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A very highly rated topic, though one without too many votes. Unfortunately, we're slowly running low on US-released Saturn games, so they have to be rationed to some degree among the remaining topics.
Games for this topic:
Battle Monsters
Blast Chamber
Deathmask
Hattrick Hero S
House of the Dead, The
Puyo Puyo Sun
I actually never realized until now that The House of the Dead 1 did not have any other console ports besides the Saturn one. On the flip side, we have Puyo Puyo Sun, which I think is the first game that we've now rated for all 3 systems this gen.
Battle Monsters - A
ReplyDeleteBlast Chamber - A
Deathmask - B
Hattrick Hero S - A
House of the Dead, The - G
Puyo Puyo Sun - G
Battle Monsters is an exceptionally basic 2-button fighting game. In many ways, it plays like a somewhat better version of Mortal Kombat. It has a somewhat similar visual style, featuring digitized likenesses of real actors, there's blood splashes when you hit people, and also plays in a very simple way, but it's also much better in almost every regard. Blocking is correctly done by holding back, motion moves have reasonable, street-fighter style motions, and the characters are also all distinct from each other. It's still super basic, most characters have only a tiny handful of moves, but at least the basics are done properly. One of the most annoying things about the game are the stages, notably, that there are any beyond just a flat 2D plane. Many levels have platforms you can jump onto and such, which has no value from a gameplay perspective, but makes it very easy to run down the clock by simply hopping between platforms since you can't really be hit out of it. This, combined with the game's complete lack of depth means it isn't likely to stay interesting for very long, but it's still not totally atrocious.
Blast Chamber is pretty much the same game as it is on PS1, and I have pretty much the same thoughts about it. The basic gist of the game is that it takes place inside a cube that you can rotate by stepping on arrows, and you need to collect a bomb and get it to the reactor before time expires. There are occasionally some clever room setups, but most of them are very basic, often having only one path you can take, thereby making the solution instantly obvious. These could still be somewhat entertaining, though they're marred by long load times and thus fairly lengthy downtime between levels that prevents the experience from being as punchy as it could be. There's also a multiplayer mode, but it's also very simple and I don't feel it stays interesting for too long either. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it makes for an especially great game.
Deathmask is a really interesting idea that in no way lives up to its potential. The concept behind this game is actually quite cool. You play as Jake, a detective in the futuristic Neo City who is on the tail of the notorious terrorist Angel Devoid. After being injured in an accident, Jake wakes up in a hospital, and is shocked to find that he has been given facial reconstruction surgery when he was unconscious to make him look exactly like Angel Devoid. No one can tell the difference and his vocal chords are out of commission temporarily from the surgery, so he quickly finds himself public enemy #1 and has to run for his life. To survive, he'll have to pretend to be the man whose face he now wears and try to get information out of his associates while avoiding law enforcement and Angel's many enemies. This actually sounds like a great setup for an adventure game, or at least a good movie, but unfortunately this game is neither of those. It skew much closer to the latter, this is easily one of the most linear adventure-style games of all time. Most of the time, there's only a single interaction option per screen, and failing to select it fast enough usually spells doom, or if two options are available, one of them will kill you, almost making it play like Dragon's Lair. This completely robs the game of any sense of exploration, which is too bad because the design of the city is pretty cool. Despite its extreme linearity, the game is also extremely short, which makes it feel extra unsatisfying as it barely has any time to do anything with its interesting premise. If they were barely going to do anything with the game, they honestly should have just made this into a movie, as it actually might have been kind of interesting to watch, whereas as a game it just feels disappointing.
Hattrick Hero S is a very silly game but I don't feel it's particularly good. It's a very heavily arcade-style Soccer game with a lot of big hits and special moves, which I would normally be a fan of, but it kind of feels like it's missing something. The first thing to note about this game is that it's extremely fast-paced, probably too much so. Hits are really strong, both in terms of slide tackles and regular tackles, which means that if you have the ball and you're anywhere near another player it's going to lead to a turnover almost immediately, but you can immediately steal the ball back from them as well, which tends to lead to a lot of situations where a lot of people get hit but the ball doesn't really go anywhere. When you do finally get close to the goal, the goalies are very strong, you kind of just have to rely on lucky rebounds in order to score, which isn't ever especially interesting, especially with how rare these scoring chances are. There are special powerups that you can activate when the game is stopped (such as during a throw in) and these show some degree of promise, for example you can activate something to make all your players really fast or to give you super shots, though to some degree it feels like this is just trying to cover for the fact that the core gameplay isn't so great. It's tolerable, but I don't think this is anywhere near as strong as, say, Dolucky's A League Soccer on SNES if you want an arcade-style soccer game.
DeleteThe House of the Dead was considered the pinnacle of Light Gun games when it came out and it's not really hard to see why. For starters, The House of the Dead uses 3D graphics instead of a prerendered video (ala Area 51), though it makes far better use of it than Virtua Cop or Time Crisis. The main thing that the 3D is used for here is to allow the game to react to your actions. Most enemies in the game take multiple shots and react differently depending on where you shoot them. Shooting a zombie in the arm might cause it to drop its weapon, and shooting most enemies in the head defeats them much quicker. There are even enemies like the monkeys that can be flung backwards when you hit them, and will then attack from different angles, making the game feel far more dynamic compared to any lightgun game before it. Something I've criticized Sega a fair bit for this gen is releasing barebones arcade ports without any added content to justify the console release, but this is also not the case here, as this game adds a pretty neat new mode where you can play as different characters, who all have different statistics. The fact that you can even have multiple characters who play in a meaningfully different way in a game like this is kind of impressive, and the added replay value helps a lot. They also did a pretty good job of supporting the controller. Many lightgun games feel almost unplayable using it, but here it actually feels perfectly fine and I might even prefer it to the gun, as unlike most lightgun games where pretty much all you need is speed, accuracy is also very important in this game and the controller has an edge there. That's not to say speed doesn't also matter, this game is no stranger to cheap shots where enemies will attack almost instantly when they come onscreen, but you can still deal with them using the controller if you know roughly where they're going to attack from. Having to memorize the routes is annoying in most games of this type, but it's not so bad here, both because the game is more fun to play and the settings are more memorable, so remembering the enemy attack directions isn't too tough. Overall, this is just a really solid game and I'd probably recommend it even to people who aren't a big fan of games like this.
Puyo Puyo Sun is available on all 3 systems this gen, and it's pretty much the same game on all of them. The N64 version is mildly downgraded compared to the others, but Saturn and PS1 are pretty close to identical. The new Sun rule actually doesn't change the game much compared to Puyo Puyo Tsuu, the biggest change is to the presentation, which has been massively upgraded. Not only do all characters now have full voice acting, they also have attack animations, backgrounds, and the sprites for the intermission scenes are of much higher quality. Pretty much the entire game looks and sounds fantastic, this is almost certainly the best-looking puzzle game of the era. It's actually kind of crazy how much Compile stepped their presentation game up in just a couple years.
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