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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Allied General - AAA - 50% (3)
Battle Arena Toshinden 3 - BBGGAAG - 57% {7}
Cat in the Hat, The - AABA - 38% (4)
ESPN MLS GameNight - AA - 50% (2)
Radikal Bikers - BGG - 67% (3)
US Navy Fighters - BB - 0% (2)
Wow, I didn't think this would be a topic with no games in the high range, especially because the Saturn topic actually did pretty well.
Games for this topic:
Bass Rise
Carmageddon
China: The Forbidden City
Mainichi Neko Youbi
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen
Viewpoint
I can't get over how many fishing games there are this generation. Being a big fan of River King, it never struck me as a genre that was very dependent on 3D visuals, but they seem to have just exploded this gen. Speaking of explosions, we also have Carmageddon, though that might be more of a splatter.
Bass Rise - A
ReplyDeleteCarmageddon - B
China: The Forbidden City - A
Mainichi Neko Youbi - A
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen - A
Viewpoint - B
Bass Rise is another very promising fishing effort that is held back by a single major flaw. This is a game that does almost everything right. Finding fish is easy, fighting fish is competent, and the presentation is fantastic, in particular the underwater views both look and sound amazing for their time. As such, you might guess that the problem would be the game's progression, which is kind of an issue. It doesn't really have a lot, you kinda just visit various fishing spots and sometimes someone gives you a little challenge to do, but honestly if the core fishing gameplay was good enough this wouldn't be an issue. The issue actually lies in hooking the fish. It's very easy to get fish to attack your lure, but getting them hooked so you can begin fighting them is bizarrely inconsistent and I think it may be straight RNG. In almost every other game, you just press Down to hook a fish, but no such luck here, I've tried state saving before a fish strikes and pressing every combination of buttons possible to see if I can hook the fish, and although I can occasionally turn a failed strike into a successful one by pressing some button at a specific time, I can never do it consistently or identify any kind of pattern, which makes me think it's simply RNG and I just happen to be advancing the number generator to a suitable value through my random actions. This is not such a huge issue during normal gameplay as fish strikes are common, but when attempting the game's challenges, which involve things like catching a certain number of large fish in a certain amount of time (with whether or not large fish appear ALSO being RNG) it quickly becomes very annoying. If there is some way to hook a fish every time it would probably bump this game up to G, but I haven't been able to find a scan of the game's manual and it's certainly not something I can figure out.
Compared to the N64 version, Carmageddon for PS1 is closer to the PC version in terms of design, however everything about it is executed so poorly that it's completely unplayable. You probably know the basics of the series by now, but they're worth repeating. Carmageddon is a car combat / racing game where you can win every course in one of 3 ways - finishing 3 laps of the course before time runs out, wrecking all rival cars, or wiping out every zombie. Progressing towards any of these goals awards credits that you can use to repair or reset your car during the race or buy new cars between races, and killing zombies and damaging rivals also grants time bonuses (passing checkpoints does not, but awards a lot of money instead). This is a pretty cool concept overall, I like the way the various goals tie together and you can alter your strategy on the fly. All of these concepts are also present on PS1, they just don't work at all here. For starters, the controls on PS1 are absolute garbage. The cars barely turn at all if you have any kind of speed, which makes all of the various tasks you need to do a total pain. You might recall that the turning is very sensitive on N64, this was probably done to address this issue. The stages are also way more open compared to PC, which isn't inherently a bad thing, but it makes the racing impossible as the track isn't really marked in any way. On PC, you can call up a map at any time that shows the course plus the location of the next checkpoint you need to go to, but this is absent on PS1, the only way to follow the course is through small yellow arrow boxes that are almost impossible to spot amidst the chaos, especially if travelling with any kind of speed, and if you miss a checkpoint, good luck ever finding it again. This pretty much eliminates racing as a viable option, leaving only the car combat and wiping out zombies, which are also both trash due to the awful controls. It's a shame this game never got a competent console port because it is an interesting title, but you'll just have to stick to PC.
DeleteChina: The Forbidden City is very similar to Versailles. Like Versailles, this is a historically-focused adventure game where the main appeal is being able to explore a famous historical location in full 3D. The environments look great and are interesting, and as you explore you can look at various things and the game will give you the historical context behind it, which is interesting. The biggest issue is that the adventure behind the game kinda feels like an afterthought. Pretty much the whole game is just "explore the city and find the right people to talk to", which is actually even harder than it is in Versailles since the city is so big. Luckily, exploring the city is interesting so despite your impending doom being lost is still pretty interesting. Honestly these games are pretty close to G, I just wish the adventure itself was a little better fleshed out.
It's interesting to come back to Ogre Battle. On SNES, this is clearly a G-level game, but the strategy genre has seen a ton of innovations since the SNES that now leave this game feeling somewhat dated. To cover the basics again, Ogre Battle is a strategy RPG with a somewhat unique real-time battle system. Rather than having a grid system, there is instead a landscape dotted with various points of interest. You direct your units and they move to these destinations in real time. If they encounter an enemy, a simplistic battle ensues. Each unit on the overworld is made up of up to 5 soldiers, with one leader unit that is generally stronger than the others. Each character has only a single attack, which depends solely on their positioning, for example, a cleric will heal if positioned in the back row, but will use an attack spell if positioned in the front row. Battles play out automatically with the player having little involvement except to select targeting priority or use tarot cards, which are limited-use special attacks. Ultimately your goal is to liberate towns and take out the boss of each map so you can move on to the next. The game is generally fairly simple, save for the alignment system, which is quite obnoxious. Defeating enemies that are higher / lower level than you affects your alignment, as does defeating enemies of certain types. Liberating towns with high-alignment characters gives good results, while low alignment ones gives bad results, which can affect the ending. One of the biggest issues facing this game is that Ogre Battle 64 exists, which improves upon it in every way. In particular, the battle system in OB64 has way more depth, thanks to the change from just front / back in unit alignment to the 9-cell system, though the story is also significantly better told and the alignment system is less cumbersome as well. I feel like this game also doesn't compare especially well to other good strategy games from this era like FF Tactics, Front Mission 3, Funky Fantasy, Devicereign, etc, it feels somewhat overly simplistic and unit management is pretty tedious given how basic the battles are. It was still an important game for its time and it remains playable, but strategy games have come a long way in just a few short years.
DeleteThe moment I started up Viewpoint I knew it felt familiar, it turns out this game was also ported to Genesis, and we covered it in Genesis GAB. When we rated this game on Genesis, I noted that it had some strong points but the Genesis version simply didn't run well, having near-constant slowdown. The PS1 version runs properly, but it also completely sucks and is way worse than it is on Genesis. There's not a lot to say about this game other than that it simply feels bad and sloppy. The movement is incredibly slow and stiff, your hitbox is much too big, and the stages are too small and feel incredibly claustrophobic. It also still has some porting issues despite running at full framerate, it takes a long time to load after you die and the music also cuts out if you pause. I immediately went back to the Genesis version to compare and it's night and day, despite the slowdown that version is way better, having fixed all the issues from the arcade version by widening the playing field, shrinking your hitbox, and speeding up the movement, as well as improving the soundtrack. If only they had just ported the Genesis version and made it run 60fps.