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Last Topic's Ratings:
Grid Runner - AAA - 50% (3)
Iron Storm - GAAGA - 70% (5)
Metal Black - AGGA - 75% (4)
Super Adventure Rockman - ABAG - 50% {4}
Virtual Open Tennis - BG - 50% (2)
WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game - GGGG - 100% (4)
By contrast to the PS1 topic, this one rated much higher. Interestingly, WWF Wrestlemania saw a pretty big boost compared to PS1, maybe that's because the Saturn pad is a pretty good controller for it.
Games for this topic:
Crusader: No Remorse
Heir of Zendor: The Legend and The Land
Jewels of the Oracle
Koutetsu Reiiki: Steeldom
Sega Ages: Phantasy Star Collection
World League Soccer 98
I was going to put Phantasy Star Collection as the headlining game here, but it didn't fit in the topic title. It'll be interesting to see what they've done to Heir of Zendor, since I wasn't particularly impressed by Gotha.
Crusader: No Remorse - G
ReplyDeleteHeir of Zendor: The Legend and The Land - B
Jewels of the Oracle - B
Koutetsu Reiiki: Steeldom - B
Sega Ages: Phantasy Star Collection - G
World League Soccer 98 - A
Crusader: No Remorse is virtually the same as the PSX version (which in turn is very similar to the PC version). As before, this is a very cool game with a great soundtrack and a lot of neat ideas, with one significant flaw, which is that the controls are pretty clunky. You'd think that they would be better on PC, but it's actually pretty clunky there too, surprisingly, so you're not really doing yourself any disservice by playing this version. Compared to the PSX version, a few sound effects seem to be missing (for example, the guards don't talk and the camera alert sound is missing some of the sound effects), so the PS1 version is probably slightly preferred, but it doesn't affect the experience much. It's too bad they never ported the sequel to consoles.
Heir of Zendor hasn't really changed a lot compared to Gotha. By far the biggest difference is that it's now a little quicker. Turns are faster, and battles tend to involve slightly fewer units, which makes it less tedious to play. The problem is that the core gameplay is still hyper-simplistic and not very fun, if anything, the fact that there's fewer ships and it's easier makes it even more basic than before. Of course, this version of the game is in english, but this isn't much of an improvement, the dubbing is of very low quality and the story isn't interesting either. This is pretty much the bottom of the barrel as far as strategy games go, and with Saturn having numerous significantly superior options I couldn't recommend it in any capacity.
Jewels of the Oracle is a weird game, but it's clearly not very good. The game is structured like Myst, but actually, it isn't that type of adventure game at all, this just serves as a hub of sorts for the game's puzzles, which are all various logic puzzles that you have to solve using a cursor. Some of these are fairly well-known types of puzzles, but all of them are extremely tedious and I wouldn't really say any part of the game is fun. For example, there's one puzzle that is a maze, where you have to locate some golden objects. The maze is massive and appears very small on the screen, and it takes place on the sides of a cube, so you can't even see it all at one time. It also controls awkwardly with the object moving towards the pointer rather than using a more straightforward DPad-based approach. It takes forever to solve and isn't very fun, which is a good description of pretty much all of the puzzles in the game (this is actually one of the better ones). The game also gives very few hints, so unless you recognize the type of puzzle already, you won't get much help. This is probably even more tedious and dull than Gotha.
DeleteKoutetsu Reiiki: Steeldom is incredibly similar to Reverthion, which makes sense considering it has the same developer, so I guess it's a pseudo-sequel of sorts. It's nearly identical to Reverthion in almost every way, it looks almost the same, it controls almost the same, and the gameplay has barely changed at all, about the only difference is that if you pause the game, it shows the command list for your character, which is very welcome since now you can actually figure out how to do specials. There aren't many, each craft has 3, a move that's done by charging the basic attack button, a move that's done with some motion, and a charging move that's done with a different motion. The game is incredibly unbalanced, in particular the ice character Sorma is ludicrously OP, all of his specials are way above average and his dash move is crazy fast, tracks automatically, is totally invicible, has no recovery, and launches you way backwards if it hits. He can simply wait for most characters to do any attack, then perform this move to blow through whatever they do and hit them (usually leading to a ring out), which makes fighting him feel almost totally impossible as about half the cast. Of course, playing as him does make the game more enjoyable since you win for free, but it never feels especially great to play, owing mostly to the poor controls and overly simplistic gameplay. It is an improvement over Reverthion, but probably not by enough to pull it out of B.
Phantasy Star Collection is a solid title that no one will ever bother playing. As you might expect, this is a collection of the four Phantasy Star titles ported to Saturn. Unlike Sonic Jam, there are not many extras here, besides some promotional videos and artwork, which are pretty cool (it's neat to see the original commercials for the games). For Phantasy Star 2 and 3, you can apply speedup to the character movement, which is great and makes these titles play much better. Unlike, say, Squares collections of the FF titles on Playstation, these games run totally from RAM and thus there's no slowdown, which is greatly appreciated. So why wouldn't you bother playing this collection? Because the developer released an upgraded version of it for PS2 that contains a bunch of additional features, like bugfixes and additional tweaks, as well as more extras and the ability to play the games in English. This still would have been a very solid collection for Saturn at the time, but it's far preferable to get the game on PS2 now.
DeleteWorld League Soccer 98 is a solid effort with good presentation but doesn't quite have the polish to match the best games in the genre. For starters, compared to something like FIFA 97, this is a gorgeous-looking game. The players look great, with a lot of player variety as well as detailed and smooth animations. There's also some pretty well-done commentary, complete with the names of all the players and teams. The game also controls fairly well, though my one gripe is that short pass and long pass are mapped to the same button (you hold for a long pass), and it requires a very short tap not to get a long pass, I get accidental long passes fairly often. The game does have a few issues though. For starters, it's very unbalanced. Similar to NHL 95's famously overtuned one-timers, crosses are WAY too good here. A simple cross from the corner into a header scores at least 80% of the time, and doesn't require any fancy positioning or timing. I thought I was doing something wrong when the AI kept scoring on me with it, but sure enough, the second I started doing it I was scoring 4-5 goals per half as well. This robs offense of most of the nuance since this one play is so simple and scores so frequently that there's no reason to ever do anything else. Secondly, there's some issues with the AI. One of the strangest things is that if a throw in occurs near the corner, they will throw the ball out of bounds every time, giving you a free corner kick, which you can exploit easily, even if you're not doing this on purpose it happens a couple times a game. These sorts of issues do limit how interesting the game is to play, which is too bad because it is in some ways a decent effort.