters always run the second you swing, regardless of whether or not you make contact, and it's almost impossible to get them to stop or turn around, so on any strike all of your baserunners will get out. Fielding the ball is equally nonsensical, with the fielders often throwing the ball in random directions rather than to the indicated base. Even the batting control is quite bad, as the swing almost never visually makes contact with the ball, making it almost impossible to read balls vs strikes. It's hard to say enough bad things about this game, if there was a grade below B this would be a strong contender for it.
While clearly drastically better than the previous 3 games, Magical Drop 2 still has some issues. Compared to the original game, it seems fairly similar at first glance. It actually has fewer modes overall, with the puzzle mode from the original being axed, but the new endless mode is definitely an improvement over the original so it kind of balances out. The visuals have also definitely seen a nice bump, with the somewhat poor 3D visuals of the previous game swapped for very sharp 2D visuals. The biggest change mechanically is the addition of new special pieces, particularly the power pieces for each colour, which, when cleared in a match, immediately clear all the rest of the pieces of their colour in a chain. These are fun in the single player mode, as the expanded field size lets you make a bunch of cool combos. Unfortunately, they completely explode the balance of the VS mode. Since even touching one of these pieces guarantees a 2 chain, and they take quite a while to clear, easily letting you skill chain at least 2-3 more matches, these make combos absurdly too easy to get. Combined with the fact that the amount of time to make a skill chain is much larger than the first game, this means that you'll constantly be slinging 4-5 chains back and forth with no prep time whatsoever, and given how high the damage output is this means that matches in VS mode almost never last more than 10 seconds. It's an intense 10 seconds I suppose, and there can be some cool back and forth if you can both keep up the chains, but I think it's pretty clear that the original plays much better here. If there was a way to adjust the damage that chains do to be maybe half what it is, I think it would probably be G, but I'm not aware of such an option (it seems you can increase the number of pieces that are needed to make a match, but not the amount of damage matches do). Maybe they'll sort this out by the next game.
DeleteMobile Suit Gundam Gaiden Vol 2 is almost identical to the first one, it seems fairly clear these were originally intended to be a single game that was cut into three games as there are absolutely no system improvements here. As before, you control a very simple mobile suit that has only 3 basic weapons, but it makes up for this by having an absurdly spammable dash move and a crazy lock-on function. Compared to the first game, there's more action here, with most of the stages being big battles with many mobile suits, but this also tends to expose the game's limitations more, namely that the game largely revolves around constantly spamming dashes on both sides and there's not a lot of depth. The game's third mission is timed and is absurdly tough, you have to beat like 20 Mobile Suits in like 300 seconds, which is nowhere near enough. It pretty much forces you to play extremely suicidally using the sword attacks, but this causes you to take a ton of damage and there's also static defenses, but there's really not much you can do to play better other than just hope you get lucky with shots. It still controls decently, but I wish they had given you a different mobile suit with different weapons for this game to help differentiate it from the previous one.
I haven't been super impressed with some of the Sega Ages releases on Saturn, but Power Drift is actually pretty cool. It uses somewhat similar technology to Outrun, but the courses are now 3D and have some verticality to them, for example almost all tracks have a raised section that crosses over another portion the track. Like in Outrun, the track is actually made out of 2D sprites, and it still uses pretty much the same camera angle from Outrun as well, which gives it an extremely unique visual style, but also makes turns very difficult to read visually, particularly at high speeds. The main thing that needs to be said about this game is that it is absolutely bonkers hard, probably comparable to F-Zero GX's VH story mode even on its easiest difficulty. Tracks are very short and the speed of the game is insanely fast, so track memorization is absolutely essential and if you make even a single mistake you're probably screwed. Despite this, the game still feels very cool, it has a good sense of style and its soundtrack is amazing, and I was actually considering G for a while, the problem is that after the first 2-3 tracks in a circuit the game effectively becomes unplayable, even for a very a good player I'd expect them to have to continue 20+ times on every track, and while it is satisfying when you finally nail it most people won't have the patience for it. Still, an interesting piece of history for sure and I'm sure this was a fun arcade title when it came out.
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