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Last Topic's Ratings:
Colony Wars Vengeance - AGGAGG - 83% (6) (1 SR)
Live Wire - BBB - 0% (3)
Table Hockey: Highschool Kimengumi - BB - 0% (2)
Mad Stalker: Full Metal Force - BAB - 17% (3)
Toyota Netz Racing - AA - 50% (2)
X-Men: Mutant Academy 2 - GGGGAGA - 86% (7)
Pretty decent number of votes for X-Men Mutant Academy 2, I guess the X-Men can always bring in the crowds. I'm looking forward to watching X-Men 97.
Games for this topic:
Final Fantasy 6
Mission, The
Pastel Muse
Rescue 24 Hours
Truck Rally
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 3rd Edition
Let there be much rejoicing, this is the last Final Fantasy remake on PS1, which means I can no longer stall before putting up FF8 and FF9. Also, I'm kind of vaguely intrigued by The Mission.
Final Fantasy 6 - A
ReplyDeleteMission, The - B
Pastel Muse - B
Rescue 24 Hours - A
Truck Rally - A
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 3rd Edition - G
It's no secret I've never been the biggest fan of FF6, and watching the recent AVGN video on it actually helped me to articulate why. I think one of the main things people were impressed by when it came to FF6 was its scope. It's true that for it time, FF6 is a very big game. It's quite long, has a lot of characters, and a somewhat more complex story compared to most earlier RPGs. However, the thing with games where scope is the appeal (which also includes games like Ocarina of Time) is that scope is constantly increasing and it never takes long for others to catch up. Final Fantasy 6 released during the beginning of the RPG boon in the US. It was predated by Secret of Mana, and within a year we would also see Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, all of which are games that I would say have comparable scope. And though we would not get them in the US until much later, Tales of Phantasia, Live a Live, Treasure of the Rudras, Seiken Densetsu 3, and Star Ocean all released within a year or two as well, and I would say that all of these games are better than FF6. A lot of the issue is that FF6 actually doesn't execute on its large scope all that well. It has a ton of characters, but very few of them factor into the story in any meaningful way, with at least half the cast basically vanishing into the background the moment they join. Each character has a unique ability, but very few of them are actually useful. Magic outclasses all character abilities and most of the more interesting abilities like Gau's Rages or Mog's Dances simply aren't all that useful. Even among spells, the vast majority of spells are useless, with only a handful of spells ever seeing any kind of use. The game's encounter rate is high and due to the simplicity of the battle system random encounters are rarely interesting, which means the story has to do most of the heavy lifting and I don't find it to be especially strong for the most part. Sure, everyone loves Kefka, but the main characters in the game are otherwise pretty dry and undergo minimal character development throughout the game. I generally feel like Final Fantasy 7 outclasses FF6 in almost every way imaginable, for example compare the opening bombing mission to the Narshe Mine section, gameplay-wise they are similar but it's much faster paced, and even the boss generally works better since you're not likely to constantly trigger the counterattack due to long buffer times between inputting the command and the attack actually going off. But we're not here just to talk about the SNES version of the game, this review is for the PS1 version, which is a significant downgrade. The biggest issue is load time, actually, the load time before and after battles isn't as bad as I remebered (though it does make the high encounter rate more annoying), the big issue is there's very significant load time when opening and closing the menus, which of course you'll be doing near constantly since this is an RPG. The game also has some slowdown, both in the field and during battles, which isn't present on SNES. And finally, this game also simply suffers from the fact that it came out much later. For a game whose main appeal was seeming impressive for its time, by the time it came out on PS1 both FF7 and FF8 were already out, as well as numerous other PS1 JRPGs, which ensured that this lackluster port wasn't going to impress anyone. It's still not nearly bad enough for B, but it's the worst way to play a game that I wouldn't even put near the top of the system it originally came out on.
I had absolutely no idea what to expect from The Mission, but it's unfathomably atrocious, probably one of the top 5 worst games of all time. This game simply does not work on any level, having among the most poorly designed controls and mechanics of any game ever made. The gist of the game is that it's a soccer themed action game, apparently based on a commercial, where a bunch of soccer players have to steal some artifact that looks like a ball and defeat a bunch of mooks with it, while avoiding traps and lasers along the way. The issue is, the controls in the game simply don't work at all. The first thing you have to do is avoid some lasers to get the ball. You can see the lasers easily enough, but good luck avoiding them. You can slide under the high lasers, but the game has the most unreliable jump of all time, which frequently doesn't come out at all when the jump button is pushed while moving, making it almost impossible to get the ball without damage, the best option is just to get hit and then try to slide into the ball with your mercy invincibility. This causes an alarm on the wall to go off. Your next goal is to kick the ball into the alarm box to break it, but it's high on the wall, and this is virtually impossible. I had to look up a video on how to hit the box, and from the comments, the uploader of the video is seemingly the only person who ever got past this point in the game, with everyone else commenting that they never hit the box and simply threw the game away. 99.9% of the time, you will do a low kick when you use the circle kick on the box, but 0.01% of the time, you will kick the ball into the box, with no explanation whatsoever for why it works. I think it has something to do with extremely precise positioning + maybe some kind of directional input, the way I did it was to face away from the box, then start charging the kick, then press up before I kicked. This was still nowhere near reliable and I had to save state after every attempt as you have to hit the box like 5 times within a very short time limit, which I doubt anyone has ever done on official hardware. Should you make it past this point you're greeted by some completely atrocious action segments where you have to kick balls into enemies while trying to avoid traps, again remembering that the controls don't work at all and you can't properly jump. There are passwords you can use to skip ahead in the game as you will constantly get stuck, though why you would want to experience more of this is beyond me. Quite possibly the worst game on the system, and it has 4000 games.
DeletePastel Muse is actually slightly different compared to the Saturn version. As before, this is basically Bust-a-Move but sideways, you have to launch the balls into a little cone, which generally just makes aiming your shots more annoying since you now have to charge them to determine how far the shots go. On the Saturn version, in order to get the little line that shows where your shot will go, you have to play on the easiest difficulty, but on Playstation there's just a setting in the options for it to always be on, which is definitely helpful, and I feel like the shot timing is also a bit slower (and thus easier to aim on PS1) as well, though this could just be due to the game running slower overall. In any case, it is a bit more playable here, but I still feel like it's never particularly fun or clever. It really is just "worse Bust-a-Move" in pretty much every way.
Rescue 24 Hours is an interesting title. The gist of the game is that you drive a rescue vehicle that has to handle various emergencies like fires and vehicle accidents. The game proceeds in real time, and you get various dispatches of places that you need to get to, which you much quickly reach to deal with the problem. A successful rescue (which is done with start + circle after arriving) awards money and reputation points, though failing to make it in time costs you reputation points. One of the primary forms of nuance is that your vehicle must switch modes at HQ to handle different types of problems, for example if you're currently in tow truck configuration you can't handle fires. If you get a dispatch while out on the road, you won't have enough time to get back to HQ and switch, so you need to pay attention to the dispatch and decline it if you can't feasibly solve it (you might also need to decline due to it simply being too far away). You do lose a reputation point for declining, but not nearly as many as you'd lose for failing the mission, so this is always the better option. When you're not on the clock (which is almost never), you can visit shops to upgrade your vehicle, but a call will almost always come in before you can get there so you'll usually have to decline them to go shopping. You can also simply wait at HQ until a call comes in, which is the easiest way to handle them since you can immediately swap to the right configuration. The setup is somewhat interesting, but it has a few flaws. For starters, when not on a call, you have to obey the traffic laws, which is kind of tedious, if you fail to do so you'll get a small fine. These fines are quite trivial compared to the amount of money you make so you could just pay them, though you can get a few reputation points for maintaining a clean record. Most of the time I'm often happy to have a call come in just so I can drive fast (the rules of the road don't apply while your siren is on). The upgrades to the vehicle also generally feel somewhat unnecessary. The default vehicle is already good enough in pretty much every way, and while you can upgrade it to have more health or be a little faster it's not really needed, about the only shop you really need to visit is repairs every once in a while. Overall, it's a pretty unique game, though it also does tend to get repetitive, I feel like it could have used just a little more polish.
DeleteI didn't realize this at the time, but Truck Rally is actually completely identical to 5 Star Racing from a few weeks back, only this time there are only trucks and there's slightly fewer courses. The tracks are actually even identical, it just only has the first 6 tracks from 5 Star Racing instead of all 10. By all rights, this should be B, it's a purely inferior version of an already mediocre game, but it simply controls too competently to be B when there are so many racers that have completely unplayable driving engines cluttering up the B tier. It is really, really close to B, though, don't mistake this for being the same quality as Final Fantasy 6 or Toyota Netz Racing or something.
Speaking of games that are identical to their predecessors, we have Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 3rd Edition. Well, that's not COMPLETELY true, there are some very minor changes in this version, most particularly Regis will sometimes ask you to confirm that a choice is your final answer to psyche you out, and there's some new graphics for things like polling the audience, but it's virtually the same game but with new questions. Still, as the previous game was already a pretty much completely perfect conversion of the TV show, you really can't ask for much more than that. I mentioned this last time, but I absolutely love the way the game taunts you by taking longer than necessary to reveal the answer, this is so key to the appeal of this game and they nailed it. It's also a big deal that they got Regis for this, as his delivery is also key to making this game work. Phone a Friend also still has a unique 30-second conversation for every question in the entire game, which is an absurd degree of attention to detail. Maybe one of the best game show conversions to a home game ever made.
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