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Last Topic's Ratings:
Cabela's Ultimate Deer Hunt: Open Season - GB - 50% (2)
Damdam Stompland - BB - 0% (2)
Dr Slump - GGG - 100% (3)
Goal Storm - BB - 0% (2)
Red Asphalt - BAB - 17% (3)
Slam Dragon - BB - 0% (2)
With the other topic getting so many ratings, I didn't realize how quiet this one was until I tallied it up.
Games for this topic:
Ballistic
Block Kuzushi Kowashite Help
Kawa no Nushi Tsuri: Hikyou o Motomete
Raven Project, The
Test Drive 6
Vangale: The War of Neo Century
We've done a million fishing games for PS1 already and I keep comparing them all to the River King series, so it's probably time we finally covered it. I'm also kind of interested in Vangale.
Ballistic - A
ReplyDeleteBlock Kuzushi Kowashite Help - G
Kawa no Nushi Tsuri: Hikyou o Motomete - G
Raven Project, The - B
Test Drive 6 - G
Vangale: The War of Neo Century - B
Ballistic is a game that you almost certainly recognize, but possibly not under this name, as there's been a million clones of it. Exactly why that is is not immediately clear, as the game is "all right" but not much more than that. The gist of the game is that you shoot coloured marbles into a spiral. Whenever 3 marbles of the same colour match they vanish, and then any marbles of matching colors on opposite ends slam together, possibly creating combos. That's about all there is to the game. It really doesn't have much depth, since you can basically only make combos in one direction (the chain can basically be thought of as a long 1-row high stack of blocks), so you basically just try to take advantage of chains that are already present rather than being able to set them up yourself. As the game goes on they start adding so many colours that chains become extremely infrequent, causing it to become dull. There's also a stage clear mode, but it's not as fun as the endless mode as the stages are very short and have little variety. It's an okay game but I can't see how you could play it for more than an hour or so.
It's fascinating to me that there's a ton of breakout clones on PS1 and yet they all feel different, generally due to each one of them putting a unique spin on the breakout formula. For the first level or so, Kowashite Help initially feels a little bit similar to Deden no Gyakushuu, but it quickly becomes clear it's its own thing. Probably the most unique thing about Kowashite Help is also possibly the worst thing about it, which is the time limit. Unlike pretty much every other game of this type, stages in Kowashite Help are timed, and running out of time causes immediate death. The time limits are not generous, either, in fact they're actually very strict, and it will most likely be the case that the majority of your deaths will be to time running out. This forces you to think about the game through the lens of how to clear stages quickly, but due to the nature of breakout there's simply just not a ton you can do. If your ball gets stuck at the top of the stage for a long time, for example, you pretty much just get to watch the clock tick down to your doom. While it does sometimes make the end of stages quite exciting (I've cleared stages on the final second several times), it also creates a fair bit of frustration as well. Lives are relatively abundant so it's not game-ruining or anything, but I do wonder if the game would be better if it could be turned off. Thankfully, the rest of the game is pretty solid. The level design is quite interesting and varies, with a fair number of enemies strewn throughout the levels which lead to some pretty clever stage design, though the real highlight are the bosses. This game easily has the best bosses of any breakout game, and the time limit works quite well here, serving as a decent way to add challenge without forcing the boss fights to rely on cheesy one hit kill attacks or anything like that. The transforming mecha boss in the second world is especially cool, but they're all pretty neat. There are a couple low points in the game, a few of the stages are definitely somewhat lame, but overall the experience is still generally pretty good. It's probably one of the weaker of the breakout games on PS1 overall, but it's a strong field.
Speaking of being one of the weaker titles of a strong field we have Kawa no Nushi Tsuri PSX. Throughout the history of GAB, I've long talked about how the Nushi Tsuri / River King games are miles ahead of pretty much every other fishing game ever made. This owes to a combination of their simple, yet effective fishing systems combined with RPG mechanics. This both helps make fishing accessible to a wide audience and gives the needed variety and progression that the genre needs to stay interesting. Unfortunately, the franchise eventually loses its way and loses much of what makes it fun, but thankfully, that has not happened yet, and Kawa no Nushi Tsuri PSX is still good, old-school River King fun. The only problem is, Kawa no Nushi Tsuri PSX is probably only the 7th best game in the franchise. The absolute best games in the franchise are the ones on Gameboy. These have it all, great fishing gameplay, the tied progression system between the fishing and animal battle systems, and great music to tie it all together. The N64 ones lose some of these mechanics, notably the animal battles are significantly degraded and there's no music during fish battles, but at least the fish battles have newly improved physics and the games look fantastic and are much longer than the others. Prior to the Gameboy games, there's also the SNES game, which plays fairly similarly and still has the animal battles, but has no music during fish fights and feels a bit more rough. Then we come to the PSX game. It plays very similarly to the GB games, though the animal battles have been cut (there are animal encounters but these just have a random chance to steal your fish), and there's once again no music during fish battles. On the plus side, the graphics are pretty nice (I like that you can see other fish in the water during battles), though not to the degree of the N64 games. I think you can very easily make the case that the GB and N64 games are better, and you might even be able to argue for the SNES game due to the presense of the animal battles, though this one is superior to it in other areas. The thing is, between the GB and N64 games, that's 6 full Nushi Tsuri titles. Does anyone really need more than 6 of these games? Well, to be honest, I kind of do. Despite this game being somewhat outclassed by the others it's still pretty fun to fire up another classic Nushi Tsuri game, and I kind of appreciate that it exists even if it's a bit outclassed. I also do kind of appreciate that it's pretty simple in terms of progression, similar to River King 1 on GB, the area maps are small and there aren't too many NPCs, which makes it easier to play in Japanese. In any case, despite being one of the weaker Nushi Tsuri games, this is probably still one of your best fishing options on Playstation, and I enjoy it significantly more than most other fishing games we've covered so far. Perhaps it's both the weakest of a good lot (the Nushi Tsuri games) and the best of a poor lot (other fishing games on Playstation) at the same time.
DeleteThe Raven Project is complete garbage. It's a flight sim game, but everything about it is probably the worst ever. Something I have to call attention to immediately is the game's utterly atrocious sound design. The engine noise in this game is a constant, high-pitched whine, and the music is only marginally better, you'll almost certainly want to immediately turn both of them right off, which makes the game harder to play but it's essential to preserve your eardrums. The gameplay really isn't much better. It's an extremely basic flight game with fairly lousy controls. Locking on to targets barely works, and aiming your cannons is also extremely imprecise (your shots frequently go right through targets), which makes the game almost totally unplayable. It also looks completely terrible and the missions themselves are extremely basic. Definitely avoid this one, literally any of the other options are far superior.
DeleteTest Drive 6 is pretty solid. Long gone are the atrocious controls of Test Drive 4, the controls have been refined ever further from Test Drive 5 and the cars now feel quite good to drive. There's an absolute boatload of content here, too, the game has a ton of tracks and cars and a well-executed campaign mode to tie it all together. The simple loop of "buy a car, win races, upgrade the car" just works well and it's surprising more games don't use it. About the game's only real issue is the AI, which cheats extremely hard even on Easy. The culprit here seems to be cornering, the AI cars simply have infinte traction and can take all turns without slowing down in the slightest, which means that even if you take a corner at 80mph with a well executed powerslide the AI will blow past you at 120mph because they're magnetized to the road in a way you can never be. You can still generally beat them by taking advantage of the fact that they sometimes crash, but it definitely feels a bit off and is pretty much the only mark against an otherwise very solid game. It's still well-worth playing though and finally gives NFS Hot Pursuit some competition.
Vangale looks good, but unfortunately it doesn't play well. The basic gist of the game is that it's a mech fighter that tries to replicate the kinds of battles from the Gundam series, and at a glance it kind of looks the part, but the gameplay is too incompetent to really pull it off. The first major issue is the controls. There are 5 things you can do in this game: Block, fire two different weapons, do a melee attack, and fire a super weapon. The Playstation controller easily has enough buttons for this, for example you could map the four types of attacks to the face buttons and block to a shoulder or something. Of course, it's not actually done this way. There are buttons for the two main weapons and a button to block and that's it. The super is done by pressing the block + a main weapon button at the same time, but is incredibly unreliable, and the melee attack shares a button with the second weapon, and you almost never get the attack that you want (I'm unsure if it's context sensitive or what, but whatever it is it doesn't work). Even beyond the controls, the core gameplay just isn't really fun. The weapon attacks barely do any damage, and they can be easily blocked, so long-range combat simply isn't rewarding. The super attack might be a little better for this if it actually worked, but even then you can still fairly easily block or dodge it and at range there's not a lot you can do to make it more likely to hit. This means the game will mostly just boil down to melee combat, and the melee combat is too simple to be interesting. Many other games (even ones from this generation like Virtual On and Custom Robo) have figured out how to make these kinds of mech fights fun, so there's simply not much reason to bother with this one.
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