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Last Topic's Ratings:
Horror Tour - AG - 75% (2) NHL 98 - GBB - 33% (3)
Planet Joker - BBBB - 0% (4)
Sega Rally Championship - GGAGGGAA - 81% (8)
Shichisei Toushin Guyferd - AG - 75% (2)
Worms - GAGGGAA - 79% (7)
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:
Center Ring Boxing
Enemy Zero
Pinball Graffiti
Twinkle Star Sprites
Virtua Fighter Kids
Wara Wara Wars
I constantly get Twinkle Star Sprites mixed up with Twinkle Tale and thus I always think I've played it on Genesis, but the two games actually have nothing to do with each other.
Center Ring Boxing - G
ReplyDeleteEnemy Zero - A
Pinball Graffiti - A
Twinkle Star Sprites - G
Virtua Fighter Kids - B
Wara Wara Wars - G
I generally don't expect much from boxing games, but Center Ring Boxing is actually pretty good. In some ways, this game plays somewhat similar to K-1 Grand Prix, being a somewhat slower take on the sport that emphasizes management of stamina and defensive tactics and positioning over the button mashing that usually dominates boxing game conversions. In Center Ring, you have 3 status bars, the top one is your down bar. Rather obviously, this depletes when you get hit and if it gets emptied you get knocked down, though it also comes back pretty fast when you're not being hit. The second is your stamina bar. This depletes when you punch, and when it's low your punches hit less hard and you eventually can't throw any at all, but it recovers when not punching or quickstepping. Finally there's your health bar, which decreases when you get hit or knocked down. It's impossible to empty this, but as it falls, the maximum length of your down and stamina bars drops (particularly the down bar) and you take longer to get up after a knockdown. In any case, managing the top two bars is vital. When your down bar or stamina bar gets low, you need to back off or block and let them recover, but obviously the opponent will want to chase in this situation, especially if their own bars are pretty healthy. However, if they get too aggressive you can stick out punches in this situation, and the bars come back pretty fast as long as you're still healthy, so the tide of the match can turn fast. You have two main punch buttons, a fast punch and a hard punch, and one good thing is that the fast punch still hits fairly hard, a couple fast punches can still put you at risk of a down, and they can also interrupt hard punches, but hard punches are nasty to block and are good counters if you avoid a punch. In terms of progression, the game features a fairly simple RPG-like mode where you create a boxer and go through the ranks. Before each official fight you can train a bit to increase your stats, though it kinda feels like they don't affect the game that drastically, but since the core gameplay is pretty solid it's not too much of an issue. Overall, it's definitely one of the better boxing games I've played, it shows how developers are starting to have a better understanding of game mechanics this gen.
Enemy Zero is an interesting but flawed game. It's kind of a mashup between a Myst-style adventure game and an FPS, where short adventure segments are broken up by action segments. This is actually a pretty decent setup. Keeping the adventure segments short keeps them from being overly cryptic or confusing and the action segments help add tension to the game, which does a far better job of selling the horror atmosphere compared to D (which was made by the same developer). However, both of these sections have some flaws. The adventure sections are so simple that they basically have no purpose other than storytelling and to look nice, the puzzles are pretty much limited to "get item, use item in same room", and the game gives you tons of hints in the event that you somehow can't figure something out. As such, the action segments have to do most of the heavy lifting, and they're also not fantastic. See, this isn't actually a normal FPS. The big gimmick in this game is that the enemies in the game are all totally invisible, and they also kill you in one hit if they get close. To detect them, you have a sonar device that beeps based on their position and proximity, which kind of works, and it helps that the game does include an optional tutorial on how to use it. The bigger problem is that when you need to fight them, which you sometimes do, you have to use an extremely crappy gun that has a triple whammy of having almost no range, needing to charge, and having very limited ammo. Even if you know exactly where an enemy is, hitting them with this thing still feels like a complete crapshoot, and the game also features not only limited saves but limited reloads. Of course, this can be mitigated by save states, which makes the game significantly more playable, and it's actually kind of an interesting game, with a plot that's very similar to Alien. It still wouldn't be a strong recommendation but it's at least a big step up from D.
DeletePinball Graffiti is a pretty interesting game, though I don't think it quite succeeds on its ambition. The big deal here is that this game has a story mode, which is extremely unusual for a pinball game. This actually plays a lot like the story modes found in most pachinko games, except with Pinball. You can play pinball against various people and see story sequences as you try to gradually win tournaments and work your way up the ranks. It's a very interesting and unique setup and I've often mentioned that I think pachinko games would do better if the game involved slightly more skill, similar to pinball, so it's a strong concept in theory, but I don't think the execution is quite good enough to pull it off. One of the biggest issues is that this game has only three tables, and all of them are available everywhere, which gives it a very limited sense of progression. As the game involves travelling from city to city, I think the game probably would have fared better if each region had a single table, forcing you to learn that table to win that region's tournament and move onto a different one, though either way there'd probably need to be a few more than 3 tables to make it work, maybe 5-6 would have been sufficient. The tables themselves are all right, they're fairly modern in style, though I don't feel they're quite as good as many of the tables you'd see in games like Pro Pinball. They're certainly still fine but I don't know if they really hold up forthe number of times that this game forces you to play them. There's also a basketball minigame you can play, though it's also not especially great. Overall, I do appreciate that it tries something different, but there's only so far you can stretch this volume of content and I think something like Digital Pinball Necronomicon pulls off a progression mode in a pinball game significantly better.
Twinkle Star Sprites is a very unique game. It's effectively a mashup of a shmup and an action-puzzle game, the screen is divided in half, with one player playing on each side. Enemies appear from the top, and when you shoot them they blow up, possibly creating chains, which send attacks to the opponent, similar to something like Puyo Puyo. You can shoot the attacks your opponent sends at you back, and you also have a charge shot, which can unleash a super attack at the opponent after building it up enough. You have a couple hit points (though not many) and the goal is to be the last one standing. It's an interesting idea, and there's a lot of different characters who all have different charge shots, bombs, and special attacks. This was originally an arcade game, but the Saturn has some extras, most notably an extra character and some improved visual effects and art. However, the Saturn version does have one very significant annoyance to it. See, the original arcade version had an absolute ton of slowdown, which makes the game feel fairly lousy to play, as the slowdown messes up the timing on your charge shot, frequently causing you to shoot uncharged shots when the game slows down and take damage. The thing is, in the Saturn version the slowdown is emulated, and you can unlock the option to turn it off entirely, but it requires you to beat the game once with the slowdown enabled, which is a fairly miserable experience (I originally rated the game as A before discovering and unlocking this feature). Once done you can simply turn it off forever and the game plays way better, but if you play the Dreamcast version you can just turn it off from the start as apparently they realized how much it hampers the game, and the DC version also has english text and better sound, so you might just want to play that version instead.
DeleteVirtua Fighter Kids is a really weird product. It's basically Virtua Fighter 2 but chibi, with all of the characters being replaced by silly super deformed variants. Visually, it actually looks quite good, the character models are solid, they animate well, and the facial expressions are often quite funny. The game also adds a new Kids mode, which simplifies the inputs to some degree, for example you can do downed attacks and throws with a single button, which is welcome. However, the gameplay of the game has a lot of issues. The biggest one is that the switch to SD characters and proportions means that all of the characters are super stubby and all of their attacks have no range, effectively eliminating any form of footsies or spacing from the game, and considering that footsies is basically the entire point of the series and the game has not been adapted in any way to account for this this is a huge issue. The lack of footsies, combined with the uselessly floaty jumps and nonexistent zoning options or other unique tools basically means the game has no neutral and the entire cast feels the same to play. It is kind of funny to look at, but the moment you switch back to Virtua Fighter 2 it's instantly obvious that that game is drastically better, and I still don't even think VF2 is one of the best fighters of the era.
I was worried Wara Wara Wars might be really complex, but thankfully it's fairly easy to understand and a pretty fun game to boot. It's essentially a much more straightforward version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you start by choosing an army and then pick another army to conquer. This takes you to a battle map which is divided up into sectors, with your army initially comprising only one sector while the enemy army controls one or more sectors elsewhere on the map. On each turn, you will be granted money based on the number of sectors you control, though a portion of this money has to be used to pay your army (if you don't have enough to pay them, some of your units will be lost). You can spend whatever money is left to recruit and upgrade your troops. Recruited troops always come in at C rank, which is basically cannon fodder, so you'll want to save some money to upgrade your troops to B and A rank, which are far more useful in battle. You then get 3 movement points to use to move your armies and capture new sectors or attack enemy armies. When a battle occurs, it's pretty much completely automated, the armies just go at each other until only one is left standing. You can use cards to influence the battle if you have them, which are sometimes offered for sale at the beginning of turns, but they use precious money that you won't be able to spend buying troops. Generally, cards are useful to turn the tides of big battles between massive armies, but when armies are small they generally aren't worth the investment. This relatively simple setup hides a fair bit of depth, though. An important mechanic is that the attacker has a disadvantage in battle, every sector has a defense bonus that gives the defender a bit of an edge, and the forts around the map have a particularly strong one, so that might make you want to wall up inside a fort if you think the enemy will attack. Of course, if you hide inside a fort the enemy can just go around the map and capture the rest of the sectors so you have no money, so you can't be too passive, but you can create sub-armies to capture sectors while the main army holds a key choke point. Also, just like in Advance Wars, while capturing a neutral sector is good, it's even better to capture an enemy sector since that deprives them of income, there's a fair bit of nuance involved in figuring out when to be a bit aggressive in pushing into their territory and when not to be. In any case, the battle is won when you wipe out the last enemy army, at which point you can add them to your ranks (allowing you to recruit their units in future battles) and move onto the next country. It's a pretty fun setup which ironically feels much simpler to learn than ROTK despite not even being in english, and I also definitely prefer it to Dragon Force, which is also kind of a simplified version of ROTK.
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