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Last Topic's Ratings:
Crypt Killer - GGAA - 75% (4)
Darius Gaiden - GAGGGGGGGG - 95% (10) (2 SR)
Game no Tatsujin - GG - 100% (2)
Kanzen Chuuki Pro Yakyuu: Greatest Nine - AA - 50% (2)
Mystaria: The Realms of Lore - GGGA - 88% (4)
World Heroes Perfect - GGG - 100% (3)
The ratings for this topic were very similar to the PS1 topic, except one full grade higher. At least one system had good games that week.
Games for this topic:
Horror Tour
NHL 98
Planet Joker
Shichisei Toushin Guyferd
Sega Rally Championship
Worms
Shichisei Toushin Guyferd actually looks kind of cool, I'm curious to see what's going on with it. This is also probably the last time we'll have the original Worms.
Horror Tour - A
ReplyDeleteNHL 98 - B
Planet Joker - B
Sega Rally Championship - A
Shichisei Toushin Guyferd - A
Worms - A
Horror Tour is another Myst-like game, albeit one that tries to throw in a little bit of fanservice. Compared to Myst and Riven, one nice thing is that the puzzles are far less cryptic. The game makes it much more clear when you're looking at a puzzle and is much better about giving hints to the puzzles, so it's not unreasonably impossible to progress without using a guide. The biggest issue, as with many similar games, is that movement is quite slow, particularly as some scenes play FMVs and you can't move until these scenes both load and complete, which can sometimes make it feel like they game just got stuck or something. There are also various action sequences where you have to click on or drag an item on top of something in the action pane, and these are a pain because the cursor moves quite slow on Saturn, though at least you can save anywhere so it's easy to retry these segments if you fail them. As for the fanservice, it's certainly not great, the female models look fairly absurd and they also get extremely little screentime, so I don't think anyone would play the game just for that. Overall, it is playable, but there's a reason why they don't make these kinds of games anymore. If you are going to play it you might as well play the PC version, as it runs better and is in English.
NHL 98 is another one of the contenders for the title of worst Saturn port of all time. This is actually a decent game on PS1, but the Saturn version is one of the most butchered ports ever made. It runs at about 1/4 the framerate (PS1 version is 60fps or close, Saturn version is probably around 15fps), the players have less detail, the load times are longer, and the game itself also runs slower. About the only good thing you can say about it is that the commentary is intact, but the game itself feels atrocious to play on Sega's console. I sort of wonder how it was even possible to make a port this bad, like did they just port across the PS1 code with no changes whatsoever or something? It feels like this must not have been playtested at all. Obviously, never play this version, stick to PS1, it's so much better it almost feels like a generational upgrade.
Planet Joker is just another example of that age-old rule that shmups should not be 3D. There's very little to say about this one, it's one of the blandest shmups ever made. You can take many hits and have a shield, so it's not very challenging, there's nothing interesting about the weapon or powerup systems, and you fight the same handful of enemies a couple at a time over and over again (the game can probably only handle having a couple enemy models onscreen at once, so they never come in any interesting patterns), so it gets repetitive almost instantly. Even the transitions to the talking sequences are so poorly done that I thought the game locked up the first time. Easily one of the worst shmups ever made.
Shichisei Toushin Guyferd is kind of a weird game that somewhat resembles Super Adventure Rockman. It's based on a TV show that heavily resembles Kamen Rider, and there's a lot of clips from the show included. I was hoping it might be a fighting game akin to the excellent Kamen Rider games on PS1, but instead it's actually more along the lines of a first-person dungeon crawling RPG, albeit a very simple one with no levelling up. The dungeon design is not bad, it's relatively small and simplistic and you do get a map, so you shouldn't spend much time being lost, and the puzzles are also straightforward enough that I was able to solve them even without using Google Lens. Periodically you'll encounter enemies, which are divided into two types. Some of the battles resemble Super Adventure Rockman, where an enemy will appear onscreen and you'll have to line up a cursor to hit them. These work reasonably well, as they did in Super Adventure Rockman, no real complaints here. The second type of battle is what the game calls a "Card Battle", but this is a misnomer because there's no deck or anything like that, these are actually just super simple RPG-style battles. You have 3 actions to choose from, normal attack, special attack, and heal, and you take turns throwing attacks back and forth at each other. Hit rates are low, especially for special attacks, so there's a lot of luck involved, particularly since the heal diminishes in effectiveness the more you use it, so you can't really defend. The worst thing though is that at the start of each battle, there's a little mini-challenge where you have to mash for 10 seconds and whomever mashes more gets a power up. These are trivial to win against regular grunts, but the bosses mash super fast and if you let them get the powerup the battle will be effectively unwinnable (the first boss one-shot me from full HP after getting it) so these are basically mandatory to win, which means the battle system is mostly about mashing and luck rather than skill. Making these battles even more annoying is the fact that they don't reward you with anything. There are no levels in this game, the only way to get stronger is to find these little chips that make you stronger. They are often in item boxes and the enemies that you fight with the cursor can drop them, but as far as I know those battles are finite and the RPG battles never seem to drop them, making them feel particularly pointless. It's a shame, too, because pretty much everything else about the game is pretty good. The dungeon exploration is solid, there are parts where you have to explore the city and talk to people and these are fine, and there's a ton of FMV from the show and it's of good quality and the show is clearly pretty cool. If they had done almost any other type of gameplay for those battles this game would almost certainly be G, like for example it could have been a real card game (you periodically collect card data for the various characters in the show, but it's only useful for the 2P vs mode), or just make all the battles use the Rockman style or something. As it stands, it's still kind of an interesting game (definitely use a turbo controller), but you'd probably be better served by just watching the TV show.
DeleteSega Rally Championship is probably the quintessential Saturn game. Compared to some of the early issues Sega had with Daytona USA, this game is very solidly made. It controls well, has a decent framerate and draw distance, and the presentation is also quite good. It's also a game that you can literally finish in its entirety in 5 minutes. The gist of the game is that it's a rally series where you do 3 courses in a row, carrying over your time and position to the next race. If you finish first, you get to do a short bonus fourth track. Each course is only about a minute to 90 seconds long, leading to the 5 minute runtime for a full playthrough. Now, to be fair, you probably won't get first on your first few attempts, that might take around an hour, but there's basically nothing more to the game than this. There are 3 cars total (one of which has to be unlocked by beating the game on normal or higher), and no courses beyond these four. There is an option to do 3 laps instead of just one, which increases the length of the game to around 10 minutes, but this is still simply nowhere near enough content for a full-priced console release. It's quite a shame, because the mechanics are decent, if they had, say, increased the number of courses to 9 and split them into 3 separate rallies, then maybe started with 3 cars and put 3 more as unlockables for winning them, this might be G (though I would probably still be complaining about it being sparse on content). They could also potentially add in car classes or something to pad it out more, as Rally de Africa does, which feels completely fine in terms of content despite having only 5 courses total. Either way, this is just another example showing that Sega really did not understand how to do home console releases in this generation.
DeleteThere's not really a lot to say about Worms. It's a solid port to Saturn that plays well, the only real issue is that Worms 2 and Armageddon are huge upgrades over this game and they came out very shortly after this port. Worms 1 is comparatively barebones, lacking any kind of single player campaign and having very limited customization options. The AI is also way too good in this version, even the "normal" AI has completely perfect aim and will usually even hit the most optimal possible shots, ie blasting you into mines and such with perfect accuracy. There's still some fun to be had, but you'll probably want to stick to the sequels instead.