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Last Topic's Ratings:
Baby Felix Tennis - BB - 0% (2)
Command and Conquer: Red Alert - AGGGGGG - 93% (7)
Midnight Run - ABAB - 25% (4)
ODT: Escape Or Die Trying - ABBGG - 50% {5}
Pinobee - AGBA - 50% {4}
Twin Goddesses - GG - 100% (2)
I certainly didn't expect Twin Goddesses to outscore all the other games in this topic. I think this one is legitimately kind of a hidden gem.
Games for this topic:
360: Three Sixty
Anastasia
Block Kuzushi Deden no Gyakushuu
Gauntlet Legends
Trickshot
Tunnel B1
There's actually ludicrously many Block Kuzushi games on the system, so make sure you're rating the right one. Tunnel B1 also looks kind of interesting.
360: Three Sixty - B
ReplyDeleteAnastasia - B
Block Kuzushi Deden no Gyakushuu - G
Gauntlet Legends - A
Trickshot - A
Tunnel B1 - B
360 is pretty bad. It's a high-speed hoverbike racing game, not entirely dissimilar to something like Wipeout, but hugely inferior to it in pretty much every way. For starters, the control is not great. The crafts have very little grip, so you have to make extremely wide, sweeping turns, even using the lean turn does not allow for any degree of tight turning. The game also has combat, but there's no nuance to it. Like Wipeout, you have a health bar and can pick up weapons along the track, however the weapon pickups are extremely small and are almost impossible to grab intentionally. Every craft also has a cannon which can be fired endlessly, save for the fact that you need to let it recharge occasionally, and it is immensely lethal with zero counterplay to it. Unlike in later wipeout games where you can absorb powerups to heal yourself, there's pretty much nothing you can do to prevent death here, and when the game respawns you it seems to pick your facing direction near randomy, as I had it turn me the wrong way on several occasions. If combat could be disabled this game might be A, as the game runs fairly well and once you get the hang of the controls it's not completely awful, but the combat just gets in the way too much for it to be fun.
Anastasia is an extremely strange product. It's broken down into three components. The first is an animated movie. You might think this would have something to do with the 1997 film of the same name, but it doesn't, I have no idea what studio produced this film but it's of quite low quality, with very jerky animation and poor voice acting, and the video is also heavily compressed. The second activity is a colouring book where you can colour some shots from the movie. This is the high point of the package, it works competently and you can actually colour the pictures pretty fast, though I wish there were more colours available. The last activity is a terrible slide puzzle game that has terrible sound effects and isn't fun. If this had been based on a good movie and if the mini-games had been a little higher in quality I could see this making for a decent kids' game, but as it stands it's basically just a strange curiousity.
Block Kuzushi Deden no Gyakushuu is really solid. Compared to The Block Kuzushi, which we covered a while back, this one is a lot more traditional. There aren't any power shots or curve shots, instead it skews much closer to the arkanoid formula. One of the first things that stood out to me about this game is how creative its level design is. There's all kind of level parts here, from regular blocks, to blocks that need multiple hits, blocks that moves, cannons that fire at you and can destroy blocks, warps, and tons more, which ensures that almost no two stages ever feel the same. One really creative stage had a set of cannons firing at respawning blocks that give you powerups, so you basically had an unending stream of powerups coming your way, but you eventually had to get behind those blocks to break the cannons. Speaking of powerups, there's a ton, but you can only have one at a time, which create a number of funny situations where you have a good powerup so you don't want to collect any more but they're in the way of getting to the ball. The multiball powerup in this game, while super broken (you can press a button to make the ball split whenever you want) is maybe the most fun powerup I've ever seen in a game like this. In terms of progression, there's two main modes available, the standard arcade mode, and a story mode of sorts where stages are divided into floors of 4 stages each. One of the stages randomly contains a key which lets you go to the next floor, and you can also get money for weapons and such. I swear I always find the key on the last stage on each floor, but it's fun regardless. The game's presentation is quite good too, it's very high-energy, with a ton of bright pastel colours for the stages that really pop, as well as a great jazzy soundtrack. I ended up playing this game way longer than I needed to for the review, but I never really got tired of it.
DeleteGauntlet Legends on PS1 is an almost totally different game from the N64 version. Knowing the the PS1 would never be able to handle the high enemy counts of the N64 version, the PS1 version instead opts to have few, powerful enemies instead, and a generally slower and more methodical pace to the combat. It kind of works, but there's no question it's a big downgrade compared to the N64 version, and it kind of doesn't really feel like Gauntlet without the hordes of enemies. The presentation has also been downgraded as well, besides the lack of enemies and degraded visual effects the PS1 version inexplicably has much lower quality audio. It's still kind of fun, but there's not much reason to play it on PS1 over the many other consoles where it or its expansion Dark Legacy is available.
Trickshot is a very basic Pool game. Compared to many other games from this generation, its presentation is extremely dry, you won't find any fun story mode or flashy visuals here. What the game lacks in flair it makes up for in mode selection, as the game includes like 20 different varations of pool you can play, a lot of which I've never heard of before. Some of them are interesting, like the Poker Pool variant, though I don't feel any of them are quite strong enough to elevate the package to any great heights. It's serviceable, but wouldn't be one of my top choices for the sport.
DeleteTunnel B1 kinda just doesn't work. The basic gist of the game is that you control a vehicle, speeding through various tunnels and shooting enemies along the way. The game is very fast, and when you're speeding along the tunnels, weaving in and out through turns, it almost feels fun. The problem is, while going fast, you can't really shoot anything, because your cannons always fire dead ahead and if you line yourself up with an enemy, you'll just crash right into them. You can simply go around the enemies, and this is usually recommended, but the game also throws a bunch of other things that slow you down at you, namely mission objectives to find things in various boxes, and gates that require you to find switches to open, both of which bring the game to a dead stop for no real reason. The game's combat never really feels good, enemies are bullet sponges and most of your weapons don't feel very good to use, and sections where you get to go fast are relatively uncommon and impeded by barriers and other annoyances that bring you to a dead stop if you collide with them. This game desperately needed some kind of dual stick setup where one stick controls your movement and the second controls aiming.