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Last Topic's Ratings:
Defcon 5 - AA - 50% (2)
Disney's Peter Pan: Return to Neverland - GAA - 67% (3)
Intellivision Classic Games - AABBB - 20% (5)
Neorude - AA - 50% (2)
Pitball - AA - 50% (2)
R: Rock'n Riders - AA - 50% (2)
This is probably one of the lowest rated topics ever, there wasn't a single game in the high range.
Games for this topic:
ATV: Quad Power Racing
Big League Slugger Baseball
Brave Prove
Gokuu Densetsu: Magic Beast Warriors
Project Overkill
Ultimate Brain Games
Kind of an interesting-looking set this time, pretty much all of these games look a little different from the norm for their genres. Also, there's a fan translation available for Brave Prove.
ATV Quad Power Racing - A
ReplyDeleteBig League Slugger Baseball - B
Brave Prove - A
Gokuu Densetsu: Magic Beast Warriors - B
Project Overkill - B
Ultimate Brain Games - A
Interestingly enough, this topic actually was going to feature TNN Hardcore TR instead of ATV Quad Power Racing until I noticed through a quick check that TNN Hardcore TR is a clone of C3 Racing. It actually lends itself to kind of an interesting comparison because while Hardcore TR is a solid game, it has almost nothing to do with Hardcore 4x4 (not surprising considering it was a completely different game that just had trucks slapped on top of it), by comparison ATV Quad Power feels much more akin to Hardcore 4x4, having generally somewhat similar mechanics and visuals, just with a lot more polish. Like Hardcore 4x4, this is a very bouncy game with extremely uneven terrain, but at least it handles decently here and the visuals aren't nearly as atrocious as in Hardcore 4x4. The end result is a product that generally works, the physics engine is fine and it does definitely feel like an off-road game, but it's also definitely a bit on the slow side. Races are very long and not terribly exciting, the courses are super generic (they have exciting names like "Forest 2" and "Snow 1") and there's not much sense of speed. It's definitely playable, but it feels quite bland.
Big League Slugger Baseball is a weird product. If you're familiar with Japanese baseball games, you'll take one look at the title screen and say "oh, I get it, this is a Power Pros game that's been stripped of the license and Japanese teams", as the art is still a dead ringer for it, but it's actually not. It seems that this is instead some kind of Power Pros knockoff, which actually doesn't have the licensed teams even in the Japanese version, and was seemingly re-released at some point to have less copyright-infringey art. Unfortunately, this is easily the most interesting thing about it, it is otherwise the most bog-standard baseball game imaginable. Apart from copying Power Pros' look, they didn't actually copy any of the things people like about it, like the Success mode, this game is actually extremely barebones in terms of content. Sure, you can edit the players and teams, but only the names of the players can be changed, it doesn't seem like the players actually have stats of any kind, and the gameplay is similarly basic, with only a few pitches available, all of which feel fairly slow, even your fastball (which is for some reason done by holding up). It is kinda playable, but it's easily one of the weakest baseball options on the system due to the lack of real teams or any notable features.
Brave Prove is a good example of how sometimes less is more. It's a 2D action RPG that somewhat resembles Terranigma, though it's not nearly as good in any respect. It starts off decently enough, the writing and characters have a decent bit of 16-bit style charm, and the combat controls are not bad. You have a three hit slash combo, but you can cancel it into a dashing slash followup, which is decently satisfying to land, and the early part of the game seems to have a lot of promise. Then you get to the first dungeon, and everything starts to come apart. Actually, the first part of the first dungeon is not too bad, you have to climb a mountain and fight some enemies along the way, but it just keeps going and going much longer than you'd expect. When you finally get to the end there's a save point, so surely there's a boss here, right? Oh no. This is only about the 35% mark through this sequence, what follows is a second, significantly larger and more confusing dungeon. This area is an absolute nightmare as every screen looks the exact same and there's tons of breakable walls you have to keep a constant eye out for, plus the area is absolutely massive, probably consisting of at least 15-20 screens with numerous paths in every single one. At this point, there's simply no way you can keep fighting all the enemies, if you didn't do so already by now you kinda just have to avoid most of them, it's not that they're especially hard or that you'll get run down, it's just that it gets far too tedious to unscramble this maze while fighting like 10 enemies per screen, each of whom takes several combos to defeat. If you somehow solve this nightmarish blue hell you'll finally come to another save statue and surely it's the boss this time, right? NOPE! There's still another area! Thankfully the third area is very short but it's insane that the first dungeon is basically made up of 3 separate areas, the third area alone is almost big enough for a first dungeon in a game like this. By this point it's probably been about 90 minutes, which might be a reasonable but still somewhat excessive length for the final dungeon in the game, but this is still the very first dungeon. The first boss is actually kind of an interesting fight and afterwards you gain access to magic, which adds a little more variety to the battle system, but this is basically what it's going to be like for the rest of the game. Basically no story, progressively longer and more insane dungeons where every screen looks the exact same and there's no map, and spamming the same combo over and over when you pin enemies in a corner. It's a shame, too, because gameplay-wise I don't think this game is much below Terrangima, but there's so much more to making a good JRPG than just fighting the same enemies in an endless dungeon ad nauseum. Honestly this game might actually be close to B.
DeleteGokuu Densetsu: Magic Beast Warriors is basically a way worse version of Twin Goddesses. It's an extremely basic fighting game that seems like it would be based on a TV show, as the entire game is done in Tokusatsu style and there are tons of live action cutscenes, but as far as I can tell it is instead an original property. In any case, it's an extremely basic fighting game that also completely sucks. Basically every mistake that was made in early fighting games is present here, combos are almost nonexistent, the damage of moves makes no sense, the frame data makes no sense, it's full of unavoidable tick setups since you can't tech throws (though the AI always throws on the first possible frame so good luck doing this against them), it's preposterously unbalanced, and so on. About the only reason to play it is for the presentation, which is legitimately kind of funny, but when the game is this bad it kinda feels like the joke's on you. I do appreciate that it shows you the motions for the special moves for the various characters, but there's not much else good you can say about the game.
DeleteProject Overkill is actually a very aptly named game, because its control scheme is complete overkill for the type of game that it is. It is essentially a fairly simple isometric action game, but it has twin stick controls, which would not be so bad if the game actually supported Dualshock, but it came out too early for that and so instead you have to try to use the face buttons to shoot. This setup can work, we've seen that done well by Super Smash TV, but this game makes many critical errors that make it feel like absolute crap to play. For starters, the game is isometric, so that means you almost always need to be shooting diagonally, which requires you to hit two face buttons at the same time. There is an option to rotate the controls so this only takes one button, but this still feels awful and you have to shoot cardinally often enough that it's still problematic. Furthermore, the game isn't even a true twinstick game. The entire reason to use twinstick controls is so you can move in one direction and shoot in another, but you can't do that here, you can actually only aim straight forwards or at a 45 degree angle while moving, and pressing any other direction just results in you getting one of those three directions at what feels like at random. As if this all wasn't bad enough, you also have extremely limited ammo so you have to make every shot count, but there are tons of enemies so you can't play methodically and aim your shots. It would probably be completely playable if they completely axed the ability to shoot at 45 degrees and just always had you shoot straight ahead, or if it actually had proper twinstick controls, but as is it's basically an unplayable mess. It's a shame, too, because the game does show some promise, the graphics are pretty good for their time, the game runs well, and there's 4 different characters to choose from as well as branching mission paths. I don't know why they didn't re-release this when dualshock came out because it might have been able to salvage the game.