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Last Topic's Ratings:
Fighter Maker - BABB - 13% (4)
Hakai Ou: King of Crusher - AA - 50% (2)
Puma Street Soccer - BB - 0% (2)
Road Rash 3D - AAAAA - 50% (5)
Terracon - GGG - 100% (3)
X2 - BB - 0% (2)
This was another nearly universal topic. It's also interesting to me that Road Rash 3D got the exact same score as Road Rash.
Games for this topic:
Actua Ice Hockey 2
Battle Hunter
Inuyasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale
Nanotek Warrior
Ninja: Shadow of Darkness
Touge Max 2
I was a pretty big fan of Inuyasha back in the day, so I'm curious to try that one out. It's surprising to me that it had a fighting game on PS1, but it was a very late release.
Actua Ice Hockey 2 - G
ReplyDeleteBattle Hunter - B
Inuyasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale - G
Nanotek Warrior - G
Ninja: Shadow of Darkness - B
Touge Max 2 - B
The Actua Sports series has had some ups and downs but Actua Ice Hockey 2 is actually quite solid. Probably the most impressive thing about this game is that it's actually basically two games. You can choose to play with Arcade-style rules or using Simulation-style rules, and unlike many games where this is kind of a superficial change, it matters drastically here. In Arcade mode, the game is a 3-on-3 game taking place in a very small rink that closely resembles Wayne Gretsky's 3D Hockey, whereas in simulation mode it's a 5-on-5 game in a much larger rink that feels a lot more like the NHL series. You would probably think that at least one of these modes would be a throwaway, but actually, they're both quite competent, and the game features strong presentation throughout. The commentary is of surprisingly high quality, for example the commentators recognize and call it out if you ice the puck to get a line change. In terms of gameplay, defense is generally pretty strong as checking is powerful, but the goalies aren't especially fantastic, so if you do manage to get a breakaway you have a good chance to score, which is the mark of pretty much any good hockey game. Overall there's just not too much to complain about here, if you want a hockey title on PS1 this is probably one of your best options.
Battle Hunter is an extremely weird game but I feel it's clear that it's not very good. The game is essentially a board game, the goal is to find a specific item (which will be hidden in a box) and make it to the exit. You have rivals, who could also find the item, and if they do, you have to attack them to steal the item before they can exit. That's about the gist of it. The main problem with the game is that it's almost completely luck-based. How far you can move and how much damage you do and take when you attack is all pure RNG, and those two things are basically the whole game, which should give you a good idea of how much strategy is involved. It's also extremely slow paced due to the fact that all four players have to act in sequence. When you combine this with the fact that you don't really do anything other than watch the dice determine how far you move, it gets dull fast. I feel like this is one of those games where they had what they thought was an interesting idea but it just didn't make for a fun game. I've also been there with some of my own projects, at a certain point if everyone says "this just isn't fun" you just have to go back to the drawing board.
Inuyasha is actually way better than I expected. It's a relatively simple 2D fighter, where all special moves are done with simple direction + button inputs, but it's still a lot of fun. The characters are extremely well animated and have pretty much all the moves you'd expect from the show, and there's also full voice acting with the original (Japanese) cast. The game has a story mode where you need to collect shards of the shikon jewel, which involves beating them out of your enemies and winning simple minigames, and if you get enough shards you unlock a new character, which is pretty fun and gives it a lot more single-player content compared to many similar games. Something to know about the game is that it has a fairly strange counter system that takes some getting used to. There is a dedicated parry button, and when used at neutral it does sort of what you'd expect, you do a little parry animation and if you get hit you push the enemy back, which leaves them open to a special move or even a full combo in some situations. This is simple enough, and makes sense to have considering that this game's offense is otherwise very oppressive and safe, with long blockstrings and safe specials everywhere. However, the parry is not limited to being used at neutral. You can also use the parry during blockstrings, and even when being comboed, to break out and still gain the advantage state of the parry, which I initially thought was gamebreaking until I learned more about how it works. The timing to break out of blockstrings and combos is very tight, probably 1-2 frames, though the AI can do it very consistently, and even I was hitting a fair number of them after a bit of practice. The key is that you simply don't do long strings unless you're desperate enough to risk the parry. It's not possible to parry specials, and parrying a single normal is extremely tough unless you're watching for it, so you basically just do 1 normal into special most of the time unless it's a juggle combo (which are inescapable) or you're really far behind and you absolutely need the extra damage. This tends to lead to a lot of specials at neutral, staredowns, and empty jumps into throws, which actually make neutral in this game fairly interesting, and after I got used to it I was still destroying the AI pretty decisively almost every time. There's also a 2v2 tag mode that has character swapping and assists, though it doesn't change the experience that drastically. Overall, the game has a ton of characters, every character has dialogue for facing every other character in story mode, many characters have unique partner callouts in 2v2, and in general it feels like quite a lot of care went into this game, so it's a fairly easy recommendation for fans of the show.
DeleteNanotek Warrior is a neat game. It's kind of hard to describe, it's an action game where you're on the outside (or sometimes inside) of a cylinder. You drive along the cylinder automatically, and can move left and right to rotate around the cylinder to avoid enemies and obstacles, and boost and brake to adjust your speed. You can also jump and hover. It's a fairly simple setup, but it's an extremely fast and frantic game, stuff is coming at you from all directions constantly and you need extremely quick reactions to decide whether to go over, around, or through all the various obstacles coming at you. After a while when you start getting used to the game and start seeing the patterns in the obstacles it's very satisfying to do a section perfectly, but a lot of the time you'll probably be taking a lot of hits and desperately looking for the next health pickup. It's good fun in any case. There are bosses after each level where you instead get to fly in 3D space, though these are kind of forgettable compared to the main game, at least they're fairly short and easy most of time.
DeleteI'm kind of surprised by the reception to Ninja because I found it to be pretty bad. It's a very basic 3D beat-em-up that doesn't really do anything to stand out. You play as a Ninja, but you'd never really know it, you certainly don't do any sneaking, you don't use any cool ninja gadgets, and you engage most enemies with basic punches and kicks. You can throw kunai, but they are weak and generally are only used for a few enemies who can only be harmed by them. What you do a ton of is platforming, because there are insta-kill pits everywhere, but the game's platforming is quite poor due to sloppy jump momentum and the fact that this is an isometric game where you have to push diagonals to move. Annoyingly, even though there are pits everywhere and you can be hit into them with the slightest tap, enemies cannot ever be knocked into them (they stick to the ground as though there's an invisible wall over the pit), which robs the game of the one thing that might be fun. Instead, it's just an extremely repetitive and tedious affair that frequently feels frustrating when you miss a jump and lose a ton of progress. I guess the one good thing you can say about the game is that it's actually extremely long, but I don't consider that to be a major benefit if the core game isn't very fun. I would certainly take Tai Fu over this game in a heartbeat and that game wasn't that great either.
Touge Max 2 is an improvement over Peak Performance, but not where it counts. Compared to the first game, there's a lot more here. It now has a somewhat similar progresstion structure to High Velocity / Touge King the Spirits, there's a ton more cars, and there's even a story mode. However, none of this really matters because the game's handling engine is still terrible. Cars feel extremely sluggish and heavy to drive, they feel as though they constantly both over and understeer, and no matter how much you try to adjust to it it's just too much of a pain to ever be fun. It's too bad, because the game's presentation is fairly solid, but at no point can you escape the fact that it just feels like trash to play. I went back to King the Spirits after playing this to see if I was just being too harsh on it and it's night and day different between the two games. Maybe the third game will get the handling engine from Saturn because it would instantly turn this into a pretty solid game.