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Last Topic's Ratings:
Arcade's Greatest Hits: Atari Collection 1 - AA - 50% (2)
Daytona USA Championship Circuit Edition - GGAG - 88% (4)
J-Swat - ABA - 33% (3)
Solar Eclipse - AGGGA - 80% (5)
Solo Crisis - AB - 25% (2)
VR Soccer - BB - 0% (2)
I was surprised by the positive reception to Solar Eclipse, I wonder if it's the most positively received "real actors" game that we've covered so far? I don't remember any others making it into the high range.
Games for this topic:
Crypt Killer
Darius Gaiden
Game no Tatsujin
Kanzen Chuuki Pro Yakyuu: Greatest Nine
Mystaria: The Realms of Lore
World Heroes Perfect
I debated the inclusion of Game no Tatsujin because it's mainly focused on games that most westerners don't know how to play, though I suppose it's about time I finally learned the basics of Go. For those who prefer more westernized content we actually have an RPG that was localized this week in Mystaria, which incidentally is the same game as Blazing Heroes, they chose to rename it for a re-release for some reason.
Crypt Killer - A
ReplyDeleteDarius Gaiden - G
Game no Tatsujin - G
Kanzen Chuuki Pro Yakyuu: Greatest Nine - A
Mystaria: The Realms of Lore - G
World Heroes Perfect - G
Crypt Killer is a cut above some other poor lightgun games this gen, but it also can't quite measure up to the best this gen has to offer in the field. Between its macabre style, branching paths, and 3D visuals, comparisons to House of the Dead are inevitable, and unfavourable for Crypt Killer in basically every way. It's not nearly as dynamic as House of the Dead, it doesn't look nearly as good, and its boss fights are also of far lower quality (they're the worst kind of lightgun bosses where you just have to mash the fire button on them like 200 times). The biggest issue, though, is with how much the game flashes. This is a game that requires you to shoot near constantly, there are zillions of enemies and many of them require multiple hits, and the screen flashes white with every shot for several frames, even if you're using a controller and not a light gun. The end result is that in many segments, the screen will spend at least 20-30% of the time flashing and it's honestly just painful to look at. If you compare House of the Dead, it does not force you to fire as quickly, the screen flashes are shorter, and it also doesn't flash the screen at all when using a controller, making for a far nicer experience. It's not all bad though. One mechanic I do like is that you get a bomb subweapon which can be used to wipe a screen instantly, and making quick decisions about when to use it does give the game some depth. It also feels like there are somewhat fewer cheap shots compared to many older games of this type, and you can also earn extra hits occasionally, so it feels a bit more fair than most, and there's also quite a lot of stages in the game. Too bad they never released this on Wii or something where the screen flashing could have been eliminated.
Darius Gaiden rocks. We were already starting to see the Darius series become quite good with Darius Twin last gen, but IMO here is where it really starts to shine. This game basically has everything you could want from a shmup. It's got a ton of stages, it looks and sounds great, it has a ton of cool boss fights, it's challenging but not unreasonably so, etc. I particularly like the way the shield system works in this game, it lets you take a stray hit or two, but you really can't take too many, so it can cover you on a single random mistake but you still feel under a lot of pressure if you let your shield go down even though you can get it back relatively quickly much of the time. I also like how the enemies are colour-coded, which tells you which ones have which powerups, so you can focus on those ones. Compared to the PS1 version, the Saturn version has less slowdown, so this version is preferred if you have the option, though it's still a great game on both platforms.
I considered skipping Game no Tatsujin for its sequel, since it appears to be very similar on the surface, just with more games, but I'm glad I didn't. Game no Tatsujin is basically a board game compilation with 4 games: Go, Shogi, Richi Mahjong, and Reversi. The sequel adds Chess, Backgammon, and Renju to the list, though makes a fair number of other changes, which we'll come back to in a moment. For a simple board game collection, this game has a fair bit to it. Not only does it have pretty good presentation and music, there's also a decent number of modes available. For starters, there's free play mode, which is about what you'd expect, you can pick one of the four games and then set the rules and difficulty as you'd like. There's a ton of options and difficulty settings so this is a decent option for players of all skill levels. There's also a tournament mode where you can pick a game and face a series of opponents, and most interestingly of all there's the world tour mode, where you face opponents from all over the world and try to beat them all. An interesting aspect of the world tour mode is the various players have different levels of skill at the different games and you can challenge them in any game, so if you know several games you can get an advantage, but if you're a god of any one game you could just beat the entire game using that one mode, and I appreciate that level of flexibility. Honestly, I feel like this game has pretty much everything you could want from a collection of this type and all of the games play well. But what about the sequel? You'd think it's just the same thing but better, right? Well, not exactly. For starters, the world tour mode is gone, which is regrettable because that mode was very fun. The bigger issue though is that the AI plays REALLY slow in the sequel. In the first game, even on the hardest difficulty they almost never take more than a few seconds to play, but in the sequel the opponent taking a minute or more to make their move becomes quite common, and this is super tedious, particularly because most of the games don't give you the option to restrict the turn time. We'll come back to this more when we do the sequel, but overall I think the original is a little better.
DeleteKanzen Chuuki Pro Yakyuu is a competent but basic baseball game. There's not really a ton to say about this game other than it plays like a solid game from last gen. It has simplistic batting and pitching controls with none of the added nuance we see in some of the newer games, but everything controls well and it has decent balance between batting and fielding, where fielding doesn't feel bad but it also doesn't feel unreasonably hard to get on base. The presentation is also very simple, there's no commentary whatsoever and generally it doesn't feel like it's really doing anything with the newer hardware. It's a decent option for a classic baseball game, but there's already a decent number of those available and they generally have somewhat better presentation, so this one is probably a bit forgettable even if it is competent enough.
Mystaria: The Realms of Lore is a basic SRPG that reminds me a fair bit of Arc the Lad 1. Much like Arc, it's a fairly simple character-driven game with largely flat maps and no complex job systems or anything like that. Its most unique feature is its technique system, each character will begin the game knowing several techniques, but they can learn many new ones by using their existing ones. For example, the Healer begins with a healing spell, a fireball spell, and the ability to defend. If you heal a lot, you can learn a better heal, while using a lot of fireballs will learn a lightning spell. You can even learn a better defensive move by defending a lot, and from there using the new moves will learn even more new abilities. This helps to give the game more variety, though realistically you're probably going to want to try to learn everything as pretty much all of the moves are useful in one way or another. To actually use these moves, you have to equip them to a radial battle menu, but you can swap the equipped moves at any time as a "free action" so this doesn't really add any depth to the game, if you had to choose the 9 moves you wanted to bring into battle this might have given the game a little bit more strategy, as it stands it feels a little superfluous. Speaking of the radial menu, it's also the source of the game's biggest issue, which is the translation of the UI. This game has the classic "small character limit" problem we see with many old RPGs, but they've chosen to compress the names of the moves in maybe the least readable way possible, every word is compressed to 3 letters, so for example "Fireball" is FRB and "Healing" is HLG. Longer names like "Mystic Strike" become MYS STK and so on. This just looks super amateurish, even if you will eventually figure out what things are. I mean, "Healing" literally fits within 7 characters, and something like "Fireball" could easily be "Fire" or "Firebal" or something like that. "THR STR" ("Throwing Star") could be "Shurikn" or something along those lines, it would look vastly better. Sadly this is not improved in the Blazing Heroes re-release, which seems to change nothing other than the title. Other than that, the game is generally competent. The enemy AI is pretty poor, though the level of difficulty is generally decent, there's a reasonable variety in mission objectives, and there's even some nonlinearity in the order in which you gather the party members. Compared to Arc 1, I think the story is a bit weaker, but the gameplay is a fair bit stronger. I actually rated Arc 1 as B, but a fair bit of that was due to its extremely late release in the US, it didn't come out in the US until 2002, by which time a gazillion better SRPGs were available, but Mystaria came out in the US all the way back in 1995, at which time it would easily have been one of the best SRPGs to that point, and Saturn also doesn't have quite as much competition in that department as PS1, so even though this game is pretty borderline between A and G I'm more inclined to err on the higher side here.
DeleteWorld Heroes Perfect is kind of a misnomer, it sounds like it's basically just an upgrade or definitive edition of the previous games, but it's actually a massive step forward for the series. The first two games were really basic fighters that strongly resembled Street Fighter 2 (and specifically the original, not Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo), but the game now plays more like Darkstalkers. The big addition since the second game, besides new moves and better visuals, is a super meter. Like in Darkstalkers, when it's full, it turns one of your special moves into an upgraded version that functions somewhat like a super, but you also have SNK-style desperation supers that can be performed when your health is below half. Should you perform your desperation super when your super bar is full, you get a stronger variation of it instead, though an important note is that in both cases, you can't choose not to spend the bar, if you do the move, it gets used up. I think this adds an interesting strategic dimension to the game, in most other fighters where there's only a single super bar, you're basically just going to be looking to cash it out as soon as possible, but the fact that you can spend your bar in one of two different ways here makes you think more about how to use it. Plus, if you are trying to preserve your bar, that means there's one of your special moves you can't use at all, which is significant if it's a strong neutral tool. It's still on the simple side compared to later games that add all kinds of ways to spend resources, but it still adds a nice strategic element to an otherwise reasonably straightforward game. Beyond supers, the game is generally a competent old-school fighter. It's very footsies heavy and combos tend to be relatively short, though it has a few modern touches like the ability to airblock certain special moves and normals that have autoguard properties. Overall, it's really just a pretty solid game. I don't think it's quite on par with Suiko Enbu but as eclectic fighters go this is definitely one of the better ones.
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