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Last Topic's Ratings:
Discworld 2 - BB - 0% (2)
FEDA Remake: Emblem of Justice - GGG - 100% (3)
Hansha de Spark - GG - 100% (2) (1 SR)
NBA Jam Extreme - GBB - 33% (3)
Robotica - GA - 75% (2)
Sega Ages: I Love Mickey Mouse - GAAA - 63% (3)
Something that occurred to me while tallying this up is that we haven't seen a squiggle bracket game for quite a while.
Games for this topic:
Criticom
Death Throttle
Gokujou Parodius Da Deluxe Pack
Hyper Securities S
Lode Runner Extra
Murakoshi Masami no Nippon Rettou
This is actually a really interesting one for me. My cousin had Death Throttle on PC when I was younger, but I never knew the name of the game and could never remember enough about it to find it (I just remembered it was a violent game about being a cab driver). When I was looking up the games for this topic I instantly recognized it as being that game, though I don't think that was the name it had on PC. In any case, I'm very curious to see it again. Also, it's no secret that when making the list for Saturn, I was somewhat more permissive with Japanese-only games than I had been in the past, largely due to better translation tools being available, but Hyper Securities S might be pushing it in terms of what can feasibly be played without full Japanese fluency. We'll see how this one goes.
Criticom - B
ReplyDeleteDeath Throttle - G
Gokujou Parodius Da Deluxe Pack - G
Hyper Securities S - A
Lode Runner Extra - B
Murakoshi Masami no Nippon Rettou - G
As I noted on PS1, Criticom might be the worst fighting game ever made. Literally everything about this game is terrible. It looks terrible, the animations are terrible, the sound quality is terrible, the controls barely work, and you can't even block. Even something like Iron and Blood looks like a masterpiece compared to this game.
Revisiting Death Throttle was interesting. The gist of this game is that you're a cab driver in a post-apocalyptic city and you have to rush people to their destinations while blowing away anyone who gets in your way, which is virtually everyone as almost everyone else in this city is out to kill you. It's sort of like Carmageddon meets Crazy Taxi, though it predates both of those games and was clearly quite ahead of its time. The first thing to note about the game is that the core mechanics actually work pretty well. The game's basic loop of "find passenger, drop off passenger, buy repairs and upgrades" is fun and generally feels well-balanced. You make about enough money to keep the car in decent shape as long as you play well and you won't just get wiped out in an instant (as can happen in a game like Crime Killer), but it's also not so easy that it becomes boring. The port also makes it to Saturn impressively well-intact, this version is pretty much a dead ringer for the PC version, save a minor Saturn-exclusive issue where due to the game's variable framerate, it sometimes runs significantly too fast in areas with very little going on. Probably the game's biggest issue has to do with its progression. The game is divided into 6 stages, and to actually beat each stage you have to go to the exit and enter a password. The password is given to you from a special mission, which will always differ from the standard dropoff missions, for example on the first stage you have to blow up some taxis. The issue is that it's not clear what you have to actually do to trigger these missions, even all this time later no one really seems to have any idea beyond "drive around and deliver a bunch of people and you might find it eventually. Perhaps there is some trick to it and it can be done fast, but it means you spend a fair amount of time just aimlessly delivering people and hoping you find it. This isn't the worst thing ever because the core gameplay is fun, but this aspect of the game definitely could have been tuned up a bit. At least once you know the password, you can essentially skip that stage next time because the passwords never change.
Gokujou Parodius Da Deluxe Pack is a great game where there's not too much to say about it. It's a port of Gokujou Parodius and Parodius Da to Saturn, and both are pretty much perfect conversions. Gokujou Parodius is a masterpiece and is still one of the best shmups ever, with an absurd number of characters, many of whom are really interesting to play, as well as great level design and visuals. Parodius Da isn't quite as good but it's still a worthy inclusion. Obviously, the Gradius powerup system is always really cool, but Parodius takes it a step further by also including the bell system from Twinbee for even more chaos. There aren't really any extras to this collection or anything, but when the games are this good it doesn't really need them.
When it comes to Japanese-only games, I always have this internal debate over whether or not the game is playable enough for US audiences. In recent years, the threshold of what I will accept has gone up as tools like phone translation have become more widely available, but there is still a cutoff where I deem a game to be too inaccessible for GAB. While playing Hyper Securities S, I constantly wondered whether or not it was such a game, but I think the reality is that the language barrier isn't really the issue, the game is just innately somewhat opaque in a manner similar to Asuka 120% Excellent. Hyper Securities S is a game about managing a police department consisting of 3 female police officers. Each week, you have to create a schedule for the officers, consisting of some mix of training, police operations, and rest. The goal of the game, as far as I can tell, is to take over the city, which is divided into 23 districts. Keeping districts free of problems through police operations gradually increases your level of public support there, which is important because there are also rival police forces vying for control, which kind of feels a little similar to something like Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Periodically, while performing police operations, your officers may encounter a criminal who they have to battle, using a simplistic card-based battle system. These battles are very simple, enemies have both an HP and an FP stat, and you have to deplete either to win, before they do the same to you. This typically comes down to picking your strongest attacks of one type or the other (depending on how you train the girls, they'll tend to be better at one type or the other) and just wailing on them for a few turns, but there are some special cards as well that have various effects like buffs and debuffs. These battles are probably the highlight of the game, but they're also fairly rare, you probably get one about every 2-3 weeks or so. In any case, the general setup of the game is okay, but the problem is that the game doesn't give you much feedback on what you're doing. True, unlike Asuka 120, when you do a training exercise, the game does at least show how it affects your stats, the problem is that the effect that your police operations have on the various districts is not shown, which makes it very hard to tell if your choices are effective. I had to result in screenshotting the district statistics screen every week and comparing it to the previous week to get any sense of what effect my actions had, which would obviously be impractical on a real console. Another annoyance is that although the districts are numbered, on the schedule screen they are all identified by name (in Kanji no less), and the name of the district is not shown on that screen, making it impossible to tell where someone is assigned to unless you know kanji and memorize the names of all the districts, which is stupid. In any case, after fiddling around with the schedules for a while I gradually found out that it seems optimal to do 2 patrols per person per week, and the road patrol the first person is initially assigned to barely does anything, so I swapped it out for the other type of patrol. Even then, progress was very slow. I eventually figured out that an auto schedule option exists and started using that. The AI is far more aggressive with pushing the girls hard on little rest than I was being and this does seem to get you more battles, though of course if you exclusively use this it eliminates almost all the strategy from the game. Either way, it seems like an interesting but flawed idea where most of the issues stem from the interface design. The main reason I wanted to cover this game is that it has a sequel on PS1 and I'm curious to see if that version makes some improvements to the formula.
DeleteLode Runner Extra is basically just a level pack for Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. The gameplay is identical to that game, except that the levels are all crap. This is obvious right from the get-go, with the first level being one of the most tedious levels ever created. This game introduces the concept of gold behind hidden behind blocks, so you must destroy absolutely every block in this stage (which takes forever), and also double back and repeat sections of the stage constantly. There are no enemies, so it's trivial, it just takes forever. Things really don't get any better, with pretty much every stage having many parts that require you to backtrack over and over and just generally feeling like an absolute slog to play. It's an interesting case study into how important level design is for games like this, I suppose, as you can easily take a good game and make it terrible by just swapping out the levels for terribly designed ones.
DeleteMurakoshi Masami no Nippon Rettou appears to be completely identical to the PS1 version, which is great because this is probably the top fishing game of the era. This is a game that just does everything right - it has great presentation, the fishing mechanics are great, it's not overly difficult to find or hook fish, even the music is pretty good. This game just has a great core loop. Murakoshi introduces you to the type of fish for the next area (complete with a full cutscene explaining how to catch that type of fish), then sets you up with the relevant gear and has you catch a few of them before moving on to the next area. It ensures it never gets tedious or repetitive and also prevents you from getting lost or stuck, which can definitely be an issue with some other games of this type. There may not be quite as much here as in River King but it's certainly a lot easier to get into and is also a lot more polished.