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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Darklight Conflict - GAA - 67% (3)
Farland Story: Habou no Mai - GG - 100% (2)
Tempest 2000 - GGGGGGGG - 100% (8)
Touryuu Densetsu Elan Doree - AGG - 83% (3)
Tunnel B1 - BB - 0% (2)
Wonder 3 - AAG - 67% (3)
I don't really have a ton to say about this set, other than that I was surprised Tempest 2000 pulled in quite that many ratings.
Games for this topic:
Death Crimson
Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom
GT 24
Johnny Bazookatone
Maboroshi no Black Bass
Sengoku Blade
Note that this topic covers only Tower of Doom and not Shadow over Mystara. It is perhaps a little weird to rate them separately as they were sold as a bundle, but they are two completely separate games and since this was the primary home release for both of them I think it makes sense to evaluate them individually rather than as a set, though you can certainly take the fact that you got both games at once into the value proposition.
Death Crimson - B
ReplyDeleteDungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom - G
GT 24 - B
Johnny Bazookatone - A
Maboroshi no Black Bass - B
Sengoku Blade - G
If Death Crimson isn't the worst light gun game of all time it's got to be bottom 3. Basically, think of everything bad about any light gun game you've ever played, and all of that applies here. Enemies that shoot almost the moment they're onscreen, terrible, unresponsive controls when playing with either a gun or a controller, terrible, generic graphics and enemy design, this game has it all. What makes this game stand out as even worse than typical light gun games is how excessively the screen flashes when using an actual light gun, I don't know whether it's because the visuals are naturally very dark or what, but when you shoot the light flash is completely disorienting almost to the point of being totally unplayable, and you have to shoot constantly. I certainly can't recommend playing this one in any capacity.
I was never all that impressed with the Dungeons and Dragons games, though upon revisting them for this review, I found that this game was quite different and better than I remembered. I quickly realized this is because I never actually played Tower of Doom before, only Shadow over Mystara, and IMO, the first game is substantially better than the second. At its core, Tower of Doom is a fairly simple game, which reminds me a lot of The King of Dragons. One of the main things it shares with KoD is that everyone hits like a tank. Enemies die in a couple hits, and you can even take like half health off a boss with one good combo (combos in this game are just your first normal attack over and over again), but you can't take many hits either, so the game is very dependent on careful positioning and spacing. The biggest addition since King of Dragons is the inventory system. You can find money from defeated enemies and treasure chests, which you can use to buy various consumable items like arrows, hammers, and magic rings. These give you access to ranged attacks that are vastly safer than your normal attack, though obviously they are limited in quantity, so you'll want to save them for particularly dangerous situations, usually bosses or groups of difficult enemies. You can also use this money to buy healing potions to recover your health inbetween stages. There are also branching paths between stages and a couple fun nods to D&D, like how the Troll boss will regenerate unless you use fire on him. It's nothing super revolutionary, but it does its job and the core gameplay is fun and well-polished. The Saturn port of the game is also generally pretty good, it's very accurate to the arcade, save for the addition of some load time between stages, but it's not too bad. It's basically just another classic beat-em-up from Capcom that I'd easily recommend to anyone who was a fan of King of Dragons.
Maboroshi no Black Bass is one of the most frustrating games I've covered in a long time. This game comes absurdly close to being great, but suffers from one incredibly critical flaw that prevents it from even being good. Everything about the setup of the game seems incredibly promising. It's got great presentation, it's not inordinately complex, it's divided into levels that don't require you to catch too many fish, you can see underwater to determine which fish you want to hook, and it's not difficult to hook bass. The problem is that the actual fish fighting, which is by far the easiest part of a fishing game to get right, is completely terrible. The game's core mechanic is to use L and R to adjust the line tension, watching a marker over the fish's head to determine the current tension, and using L to reduce it if the marker starts to get red. This is a bit basic but it could be tolerable. The problem is that 99% of the time, when you lose a fish, it will not be because your tension is too high, but rather because every time a fish jumps, there is a random chance that they just instantly snap the line, and they jump A LOT. This functionally makes catching fish completely RNG, and as fish take a long time to catch, this gets insanely frustrating fast. Even if you go out of your way to catch turtles, which can be used as a super lure, it doesn't protect you from this, making the turtles functionally useless. You can still progress if you just keep trying over and over, but it's simply not fun. If only they had just used any kind of basic fishing engine! Literally any other fishing game's fish fighting system would have been good enough for G.
DeleteSengoku Blade is very similar to Psikyo's other shmup from this generation, Strikers 1945. It has the exact same difficulty system, powerup system, a bunch of different characters to choose from, and ironclad belief that every boss must somehow turn into a giant mecha. The biggest change here is that it's a horizontal shmup instead and it has a "feudal japan" aesthetic, which makes for a bunch of fun enemy designs, I particularly enjoy the mecha that's based on Shachihoko. The one issue I have with this game is that compared to many similar shmups, your hitbox here is actually very large, and it feels like there's a fair number of situations where bullet patterns can overlap in ways you simply can't dodge, though bombs are very powerful and are given out pretty freuqently, probably to deal with such situations. There's not too much else to say about it other than that it's quite well-polished and fun, clearly Psikyo knew what they were doing with shmups this gen.