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Last Topic's Ratings:
Chessmaster 3D, The - AAAB - 38% (4)
Initial D - GABB - 38% {4}
Lake Masters - BB - 0% (2)
Note, The - AA - 50% (2)
Spectral Tower - GAB - 50% {3}
Super Dropzone: Intergalactic Rescue Mission - AA - 50% (2)
Not the best start for the games that were newly added to the PS1 GAB list (both Lake Masters and Spectral Tower were added more recently), but I'm confident that some of the new games will end up being good.
Games for this topic:
Army Men World War: Land, Sea, Air
Gundam: Battle Assault
Motorhead
Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996
Shanghai Banri no Choujou
Stray Sheep: The Adventure of Poe and Merry
I suppose technically Army Men probably should have been the headlining game for this topic, but I'm quite curious to try out Stray Sheep, as at least from a visual standpoint it seems like something I'd like. Also, there's apparently a million versions of Shanghai on PS1, so we'd probably better get working on them.
Army Men World War: Land, Sea, Air - B
ReplyDeleteGundam: Battle Assault - G
Motorhead - G
Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996 - G
Shanghai Banri no Choujou - G
Stray Sheep: The Adventure of Poe and Merry - A
Army Men World War: Land, Sea, Air is a sequel to the original Army Men World War, and while it does make some improvements it still has a ton of issues. Like the original game, this is a more "serious" take on the Army Men franchise that lacks any of the humour you'd find in a game like Sarge's Heroes, which is clearly a mistake, as the humourous presentation added a lot to those games and with only the gameplay to carry the day here the flaws are much more evident. Gameplay has definitely been refined a little since the first game, it's now quite clearly a "cover shooter", and the core mechanic of running to cover, pressing the button to dive, then trying to peek out and shoot enemy soldiers is kind of fun when it works. Unfortunately, it frequently doesn't. Unlike more modern games where you kind of "snap" to cover, here the cover is totally manual, which basically means you're totally at the mercy of the level geometry as to whether it works or not. A very frequent issue is that the cover you select might just be a pixel too tall for you to crouch fire over, causing you to hit your cover instead of the enemy. This requires you to stand up to fire, which basically ensures you'll get torn to pieces as you have very little health. The game features very generous auto-aim, but this is actually a problem because it even activates when you're in the manual aiming mode, sometimes causing you to try to autoaim at the wrong targets and making it impossible to lead your shots (shots in this game are not hitscan and have travel time). Explosives are also massively overpowered, anything dies in one hit to an explosive and they have large blast radiuses that completely ignore cover, so if an enemy shows up with a rocket launcher and you don't immediately detect and eliminate him you're just outright dead most of the time. Making matters even worse, the game doesn't run all that well, and has limited draw distance and slowdown, making these firefights even more problematic than they might be otherwise. As the name implies, the big new feature here is that you also sometimes get to control vehicles, though these are generally autoscroller sections where you simply aim. A couple of these are decent, like the jeep mission on the second level, but on pretty much any situation where you need to shoot planes the game starts to fall apart, because planes are fast, which means you need to lead your shots to hit them, but due to the limited draw distance you generally can only see them for a split second before they're right on top of you. It is playable, but there's so many crappy sections that I'm hard pressed to see why anyone would put up with it. Sarge's Heroes is certainly far superior in every way.
Well, I have to give them credit, Gundam: Battle Assault is an absolutely massive improvement over Gundam: The Battle Master. Literally every complaint I had about the first game has been addressed. The nonsensical health system is gone, you now just have 3 standard health bars (you go into a knockdown state when each bar is depleted), there are now actual supers (though no super bar, you just get 3 supers per round), you can now block projectile moves and you have limited ammo, so you can't just spam them the whole match, and there's a lot more moves and combos. It's still not quite as good as Gundam Wing Endless Duel, but it's actually a fairly competent fighting engine now. The game features a story mode, and something I like about it is that although you always play as Heero Yuy, you can select any mobile suit in the game to use, so it really functions more like a standard arcade mode with a little talking. Speaking of the roster of mobile suits, it's actually quite good, there are over 15 and they play pretty differently from each other. There are even a handful of giant suits, which play kinda like Gold Lightan from Tatsunoko vs Capcom, where they have a ton of armor but are big and slow. As with Tatsunoko vs Capcom, I don't think these characters are very interesting to play as or against as you generally kinda just have to lame them out with zoning since they can't be comboed properly, and this is probably the game's biggest issue, though I do appreciate that they do let you unlock and play as these characters, as in most games these would have been unplayable boss characters. Somewhat lame boss fights aside, I think about the only thing you could complain about is the game being somewhat basic. Combos into supers do a ridiculous amount of damage and are easy to hit confirm, you get a lot of advantage after taking out an enemy health bar, and the AI isn't particularly smart, which can make it feel a touch on the mindless side, but it's entertainingly mindless at least and there's quite a bit of replay value. It's maybe a bit of a low G, but I appreciate it when developers actually learn from their mistakes.
DeleteMotorhead is a pretty cool game. For starters, this game has a great aesthetic. From the slick menus to the stylistic track designs, this is a pretty nice-looking game that kind of reminds me of wipeout, albeit where you race traditional cars. The gameplay of the game is kind of wipeout-esque, as well, in particular this is a very technical game with narrow tracks that demands both good track knowledge and total mastery of the game's controls. It is quite satisfying to play well as the game feels very fast and it is quite responsive when you get the hang of it, but you will absolutely have to brake for difficult turns and you'll probably need to use the manual transmission if you're attempting to play on anything above easy (there's no shame in playing on easy, it's still very tough even on that setting). Speaking of settings, something I think is interesting is that the game gives you the option to either play on 60fps with only 2 computer opponents, or 30fps with 5 computer opponents, which feels oddly modern for its time, not many games of this generation paid any serious attention to the framerate. I think I actually prefer the 30fps options, though. Besides having more opponents, the 30fps setting is also locked 30fps and never has any dips whatsoever, whereas the 60fps setting frequently drops to 40fps or so and with how technical this game is it's very noticeable, though when it is hitting 60fps it feels great. Progression in the game is pretty decent as well, it's a fairly standard tournament mode, but there's a fair bit to unlock, and I like that you can swap to any available car for every circuit, because sometimes this is necessary. There's no question that this is a very hard game, but it's also quite a rewarding one, and probably worth a look for wipeout fans.
I'm honestly kind of shocked, but Olympic Soccer 96 is actually pretty good. Visually, it's a very plain-looking game, the player models are of very low quality (though at least they animate somewhat well), it clearly looks like a 1996 game, and the commentary is also very basic, but the game's limited presentation belies its surprisingly well-polished mechanics. If we were to look at other soccer games I've reviewed here, there's a number of common complaints that come up - passing often selects the wrong target, the game has difficulty auto-selecting the right player, the balance of offense vs defense feels off, slide tackles are either too weak or too good, etc. This game simply doesn't have any of those problems. For starters, passing feels great, and the game always seems to know pretty much exactly where you want to send the ball and which player you should control. Defense is solid too. You can steal the ball by simply touching the ball with your player, which feels quite intuitive, and the general mechanics of the player with the ball being just a little slower than everyone else but not egregiously so just feels right. One thing you might point out is that the cross feels somewhat weak in this game. There isn't even really a true cross, it's more of a high shot that you can angle towards your players to attempt to head into the goal, but to be honest it's not really a big deal. The standard shot still works really well, and corners are also quite strong, so it doesn't really feel like you need it and many soccer games are too dependent on the cross anyway. Speaking of corners, I also quite like the way throw-ins / corners / goal kicks work, rather than how you just get a directional indicator or something as in many other games, here you instead get a positioning cursor that gives you precise control over where to put the ball, it's just another way that the game feels nicely responsive. One last strong point is that the goalies in the game actually aren't all that great. A good shot will almost always either go in or result in the goalie giving up a bad rebound, so a well-played offense will generate quite a number of goals, as it should be. Overall, while still clearly a product of its time and somewhat outclassed by later games, you can tell the dev team for this one understood the mechanics really well and it was almost certainly your best option for the first few years of the era.
DeleteShanghai: Triple Threat is mostly the same game as on Saturn, though there are a few more differences than you'd probably expect. As before, this is a Mahjong Solitaire game with a ton of options, though probably the main appeal is the arcade mode, which tasks you through playing through a bunch of different board patterns as you travel through China. This mode is pretty great, obviously Mahjong Solitaire is a classic game and having the board variations helps give it just enough variety to remain interesting. There's even a couple different rulesets to choose from, each with their own full arcade mode, so there's a ton of content here. Compared to the Saturn version, there are a few differences. For starters, every stage in the Saturn version has a picture of China in the background of each stage, which is initially in one colour but the full colour version is revealed when you win. The Playstation version instead has a plain background, but still reveals the picture upon winning. The two version of the game also have a totally different OST. They're both good, but I think the Playstation version is a little better. Overall, I might lean towards the Saturn version just by a hair, if for nothing other than the fact that it's localized, but you can't really go wrong with either version. Something else worth nothing is that there's actually tons of other Shanghai games on PS1 (my list contains 5 more), so you might maybe think "well, as one of the earliest ones maybe it's better to get one of the later games", but actually I think this is the best one, though we'll discuss that more when the others appear.
Stray Sheep is indeed cute, but it's not quite as fun as I'd hoped. It's basically a very simplistic adventure-style game with occasional minigames. It does have the typical adventure game trappings of visiting various areas, picking up and using items, and talking to various characters, but everything is extremely simplified. For example, an icon will appear over your head whenever you can interact with something, and if it's a situation where you need to use an item, the item window will pop up automatically, so there's not really a lot of puzzle solving to it. In the few situations where you actually do kind of have to solve something, the game gives you a lot of hints as well. For example, an early challenge is to feed Poe's bird friend. You can find an earthworm for him, but he doesn't like it, and states he'd rather eat something sweet. If you try to get him another earthworm, an NPC will tell you that the taste of the earthworm is influenced by its diet, and you should try feeding it some grass or flowers or something. You can now return to the first area to find some flowers you can pick, and if you read their descriptions one of them says it has a sweet smell, that's the one you need to feed to the earthworm to make the correct flavour. Actually, this particular puzzle was not so bad, but pretty much everything is much simpler than this. It's probably the case that the game was made for kids, but there are also occasional minigames that you need to beat and some of them are actually fairly hard. For example, there's one where you have to push an armadillo off a bridge. To run, you have to press L1R2, L2R1, over and over and over again. You have to make sure to press the combination of buttons properly and also at a pretty good clip to win, I think a lot of kids would struggle to win that. In any case, it's not atrocious, but nothing about it really grabs me. It's pretty cute and kind of goofy, but it's not really funny or clever enough to really make me want to keep playing, and the puzzles and minigames are a bit too basic to really be compelling either.
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