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Last Topic's Ratings:
Aconcagua - GGGA - 88% (4) (2 SR)
Fisherman's Bait 2 - AAA - 50% (3)
Guntu: Western Front June 1944 - BB - 0% (2)
M&M's Shell Shocked - BGABB - 30% {5}
Pocket Fighter - GGGAGAG - 88% (7)
TOCA 2: Touring Car Challenge - GGGAA - 80% (5)
There were two games to get the squiggle bracket this week (the other one was on Saturn). Fun fact, due to the way the squiggle bracket works, it can only appear on games that score between 30-70%.
Games for this topic:
Circuit Beat
Eternal Eyes
European Super League
PO'ed
Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage
Twinbee Taisen Puzzle-Dama
More Twinbee this week, albeit in a very different format. We also have PO'ed, which looks incredibly weird, and of course one of the system's most prominent 3D Platformers in Spyro 2.
Circuit Beat - B
ReplyDeleteEternal Eyes - G
European Super League - A
PO'ed - A
Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage - G (SR)
Twinbee Taisen Puzzle-Dama - A
I had some hope for Circuit Beat based on the quality of Prism Arts' later titles, but it's quite bad. The first thing you'll notice is that it just doesn't feel good to control. Drifting is completely nonexistent, if you brake you just instantly lose all control and spin out, instead you're reliant on a power turn mechanic that involves releasing the gas momentarily and it just feels off. Beyond this, this is also a basic 3-track racing game with nothing to unlock. I feel like far too many games tried to just duplicate Ridge Racer early on without really understanding that it was the mechanics of the game that made it successful, not its structure. At least they later evolve into making some pretty cool games.
Eternal Eyes is actually pretty fun. It's a fairly traditional SRPG with a Monster Raising mechanic. The core of the battle system is nothing you haven't seen before, there's very standard options to move, attack, and use magic, and each side acts one after the other. It feels reasonable well-polished, but certainly, it couldn't carry the game on its own, so the Monster-Raising mechanic is appreciated as it helps make the game feel more unique compared to many of its competitors. It seems like a focal point for complaints has been the Monster Raising system being too complex, but I feel like it's really not. As you fight, you get gems, which you can feed to your Monsters back at your house. Depending on the type of gem you feed them, they can gain stats, learn spells, or evolve, depending on their level. Each Monster can evolve into 2 possible forms, 4 times total, which affects their stats and what spells they can learn. It's possible that this system could have been a bit more clear in some ways (for example, it'd be nice to know what kind of spells you'll be able to learn when you evolve), but you can save at any time so you can just use a little experimentation to see what options you have, or use a guide. Compared to what many people were saying about it I don't feel it's offputtingly complex in any way (compare the Monster Raising system from Saga Frontier for example, which is far more complex), and it adds some variety and replay value to the game. In terms of other stuff, the game's presentation is actually kinda nice. You can run around towns and talk to people like in a standard RPG, though apart from buying items there's not a ton to do here, and the story has a bit of charm, though it's not too complex. There's also a little nonlinearity in terms of which maps you want to tackle and when, which is appreciated, and I also like that you can re-do maps as often as you want for levelling purposes (it actually feels somewhat similarly structured to Disgaea in this regard). Overall, while clearly not as good as, say, DeviceReign, I think this is still a pretty decent game and I would probably rate it towards the upper end of SRPGs on PS1.
European Super League looks quite good but it's definitely style over substance. Visually, the game looks great. The highlight of the game is likely the player models, which are quite detailed and have unique faces, making the game look visually quite a bit better than many of the other Soccer games of the era. However, it's clearly not as well-polished in terms of control. I always say that the mark of a good soccer game is how well does it feel to pass and cross and both are a bit off here. With passes, the key is that the second you pass, you have to let go of the control pad or you'll overrun the pass, which feels weird, but at least you can adjust to it. With crosses, they almost never feel how they should, the problem is that the second you press the cross you switch to "defender" controls so trying to kick the ball out of the air often results in you getting a slide tackle or something and generally crosses feel so unreliable that I never use them. Switching players on defense also feels a little janky, though at least the slide tackle feels good to use. It's playable and certainly not the worst I've played but a far cry from FIFA or Liberogrande. Another oddity is that the game has absolutely no commentary, which is strange considering that its production values otherwise seem to be pretty good, and this also takes it down a peg. Overall, it's playable but by the time this came out there were many better options.
DeletePO'ed is an extremely weird game. Everything about it is extremely janky and bizarre, to the extent that it's hard to even describe. For starters, it's an early FPS that bares some resemblance to games like Doom. For an FPS game on PS1, it actually runs really well, the movement and performance is quite smooth. This is about the extent of anything coherent I can say about it, as everything else about the game is super janky and weird. For starters, there's the level design, which is some of the most wacked out I've ever seen in any game. The stages have a lot of verticality, but their design feels almost random, with tons of holes and irregular design everywhere. On the first level for example, there's a big multifloor area past a set of doors that you can get to, but there's actually nothing over there besides a ton of health powerups, which you likely won't need, you can just go the other way at the fork to go straight to the exit. The next level is even more crazy, it's a buunch of platforms that you're supposed to jump across, but you can press space to toggle a high speed mode that allows you to jump extremely far and bypass much of the level, I have no clue if I solved this stage in anywhere near the manner they intend you to. It only gets more strange from there. Generally, while this might feel somewhat interesting at first, I feel like the madcap nature of the level design generally works against it, particularly because the controls are fairly slippery and don't work that well for the constant jumping the game expects you to do. It sort of feels like this game was made by a competent programmer and a 5-year old level designer who had never played a game before, and I wish the level design was more traditional.
Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage is a classic good sequel that is just bigger and better than the original in pretty much every way. The original Spyro was a very impressive technical achievement on PS1, but it can also be a bit of a dry game, with levels that are generally very easy and don't have a ton to see or do in them besides finding gems. Spyro 2 spruces this up in pretty much every way imaginable, adding a ton of new types of challenges to add variety to the game, as well as giving it a huge injection of personality and charm. It's somewhat difficult to overstate how much more personality this game has to the first one. From the addition of Spyro's fun crew of friends, Hunter, Elora, and Moneybags, to the little storylines in each level of the game, and having a great villian in Ripto, this game just oozes charm from every angle. It's quite solid gameplay-wise as well, having significantly more variety in level design and giving Spyro a number of new abilities to use, and the new orb challenges give you more to do in each level besides looking for gems. Of course, the game remains a technical marvel, it actually looks even better than it did before and still runs like greased lightning, showing just how much can be achieved in a 3D game on PS1 with some ingenuity. An extremely solid title overall, quite possibly PS1's best 3D platformer and one of the few that can stand up to what N64 has to offer. It's just too bad the series couldn't stay this good after PS1.
DeleteTwinbee Taisen Puzzle-Dama is pretty similar to Tsuyoshi Shikkari Shinesai Taisen Puzzle-Dama on SNES, though IMO it's quite a bit worse than that game in a number of ways. For starters, gameplay-wise, the two games are identical. Twinbee has no gameplay changes to Tsuyoshi except possibly slightly better balance when it comes to drop patterns, though this comes at the expense of almost all the modes in Tsuyoshi, as here you have only a basic arcade mode and 2P VS and that's it. Still, these are the two most important modes so that's not a huge deal, and the code gameplay of Taisen Puzzle Dama remains fun (for the uninitiated, it's basically a slightly simpler version of Puyo Puyo). The problem is that this version of the game has among the worst visual design I've ever seen in a game. The character backgrounds use extremely bright colours that are almost identical to those used by the foreground pieces, and the characters animate constantly, which is extremely distracting to the point that playing the game for any length of time actually gives me eye strain. It's very important for backgrounds of this nature to generally use dull colours to avoid creating noise with the foreground, and the characters generally shouldn't animate any more than absolutely necessary. If you compare with Tsuyoshi, the colour schemes are just handled so much better overall that it instantly feels way better to play. Considering that the two games are functionally identical and that Tsuyoshi also has a lot more content, I'd probably just stick with that version and spare your eyes.