This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Caesars Palace 2000 - GA - 75% (2)
City of Lost Children, The - BABB - 13% (4)
Disney's Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers - GGG - 100% (3)
F1 Racing Championship - GGA - 83% (3)
K-1 Revenge - AAA - 50% (3)
Lup Salad: Lupupu Cube - AA - 50% (2)
Pretty standard, not really a lot of surprises here. I hope everyone had a good holiday break.
Games for this topic:
Cabela's Ultimate Deer Hunt: Open Season
Damdam Stompland
Dr Slump
Goal Storm
Red Asphalt
Slam Dragon
This looks like a pretty interesting set of games, particularly Dr Slump, which incidentally has a fan translation available.
Cabela's Ultimate Deer Hunt: Open Season - G
ReplyDeleteDamdam Stompland - B
Dr Slump - G
Goal Storm - B
Red Asphalt - A
Slam Dragon - B
Cabela's Ultimate Deer Hunt feels very similar to the last Cabela's game we played, though I found it generally seemed to play a bit better, so I had to boot up the other one to compare. As before, this is a hunting game where you roam large 3D environments looking for animals to snipe. The visuals are very similar to the previous game, which means there's still no blood, which I appreciate as I'm not super keen on the idea of harming animals and this makes it more approachable. Just like in the previous game, before each hunt you'll buy various gear, then be given a list of targets to shoot and tag to complete the stage. The controls and such haven't changed either, but in general the entire game just works a bit better now. One of my main complaints last time was that firing your gun has a ton of random shot waiver that makes shooting feel very unreliable, which has been mostly eliminated. There's still a tiny bit of waiver but it's way less and if you have a good clean shot on your target you will now almost always hit, which does make the game a lot easier but it feels much more responsive. Speaking of, the game also runs faster now. I can't quite tell if the game itself has been sped up or it simply runs at a faster framerate (it could be both) but movement is quite a bit quicker now, which is appreciated as it makes tracking animals quicker. Speaking of, there's a new arrow that shows the locations of potential prey, as opposed to the red dots from the previous game, which also helps by showing distance. Generally, all of this makes tracking and bagging animals much quicker, so even though the stages require more kills now, they tend to go by faster. It's still not totally perfect though. One thing that feels a bit superflous is gear. There's an absolute ton of it to buy, but much of it also feels kind of unnecessary, I don't see much reason to bother with decoys and lures and such when I can just snipe a deer from way outside of its vision range, and there's a limit to how much you can carry anyway so I tend to just pack the essentials. Gear is also very cheap, I imagine the idea was to have the prices be somewhat "realistic" but after one stage you'll have far more money than you'll ever need, so there's no real sense of progression to the gear. There's also the stage targets, which are much less clear this time. In the previous game, the mission would usually be something like "shoot a sheep and a deer" and you could do that easily enough because they looked different, but here, they're all very similar-looking different types of deer, and you need to score deer of different point scores (I assume this might be related to size?). The general strategy is just to shoot everything that moves until the game tells you you've found what you need, but luckily as finding and bagging animals is pretty easy this isn't a big problem. Overall, the game now does feel fairly decent, though I wish it had a little bit more nuance to its progression.
When I first played Damdam Stompland, I had no clue what was going on and I thought the game was complete garbage, but I was able to find an explanation of the game online. Initially it seems like an absurdly terrible fighting game with atrocious hit detection, as your main stomping move has almost no range and only rarely does anything. This is because the goal of the game is actually not to kick the opponent, but instead to stomp on their shadow. Once you understand this, the game makes more sense, but it's still complete garbage. For starters, easily the stupidest part of the game is that the light source swivels around constantly, causing your shadow to spin around you at all times. If the light source moved infrequently and in some kind of pattern there might be some nuance to it, but with how quickly it spins plus how slow your attacks are hitting someone is still mostly luck. There are different arenas, but they barely matter as going outside the bounds of the arena damages you so slowly as to be irrelevant, and each character also has a special move which mainly just serves to waste time as pretty much none of them contribute to getting hit. There are also powerups that make people slow or small (being small is actually an advantage) but generally the game feels like it has almost no nuance and isn't fun to play even when you know what's going on. Definitely one of the weaker titles on the system.
DeleteDr Slump is an incredibly weird game, but I guess that makes sense because it's also an incredibly weird anime, and it actually follows the anime pretty closely. The start of the game begins just like the anime, with Arale being created and learning about life, by meeting new friends and going to school and such. This part kind of plays like an adventure game, wtih Arale running around and talking to people to advance the story, which generally seems to follow the anime fairly closely. Thankfully the writing a pretty decent (it's very goofy), because these sections are quite long. Eventually you encounter the action stages, which are relatively short action set pieces ending with a boss fight to end the episode. The game then moves back to adventure style gameplay until the next action stage is encountered. It actually reminds me a fair bit of the PS2 game Adventure of the Tokyo Disney Sea, which has a similar kind of gameplay loop. You could probably make the case that the action sections aren't of super high quality and that just leaves the adventure segments, which probably won't appeal to everyone, but I think the combination of the two styles actually works together somewhat well, in particular I like how Arale learns various moves from her day-to-day life that you can use in the action stages. It's definitely a strange combination, but I still mostly enjoyed it and I think it's a pretty decent representation of the show.
Goal Storm is a standard bad early Soccer game. For starters, it has all the things you'd expect from most early soccer games - generic player models, very limited animations, and no commentary, but it has a number of issues beyond this as well. For starters, the game's controls are terrible. The worst choice by far is the fact that dribble and pass are mapped to the same button. If you're holding the dpad in the direction of a player when you press X, you pass, if not, you dribble. Obviously, this results in getting the wrong action with a great deal of regularity, it's particularly nuts that when dribbling, if an ally moves in the direction you're dribbling in, you'll immediately pass to them, since dribbling requires you to hold the button down. The other actions are no better. The slide tackle is one of the least responsive and stiffest that you'll find in any game, and even kicking the ball is unresponsive, I had several times where I got a rebound off the goalie, got the ball, and pressed the button for what should have been an easy goal only to have the player not shoot the ball until the goalie had time to get back into position. You can also easily slide tackle while trying to kick or head in a cross as well. Just a very sloppy game overall and there are tons of better options. I'm shocked Konami made this as it's nowhere near the quality of something like ISS64.
DeleteRed Asphalt is a game I really want to like, but it has a lot of flaws. In case you don't know, the game is essentially a sequel to Rock n' Roll Racing and follows many of the same conventions, but is now fully 3D instead of using an isometric perspective. Like in Rock n' Roll Racing, it's a combat racer where you earn money from races that you can use to buy and upgrade your cars. This has been shown to be a fun concept in many previous games but has virtually vanished from gaming this gen, so it's welcome to see it back, but I wish it was executed better here. Almost everything about Red Asphalt is flawed on some level, and although it can be enjoyable you have to be quite forgiving with it. For starters, there's the cars. They're extremely unbalanced. The main thing that separates the cars from each other is which weapons they have. Every car has both an offensive and a defensive weapon, and many of the offensive and defensive weapons are trash so getting a good set is vital. The first car, for example, handles like complete garbage and has awful weapons, making any kind of progress totally luck based and the entire game felt like B. Selecting the second car instead (the Tigershark) which you can just barely afford at the start of the game makes the game far more playable, though it still has many issues. For starters, the controls are somewhat rough, the cars don't really turn tightly enough and spin out far too easily, so you'll be hitting walls a fair bit. The bigger issue though is the combat. Defensive weapons don't do much, so generally whenever an opponent is behind you you just die. Dying isn't hugely punished, you respawn pretty quick, but it will make you drop 1-2 places or so. The game is heavily rubber-banded, so you're not going to be able to escape the pack, the key is just to make sure you kill the race leader near the finish line so you can get first. This typically involves slamming on the brakes when they get close to you so you can shoot them in the back, which feels degenerate but it works. The upgrade systems have issues too. Each part of your car can be upgraded 3 times, but you can also buy all the upgrades in one go and the prices don't seem to take this into account. For example, the three levels for an upgrade might cost 30k, 40k, and 50k. Why would you even consider buying the level 2 version when you can get the level 4 version for less than double the price? The track design has issues too, especially once you get to the second world with the jumps over lava that frequently don't work properly. Despite all this, there are moments where the game is fun, it just could have used a lot more polish in virtually every area.
Slam Dragon is one of the weirdest fighting games I've ever played, though it's also clearly one of the worst. It's a bizarre mashup of a 2D and a 3D fighting game, where the gameplay is actually 3D (ie, you can sidestep and move with depth), but the characters are prerendered 3D sprites and are thus functionally 2D. It's a super bizarre stylistic choice that simply makes the game look visually much worse than most comparable games. Maybe they wanted to try to increase the polygon count of the characters or something? It looks terrible in any case. The gameplay, however, is even worse. As you'd expect, everything terrible about all bad 3D fighting games is here. It's a purely string-based fighter with no motions, but it has the most poorly designed strings of all time. Like 90% of the strings simply don't work at all, either they won't combo because they don't have enough hitstun, or certain hits will push the opponent too far away for the rest of it to connect, and even when moves do hit the damage they deal is totally nonsensical, with certain hits randomly doing way more damage than others. Jumps are uselessly floaty, as per usual, and blocking is of course mapped to a button. There are supers, though I have no idea how to do them, but they also don't matter, they're slow to come out and are basically just a special attack string that basically never combos properly so even if you get hit by the first part you can just hold block to get out of it. This is just another one of those cases where it's super clear that the developers didn't understand the genre to any degree.
Delete