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Last Topic's Ratings:
360: Three Sixty - AB - 25% (2)
Anastasia - BBB - 0% (3)
Block Kuzushi Deden no Gyakushuu - GA - 75% (2)
Gauntlet Legends - AGAAAA - 58% (6)
Trickshot - AA - 50% (2)
Tunnel B1 - AABB - 25% (4)
I never even realized Anastasia was part of a big series of games before putting it up. I considered making a follow-up topic that was all games from the same developer, but I suppose I'd better not. Maybe if it was April 1st today.
Games for this topic:
Gekitou Crush Gear Turbo
Hashiriya: Ookami Tachi no Densetsu
Money Idol Exchanger
Toy Story 2
WCW Mayhem
World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
A couple interesting-looking games this time. I realized we needed to cover Money Idol Exchanger because there's a few other games that are somewhat similar to it, so we'd better cover the original first. We also have a wrestling game here, which are comparatively a lot more rare on PS1 compared to N64, where it felt like we did one every other week.
Gekitou Crush Gear Turbo - B
ReplyDeleteHashiriya: Ookami Tachi no Densetsu - A
Money Idol Exchanger - B
Toy Story 2 - G
WCW Mayhem - G
World Cup Golf: Professional Edition - B
Gekitou Crush Gear Turbo is barely even a game, unfortunately. It reminds me a lot of WGP Hyper Heat, in that the core concept of the game is decent but the gameplay is far too basic to carry it. At its core, it's a game about little combat cars that you can customize with various parts that you get by winning battles. This is a good concept, as we've seen in games like Custom Robo, but in order for it to work well you require a fun gameplay system and this game just doesn't have it. The gameplay in this game, if you can call it that, is essentially menu driven. During battles, you have an energy bar that gradually builds up. You press a direction on the DPad to choose a move, where up and down do weak attacks, left guards, and right does your ultimate, which requires the bar to be nearly full. If both players choose attacks of the same strength, whomever mashes better gets their attack, otherwise the stronger attack wins. The goal is generally to land one weak attack and your ultimate to finish the battle. As far as I can tell, it's impossible to defend against ultimates, so the game has very little nuance, if the opponent has enough to do an ultimate and you don't have enough health to tank, that's just GG. The animations in the game take forever as well, which gets very tiresome. If the game actually allowed you to control the car there might be some appeal here, but as it stands there's just not enough to do.
Hashiriya: Ookami Tachi no Densetsu is a pretty basic racing game. Its standout feature is that it has a story mode where you can play as any one of a fairly large group of characters. Before and after each race there are some simple story scenes, though these are just portraits with text so if you can't read japanese you won't get a lot out of it. As far as the racing itself is concerned, it's fine but doesn't stand out too much. Your basic turn controls well but can't turn too tight, so you have to power turn by releasing the gas. It's quite easy to get used to and works well enough, but the game is not too fast and doesn't generally feel like it has a ton of nuance. It's certainly not bad, there's 5 tracks and the visuals and music are decent, but I wish you could upgrade the cars or something, it just feels like it needs a little bit more to it to really be great.
Money Idol Exchanger is a fun game. I remember playing this with a friend in an arcade and we spent pretty much all day playing it, until our hands were so tired that we literally couldn't play it effectively anymore. The basic gist of the game is that it's Magical Drop with a twist. Like Magical Drop, you control a character who can grab orbs from the top of the screen, then throw them back. The twist is that the orbs in this game are coins, and when you match coins, they turn into bigger coins. Five 1-coins make a 5-coin, two 5-coins make a 10-coin, five 10-coins make a 50 coin, two 50-coins make a 100-coin, five 100-coins make a 500 coin, and two 500 coins clear completely. Whenever you clear coins, the new coin that is created can itself clear combos, so for example, if you clear two 50-coins beside a group of four 100-coins, that makes a combo. Like Magical Drop, the game also allows for skill chaining, if you can make matches quickly enough you can add on to your combo as it clears. That's basically the gist of it, it plays very similarly to Magical Drop save for the coin mechanic, but I think it adds an interesting twist on the gameplay formula. I enjoy Magical Drop as well, but I think if you were going to make any criticism of it it might be that it's a little on the simple side, so the added complexity of Money Idol Exchanger is welcome. At any rate, I was excited to see that it had a home conversion, but as I played it, something felt off. I wasn't able to hit nearly as many skill chains as on the arcade version, I noticed that the game ate my inputs fairly often, and it was almost impossible to win from about the third match onwards. At first I thought maybe I just got super rusty, but it felt so off that I booted up the arcade version to compare, and it turns out the PS1 version is just an atrocious port. Although it adds all kinds of new features and other cool stuff, the Playstation version revamps the controls of the game for some reason, and they're much worse. Basic left to right movement is a fair bit slower on PS1, but the biggest issue is that the game has lost its input buffering. On the Arcade version, if you press Right + throw coin quickly, you move right, then throw your coin. On PS1, you move right, and then do absolutely nothing. Similarly, pressing "grab coin, throw coin" on Arcade at any rate of speed does what you'd expect, you grab the coin and then immediately toss it back. On PS1, you grab the coin, then do nothing. The Arcade version has full buffering on all inputs, if you enter an input early you will always perform it on the first possible frame, but on PS1, the buffer window is incredibly short, likely not more than 5 frames at the absolute most. This forces you to play vastly slower on PS1 lest you risk having the game eat your inputs, and the PS1 version already has slower movement, which kills almost all skill chaining. To make matters worse, the AI is not affected by this, since they always perform their moves on the first possible frame anyway, which makes the game almost completely impossible, you have to outplay the AI to a ludicrous degree to win since they can move so much quicker. It probably sounds like I'm making an overly big deal out of this, but the two versions of the game feel night and day different to play. It's super unfortunate, because the PS1 version does add a lot of neat extras, but it just isn't fun to play.
DeleteToy Story 2 is pretty much the same game as on N64, which is significant because sometimes 3D platformers don't make the transition to Sony's system all that well. Compared to the N64 version, the gameplay is identical, which is good because this is a pretty solid 3D platformer that does justice to the films. The biggest difference between the systems is that the resolution on the PS1 version is probably half that of the N64 version. It's still completely playable and it runs well, but it doesn't look nearly as nice as it does on N64. On the other hand, the PS1 version has video cutscenes compared to N64's stills and has slightly higher quality audio. Alternatively, you can play it on Dreamcast, which is the best of both worlds. Overall, I think this is probably the weakest version of the game, but it's still a completely fine version to play if it's your only option, and I wish more PS1 ports had matched this level of quality.
DeleteWCW Mayhem is solid. When we covered the N64 game, I said that it was all right, but nothing about it really stood out, which is kind of still the case on PS1, but the game seems to have been given just a little bit more polish, which does help elevate the experience somewhat. On N64, one complaint that people had concerned the hit detection, where certain strikes would sometimes just go right through the opponent, on PS1 this seems to have been fixed, I had this happen a couple times a match on N64, but never on PS1. You would think N64 would have an advantage in load time, but surprisingly it doesn't, and PS1 wisely puts the game's controls on the load screen while N64 just displays "Now Loading", so I actually think PS1 does this better. The speed of the game also feels a little more even on PS1, and wrestlers seem a little easier to tire out and pin, I was consistently getting pinfalls a little bit faster on PS1, even when not using my finisher, which feels nearly required on N64. It's still kind of a basic wrestling game overall without too many standout features, but it has a ton of wrestlers and unlockables and it's decently easy to get into. With PS1 having slightly less competition for wrestlers than N64, this is probably one of your better options on the system.
World Cup Golf is just as unplayable as it was on Saturn. I've figured out how to change clubs now (you do it from the same menu where you swing), but of any golf game ever made, this one probably makes it the absolute hardest to get the layout of the course. You basically just hit the ball with whatever shot the game suggests and hope for the best. Am I aiming towards the green? Who knows? You certainly can't get a good view of where you're hitting or even a solid overhead view of the course. When I tried this out I didn't realize we had done this for Saturn already and my first thought was "oh my god, there's another Golf game using this awful prerendered engine", but thankfully it is the same game and they only ever tried this once.