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Last Topic's Ratings:
Creature Shock: Special Edition - BBBB - 0% (4)
Galaxy Fight - AABGB - 40% {5}
Guardian Heroes - GGGGAGGA - 88% (8) (3 SR)
Lost Vikings 2 - GGGA - 88% (4)
NHL All-Star Hockey 98 - GAAB - 50% {4}
Steam Hearts - AA - 50% (2)
It's always good to see more SRs coming out for Saturn, since we're slowly getting through the topics and not too many of them have been used. I guess there'll just be a mad rush to use them all at the end.
Games for this topic:
Break Point Tennis
Deron Dero Dero
Mizubaku Daibouken
Rise 2: Resurrection
Sega Touring Car Championship
Space Invaders
A pretty weird set this time, but a couple of the games look interesting. I can't get over how many weird arcade games Taito made.
Break Point Tennis - B
ReplyDeleteDeron Dero Dero - G (SR)
Mizubaku Daibouken - A
Rise 2: Resurrection - B
Sega Touring Car Championship - B
Space Invaders - B
Break Point Tennis on Saturn is similar to the PS1 version but seems to run at even lower resolution, in particular the players have noticeably lesser detail. It still has the same issues with stiff controls and that issue where holding right on the right side of the court makes you hit it out, so you'll want to stick to better tennis games or just wait until Mario Power Tennis arrives next generation.
Deron Dero Dero rocks. It's another puzzle game that's a variant of Puyo Puyo, but it might be the only one to actually outdo the original. The game plays quite similarly to Puyo except with the addition of two new mechanics. For starters, whenever you make a match, blocks that are touching the match or that fell will "stretch out" across empty space, potentially linking to other blocks and making matches, and this also clears out garbage blocks. Second, you have a single column (the coin column) which is protected from garbage blocks, and you can change what column this is every time you make a combo. These two mechanics combine to solve one of Puyo's biggest problems, which is that once you get buried by garbage blocks, it's almost impossible to dig your way out. By making good use of the coin column, you can protect your combo's trigger point, and wipe out a screen full of garbage near instantly and hit the opponent back really hard, leading to far more intense gameplay that involves a lot of trading hits back and forth, similar to Puzzle Fighter. Something that I think is really cool is that you can just play the game like Puyo, all Puyo building patterns still work, but over time you can start working in the unique combo mechanics that this game offers due to the stretching mechanic, by the end of my playtime I was starting to adjust my build patterns to take advantage of the new combo routes, and once you start learning them you can even make decent combos when the pieces start falling super fast, which is nearly impossible in Puyo. I feel like this game must have either been designed by someone who was a Puyo master or an ex-Compile employee, because this game's design is a clear cut above virtually all other Puyo clones. It's also available on PS1, where it was localized as Tecmo Stackers, though that version has worse backgrounds and a number of cuts to the character roster so I'd probably stick to the Japanese version on PS1 if you have the option. Either way, this is one of the best Puzzle games of all time and a must have for any Puyo fan.
Mizubaku Daibouken is another arcade-style platformer from Taito that bares some resemblance to Rainbow Islands. In this game, you play as a Platypus that throws water balloons, and the game largely revolves around water physics. While there are some neat ways in which this is used (for example, in the second world, there's a boat with a water wheel that you need to turn by dropping water on it to make it move), generally I feel like this game feels a lot more limited compared to Rainbow Islands, with many stages being very straightforward in terms of design. World 3 in particular starts to rely very heavily on tricky platforming (which is not helped by the fact that movement is slow and the controls are a little stiff) and having tons of enemies rather than using the game's unique mechanics in any clever way, and even when the water mechanics are used well it still feels much more limited compared to what you can do in Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands. It's not a bad game, it's just not a classic in the way that those two games are and the fact that it got a home console port so late (this game came out in 1990) doesn't really help matters.
Rise 2: Resurrection follows up on the original's legacy by being one of the worst fighting games ever made. Like Clayfighter, this is a game that uses prerendered characters, which means frames are nonexistent. Pretty much every move in the game has at most 2 frames of animation, and almost all moves come out in 1-2 frames, while also generally being plus, so this is a button masher of the highest order. Offense is almost completely impossible to stop since everything is so safe and plus, so all you want to do is ensure that you're hitting buttons all the time to maintain momentum and steal your turn back if you're ever on defense. Special moves and supers exist, but are completely worthless due to how slow they are compared to standard buttons, and I have no idea what causes your super meter to build in the first place, it's neither dealing damage nor taking hits. At least there are a lot of characters to play as, but the game is so mindless that all you want to do is pick a character who has a lot of range.
DeleteSega Touring Car Championship is trash. I'm actually kind of shocked at how bad this game is, especially when compared to games like Daytona USA and even Virtua Racing. The biggest issue with the game is the control. This is an extremely fast game and about the most generous thing you could say about the control is that it completely sucks. It's absurdly loose and floaty and in no way feels like controlling a car in either an arcade or sim style. It kind of reminds me of a way worse version of Ridge Racer 64, which also has kinda bonkers controls but at least there it kinda works. You can try playing the Arcade version, which also controls bad but differently bad (here it's overly tight, though this is at least a little better), but either way the game just feels bad to play. It's also one of those barebones arcade ports where there's only a few tracks and no real progression to speak of, and among games of that type you'd be far better served by something like Ridge Racer, which came out years before this game. Sega has kind of been making a name for themselves this gen with barebones arcade ports that don't really stand up when played at home, but this one is easily the worst of the lot.
Speaking of super low effort arcade ports, we have Space Invaders. This is actually a port of the Arcade game Space Invaders DX, which was basically the same as the original Space Invaders save for the addition of 2P VS mode and a silly mode where the aliens are replaced with the characters from other Taito games. For whatever reason, the latter was cut from this release of the game, leaving only an extremely barebones port of the original game with some very trivial background options. There is a PS1 version of this game with vastly more content, including a 3D mode and the ability to play the VS mode against the computer, so definitely get that version if you want to get it, but you can also fairly safely just skip this release entirely unless you're a huge fan of the original.