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Last Topic's Ratings:
Eliminator - AAA - 50% (3)
Kuru Kuru Panic - AB - 25% (2)
Resident Evil 2 - GGGGGGGGGGGG - 100% (12) (1 SR)
Sports Superbike 2 - AB - 25% (2)
Viva Soccer - ABB - 17% (3)
Zero Divide 2 - GGAAA - 70% (5)
When we covered it on N64, Resident Evil 2 got 15 ratings, so it makes me happy to see it get a comparable amount here, despite PS1 GAB being in its 7th year.
Games for this topic:
Defcon 5
Disney's Peter Pan: Return to Neverland
Intellivision Classic Games
Neorude
Pitball
R: Rock'n Riders
We've had D and Z and now R, what's up with all of these one-letter names this generation? It's also a game that I think looks kind of interesting, though whenever I say that it turns out badly. We also have another look back at Gen 2 with Intellivision Classic Games, which is interesting to me because it's a system we actually owned.
Defcon 5 - A
ReplyDeleteDisney's Peter Pan: Return to Neverland - G
Intellivision Classic Games - B
Neorude - A
Pitball - A
R: Rock'n Riders - A
Defcon 5 is pretty much the same as on Saturn, a good idea marred by confusing and flawed execution. The best example of this is the very start of the game, where you have to find the control room. On Saturn, I had to look up a video in order to do this. On Playstation, despite having done it before and vaguely remembering where to go, I still had to look up a video again to find it. This feeling of the game generally feeling somewhat clunky and unintuitive unfortunately never goes away, even though it has some interesting parts. I also think the PS1 version seems to look a little worse, but it's not by enough to drastically change the experience.
Peter Pan is pretty solid. It's a 2D Action game in a somewhat similar vein to the other Disney titles from this gen, but what sets it apart is that Peter Pan flies, making it play fairly differently from a standard platformer. Beyond having free movement in all directions, it's otherwise set up fairly similarly to other 2D platformers, particularly the Donkey Kong Country games, with its focus on finding hidden secrets in the levels. It's a pretty well-polished game, I particularly appreciate the little tutorial messages that pop up from time to time, they're just enough to ensure you don't get confused (like if you reach a point in the game you can't access yet because you need to come back with a powerup you'll get later, the game tells you this) without feeling like they hold your hand overly much. The controls are tight and it generally looks and sounds pretty good, even the difficulty level is generally fine, there's really not much to complain about. Having played a fair number of other platformers this gen has taught me not to take this level of polish for granted.
While gen 2 definitely hasn't aged gracefully, Intellivision Classic Games still feels like it fails to do the system justice. The first issue is the presentation of the collection, which is extremely dry. If we look at the Activision Classics game based on the Atari 2600, for example, the presentation of that game has a lot of energy, there's the TV showing the gameplay from each game, and the cart being inserted, even the pause menus have more style to them, but the Intellivision one is just the boxart and that's about it. A bigger issue is the game selection itself. There's a fair number of strange choices and omissions here. We'll assume for the moment that they couldn't get many third-party games, which might explain the lack of things like Carnival, Frogger, QBert, Dig Dug, Beamrider, Burgertime, Donkey Kong, etc, and they probably couldn't get the license to the Tron or Dungeons and Dragons games (even though all of the games listed here would have greatly improved the lineup), but Lock n' Chase and Buzz Bombers are both first-party and would have helped bolster the lineup of single-player games tremendously (a lot of Intellivision games can only be played by 2 players). They could easily dump Chess and Checkers for these, as there's pretty much no reason to play something like this on Intellivision. Beyond this, there's some control issues, as you'd expect. Intellivision games were controlled with a disk and keypad, and while some games convert gracefully to an analog stick and buttons, some of them definitely don't. This generally results in a collection where only a couple of the games feel fun to play. The interviews are also not great, they play in a very small window and there's not as much details about the specific games as I'd like. Overall, it kinda feels like they just didn't put as much effort into this one as most of the other collections, maybe due to the perception that Intellivision is a niche product. If you want to play Intellivision games, Intellivision Lives is a way better product.
Neorude is a very weird game. It bills itself as an RPG, but it's really more of a graphic adventure game (ala Monkey Island) that also has battles. The game is 3D, with fixed camera angles, but it's controlled using a point and click interface. You have 3 characters, whom you can switch between at any time, and they each can examine and interact with objects, which is sometimes crucial to gain clues or solve puzzles. Solving a puzzle of opening a treasure chest gives exp, which means you can usually choose which character you want to level, which is relevant for the game's battles. Periodically you come across enemies, though many of them can be avoided by either going around them or solving puzzles, and they also don't respawn, so there are only a limited number of encounters. The game's battle system takes place in real time, with you being able to give commands to the three characters as the battle plays out. There's two fighters and one healer, generally the fighters will try to charge a particular enemy while the healer stays back and supports. When being hit, both your characters and the enemy are subject to a ton of hitstun, so generally whomever gets the first hit in will be able to keep wailing on the target with little retaliation. Obviously this is bad if you're on the receiving end of it, so the best option is to order your fighter to defend, then have the other fighter attack the same target to make it a two on one, then, once you have the advantage again, you can have both of your fighters stunlock the victim to oblivion, though this could result in any remaining targets attacking the healer. It's not a bad concept, but the controls for it are very awkward and sometimes the characters seem to ignore your commands, and the healer will often sit there and not heal unless you manually control her, so it could definitely use a bit more work. Actually, a lack of polish is kind of the main problem with the entire game. During the main adventure-style mode, a big issue is the fixed camera angles, you frequently have to move to a very specific spot onscreen to get the camera position to change, which makes navigation more awkward than it should be (you can sometimes manually change the camera position, but frequently not), and it's also really annoying that all dialogue automatically clears itself after a few seconds (generally too fast for the translation app on my phone to process it). There are some interesting ideas here, but the entire thing definitely feels somewhat rough. This is a series with 3 games though, so perhaps it will get better.
DeleteI feared that Pitball might be atrocious, but it's not, though it's not great either. The gist of it is that it's kind of like a violent version of basketball where you can attack the opponent to steal the ball. To score, you have to jump and shoot the ball into a kind of glowing orb, but you shoot the ball like a gun so it's quite easy to aim and hit the orb every time once you get used to it, which is one of the game's biggest problems. Every time someone scores, the game stops for a few moments while a faceoff occurs, but goals can happen every few seconds so you spend a heck of a lot of time waiting and matches tend to drag on, I think the game would be way better if hitting the orb scored a point but play continued. Beyond that, the game generally feels very simple, attack the opponent with your strong attack, take the ball, shoot a goal. There are special attacks that are done with button combinations, but they generally feel superflous, except for the ultimate move that lets you shoot a 3 point goal. Ultimately, there's not really enough depth to it for it to stay interesting for terribly long, though it's playable for a few rounds and it might be decent with 4 players.
R: Rock'n Riders is a weird game. It's kind of a musically themed snowboarding game set in a dystopian future where rock music has been outlawed, and you have to flee from the oppressive regime on a snowboard and also bring back the power of rock to the world. As you might imagine, probably the best thing about the game is the music. The soundtrack is quite good, and features a really cool effect where the better you're doing, the more tracks are overlaid on the music, taking it from a very understated melody to rockin out as you do better. De Blob would later do something kind of like this, and it still rocks here. To do well and improve the music, you have to pull off tricks and collect instruments, which is done by bonking into the green-haired rider on the course (hitting the red one instead costs you a ton of points). One of the characters also has an interesting wall-kick move that he can do that scores a ton of points and makes playing as him way easier than the others, you have to get the trick system down pretty well with the other characters to win (triangle jumps, you hold L1 or R1 to spin, and a direction on the dpad to do a trick). The low point of the game is probably course design, although the courses last several minutes they're only comprised of a couple distinct segments that repeat numerous times, and avoiding the rider who makes you lose points often feels needlessly difficult. I think it plays pretty well as the rider who has the wall kick, when playing as him the game feels more like G, but as he is only one of the four characters and none of the others have something similar I think the overall experience is more on the A side. It is maybe worth a quick playthrough for the music though.
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