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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Fist - BBB - 0% (3)
Gekitotsu Koushien - BB - 0% (2)
Lost World: Jurassic Park - BBB - 0% (3)
Magical Drop 2 - GAA - 67% (3)
Mobile Suit Gundam Gaiden Vol. 2 - AAA - 50% (3)
Sega Ages: Power Drift - GAAG - 75% (4)
It's kind of a funny coincidence that PS1 had 3 100% games and Saturn had 3 0% games this week.
Games for this topic:
Battle Garegga
Cyber Doll
Gekiretsu Pachinkazu
Groove On Fight: Gouketsuji Ichizoku 3
Tomb Raider
Quarterback Attack
Kind of an eclectic set of games this time, but I feel like this kind of set is what Saturn is all about. A shmup, a couple PS1 ports, some cool-looking Japanese exclusive games, and whatever Quarterback Attack is supposed to be. Should be an interesting set to rate.
Battle Garegga - A
ReplyDeleteCyber Doll - G
Gekiretsu Pachinkazu - A
Groove On Fight: Gouketsuji Ichizoku 3 - G
Tomb Raider - G
Quarterback Attack - B
Battle Garegga is a decent if basic shmup. In some ways it reminds me a fair bit of Strikers 1945, though it has a few more flaws than that game. Mechanically, the most interesting thing about the game is its bomb system. To power your bomb, you have to collect missiles. Missiles can be obtained from pretty much every destroyed ground target, and every plane uses them a bit differently when using its special attack. This is kind of a cool system and I like that it gives you a lot of powerups to pick up, as weaving through enemy fire to pick up all the missiles is fun. The game's biggest downside is visual clutter. When you shoot enemies, little pieces fly off them, and enemy bullets use the same colours as your own shots, which creates a lot of visual noise that can make it very hard to pick out enemy shot patterns. It is doable if you pay extremely close attention but better shmups handle this more gracefully. Other than that it is a pretty solid game with good boss design, it just falls a little short of the top shmups of the era.
Cyber Doll is actually really cool. It's a cyberpunk RPG where you play as a cyborg cop. Battles in the game are turn-based, but there's a lot of nuance to them. For starters, battle takes place on a 2D plane where you can move back and forth, which affects which types of weapons can be used. A rifle, for example, can only be used at midrange, while your pistol can only be used at short range. Vs an enemy that can only melee attack, being at midrange forces them to approach you before they can attack, so this is advantageous, but you can only back off so far before you get pinned in a corner. You don't level in this game, to get stronger you have to equip new parts, which are found by defeating enemies. You can target an enemy's head, torso, arms, or legs, and they die if either their head or torso is destroyed. Losing arms prevents attacking and losing legs prevents movement. To get a part, it needs to be fairly intact at the end of the battle, so to get head parts, destroy the body, and vice versa for body parts. Many weapons can target the part you want to hit, but some weapons (like shotguns) damage many parts at once, so while these are powerful they're not optimal for part farming. Equipping parts could quickly become a nightmare as you'll get tons of them, but thankfully the game has a smart optimization system where you can tell it to optimize for any of the stats and it'll pick the best parts, though you can still pick one at a time if you want. Weapons also need to be reloaded, so you have to carry the appropiate types of magazines, though reloading a weapon wastes any remaining ammo in the clip, so you have to consider if you want to reload out of battle or risk getting hit while doing it during combat, particularly if you're using a weapon for which ammo is expensive. Besides the gameplay, the presentation is pretty cool too. It's a sprite based game, but the environments are quite detailed, and the music is also pretty rockin. Why has this not been fan-translated yet? At least it's not too difficult to figure out in Japanese, but if this does get a translation I would put this high on the list of games to check out.
Gekiretsu Pachinkazu is a little different from most other Pachinko games. Like many Pachinko titles, this game features a story mode where you can try to strike it rich through Pachinko. However, besides just striking it rich, your secondary goal is to find a girlfriend, so you can also spend your winnings to go on dates with various women. Something that's interesting about this title is that you actually don't have to play Pachinko if you don't want to, if you'd prefer to just make an honest living as a truck driver you can do that too, allowing the game to be played as a pure dating sim if you so desire. I kind of wish the various side jobs you can take had minigames attached to them, though perhaps this would have gotten tedious if they weren't of great quality. As for the Pachinko itself, it's pretty standard fare. This game tends to focus on older-style Pachinko machines so they don't have as many bells and whistles as the newer ones, and I also feel like this game's sound effects are not quite up to par. This makes for kind of a weird product where I feel this is probably the best Pachinko game to play if you think Pachinko is boring, but if you want a dating sim with a competent gameplay portion Star Bowling is a lot better.
DeleteGroove On Fight is a pretty solid game. The most notable thing about it by far is that it's a tag fighter, albeit a very simple one. You select two characters, and you can swap them at any time to let the other recover health, though swapping is fairly slow and if you get interrupted you don't get the swap, so you have to create some space to do it. Besides the tag mechanic, it's a fairly straightforward but competent 2D fighter. It's got a 4-button setup similar to the SNK games, and it has a fairly simple light->heavy->special chaining system that works pretty intuitively. About the only issue with the game is the load time. Load times before battles are quite long, and when you near the end, there are talk sequences before the fights that incur a second load time, which quickly becomes pretty obnoxious. There's not too much else to say about it, a lot of the rest of the game is pretty standard, there are supers, and you can perform a "get off me" like move that costs a bar, it probably wouldn't stand out too much if not for the tag system, but it's a solid game in any case.