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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
DeviceReign - AG - 75% (2) (1 SR)
Hyper Reverthion - BB - 0% (2)
Iron Man / XO Manowar in Heavy Metal - BAAA - 38% (4)
Sankyo Fever: Jikki Simulation S Vol 2 - BB - 0% (2)
Sonic Jam - AGGGGG - 92% (6)
World Evolution Soccer - BA - 25% (2)
I was hoping more people would play DeviceReign, maybe I will eventually have to put a guide together for it if I ever finish the ones I'm working on now.
Games for this topic:
Battle Arena Toshinden URA
Bug Too
Dejig: Thomas McKnight Art Collection
Detana Twinbee Yahho Deluxe Pack
Masters: Harukanaru Augusta 3
Thunder Storm LX-3 and Road Blaster
It's the return of everyone's favourite Saturn franchise, Dejig. Actually, I probably could have made that joke about Bug as well. Hopefully they've seen some improvements since the last time we covered them.
Battle Arena Toshinden URA - G
ReplyDeleteBug Too - A
Dejig: Thomas McKnight Art Collection - G
Detana Twinbee Yahho Deluxe Pack - G
Masters: Harukanaru Augusta 3 - B
Thunder Storm LX-3 and Road Blaster - B
Battle Arena Toshinden URA is the Saturn port of Battle Arena Toshinden 2, but it has some upgrades and other changes as well. When we covered Battle Arena Toshinden on PS1, I noted that it generally felt like an improvement to the previous game (for starters, it's not nearly as sluggish) and the music still rocked but I felt like it still had a number of polish issues, which have actually generally been improved a bit for the Saturn version. For starters, the big new addition to Toshinden 2 is the super meter. In the PS1 version, it builds absurdly fast, you are virtually guaranteed to get it in one combo and getting it twice in a match is common, making supers somewhat too commonplace. In URA, it has been massively toned down, you now generally won't get it at all unless a match drags on quite long or you get beat up a lot, making it function somewhat more akin to SF4's ultra meter. They may actually have gone a little bit too far, but this is almost certainly healthier for the game overall. Beyond this, the overall game generally feels somewhat smoother (perhaps the framerate is higher or more stable?), and the visuals have seen a bit of a boost, particularly when it comes to stages, which look substantially better in this version. There's also been a couple enhancements to usability, in particular you can now assign buttons to do special moves, making combos even easier to do if that's your preference, though I find it a little weird that you can't set one for Super (super is always Z + C, regardless of what those buttons are specifically mapped to). Overall, it's a solid improvement in most repsects, and I feel it finally elevates this game to a position among the better 3D fighters of the era. Probably still not at the very top, but it plays respectably now and the music is still excellent (it's by the ChoroQ composer).
Bug Too is kind of a weird sequel in that I don't really feel it solves any of the problems from the first game, it just kind of doubles down on the original design instead, but it's slightly improved in a number of ways that makes it feel a touch better. For starters, they're leaning even heavier into making Bug into a Gex copy here, with the levels now being themed based on movies in a way that feels so derivative of Gex I'm kinda surprised they didn't get sued. It does help bring some welcome variety to the settings though, and compared the the first game the visual effects have been improved a fair bit. There are also now 3 playable characters, though they're very similar, and you can now run, but otherwise the game plays much the same as the first one. Instances of truly atrocious level design still abound, for example I think the second stage in the first set is one of the worst levels I've ever played, being a mix of crusher traps and an obnoxious teleporter maze, but thankfully it's not usually this bad. I really wish they had zoomed the camera out a bit more, as blind jumps are still extremely common. Generally speaking the game still feels quite unpolished and I feel like they should have waited longer to make the sequel, but it's at least a bit of an improvement over the hyper-generic first game.
Speaking of things being greatly improved, there's the third game in the Dejig series. It seems like they actually took the criticism of the previous games to heart because this one is a drastically better effort in pretty much every way. For starters, the most obvious thing is the music. I mentioned that the music in the first two games is possibly the worst I've ever heard in any game, and thankfully this has been addressed. The new music has significantly better instrumentation and the tracks are now a lot longer so they don't just loop every 2 seconds. I still don't know if the variable mix effect works that well but it's still a huge improvement. Next up is the interface. Large puzzles no longer scroll, the pieces are just smaller, which is immensely welcome. I completely the largest puzzle in the game and it felt so much better to do compared to the previous games. Another, more subtle improvement is to the puzzle design. Whether deliberately or by luck, the pictures chosen for this set work far better as puzzles compared to the previous games, having far better variation in colour and more textures as opposed to flat stretches of colour. As anyone who has ever done real puzzles can attest, there's nothing worse than large sections of a single colour with no significant patterns and that is generally averted pretty well. The only thing I kinda don't like are the circle puzzles, which I don't feel work especially well. They're almost trivially easy to complete due to the small number of pieces and their irregular shapes. I guess they were just kind of working with what they had (since this set is based on pictures by a real artist), but these ones aren't too interesting, luckily there's a fair number of rectangular puzzles as well.
DeleteTwinbee Deluxe Pack is another one of those games where it's clearly very solid so I don't have a lot to say about it. It's a collection of two games, Detana Twinbee and Twinbee Yahho, both of which are vertically scrolling shmups that play akin to Pop'n Twinbee. The big change in both games is that you now have a charge shot, which is nice and helps add a bit more variety to the gameplay. Of the two games, Yahho is clearly better, the visuals in that game really pop and the boss design is also quite cool, but Detana is still decent. Just make sure to set Detana's screen resolution to "arcade" because it looks very stretched and pixelated under the default setting. As for Twinbee itself, the core gameplay remains fun, the "bell juggling" mechanic is always enjoyable, and the visuals are colourful and fun. Not much you can really criticize about this one, particularly considering that these games did not have previous home console ports.
Strangely, I feel like we've played Masters before, something about the interface seems extremely familiar. In any case, it completely sucks, everything about the game is terrible. For starters, this actually is a 3D game, but camera control is nearly nonexistent. You can enter a "cart cam" to look around the course, but it's extremely slow, and the default camera almost always makes it impossible to see, so this is another one of those golf games where you're basically just going to play using the overhead map. The swing controls are terrible, something that particularly annoys me is that the power bar goes up and then resets, so if you just barely miss the timing for max power you actually hit with no power, this basically always forces you to club up and try to swing with around 90% power instead. The downswing is also very uneven, whether this is lag or not is hard to determine but it's awkward. Putting is also terrible, getting a good read on the green is nearly impossible and you also can't tell how much power the putter has (I think it's 100ft?) so it's a total crapshoot if your putt will even be close. To top it all off, the game generally runs pretty slow (if you start lining up your shot then want to change your aim, you have to hit cancel twice and there's some delay on each one), and there's only one course. It boggles my mind that these sorts of games apparently sold well enough for there to be this many of them.
DeleteThunder Storm and Road Blaster are both Laserdisk games, and they also both suck, albeit for different reasons. Thunder Storm is the more appealing of the two in my opinion, it's basically just a light gun shooter with an anime movie behind it. This concept certainly can work, as we've seen with titles like Area 51 for example, the problem is just that it isn't really functional as a game. The game' hit detection is extremely wonky and it always feels like a complete crapshoot as to whether or not the game will actually register a hit. Coupled with the fact that you die if you miss a single target and the game has no checkpoints this makes it virtually unplayable without save states. Road Blaster is more functional but its design is worse. Here, you control a car and have to hold left and right and optionally brake or hold the accelerator at certain points. When ramming a car you also have to aim a crosshair for some reason. The controls in this game work, but every stage is made up of like 300 prompts, many of which come at you extremely fast, which is pretty much impossible to deal with without a ton of memorization, and also certainly leaves no time to enjoy the movie. For both of these games, the animation is easily the strong point, but I feel like they are not very interesting, for example in Thunder Storm you basically just fly around and watch stuff explode every now and then, there's basically no story and nothing particularly interesting going on. Road Blaster is a little bit better about this but I feel both of them focus far too much on trying to kill you rather than on being entertaining. I feel like it's sort of not surprising that the market for laserdisc games died out within a year.