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Last Topic's Ratings:
Exector - BA - 25% (2)
Hermie Hopperhead: Scrap Panic - GG - 100% (2)
Interplay Sports Baseball 2000 - BGA - 50% {3}
Rung Rung - GG - 100% (2)
Speed Punks - GAG - 83% (3)
Yetisports Deluxe - BBB - 0% (3)
I always find it a bit interesting when a game gets only 3 ratings and they're all different, it is, in a certain sense, the most divided result possible since no two people have the same opinion. It might be interesting to see what other games have rated this way.
Games for this topic:
007 Racing
Adiboo & Paziral's Secret
Devil Dice
Psychic Detective
UEFA Challenge
Zig Zag Ball
Zig Zag Ball looks like an interesting game, weirdly it was down on my list as an adventure game, but it seems to be a sports game, so I'm not sure how that mixup happened.
007 Racing - G
ReplyDeleteAdiboo & Paziral's Secret - A
Devil Dice - B
Psychic Detective - G
UEFA Challenge - A
Zig Zag Ball - A
007 Racing isn't quite what I expected, but it's not bad. For starters, the title is a misnomer. This is not a racing game. This is a car-based action game. The game is structed like Goldeneye, where it's divided into missions with multiple objectives each, but rather than being an FPS, it's a driving game instead. Your missions are broken up between somewhat more "racing-esque" levels where you need to reach certain points within a time-limit, and more combat heavy levels where you have to take out enemies and destroy certain objectives, though most levels will involve at least a bit of both. When it comes to the driving control, it's pretty decent. There's a level where you have a bomb in your car and you have to collect jammers to extend the time limit that heavily resembles the driving game from Die Hard Trilogy, but it's done vastly better here, not only is this a completely playable mission but it's actually pretty fun, probably one of the better ones in the game. The game does a bit worse when focusing more heavily on combat, on the third mission you have to do two arena fights and then slowly disable some computers with an EMP, and that mission plays pretty poorly. One of the biggest problems is that cycling your weapons is done with a button, and you have a lot of weapons and gadgets you generally don't care about, so cycling to the one you want can take a while. In any case though the gameplay is generally pretty decent. The production values are pretty good too, the graphics aren't especially amazing, but it has good voice acting and the cutscenes are fun. The biggest issue is actually the game's length. There's only 12 missions and most are only a couple minutes each, it's very feasible to finish the game in a little over an hour. It's a fairly decent hour and a bit and there is a hard mode, but it still feels quite short for a full-priced game. I feel like this definitely would have been a solid rental and it's still probably worth a playthrough for Bond fans, but I wish there was a bit more to it.
Adiboo & Paziral's Secret is another "baby's first platformer" type of game that reminds me a lot of Tigger's Honey Hunt, but not as good. It's not atrocious by any means, it controls all right and the visuals aren't too bad, but it's a very slow and basic game that doesn't do anything innovative. Levels tend to go on fairly long and aren't ever very exciting, so it would have fairly limited appeal outside of its intended (very young) audience, and even then its production values don't feel as strong as some of Disney's offerings, particularly its soundtrack, though it does have full voice acting and cutscenes after every level. Ultimately, while not something anyone is going to be running out to play, a child would probably have some fun with this, certainly, budget games for kids have come a long way since the NES era.
Devil Dice is a puzzle game with poorly-considered mechanics that isn't fun to play. I won't go over the game's rules because it has a tutorial that does this pretty well, but the gist of it is that you control a little man who runs around on the top of dice blocks. You goal is to match up groups of dice blocks by matching the numbers on the top faces, with the number of dice needed equaling the number on the face (so it takes 3 3s, 4 4s, etc). As you'd know if you've played Cu-On-Pa, this is pretty difficult, particularly when the field is crowded, but this kind of mechanic can be interesting. The game also features a chaining system, and this is the root of its problem. After you make a match, the dice very slowly sink into the floor. If you touch them with another dice with the same face, it extends the match and you get a ton of bonus points. Unlike making matches, this is completely trivial, you just take any other die and roll it around the match until it works. As such, the game mostly involves making one match, then connecting as many other dice to it as you can for huge points, which doesn't really have a lot of nuance. If you get stuck on a dice as it descends and can't hop to another die, you get stuck on the ground, which is lame, as you can't do much from there and must wait for a new die to spawn in, this is the main thing that stops the single-player mode from potentially being enjoyable as it just slows down the experience to an unnecessary degree. Unfortunately, the game fares far worse in multiplayer. In multiplayer, everyone plays on the same board, and you can use the chaining mechanic to steal other people's matches. As making matches is very complex, but stealing matches is trivial (and totally impossible to defend against, save by stealing it right back over and over), it is thus not even slightly worth it to bother making your own matches, you just follow other players and steal their matches. This will of course result in no one making any matches at all, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this mode. I feel like this one probably just wasn't playtested well, because I feel like it would have quickly become apparent that the chaining rule ruins the game.
DeleteUEFA Challenge is a generally decent soccer game held back by one or two unnecessary issues. At its core, it's a fairly competent soccer game with good presentation and a lot of options. I particularly like the wealth of game modes on offer, which give the game a decent sense of progression. Unfortunately, the game has a couple small issues with its gameplay that hold it back. The first, and most egregious, is that there's no way to switch players on defense. This is a huge omission, and the game's auto-swap isn't very good either, often leaving you merely watching your team on defense without having any way to contribute to the play. This alone pushes the game to A. The second issue is that the game buffers your inputs for an extremely long time, which plays into the above. You might try to press a button to execute a slide tackle, only to have the opponent pass the ball, which a member of your team intercepts, then immediately clears the ball since the game remembers that you pressed the slide tackle button (which becomes the long pass button on offense). These sorts of issues should have been relatively easy to clear up as pretty much no other game gets these wrong, but it also makes it easy to recommend pretty much anything else.
DeleteZig Zag Ball is an incredibly weird game that can really only be compared to Kirby's Dream Course, but it's not nearly as good. Like Kirby's Dream Course, this is sort of an adventure golf game. The goal on each stage is to hit the ball through all of the arches, then get it in the cup, not totally dissimilar to taking out the enemy in Dream Course. Like in Dream Course, you have a certain amount of energy that depletes every time you make a shot, and you also have the ability to affect the ball's trajectory after it is hit in various ways, that depend on the currently selected ball. The basic idea behind the game is not terrible, certainly, Kirby's Dream Course is a fun game, the problem mostly comes down to the level design. Very few of the levels in Zig Zag Ball feel like they were designed in any coherent way, with the placement of the arches often feeling nearly random, which robs the levels of any sense of flow in most cases. A very common example will be to have an obstacle in the middle of the main path, and then to have an arch on both sides of it. This forces you to waste at least two shots after passing the obstacle (one to get the arch and one to get back) after passing the obstacle, which just feels bad, and this is incredibly common. You can't hit the ball with very much power, so many courses take 6-10 shots to finish, which also robs the game of much of its nuance. You can gradually unlock various special balls with different abilities, but at least as far as I got the ones I had were not particularly useful, the default ball's strong braking ability was almost always preferred. It was kind of interesting to see another take on this idea, but I feel like the game's core design just isn't quite strong enough to carry it.