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Last Topic's Ratings:
Final Fantasy 6 - GGGGAAA - 79% (7) (1 SR)
Mission, The - BBB - 0% (3)
Pastel Muse - BB - 0% (2)
Rescue 24 Hours - AA - 50% (2)
Truck Rally - BA - 25% (2)
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 3rd Edition - GA - 75% (2)
I was a bit worried when putting in the entry for Truck Rally that we had accidentally done the game twice, upon seeing the game in the list with the same score. But it turned out that was actually the extremely similarly named Truck Racing, which got the exact same score. I kind of want to go back and play that one again now to see if they're pretty much the same.
Games for this topic:
Doraemon 2: SOS! Otogi no Kuni
Kickboxing
Love Game's: Wai Wai Tennis Plus
Motor Mash
Stahlfeder: Tekkou Hikuudan
Syphon Filter 2
I've been kind of dreading coming to Doraemon 2. I enjoyed the SNES Doraemon games from Epoch, and I've always hoped they'd be able to build upon that concept, but they've struggled this gen, and this is the last remaining Doraemon game, so if they ever figure it out, it'd have to be here (actually, there is one more Doraemon game, but it's a Mystery Dungeon clone). Actually, it looks like there's also a Gamecube game in the series, so I suppose this isn't actually the last game after all.
Doraemon 2: SOS! Otogi no Kuni - G
ReplyDeleteKickboxing - A
Love Game's: Wai Wai Tennis Plus - B
Motor Mash - B
Stahlfeder: Tekkou Hikuudan - G
Syphon Filter 2 - G
Doraemon 2 is actually almost everything I hoped for out of Doraemon game, though a single major issue somewhat compromises the experience. The gist of the game is that it's a platformer where Doraemon and friends take the roles of various charaters from famous folk tales, for example, Doramon is Urashima Taro, Nobita is Momotaro, and s***uka is Little Red Riding Hood. Each of the five characters has a set of 5 stages based on their respective fairy tales, and they're quite colorful and varied. For example, Doraemon's first stage is a fairly simple beach stage, then he has a swimming stage, two stages in the dragon palace, and his boss is the dragon king. The gameplay is generally what you'd expect from a platformer, you can run and jump (including onto enemies to defeat them) and you can also use a variety of Doraemon's gadgets as weapons, like grenades and bubble guns. You can also swap between the various stories at any time, and this is actually relevant because once one character finds a weapon or item it makes it available to all characters, and you'll need the help because this game is hard as hell. I wouldn't normally complain about a game being difficult, but this game is probably in about the same league as Super Ghouls and Ghosts, which you wouldn't expect at all from a Doraemon game. For starters, there's no health bar in this game, you die in one hit. You can collect a shield powerup to give you one additional hit, but enemies are extremely abundant and aggressive and it is easily lost. Stages are fairly long and have few checkpoints, and some of the boss fights are also brutally difficult. The boss of Nobita's first stage, for example, is a group of 3 animals who are all really dangerous and have a boatload of health. I actually thought they could not be defeated using the gadgets until I looked up a video, it turns out you actually can beat them this way but each takes about 40 shots. Using your jump attack does beat them faster, but at significantly more risk, I feel like this would take dozens of tries to win on official hardware until you figure out how to exploit their AI. Tricky platforming is also common, especially on Suneo's stages, which are based on Jack and the Beanstalk. Apart from the difficulty, it's otherwise a pretty great game, it's pretty fun and the music and visuals are both quite good, but you may find it hard to get far without save states unless you're incredibly patient.
Kickboxing should really be called Dontkickboxing. It's a sequel to Contender, and plays somewhat like it, albeit with kicks added into the mix. The way the game generally works is that punches are fast and safe but do minimal damage, while kicks are much riskier but do a little more damage. The problem with kicks is that there's a special block stance that is used to block kicks (you block punches with back / downback / upback instead), and if you block a kick in the block stance, you can retaliate with a kick of your own that will deal double damage, which is almost always an instant knockdown. As such, the general strategy to the game is to just punch until you see the opponent do a kick (kicks have fairly reactable startup), then switch to the block stance and obliterate them for it with the counter kick. The computer is also really good at doing this, and I absolutely couldn't win until I figured out what was going on, at which point I stopped ever kicking except to punish and from that point on I won every time. Obviously, this is not an ideal mechanic, since in a game between two human players no one would ever kick and thus it would just be a boring slugfest of punches (punches are unreactable and blocking them doesn't really accomplish anything). It would probably have been better if the double damage bonus for hitting the counter kick was removed, that way kicking would not be nearly as risky. At least the single player content is decent, there's a lot of characters (though they tend to play fairly similarly) and a couple different modes, and there is a little fun to be had landing the counter kicks, but just like with Contender it feels like with a little more work it could have been a fair bit better.
DeleteWhen you have a name like "Wai Wai Tennis Plus", you'd think it would be somewhat similar to Wai Wai Tennis, but actually this is a completely different and much worse game. The game has an almost completely different setup, the original game is focused around a "build a character" mode, while that is totally axed in this version and you can only choose from premade characters instead. This also means the progression mode has been axed for just single matches. The graphics have been redone, but they look worse, and the gameplay is untouched, and it's still awful. This version really should have been called "Wai Wai Tennis Minus", but neither is worth playing.
Motor Mash is a top down racing game similar to Micro Machines, but with no charm and bad controls. I actually feel like there's not really much more to say about it than that, it's kind of similar to Micro Machines 64, it's just drastically worse in every way. The biggest problem is the handling, which is far too slippery for this type of game, though the perspective is also often poor, the powerups suck, and there's also no progression of any kind. Even if there wasn't a Micro Machines game this gen this probably still wouldn't be worth playing.
Stahlfeder is a solid classic-style vertical shmup. It generally feels very similar to Raiden, but with a handful of small innovations to the formula. Like Raiden, there's a red weapon and a blue weapon, with the red weapon having spread but the blue weapon having power, however, unlike in Raiden you always have both of them available and they're fired with separate buttons. There are also four different ships available, and they all have different weapons and bombs, as well as slightly different speed and shield stats. Speaking of, this is not a one-hit kill game, you can take a few hits before being defeated, though there are no lives here. Unlike many games, the shield bar actually refills between stages, which makes it somewhat more forgiving than most, and overall this game is definitely somewhat on the easy side, though not to the point of being dull, it's just not as brutally tough as many other games in the genre. It also looks and sounds pretty decent too, it's got very clean spritework and also makes some minor use of 3D for certain enemies and bosses, though it never feels out of place. Probably the only real downside is that it doesn't support two players, though it's still a pretty fun game. I feel like you could try to make the case that there's been a ton of games like this this gen, but to be honest I don't really get tired of them, I feel like when done well these mechanics are fairly timeless.
DeleteSyphon Filter 2 is mostly the same as the first game, but the first game is great so this is not a bad thing. As with the first game, I really have to praise the level of polish here. For starters, the presentation is great, there's tons of voice acting and short cinematics, the interface is very clean, there's a map, there's a reasonable number of checkpoints, etc. There's also pretty much none of the jank that you would often associate with early 3D games of this type. The action button pretty much always does what you'd expect it to and you never really have to fiddle around with mission objectives or anything like that. I also want to draw attention to the game's great opening cinematic, which really sets the stage well for the action and I was impressed by the quality of the voice acting and direction here. Something I want to bring up that I didn't mention the when we covered the first game (because to be completely honest I didn't totally understand it at the time) is the Danger Meter. When enemies shoot at you, the danger bar slowly fills up. Initially I thought this was just a warning that you're being shot at, but this actually serves a key gameplay purpose. When the danger meter is not full, you cannot be hit, you only start taking damage when it fills up, though if you're out in the open or there are enemies very close it fills up very fast. I actually think this is a somewhat elegant solution for an issue that a lot of shooters have, which is how do you have the enemies shoot at the player in a realistic way without just relying on RNG to determine if you get hit or giving the player a boatload of health. Understanding this mechanic lets you be much more aggressive in how you tackle certain scenarios since you know as long as you can get to cover or kill an enemy before the bar is full you'll be fine, though you can die quite quickly once it does fill up, and it also doesn't protect you from certain other hazards like grenades. Compared to the first game, my biggest issue with it has been fixed, which is that the movement in the first game felt a little loose, but it's been tightened up here and it feels great to control now. The other big change is that there's now multiplayer, though to be honest I feel like this is of little consequence. It only supports two players and there's no bots, and I simply don't feel like one-on-one deathmatches stay interesting for that long (there's a reason there's only one such battle in the entirety of the original Unreal Tournament). At least they did have the sense to keep the maps small and there are quite a lot of them, with more being unlockable via secrets hidden in the levels, but I feel like the game's mechanics still aren't especially well-suited to it. A weird trait of the multiplayer is that the autoaim is very unreliable here, I actually think the game is invisibly using a version of the danger meter in multiplayer to determine whether or not you get hit, but the manual aim always hits so you'll probably spend a lot of time just trying to manual aim each other to death, which obviously isn't all that interesting since you can't move while doing it, though at least you can corner peek. Still, even if this is largely a throwaway feature, it doesn't really matter as the core game is really solid, I just kind of wish they had added co-op for the main game instead.
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