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Last Topic's Ratings:
Battle Monsters - ABA - 33% (3)
Blast Chamber - AAAA - 50% (4)
Deathmask - AB - 25% (2)
Hattrick Hero S - BAA - 33% (3)
House of the Dead, The - GAAAGG - 75% (6)
Puyo Puyo Sun - AGG - 83% (3)
I was going to post something about how I was the first one to use up all my SRs again, but apparently I was already out! Oops. I removed one from one of the other games because there's no way I couldn't give one to Choro Q2.
Games for this topic:
Miracle Space Race
Monopoly
Power Serve 3D Tennis
Shaolin
Tokimeki Memorial: Taisen Puzzle-Dama
ThunderStrike 2
Shaolin is a title I've wanted to check out for some time now, so I'm looking forward to checking that out. Also, you can tell the headlining games in this topic had short titles since I was somehow able to fit the entirety of Tokimeki Memorial Taisen Puzzle-Dama inside the character limit.
Miracle Space Race - A
ReplyDeleteMonopoly - A
Power Serve 3D Tennis - B
Shaolin - A
Tokimeki Memorial: Taisen Puzzle-Dama - G
Thunderstrike 2 - A
I knew something was off when I was playing Miracle Space Race, because I was actually kind of enjoying it. The game is essentially just discount Wipeout, the controls are fairly stiff, but once you get used to them it actually feels fairly smooth to play, and it also has pretty much the same weapons. It's certainly not perfect, the track design is pretty barebones, the pads on the ground that should clearly be booster arrows don't do anything, and whenever you get hit you lose your powerup, which is annoying, but it's definitely quite playable and with a few more improvements I might even have considered G. Of course, this is crazy talk because we all know that this is just one of a series of games that also includes Rascal Racers, so I immediately went and booted that one up to make sure I wasn't going crazy. Sure enough, with my practice from Miracle Space Race I was immediately dominating that game because it has the same engine, it just feels totally out of place for a game that looks like Mario Kart. Now that I know the game is basically Wipeout and you have to play it like Wipeout, it actually plays kind of all right, and I was no longer hating it to the same degree, though I think the course design in Miracle Space Race definitely suits the physics better. It's almost too bad they didn't simply port the Nuon game, which seemingly bares some resemblance to Diddy Kong Racing, rather than splitting it into 4 games, as if the entire game had come as a package with some minor refinements it actually might have been a somewhat decent game.
I almost don't know what you can even say about Monopoly besides the fact that it's still Monopoly. It still plays pretty much the exact same as every other version of the game. The visuals have not really been significantly improved for this version, the main difference is there's now some little CGI scenes that show when you land on each property. Some of them are a little funny (I like Baltic Avenue being a literal dump) but it does nothing to change the game. Something I don't like is the game continues not to show which player owns each property on the main board, you have to open a submenu to see this. There's also definitely some annoyance in that the AI will often propose the same lousy trade turn after turn no matter how many times you reject it. The biggest question with any version of Monopoly is how do you grade the fact that the underlying game kinda sucks. Obviously, both Fortune Street and Culdcept are a million times better, but neither have US releases this gen, which I suppose allows Monopoly to skate by with A for one more gen, but its days are numbered.
Power Serve 3D Tennis is so atrocious at first I was confused as to whether or not it was even a real game. By default, it plays in an utterly unplayable first person camera that makes it totally impossible to judge what's going on. You can change it to a standard camera, but this is no better, as the game features absurdly stiff controls and generally plays like trash. It also looks awful and has terrible animations, even the music completely sucks. This is probably one of the worst games ever made.
Shaolin is a great concept but the execution just isn't quite there. It's a combination of a 3D fighter and an RPG, which has a lot of potential, and the execution of the RPG part is not bad. You'll walk around various towns in ancient China, talk to people to progress the plot, and get into a lot of fights. You can gain levels and learn new moves from your battles, which is neat. Unfortunately, the combat system simply isn't really good enough to carry the game. It's an incredibly basic 3D fighting game with almost zero depth. There are very few moves and almost nothing combos. There are also no throws, and almost no low attacks (certainly, no low attacks that lead to meaningful damage), so you can just spam safe pokes or stand block and wait for the opponent to do something punishable. Occasionally battles involve multiple opponents or in a limited arena where you can be ringed out and these play a bit better, but overall the game's fighting engine simply doesn't have enough depth to remain interesting for the hundreds of battles you'll need to do throughout the game. It's a shame, as with even a somewhat decent fighting engine this would be an easy G.
DeleteI probably foreshadowed my opinion of Tokimeki Memorial: Taisen Puzzle-Dama when we covered Chibi Maruko Chan Taisen Puzzle-Dama. I mentioned that the series starts off great but generally gets worse due to the introduction of bad special pieces and visually noisy backgrounds, and both of those are starting to creep into the game here. First, the special pieces, which are basically this game's big new addition. There are three, and they all suck. The first is the angry face. When dropped, this causes any pieces near it to turn into hard blocks. This is kind of a dead piece that you will always just drop in some place that you don't care about and it achieves nothing other than making the game play slightly slower. It can also kill you if it shows up at a bad time, which is a dumb way to lose a game. The second is the muncher. This piece will eat all pieces in a given row or column when an adjacent block is cleared. Of all the pieces, this is the only one that has any nuance as rotating, placing, and clearing it involves some nuance for a reasonable payoff, but I generally prefer to play without it. The third piece is by far the most gamebreaking, which is the happy face. This turns all adjacent hard blocks into normal blocks. Many characters' drop patterns can be instantly cleared by this, allowing you to turn a sure defeat into an instant win for no effort, which completely breaks the game balance. Thankfully, the special pieces can and should be turned off in the options, which makes it play mostly like the old games. The backgrounds are somewhat noisier compared to the previous games, but at least they still stay relatively still, so it doesn't hamper the game too much yet. This one is still playable, but this is the last game in the series I would recommend.
As is a trend for this topic, Thunderstrike 2 is another one of those games that's almost good but is held back by a few flaws. It is a helicopter game which bares some resemblance to the Strike series, but in full 3D. It makes a decent first impression, running and controlling relatively well, but once you start doing the missions you quickly run into two majors problems. The first is the game's atrocious auto-aim. The autoaim constantly takes over your cursor and aims it god knows where, almost never at what you actually want to hit, which is pretty important considering the game generally involves making precision strikes against key targets and not simply sitting around and shooting everything in sight. You can manual aim with R2, but this also prevents you from moving entirely, causing you to take unavoidable damage. It's still probably better than fiddling with the auto-aim but it feels like a poor solution. The second problem is the draw distance. The game's draw distance is fine when dealing with ground targets, but when trying to deal with helicopters and especially planes it's a big problem. Planes have to be shot down with missiles, but the second they're more than like 10 meters in front of you they disappear and you can't lock on to them anymore, which makes fighting them a total exercise in frustration. If you can get past these two issues it is playable, but it's probably not quite good enough to be worth your time.
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