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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.
DeleteUltimate Brain Games is actually very comparable to Game no Tatsujin, which we covered for Saturn last week. Like that game, this is a collection of popular board games, though compared to Game no Tatsujin, this selection will likely be significantly more appealing to Westerners. UBG brings together Battleship, Mahjong Solitaire, Backgammon, Chess, Checkers, Reversi, Dominos, and Connect Four. You really can't fault this list much, this is a really solid lineup of games, but unfortunately the games themselves are not nearly as well fleshed out as Game no Tatsujin. For starters, there's nothing comparable to Game no Tatsujin's World Tour mode or even the championship mode, there are only single games against the AI and multiplayer here, but an even bigger strike is the vast majority of the games have no customization whatsoever, not even difficulty settings for the AI (the only game that allows this is Chess). The games control perfectly fine and the game's general presentation is pretty solid (in particular the OST is surprisingly good), but I definitely feel that they could have done a lot more with this package and I think Game no Tatsujin is a lot stronger overall.
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