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Last Topic's Ratings:
Criticom - BBB - 0% (3)
Death Throttle - BG - 50% (2)
Gokujou Parodius Da Deluxe Pack - GGG - 100% (3)
Hyper Securities S - AA - 50% (2)
Lode Runner Extra - BBB - 0% (3)
Murakoshi Masami no Nippon Rettou - GG - 100% (2)
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:
Black Matrix
Hyper 3-D Pinball
PD Ultraman Link
Star Bowling Vol 2, The
Steamgear Mash
Three Dirty Dwarves
I really, really hope Three Dirty Dwarves is good. Everything about that game looks hilarious. Actually, Black Matrix looks like an interesting game too, and I'm down for more Ultraman after playing Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher.
Black Matrix - G
ReplyDeleteHyper 3-D Pinball - G
PD Ultraman Link - G
Star Bowling Vol 2, The - G
Steamgear Mash - G
Three Dirty Dwarves - A
Black Matrix is a pretty interesting game. It's a strategy RPG that bares some resemblance to Tactics Ogre, but has a unique story and gameplay systems. We'll start off with the story, which is probably the main appeal of the game. The concept behind the game is that there was a war between angels and demons, and the demons were victorious. They enslaved the angels and sealed away God, and essentially rewrote history to suit their own purposes. Now, the angels are a slave class with no rights, what we would think of as traditional morality is outlawed, and God is seen as the supreme being of evil. The main character is an angel who lost their memory and lives with a demon who is in love with them, which is super forbidden in this world (lust is perfectly fine, but love is the greatest sin of all). This gets discovered, and the main character is tossed in a prison to be executed while the demon is taken away to some unknown place. With the help of a few other prisoners, they escape and try to find out what happened to their partner, but they'll end up making an enemy of pretty much the entire world along the way. It's a novel setup, though it has some limitations. For starters, an interesting idea is that you can choose the identity of the partner (but not the main character) at the start of the game, and something that got a fair bit of attention at the start is that there's a hidden male option, creating a same-sex pairing, but apart from aesthetics this choice doesn't really matter as the partner plays only a very minimal role in the game. This is actually not true of the Dreamcast remake, which expands the game to some degree, but we'll come to that in a moment. In terms of gameplay, it's a fairly standard old SRPG with some twists. Combat is generally fairly basic. You can attack, and use items and magic, but there's no class system as there is in many comparable games. You can sort of create classes depending on how you assign the stat points for each character (which is completely up to you), but things like which weapons they can use is immutable. One unique wrinkle is how reaction abilities work. You can choose between three reaction commands, guard, dodge, or counter, but you must choose during your turn. Guard is the most reliable and just reduces damage, dodge is less reliable but might avoid damage entirely, and counter takes the full damage but hits back, and proper use of all three is vital. Probably the game's most unique system though is the blood system, which is a resource you get from killing enemies. Before each battle, you can assign blood points to the characters, which are needed to cast spells, but they get used up in the process. This creates an interesting kind of risk / reward to magic, as while spells are very powerful, they're also very limited and if you cast spells now you might not have as many blood points as you'd want later, particularly because blood points are also used to upgrade weapons. They're not super limited and there are some areas where you can infinitely grind free battles but you'll still want to use them at least somewhat carefully. Another useful mechanic is that after battle, you get your exp in a pool and can choose whomever you want to give it to, which means you don't have to specifically try to save last hits for weaker characters or anything like that, which is nice.
Finally, one other thing I have to mention is that this game has difficulty options, which were a rarity for games in this era, and if played on the hardest setting it's legitimately quite challenging, which does a lot to help keep the game interesting (the gradual move towards making difficulty selectable in most modern RPGs has been one of the most important steps forward for the genre, as nothing gets boring faster than an RPG that's too easy). As I mentioned earlier, there's also a Dreamcast version of this game which is effectively a remake of it, as it changes a ton of stuff. The game is longer, there are some changed gameplay mechanics, there are a bunch of cutscenes, and the art style has been changed to be more traditionally anime-inspired. This version is probably somewhat better and if you're going to invest a ton of time into it you'd probably want to play that one, but the original is still a pretty neat game and I wish there was a fan translation available for either of the versions.
DeleteHyper 3D Pinball is pretty solid. In a lot of ways, it's quite similar to Pro Pinball, with the big difference being this is a single disc release with 6 pinball tables. This is a pretty solid number of tables, and they're also quite different from each other, so it's good value for money. A few of the tables aren't too incredible (I find the clown one particularly underwhelming), but there's so many that even if you don't like a table or two there's tons of others. I particularly like the gangster table, it has a cool aesthetic. Much like Pro Pinball, these are the more modern pinball tables that have the video screens and tons of events and bonus modes. In particular the game throws multiball at you pretty often, which is always fun. I also appreciate that you can choose to play the game using a top view camera, which even if it isn't the most flashy gives a very good view of the table. Overall it's just a pretty solid product that you can't complain about too much.
PD Ultraman Link is an interesting title. It's another falling block game, but with a pretty unique mechanic. The blocks in this game kind of look like Dr Mario pills, but it's not the colour of the blocks that matter, but rather the little nozzles on the end, which can connect to each other to form links. Making a link of 3 or more pieces clears them, causing other pieces to fall and potentially create combos, as in most other games. Creating a 4 link of a single colour is special, and clears out all other instances of that colour on your board (as well as activating your special attack in VS mode, more on that shortly), and making a 4 link of 4 different colors clears out all garbage blocks, though this is very tough to set up. What's interesting is that the different colours of pieces always have the links in the same location, for example yellow always has them stacked vertically while green always has them both on the same side, which means that some 4-matches are harder to make than others (purple in particular) and that certain combos can always be set up the same way with the same colours, which gives the game an interesting nuance that I appreciate. The game basically only has two modes, there's the main vs mode and a puzzle mode (which is actually under Training). When playing versus, each character has a different set of powers that they can activate when making 4-matches of a certain colour, and an interesting feature is that not all characters activate their powers using the same colours. The powers typically aren't too gamebreakingly powerful, generally small attacks or defensive moves, but it makes the characters feel a little different from each other, which is appreciated. Overall, this is a pretty unique title. It maybe doesn't do a ton with the Ultraman license, but the gameplay is surprisingly well thought-out and unique.
DeleteSteamgear Mash is a cute little game. It's an isometric action game with some light adventure elements. You play as a little robot who has a rapidfire shot, a charge shot, and some energy-consuming gadgets and have to battle your way through a colourful mechanical world, collecting new weapons and upgrades along the way. The game's controls are pretty solid, one of the most critical features for a game like this is the ability to strafe and it's wisely mapped to R for easy accessibility. Actually, one of the game's more unique features is the ability to learn new strafing skills, which can be swapped out with your default strafe using L. You also start with the ability to lock yourself in place and simply rotate, but you'll also learn abilities that let you spin while moving, shoot behind you, and more. I feel like the default strafing move is almost always the one you want, but it's an interesting idea. The subweapons that you pick up are perhaps more useful, as they are required to break certain blocks to progress, and are also useful for general combat, thankfully subweapon energy drops quite often from enemies so you can use these fairly liberally. The game also thankfully provides a map that you can call up at any point that should help ensure you don't get lost. There are a couple small issues though. The first is that the game is generally pretty zoomed-in, and you can't see too far around your character. Undeniably it is a pretty nice looking game and they probably wanted to show off the spritework but pulling the camera just a little further back would have been helpful. The second is that the game's bosses are generally pretty simplistic in terms of movesets but also have a ton of health, making these fights feel somewhat overly long and drawn-out. It's still a pretty decent game in any case and was probably one of Saturn's better early action games.
DeleteThree Dirty Dwarves is an okay game but it's not quite as good as I hoped. It is primarily a beat-em-up, albeit a somewhat unique one. Even when playing single player, you control all 3 Dwarves, and can swap between them at any time. If you take a hit, your dwarf gets stunned, and it swaps you to another one (assuming one is available). You can then rescue the downed dwarf by smacking him, which is pretty funny. The three dwarves are fairly similar gameplay-wise, each has a normal attack, a strong attack, and a special attack that requires a collectable to use (though they are pretty common). If this doesn't sound like a very significant moveset, it's because it's not, and that's one of the game's biggest problems. Most enemies die in one hit to your strong attack and there's not much enemy variety, so a lot of the game just involves walking forward, killing a few enemies with your strong attack, then repeating 20 or so times until the level is over. There are minibosses and obstacles from time to time, which helps, but the levels still drag on quite long, as is a typical problem for this genre, particularly for those where the gameplay is overly simple. After every beat-em-up level is a boss fight, and these are actually really well done. There's a ton of variety to them and pretty much every one has some unique mechanics, these are easily the highlight of the game, but even this comes with a small drawback in that many of them can only be played by 1 player, so if you're playing multiplayer the other players can only watch while the first player fights the boss, which significantly lessens the appeal of the multiplayer. Overall, it's not terrible, and having the good boss fights does help give you motivation to go through the beat-em-up levels, but it's not strong enough for a really high recommendation. It's a high A, but not quite G.