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Last Topic's Ratings:
007 Racing - BGBA - 38% {4}
Adiboo & Paziral's Secret - AA - 50% (2)
Devil Dice - AGGBG - 70% {5}
Psychic Detective - GBG - 67% (3)
UEFA Challenge - AA - 50% (2)
Zig Zag Ball - AB - 25% (2)
It's sort of funny to me that Adiboo & Paziral's Secret ended up being one of the higher rated games from this topic.
Games for this topic:
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill
Guardian's Crusade
Kurt Warner's Arena Football Unleashed
Machine Head
Milano no Arbeit Collection
Straight Victory
I wanted to put Kurt Warner's Arena Football Unleashed in the topic title, but there was just no way it was happening with the character limit. Looks like an interesting set this time in any case.
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill - A
ReplyDeleteGuardian's Crusade - A
Kurt Warner's Arena Football Unleashed - A
Machine Head - B
Milano no Arbeit Collection - G
Straight Victory - A
Duke Nukem is functional, but it's not especially fun. It's a third-person shooter, but a fairly clunky one with a number of issues. For starters, the movement is very slow. It has very generous auto-aim, so this doesn't affect your ability to damage enemies, but it makes it almost impossible to stay mobile during a firefight, which makes it nearly impossible to avoid damage. When it comes to TPS games of this type, movement and aiming is like 95% of the skill of the game, so having the aiming be automatic and the movement be clunky removes almost all of the skill from the game. Indeed, about the only thing left is knowing the level layouts to know where to find armor as quickly as possible, because taking damage during fights is functionally unavoidable and health pickups are far too infrequent. The game also feels like it wasn't properly tested on any difficulty settings beyond the lowest one, as taking at least some deaths feels nearly unavoidable due to how little health is available. There are checkpoints, but it feels like you basically have to treat your lives like currency rather than trying to make it through the stages while taking as little damage as possible. On the plus side, at least the presentation is still pretty decent. Duke has a lot of voice acting, the stages are pretty big, and the lighting is decent, I just wish the core gameplay was a little better.
Guardian's Crusade is a very basic RPG with a couple unique ideas. Something you can't escape at any point while playing this game is how simple it is. Its visuals are extremely simple, its story is extremely simple, its characters are nonexistent, its combat is extremely simple, etc. Still, simple does not always mean bad and the game does move along at a good pace and has some charm, helped out by its above-average soundtrack. The game is a very basic RPG with only 2 party members, only one of whom is even controllable. Besides attacking, the main other action you can do is use the living toys, which is the game's one interesting mechanic. You find these toys everywhere in the game world, and they sort of act like spells, but there's a bit more nuance to them than that. Some of the toys work exactly like a spell, you use it and then it it has some instant effect, but many of the toys function a bit more like summons, once you call them out they continue to perform their action every turn, even if you defend or use an item or what not. This is kind of an interesting idea, and it gives the battle system a little more depth than it would have had otherwise, but it's also about the only thing the game has going for it. It's playable, but it really would have benefitted from a more interesting story or visuals to help keep the experience moving along.
If you're ever played NFL Blitz and thought "I like this game but I wish it was less complicated", Kurt Warner's Arena Football Unleashed is the game for you. In pretty much every way, it's just NFL Blitz but less - there's fewer players, there's fewer plays, and the arena is half the size in both directions. While this does maybe speed the game up a tad, it also strips the game of virtually all of its nuance. Drives are so short that clock management now doesn't matter, losing access to plays makes both offense and defense more simplistic, and removing the ability to punt removes strategy from the game. The game unfortunately fails to capitalize on any of the mechanics of Arena Football in any way, for example field goals are more important, so they possibly could have tried to make the method of kicking them more complex, but it's unchanged from Blitz, as is everything else, which is a lot of the problem. They also could have maybe leaned into the chaos with powerups or something, similarly to NFL Blitz on PS3. It also sucks that the one they they didn't reduce were the loading times, which are still pretty long, even though I'm not sure exactly what this game is loading since there's barely anything in the game. It's still not awful, certainly the presentation is still really good and the mechanics still kind of work, but I can't see why you'd play this over NFL Blitz.
DeleteMachine Head makes an interesting contrast with Duke Nukem because they're almost polar opposites. Unlike Duke, Machinehead does have fast and smooth movement, however it completely fails at everything else. The biggest issue with machinehead is its draw distance, which is atrocious. Almost everything that's more than a few feet in front of you is just a black void, which is a huge problem with how fast you move, you just have to start shooting at the radar blips and hope you hit stuff, which should never be the case. However, the poor draw distance causes far more problems than this, it also makes the game's overly labrynthine levels almost impossible to navigate. Elevation changes are constant in these stages, forcing you to constantly find ramps to go up, which are neither properly indicated on the map nor visible from more than a few feet away, which will lead to tons of running around aimlessly until you finally find out where to go. The games controls, while quick, are also somewhat unwieldy, as the game requires you to both move and aim in three dimensions without supporting analog controls. The best scheme is scheme 5, which puts all movement on the dpad and aiming up and down on the buttons (you don't need to aim up and down THAT often), but even then it still feels clunky, likely in part due to the speed of the game and the poor draw distance. At any rate, unlike Duke, which is at least passable, none of this ever feels fun to any degree. It'd be interesting to know how much better this would play if you could actually see what you were doing.
Milano no Arbeit Collection is a cute little minigame collection. The basic premise is that Milano has just arrived in Zuccini Town for a fun-filled summer vacation with her uncle, but unfortunately he has been called away on business. Being an industrious little girl, Milano decides to get a job and have her vacation in Zuccini town anyway. Your days are split between working, which involves playing various minigames, and taking care of the house, which is a simple time-management minigame. At night you can use an online catalog to buy more furniture for your house, some of which lets you unlock new actions for how you spend your evenings. It's a cute setup, and the visuals are phenomenal, with incredibly detailed spritework and animations that really makes the game pop. In terms of the job minigames, they're generally pretty decent. There's quite a few of them and there aren't any real stinkers in the lot, so you probably won't get too bored with them, which is good. The time-management aspect of the game is a little weaker. It's basically just a little too simple. Milano can do various things like cooking, cleaning, drinking tea, studying, feeding her cat, etc. She only has enough time to do two things each evening. Some of the actions she can perform, like cooking for example, raise her statistics, which are happiness, heart, and brains. These are important because this is how you unlock the higher levels of the minigames. However, not doing certain things that would seem important (ie, cooking, cleaning, feeding the cat) has no real penalty, which feels odd. I kinda wish this section had a bit more nuance, like forcing you to take days off from work every now and then to catch up on housework or face some kind of penalty (like maybe the cat runs away if you don't feed him and you have to spend a day looking for him or something), but it doesn't significantly hamper the experience, it still generally does its job of bookending the minigame collection well enough.
DeleteStraight Victory is basically a Japanese version of Nascar. It plays very similarly to the Nascar games and has some similar tracks, though pretty much everything about it lags behind EA's efforts. For starters, there's the control. It's all right, when you get used to using the brake and powerslide you can still control decently, but it definitely doesn't feel as natural as the later Nascar games. The presentation is also much drier, with no in-race commentary, and there's also fewer tracks (only 6), though at least they are decently varied. The game's visuals are also pretty nice, save for the fact that you can see it drawing the track ahead of you, though the car models and track detail are both pretty good. There's not really a ton else to say about it, it's another middling racer with a small amount of tracks and not too much progression and this gen has a ton of them.