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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bass Rise - AA - 50% (2)
Carmageddon - ABAB - 25% (2)
China: The Forbidden City - GA - 75% (2)
Mainichi Neko Youbi - AA - 50% (2)
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen - GGGAAA - 75% (6)
Viewpoint - BB - 0% (2)
A pretty quiet topic this time, I thought Carmageddon would draw out more ratings.
Games for this topic:
California Watersports
Choro Q2
Iron & Blood
Kenki Ippatsu: Shovel Master ni Narou
Monkey Magic
Zanac X Zanac
It should be noted that Kenki Ippatsu: Shovel Master ni Narou is NOT the same game that was localized as Power Shovel, even though that game's Japanese name is the heavily similar "Power Shovel ni Norou". Yes, there are two totally distinct games for PS1 about driving a Power Shovel. That's just the way the PS1 era was.
California Watersports - A
ReplyDeleteChoro Q2 - G (SR)
Iron & Blood - B
Monkey Magic - G
Shovel Master ni Narou - B
Zanac X Zanac - G
I spent quite a while playing California Watersports because I could tell it had some potential. The biggest issue was figuring out the controls, as there is no info on this game anywhere. This is, essentially, a one button game, X is the only button you need to care about. To catch a wave (while surfing), position yourself diagonally away from it to gain speed when it reaches you, then press X to get on your board. You will now be going moderately fast, to gain extreme speed, to a downwards turn (turn away from the wave) so you're going the other way. Ideally, the wave should be coming down on top of you, which is what you want, this is called a barrel ride and makes you go super fast. Now, if you want to do a jump, pivot towards the wave just as you come out of the barrel ride (when the wave starts rising again, and hold X and Down. If timed or angled poorly, you might go flying off your board, but if done properly, you will pull off a sick trick and maybe even land and be able to do it again. When executing this properly, the game is actually kind of fun, it feels fast and there is actually some nuance to it. Unfortunately, the game's progression in a letdown. There are four tournaments you can do, each of which focuses on a different scoring system. This is fine, and the tournaments do work and are kind of interesting. The problem is the format. Basically, each tournament is a battle against 3 AI opponents that lasts for a certain length of time, the shortest being 10 minutes. Time does not pass during the AI's turn, though you still have to watch it for a second or so, and, at best, only your best 3 runs count. The problem is, the ten minute time limit is enough for you to get at least 20 attempts, and there's simply no reason that you'd need anywhere near this many. If the game had limited you to, say, 5 tries and that's it, it would probably be G, but as it stands this makes it drag a lot. Incidentally, there are other vehicles you can ride, and the Jet Ski is also not bad (it has an accelerator which IIRC is square), but the Surfboard is clearly the most interesting one. Not a bad attempt at the sport, but there's still room for improvement.
The original Choro Q was already a great game, but Choro Q2 is another one of those classic good sequels which is just more and better of everything. The most obvious change is the addition of a new hub world of sorts, Q Town, though IMO this is actually one of the less significant changes. You really just have to drive around Q Town a couple times to encounter various races and shops, as once you visit them once they get added to the main menu, which is probably how you'll access them from that point forward. There's also been some small polish changes, for example the controls have been refined a bit further, making this easily one of the best handling racing games on the system, and the progression through the parts system has been improved a little. Pretty much everything the first game did well is retained, the "collect and race" system remains fun, it's still very well-balanced, and the presentation is still great, in particular the new music is all really good. The biggest addition is actually kind of a hidden feature, which is that after you finish all the content from the new game, you can actually unlock all of the tracks from the first game, complete with their original music. While the tracks from Choro Q1 probably weren't intended for the level of speed you'll have at this point, this is still an incredibly cool feature and I'm not sure how they managed to cram it all into one disk. I feel like you can really tell how passionate the team was about these games, the amount of stuff they jammed into this game is just crazy. Easily one of the best racing games ever made.
Iron and Blood is a game with a lot of good ideas, but the execution of the game is so utterly atrocious that it robs it of all of its potential. The basic gist of it is that it's a fighter with 16 characters. Each team picks 4 characters, and they send them out one at a time for one-on-one duels. Some duels have extra stakes, such as gaining magic power, which allows them to perform a super attack, or granting a new character to the victor. Damage taken from battle does not immediately heal, but a character can sit out for a few matches to rest up. Each character also has several lives (which are lost by losing a round), and losing a life causes you to lose your accumulated magic. You can even find special items every now and then that give you little advantages. This setup is actually pretty cool and if you slapped it on even a halfway competent fighter it would be an interesting game, but alas, this is one of the worst fighting games ever created. It's a totally incompetent 3D fighter, and almost anything bad you can say about any 3D fighter applies here. For starters, the frame data is complete nonsense. There are strings, but they almost never combo properly, many moves are unsafe on hit, while other moves are so bonkers fast or safe that you can spam them incessantly with almost no recourse from the opponent. The controls are also atrocious. Many moves are mapped to completely nonsensical combinations, which also usually fail to register. How does the Elf shoot an arrow from his Bow? Forward + a button? A QCF input? Of course not! It's Triangle + Circle, then Square + X, in very short succession. The arrow also takes forever to fire and does pretty much no damage even if it hits. Block is also mapped to a button, and is super unreliable, as many moves randomly go through your block, but it is necessary to turn yourself around as enemies will often come at you from weird angles and you need to reorient yourself constantly. The game basically comes down to identifying the handful of busted characters (generally those with very simple movesets or good range), and spamming the heck out of your cheapest moves, which robs it of all of its nuance. If only a competent developer would reattempt this idea!
DeleteI don't know if I'm going to be able to organize my thoughts on Monkey Magic in a way that doesn't just devolve into incoherent rambling, but perhaps that is the only way to properly capture the essense of this insane game. Monkey Magic is a 2D Platformer with a lot of action and puzzle elements. You control a monkey, and a lot of the game does indeed involve using magic. You (eventually) get four different spells, shrink, power, fire, and ice, and you can use them both on yourself and on other objects to solve puzzles. For example, shrink can be used both to shrink yourself, so you can fit through small passages, or to shrink other things, like obstacles, so you can jump over them. You can also shrink enemies, to make them weaker and easier to defeat. Each of the spells generally has a lot of utility and the game does make pretty good use of them, though it probably leans on Power a little hard. Power effectively makes you invincible, so most of the game's fights and traps are somewhat trivialized by it. Monkey also knows Kung-fu, but once you have power you don't have to put much thought into fights, which is kind of a bummer, though there's a lot more to the game than just fighting. The game also has Tomba-esque plane switching, though it's done much better here, as you can always see some kind of indicator where you can do it, and you can also see the foreground plane in front of you in a kind of semitransparent way when there's something important there, though there were definitely times when I missed a plane switching location on my first pass and got stuck for a bit. In any case, the gameplay of the game is a bit above average. It's not the best ever but it controls fairly well and the puzzles are decent. However, this game is not all about the gameplay, we haven't even gotten to the presentation yet. From the moment you start the game up and watch the game's intro, which is presented in full anime style complete with an english theme song, you know this game is going to be something... special. There are quite a number of anime sequences in the game, and they very precariously straddle the line between "so bad it's good" and "so bad it's actually really bad". Apparently this is based on a real anime, and I'm not sure if it's intended to be a parody, but the dub definitely comes off that way, sort of like Samurai Pizza Cats but with even less subtlety. Congo himself also has a bit of Gex to him, he sometimes spouts c***y one-liners after beating opponents, though thankfully not nearly as often as Gex does. Some of the voice acting is actually pretty good, for example I quite like your bat companion, and the three foes you fight at the end of the first stage are just the right amount of stupid to be hilarious. The first stage in general is probably the highlight of the game, although the magic is used well, the second stage drags on way too long and I kind of miss the parts of the game where you actually have to use Kung Fu. Still, it's clearly still a good game and I imagine if my childhood friend and I had played this when we were kids we'd probably still be quoting it to each other.
DeleteI'm super curious to know what the story behind Shovel Master and Power Shovel is. They released at around the same time, they have almost the same name in Japanese (Shovel Master Ni Narou and Power Shovel Ni Norou), and they're licensed by the same Japanese construction company. They also play somewhat similarly and have similar missions. I don't think it's possible it was simply a coincidence, my guess would be that there was some kind of disagreement about the direction the game should take, and like half the dev team split off and decided to make their own game. At any rate, of these two similar games, this is the bad one. Everything about this game is drastically worse than Power Shovel. It controls worse (particularly when you have to drive), the physics are much worse (if you simply touch the bucket to dirt, it fills up, unlike in Power Shovel where you actually have to scoop it), it has way less content, and it has no personality. The only improvement is that a diagram showing the controls is displayed onscreen, which is helpful, but it controls so much worse that even if I sometimes mess up the controls in Power Shovel it's still much more fun to play. It's an interesting curiousity but there's no question that if the team behind Power Shovel thought they could do this game way better, they were right.
DeleteZanac X Zanac is pretty neat. For starters, it sort of sounds like a collection in the vein of Gradius Deluxe Pack or something, but it's really not, because although it does come with the original Zanac, the second game in the package, Zanac Neo, is a completely new game which was never made available separately, so it's kind of more like the original Zanac is a bonus game. Something I appreciate is that when it comes to Zanac, there's actually multiple versions available! You can play the Disk System version, the NES version, or even the (new?) Special version, all of which have different layouts. However, as cool as having the original Zanac is, you're probably here for Zanac Neo, which is actually quite an impressive game. In pretty much every way, it feels very ahead of its time, it reminds me a lot of Mars Matrix on the Dreamcast. The visuals are much cleaner and snappier than we've seen from most games this era, and it also has a fair bit more content, with 4 ships being available (one of which you have to unlock), all of which have different special weapons. It's also very hard, feeling like a proto bullet hell game, but thankfully the special weapons are pretty cool and skillful use of them helps deal with the immense amount of stuff that's going to be thrown at you. I'm actually pretty impressed this game runs this well on PS1, as it puts a crazy amount of stuff onscreen and never seems to have any performance issues. Certainly one of the most impressive PS1 shmups on a technical level.