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Last Topic's Ratings:
Irem Arcade Classics - BBBB - 0% (4)
Off-World Interceptor Extreme - BBG - 33% (3)
Stellar Assault SS - GGG - 100% (3)
Street Fighter Alpha 2 - GGGGGGG - 100% (7) (1 SR)
Vatlva - AGG - 83% (3)
VR Golf 97 - BA - 25% (2)
This was kind of an all-or-nothing topic. There were only 2 As out of the 22 votes.
Games for this topic:
Drift King: Shutokou Battle 97
Elevator Action Returns
Ghen War
Kururin Pa
Paneltia Story: Kerun no Daibouken
Pro Yakyuu Greatest Nine '98 Summer Action
I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what they do with Elevator Action Returns, since the original was kind of a classic but I also feel it didn't age especially well. Paneltia Story also looks kind of interesting.
Drift King: Shutokou Battle 97 - A
ReplyDeleteElevator Action Returns - G
Ghen War - A
Kururin Pa - B
Paneltia Story: Kerun no Daibouken - A
Pro Yakyuu Greatest Nine 98 Summer Action - A
Drift King: Shutokou Battle 97 is pretty much the same game as on PS1 (where it was localized as Tokyo Highway Battle). As on PS1, this is a solid early racer with a few flaws. It generally controls pretty well, the soundtrack is decent, and it has car upgrading, which is always nice. The issues are that races are pretty long, drifting feels a little weird, there aren't many tracks, and you can't see what impact parts will have on your car before you buy them. Compared to the PS1 version, obviously the Saturn version is in Japanese, but the game has so little text it barely matters. There are some FMVs which were cut out of the PS1 version that actually look pretty nice, and I feel like the visuals are a tad sharper on Saturn in general, but the two versions are very comparable. Overall, it feels like a very solid foundation and I really want to see what they do with the later games in the series, though unfortunately Saturn doesn't get those ones.
I wasn't too sure what to expect from Elevator Action Returns, since I was never too big on the original game, but actually it's not bad. Mechanically, the basic idea hasn't changed too much. You still do spend a lot of time going up and down elevators and ducking into and out of doors, but the game has been modernized a lot, with much faster action and gunplay, new weapons, and an impressive amount of environmental destructibility. The only real issue I have with the game is that sometimes the action stops and you just have to kill like 30 guys before the screen will scroll again, and these battles are almost never interesting, though there aren't common enough to bring the game down to A. A pretty solid title overall and one worth looking up for Saturn owners since it's an exclusive.
Well, I certainly don't agree with the previous assessment that Ghen War is better than Congo the Movie, though they're very different games and I might not have figured out they were related if no one had mentioned it. Ghen War is a mecha FPS of sorts, so one of the main ways it differs from Congo the Movie is in controls. While Congo has fairly standard FPS control, in Ghen War you move and aim extremely slow, but have access to flight. Verticality definitely does not work to this game's advantage, however, the aiming controls in the game are very primitive, with the game relying extremely heavily on auto-aim, but the verticality tends not to play nicely with it, resulting in a lot of annoying situations where it feels hard to hit enemies that are almost right in front of you. Weapons are also a pain, you can only cycle weapons in one direction, and only a few of your weapons are useful, so having to cycle repeatedly to get to the weapons you actually want to use is annoying. Another big difference is in visuals. Where Congo features some pretty solid looking jungle environments with decent atmosphere, Ghen War is one of the most generic-looking games ever made. It has atrocious draw distance, and the geometry and texture work is almost non-existent, with most maps just being barren mountain or tunnel maps with virtually no interesting visuals. Thankfully, it does retain the map feature from Congo, which is useful for exploring the levels to find the objectives, but the radar is much more useless here, as it simply shows too many things, from enemies to powerups to bullets, making it very difficult to get useful information out of it. I guess one area you could say where this game has an advantage over Congo is its length, it has more levels total, though I feel that much of its increased playtime comes from how sluggish it is. At least the story is pretty decent, it's another one of those games with real actors doing the cutscenes and they're of decent quality, but later in the game you have to go quite a lot of stages between cutscenes. Overall, it is playable, but playing it and Congo back to back I feel that the latter feels vastly more fun to play.
DeleteKururin Pa is just a game that doesn't have enough nuance to be interesting. It's a puzzle game about bombs, the main pieces are basically wicks, which come in straights and corners. You can connect them, Pipe Dream-style, and then set a flame on one end to burn the whole wick. You can never set flames anywhere where they don't immediately detonate, so there are no combos, but the real problem is the abundance of special pieces. You get very frequent bomb pieces, which, when set off, will send a flame to every square around them, and a couple of them can easily wipe huge areas of the board. Each character also has a unique special piece, and these are even more broken. For example, I was playing the character with a bomb for a head, and his special piece functions like the bomb piece, but he can remotely detonate it whenever he wants, so as long as you have a couple of these near the bottom of your board you might as well just be invincible, you wait for the board to get nearly full, then set them off to send pretty much the whole board to the opponent, at which point they then use their special to send their whole board to you, and the two things largely cancel each other out and you do it all again. Matches in the game take ages and it doesn't ever feel like you can outplay the opponent, if anything you maybe very slightly outpace them in damage so you eventually win, but it's never very satisfying. It's just not really a fun game to play.
Paneltia Story has an interesting concept, but I wish it did more with it. The basic gist of the game is that it's a basic RPG with a worldbuilding system similar to Legend of Mana. The game is divided into stages, and each stage takes place on a grid. You start with single town and a few panels to place, which are things like grassland, forest, and mountains. As you place panels, you gradually find fairies that can upgrade the town, making it sell better stuff. You can create certain patterns of tiles, such as a lake surrounded by forest, to create various special rooms, like a treasure chest. The townspeople will tell you these patterns as you rank up and the map will remember them for you, which is a nice touch. Eventually you need to make your way to the boss, the exact method of which differs slightly with each stage. The core idea is actually pretty neat, the problem is that I don't feel the implementation is actually very clever. For one thing, you'd kind of suspect that the type of terrain you put down would influence the enemies you find, but it doesn't, on each stage the overworld enemies are all completely static, so generally speaking, whether you use grassland, lake, mountain, etc, really makes no difference at all, save for making the special patterns. The overworld itself is also generally not very interesting to explore because there's never anything on it. The game will never spawn random items or anything like that to make you want to look around, so you tend to just lay out a path of whatever you have the most of to get to where you want to go with little thought put into it. The RPG side of the game is also extremely basic, it plays a lot like Dragon Quest 1, you mostly just attack and use items (magic exists, but I was never able to figure out how to get it). The stages also look the exact same, even the town doesn't change between stages, which is kind of lame. It's still sort of a cool idea and I didn't hate it but I feel it's not nearly as good as it could be. With how simplistic this game is, I feel like I could actually code a better version of it myself in Unity if I wanted.
DeletePro Yakyuu Greatest Nine 98 Summer Action is all right. The best thing about it by far is its presentation, it has quite nice animations for fielding and batting and the graphics in general look pretty solid. What I'm not as convinced by is the gameplay. Batting feels all right, it's another one of those games where you have to line up a batting icon with the ball, but with a twist. Before the pitch is thrown, you can "call out" a corner using the face buttons, and if the pitcher throws the ball there, you will auto aim on it for a power swing. This is kind of an interesting mechanic that makes batting a little more interesting, you can kind of gamble with your strikes this way (since you'll likely miss the ball if you guess wrong), vs getting a more guaranteed hit by aiming normally. Unfortunately, that's about the end of my praise for the controls. Running feels extremely awkward, getting the baserunners to run to a base or go back never feels natural, nor does attempting to steal a base, and I lose a lot of runners to them either not attempting to take an extra base fast enough or not retreating to the base after a fly ball. Fielding also feels a little on the clunky side, I always say you can tell how good a baseball game is by how natural the transition from the pitch to the fielding control is and it's not so great here, I often expect to be controlling a different fielder than I actually am, which lets a fair number of balls through. Overall, it's an okay game but wouldn't be one of my top choices for baseball this gen.