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Last Topic's Ratings:
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill - AAGABAGA - 57% (8)
Guardian's Crusade - GAAAGA - 67% (6)
Kurt Warner's Arena Football Unleashed - AAGG - 75% (4)
Machine Head - GB - 50% (2)
Milano no Arbeit Collection - GA - 75% (2)
Straight Victory - AA - 50% (2)
Actually one of our busiest and highest-rated topics in a long time, this is a rare topic where no game was in the low range. It goes to show that you should always bet on the Duke.
Games for this topic:
Allied General
Battle Arena Toshinden 3
Cat in the Hat, The
ESPN MLS GameNight
Radikal Bikers
US Navy Fighters
This strikes me as a very odd set, though I'm kind of curious to try the Cat in the Hat game.
Allied General - A
ReplyDeleteBattle Arena Toshinden 3 - G
Cat in the Hat, The - A
ESPN MLS GameNight - A
Radikal Bikers - G
US Navy Fighters - B
I feel like Allied General is a touch better than Panzer General but it's still not great. The game plays very similarly to Panzer General, but it feels a touch faster-paced and the missions are designed a little better, which helps. However, it still feels like a much less well-polished Advance Wars that is too slow and has too much RNG. Two things that really annoy me are that after you move each unit, you have to press the button again to confirm the move, even if there's no possible target for them to attack, frequently causing me to accidentally cancel my moves, and that the "expected losses" section is basically a complete guess that in no way represents reality. The units also look far too similar given how much their performance against other units varies, which makes predicting damage even more of a crapshoot. It is playable, but I can't really see why anyone would put significant time into it.
Battle Arena Toshinden is a super weird game that's almost impossible to rate, I could actually see every possible grade being valid for it. For starters, the game has changed drastically compared to Toshinden 2. While the previous game was fairly traditional and kind of resembled something like Street Fighter, it has now become a string-based fighting game, more similar to something like Soul Calibur. Special moves still exist, but cancelling is completely gone, so you have to use the strings quite heavily in your offense. Many strings resemble autocombos from other games, for example pressing square 4 times as Eiji gets a simple slash into fireball autocombo (though bizarrely, you cannot do this combo manually since there's no cancelling!), but others have other uses. In particular, some strings crumple or launch the opponent, allowing for a more traditional combo. Ellis, for example, can do X, X, Triangle Triangle for a crumple, then use her R1 special move for a decent 6-hit combo. There are also a lot of other types of special moves. Like in Toshinden 2, characters continue to have a rage meter that, when full, allows the use of a super with Square + Triangle. Since there's no cancelling, many characters have no way to combo into their super, but they tend to be extremely fast reversals so you can use them to punish virtually anything. There's also a new "Soul Bomb" special, performed by pressing X + Square, which kind of acts like a second super. You get a limited number of these per match, but they can be used at any time and are potentially extremely damaging. For example, in the corner, Eiji can do Square, X, Square for a crumple, then do his soul bomb for about 50% damage. The Soul Bomb can also be used like a reversal, but for many characters won't get full hits if done this way. The game has a ton of characters, with each character having a clone character whose moveset has minor differences by beating the game with them, and the animations and music are also pretty top notch. The biggest issue is that I don't think this game has much real depth. A lot of things are kind of janky, like for example jump ins don't combo properly, and supers sometimes drop in weird ways, but the most concerning thing is the access to extremely fast and damaging reversals in the form of supers and soul bombs that can discourage offense. I suspect this would make multiplayer in this game fairly lame, as you would have to turtle a lot and rarely attack, though the AI is bad enough it kind of doesn't matter. I'm kind of unsure between G and A for this, I guess as a single-player game it's fairly decent, and it maybe has a place as a kind of "baby's first fighting game", though I don't think it really teaches you much that would be useful for playing other games.
The Cat in the Hat is a weird game. It's a weird mishmash between an adventure game and a minigame collection. Before each minigame, the cat has to collect various parts, in a format that resembles a very simplistic adventure game. You can walk around various areas, pick things up, and use items, much like pretty much any other game of this type, though it's very simple by comparison. These sections comprise the majority of the game, and are not too bad, the visuals are quite colourful and feel authentic to the source material, and I kind of like the cat's overly slow gait. The minigames themselves are exceptionally basic, particularly the one where you have to catch the things. I do kind of like the one where you have to clean up, the cat rides a strange contraption with 4 arms that can pick up the toys, with each arm grabbing a different height. The arms come out of holes in the machine, which are laid out like the PS1 face buttons, which helps you remember which button moves which arm, which I thought was a neat little touch. In any case, it's a very short game, with only 3 adventure sections and 3 minigames, it can be finishing in about 30 minutes. There is a hidden puzzle mode that I couldn't figure out how to access, it requires you to find 25 Puzzle Pieces. You'll find 13 through the main game, and 6 more can be found by doing the minigames on the harder difficulties, but I have no idea where the other 6 are. It probably wouldn't change things too much, in any case.
DeleteESPN MLS Gamenight feels very solid in some ways, and it almost feels "too good" for A, but it also has some major issues. For starters, there's the control, which is excellent. The player movement in this game feels extremely smooth, a fair bit moreso than most games. Passing and stealing generally feel pretty great, though occasionally the game does seem to select the wrong pass target. Shooting is not quite as good. When you shoot, a power meter quickly charges, determining your shot power. This is a fine system, but the problem is, you never want to use any power at all, as if you put any power on your shot you'll always kick it over the net, so you simply tap it, which makes the system feel pointless. I think if the meter charge a little slower and there was more differentiation between the power settings it would be an interesting system, but it doesn't really do anything useful here. Still, this is mostly a minor annoyance, you just have to remember to always tap, but tap shots work fine. The real problem is the cross. Simply put, crosses in this game suck and are never worth using. I think the problem has to do with the game's AI, the characters you're not actively in control of are pretty smart and will seek out the ball quite well on their own, but the problem here is that the second the cross is attempted, a mark appears on the field and the defenders all run for it, virtually guaranteeing the cross will be intercepted and headed away no matter how you try to set it up. In all the time I played, only one cross was ever successful, a couple times the attackers hit it but it was an easy save, but the vast majority of the time it just causes a turnover. If you want to score, the correct choice is to use one-timers instead, which score pretty reliably. This has the effect of significantly simplifying both offense and defense since you don't need to care about the cross, which robs the game of a lot of its nuance, and this is the factor that pulls it down to A. It's a shame, because the presentation is also pretty solid (the commentary isn't too impressive, though), if it was balanced a little better it would probably be an easy G.
Radikal Bikers is an interesting game. Aesthetically, it's very similar to crazy taxi, having both a very similar presentation and soundtrack, and even the traffic kind of feels similar to that game, but gameplay-wise it's a pure racing title. Ostensibly the goal of the game is to deliver Pizzas, but it's really just about beating the opponent to the goal while avoiding an ungodly amount of traffic and collecting as many powerups as possible. Tracks have shortcuts and if playing the adventure mode you can earn money to buy better bikes, but it's still an extremely arcade-style affair. That is also probably the game's biggest issue, the difficulty of the game is tuned to the point where you pretty much have to do every race perfectly and use the shortcuts to win (no doubt this was quite a quarter-muncher in the arcades), but races are not too long and you can restart as many times as you want so this is not game-ruining, though I do wish for the adventure mode there was no rival and the goal was simply to beat the clock, as the clock is functionally irrelevant since the rival always finishes long before time runs out. The presentation is definitely the game's strongest suit, in many ways this looks like a Dreamcast game, it's actually pretty impressive that this is running this smoothly on PS1. If you enjoyed Crazy Taxi or similar games this is probably worth a look.
DeleteI was tempted to put US Navy Fighters on the "too difficult to understand without Japanese" list, but it's really not, it just completely sucks. The biggest problem with this game is how atrociously slow it is. Like for example, on the first mission, your goal is to shoot down a fighter and 3 ships. How long would you expect this to take? Maybe 2-3 minutes? This is a 15-20 minute mission. For starters, it takes 4 minutes of flying into a blue sky at maximum speed before you can even get close enough to get a radar lock on the target. From there, it takes about another minute and a half to be in range to actually attack. You then quickly unload your missiles, but these are not enough to destroy all the targets, so you have to use your wimpy machine gun, which requires many strafing runs. During this time, the enemy will fire missiles, but these are harmless, you just press square to drop chaff every time they fire a missile (and your wingmen even call it out for you), it's just very time consuming and dull. Once this is finally done you have to spend another uneventful 6 minutes to fly back, then land. Imagine if you lost this mission and had to restart, waiting another 5 minutes to even be able to retry the battle. It reminds me a lot of Wing Commander 3, which also had a lot of problems with spending way too much time just flying through empty space, but it was nowhere near this bad and that game at least had great presentation. Definitely skip this one.