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Last Topic's Ratings:
Actua Ice Hockey 2 - GA - 75% (2)
Battle Hunter - ABBB - 13% (4)
Inuyasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale - GGGGG - 100% (5)
Nanotek Warrior - AGA - 67% (3)
Ninja: Shadow of Darkness - GGBBA - 50% {5}
Touge Max 2 - BB - 0% (2)
An interesting contrast between the two topics this week. A weird coincidence is that for both, the 3rd game in the list rated very high, and the 5th game was a squiggle bracket game.
Games for this topic:
Black Dawn
Fist
Impact Racing
Sesame Street Sports
Stuart Little 2
Tales of Phantasia
I'm sure everyone knows this already, but there's a fan translation available for Tales of Phantasia.
Black Dawn - A
ReplyDeleteFist - B
Impact Racing - A
Sesame Street Sports - B
Stuart Little 2 - G
Tales of Phantasia - G (SR)
Black Dawn is a decent game that is very reminiscent of the Strike series. Like in Strike, you'll be given a series of objectives to do, like taking out key targets, rescuing hostages, dogfighting with helicopters, etc. The biggest difference from Strike is that you now have an onscreen minimap, which makes this process much smoother, and the game feels faster to play as a result. Controls are a little complex, but they work well enough, and the game looks and sounds good. The only real problem with the game is its difficulty. I'm not generally against games being hard, but the problem with Black Dawn is that its difficulty comes mainly as a result of RNG. There are two things you need to stay alive in this game, armor and fuel, and the way you get both of them is through random drops from defeated enemies. If either of these doesn't drop for a while, you're screwed, and the missions are very long and have no checkpoints. If fuel wasn't a mechanic, you could focus on playing defensively and trying not to take hits, but you run out of fuel so quickly that you're forced to be super aggressive and this causes you to take unavoidable damage, necessitating the RNG item drops. This robs the game of most of its nuance, which is too bad, because pretty much everything else about it is pretty good.
Fist is quite possibly the worst fighting game ever made. I knew we had played this before on Saturn, but when I booted it up I was so stunned by how godawful it was that I felt that maybe we hadn't played it, because I didn't remember playing anything this unfathomably atrocious, but it looks like I just purged that memory from my brain instantly because it is the same game and it is just as bad. I actually can't even find the words to describe how bad it is, basically if you took the worst traits from every other 3D fighter and mashed them all together, you'd have a game that's still 10 times better than this game, because this game sets a new low in every regard. It's absurdly slow and stiff, there's no moves, there's no combos, the presentation is godawful, and of course you have to block with a button. If there was a grade below B, it might still be too good for this game. Time to delete this memory from my brain for good this time.
Impact Racing is another game that we played on Saturn, but I have much better memories of it. This is a car combat game where the goal is to race down the track and shoot rivals for time bonus and other pickups. Unlike what it's name would suggest, this is not really a racing game, you just have to reach the end of each stage before time runs out and driving well does not really matter, which is also probably its biggest flaw. Shooting other cars is fun and I like the way the mines work, but there's no question that it's kind of a repetitive game without a lot of nuance. It's still fun for a bit and it's a million times better than something like Fist, but I don't think the formula is quite well-honed enough for G. I wish this game had gotten a sequel because it's a decent foundation, it just needs a bit more meat to it.
Sesame Street Sports is a weird game. For starters, it's not actually a sports game, it's really more of a racing game. There are 6 characters to choose from, but they all have the same gameplay, just on different courses, of which there are 2 per character for 12 total. On each course, you sort of move left and right along a lane to avoid obstacles, though you can also jump. There are tokens you can run over on the ground to collect them, and Big Bird and Elmo provide commentary. The thing is, there's not actually any kind of progression to the game. Stages don't have any time limit, and the game also doesn't acknowledge if you get all the tokens or not. There's absolutely nothing to unlock, and the difficulty settings barely do anything (hard has slightly more obstacles but the tracks are all the same). It kind of feels like the game wasn't completely finished or something, which is too bad because the game is kind of competent, but with no progression whatsoever it's not going to hold anyone's attention for long. Even when I was 5 I probably would have gotten bored pretty fast.
DeleteStuart Little 2 is a pretty competent 3D platformer that reminds me a lot of Toy Story 2, in fact the two games are so similar I had to check to see if they have the same developer (they don't). Much like Toy Story 2, you'll be roaming big 3D levels to collect stuff, with a lot of generally tight platforming and occasional combat and minigames. Compared to Toy Story 2, I feel like this game is probably a little more "solid", the levels are generally bigger and there aren't really any major annoyances or issues with them, though it probably has a bit less personality than Toy Story. Combat in the game is pretty simple, you mostly just use your auto-homing throwing attack, but as combat was probably the low point of Toy Story 2 I don't really think this is a disadvantage. Some of the minigames are actually pretty cool, for example I like the one in the first stage where you get to fly the plane, which is taken right out of a scene from the movie. The presentation of the game is also pretty solid, it has full voice acting and there's a bunch of clips from the movie. Overall, this is a very solid effort. I never saw the movies, but it's pretty clear that a lot of effort went into this one and I'm sure fans of the franchise would have enjoyed it a lot.
Tales of Phantasia rocks. Though the original SNES version was undeniably a great game for its time, the PS1 remake is where the series really finds its stride. I'll cover the basics first. This is a great action RPG with a fast-paced battle system that has a lot of depth. It also features a surprisingly great storyline with a likable cast of characters. Some might find the story a little cliche these days, but this game was responsible for creating many of those cliches in the first place and its story still remains endearing. Gameplay-wise, there are many improvements over Tales of Destiny here, most particularly arte cancelling, which allows you to do a couple normal hits into a base arte and then a master arte, which will become a series staple from this point onwards. You can also now choose to play as any character, though this is probably the weak point of the game. This game was originally designed as a single-player game where Cless is the lynchpin of the party, and as a result Cless is much more interesting to play than the other characters. You do get some other attackers later, but you have to go through a rather large portion of the game with Cless + 3 mages, which does not make for the most interesting multiplayer experience, though even then I have played this game in multiplayer (as one of the mages) and I still find it to be fairly fun. It's quite a substantial game with a lot of content, and the addition of the extra difficulty modes helps give it even more replay value. This game also has one of the best-balanced Mania difficulty modes in the series, since there's no real New Game Plus the entire thing is doable from Level 1, but it will really test your mastery over the game to complete it. I feel like one of the only real questions is whether or not you want to play this version or wait for the Cross version to be translated, as that version has some additional extras (most notably the removal of the spell freeze upon casting spells, and a new character), though it lacks multiplayer. Either way though, this version of the game is still incredibly solid and you really can't go wrong with it. This is one of the only RPGs I've played through like 5+ times and I still enjoy it even after all this time. One of the all-time greats.
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