This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Ballistic - GGAA - 75% (4)
Block Kuzushi Kowashite Help - GG - 100% (2)
Kawa no Nushi Tsuri: Hikyou o Motomete - GG - 100% (2)
Raven Project, The - ABB - 17% (3)
Test Drive 6 - AGAGA - 70% (5)
Vangale: The War of Neo Century - BB - 0% (2)
A pretty highly rated topic, it's not often that the PS1 topics outscore the Saturn ones.
Games for this topic:
5 Star Racing
Death Wing
Planet of the Apes
Qix 2000
World Tennis Stars
Z
I'm actually quite curious to see what Planet of the Apes will be like, though I must confess that I've actually never seen the movie.
5 Star Racing - A
ReplyDeleteDeath Wing - A
Planet of the Apes - G
Qix 2000 - A
World Tennis Stars - B
Z - B
5 Star Racing is hard to rate. For starters, I was sure this game had to be related to All Star Racing, as it is extremely similar to it, but it's seemingly not. In any case, it's basically the same concept, it's packaged as though it consists of 5 Racing games, but it's clearly just one game with 5 visually different but identically controlling sets of cars. Like All Star Racing, there's also no form of progression whatsoever and the different cars available in each class are merely visually different but have the same stats, making it feel very barebones. The biggest difference from All-Star Racing is that the handling engine in this game is competent. It still has very mushy collisions, but the cars control decently well. This engine certainly could be used to create a competent game. There are 10 tracks here, which is more than enough for a game from this era, all they'd have to do is put together some kind of tournament structure and make some of the cars unlockable or something and this would be an easy A. The question is whether or not it's a very low A even without it and I think it probably just barely is, because there's enough racing games with atrocious controls that are significantly worse than this, but I'd still never recommend it to anyone. It's just so weird to me that they would go to like 90% of the effort to making a competent game but just not put in the extra 10% to finish up the product.
Death Wing is a somewhat promising game mired by a few major issues. It's a very arcade-style Space Dogfighter where each mission tasks you with destroying some kind of stationary structure while not getting pelted to death by enemy fighters. The game's first major problem is that the enemy fighters are extremely fast and you have no effective tools for dealing with them. Your craft is equipped with a laser and three special weapons. An infinite use lock on homing laser, a limited use lock on photon torpedo, and a (worthless) blind fire cluster bomb. The problem is that neither of the lock-on weapons are fast enough to hit enemy fighters, even if you're right behind them, leaving only the laser for dealing with them, and it's fairly unreliable. Considering that the fighters are typically launched in groups of 5-6 and can track you perfectly at all times, this is a huge problem. On some stages there's a limited number of them and shooting them all down is feasible, but on many stages they periodically replenish if shot down and the unreliable method of shooting them makes them effectively impossible to deal with. If the Homing Laser actually did its job and would blow them up, guaranteed (compare the lock on charge shot in Starfox 64), the game would be vastly better. The second issue is that the game has a lot of pop-in. Because the enemy fighters are so endless, most of the time your only real option is to try to evade them and taking occasional strafing runs at the objective, but unfortunately the draw distance in the game is quite bad and this can make it very hard to tell where the objective even is. There is a radar, but it's not terribly reliable for gauging distance vs height, and when the objective doesn't appear at all when you're seemingly right on it it's easy to second-guess yourself. If they couldn't draw the whole model, at least putting an indicator in space leading to the target would be a huge help. It's too bad these issues couldn't have been resolved because the game does otherwise show a decent amount of promise, it's very fast and it has a branching mission structure similar to Starfox 64, it just needs a little bit more polish.
I actually think Planet of the Apes is pretty cool. The first thing I have to note about it is that it's quite ambitious for PS1. It's a full 3D action-adventure game with a fair number of cutscenes and full voice acting, and although you'd think this would probably push the PS1 too hard it actually runs pretty well. Draw distance is maybe not that great, but it sort of suits the game's aesthetic and I think the game actually does a good job of feeling kind of generally mysterious and foreboding, as you'd expect from an alien world run by apes. I've seen a fair number of people compare this game to Tomb Raider, though I don't think that comparison is very apt, as there's very little platforming here, this really plays more like Metal Gear Solid, though it's clearly not nearly as well-polished as that game. You'll have to traverse various 3D environments to collect items and solve simple puzzles, while also trying not to set off alarms or get overwhelmed by guards. I think most of the game's mechanics work pretty well, though combat is clearly the low point of the experience. You can get various weapons, but except for guns they're all pretty much useless. The Apes are quite tough in combat (which makes sense), pretty much your only hope against them is to stunlock them with your regular punches. Knives and clubs and such do hit harder, but are also slower and they can counterattack, whereas a well-timed barrage of punches will stagger most basic enemies (tougher enemies are more resiliant against this and can attack through it, and are better shot or avoided). There is also a stealth mechanic that works decently well, when you crouch you can see a radar that shows the position of nearby enemies, even through walls, which is very helpful, and you can fairly easily avoid enemies this way, though there's no attacking from stealth so it's not super useful to get the drop on enemies unless they're sleeping. Still, stealthing near a corner as someone comes through a door, then attacking them from behind is a decent way to get a few hits in before your opponent can retaliate and that helps a lot here. While I think it would have been nice if there was a stealth kill mechanic or the weapons were a little better, I don't actually think the combat is enough of a problem to hamper the game that much, and generally I had fun playing it, and it feels like a decent representation of the source material.
DeleteWorld Tennis Stars is completely atrocious. It's a super barebones Tennis game with atrocious animation and controls that somehow came out 2002. The first thing that needs to be noted about this game is how much its controls suck. Not only does this game have the super common issue of swinging your racket completely locking you in place, it's a very common issue for you to press the button to swing and have your character simply not swing at all! I'm not sure if this is some stupidity related to you not being able to swing while moving or something but it's easily the least responsive Tennis game I've ever played. Even when you do hit the ball, all hits travel extremely slow so there's no way you're actually hitting the ball past anyone, all points are scored either when someone fails to hit the ball over the net or when you press the button and the player doesn't swing. Beyond the godawful gameplay, there's also only 6 characters and no form of progression whatsoever. I literally can't figure out how this game came out in 2002 as it wouldn't have been acceptable even if it was a launch title, let alone one of the last games for the system.
DeleteZ is clearly a somewhat decent game, but not on PS1. It's an extremely simplistic RTS game where each map is divided into sectors. Unlike most RTS games, you don't build bases or collect resources. Instead, factories are found in most sectors that produce units on a timer, for whichever side owns that sector when the timer goes off. You can choose which unit the factory builds, then it will just keep building that unit until it's told to do something else. To capture a sector, you simply need to be the only ground unit in that sector. Generally the map starts with your side controlling part of the map, the enemy controlling part of the map, and part of the map being unclaimed, so it's extremely vital to move fast, and therein lies the problem. Since there's no real strategy to unit creation or combat, pretty much the entire game revolves around micro, and you simply can't micro effectively with a controller, especially without any kind of sensible hotkey setup. There is a hotkey to select units (it's R2 + left / right, for some insane reason), but you'll quickly have so many units that this is completely impractical for commanding them, you simply have to use the "click and drag to draw a box" method, and it simply can't be done efficiently enough using the controller for the amount of jumping around the map to gather newly made units that you need to do in this game. The core game itself has a few issues too. For starters, since unit production is tied to how much of the map you control, the second one side controls more than half the map, the match is a foregone conclusion. It's very easy to simply wall up and protect the edges of your sectors while you amass a massive army for a final push and there's almost nothing the opponent can do about it except fortify, which won't win but does make the match take forever. Many RTS games have some variant of this problem, but due to the simplicity of this game it's more obvious here. Of course, you could potentially try to outplay the opponent via good micro, but with that not really being an option here the missions frequently feel like a slog.