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Last Topic's Ratings:
Advanced VG2 - AGG - 83% (3)
BreakThru - BBB - 0% (3)
Hogs of War - GGGGGGG - 100% (7) (2 SR)
Peter Jacobsen's Golden Tee Golf - AAA - 50% (3)
Popolocrois - GG - 100% (2)
Warm Up - BGB - 33% (3)
I was pleased to see the strong turnout for Hogs of War. An interesting part of working on GAB is learning which games secretly have cult followings. I always thought I had some idea which games were popular, but there's still tons I never knew about.
Games for this topic:
Guitar Freaks
MTV Sports: Pure Ride
Night Striker
Purumui Purumui
Speed Power Gunbike
Tunguska
I've been kind of dreading covering MTV Sports: Pure Ride, as its predecessor felt very ahead of its time, but it wasn't uncommon for games in this era to just totally reinvent the wheel so who knows if it will still be good. On the other hand, I am looking forward to trying out Purumui Purumui, which looks very cute.
Guitar Freaks - A
ReplyDeleteMTV Sports: Pure Ride - G
Night Striker - A
Purumui Purumui - G
Speed Power Gunbike - B
Tunguska - B
Guitar Freaks is a cool game with exactly one flaw, but it's a significant one. This is a game about playing the guitar, where the idea is that you have to hold down a certain button (conceptually holding down the fret), and then press a button to play the note, with correct timing. The issue is that this is very reliant on its unique controller, as the game simply does not adapt all that gracefully to any other controller. The best available control scheme is to use left down right for the three columns of notes, which feels intuitive, but the problem is that you can get notes that require you to hit multiple columns at once. This is just fine for notes in adjacent columns, as you can hold downleft or downright to hit them, but the second you get to notes in the first and third columns (or all three) you have a problem. This control scheme also lets you use L1 as left, so you would hit these with L1 + right and L1 + downright, which is possible but feels clunky. I feel like a better solution would have been to make up also count as left, so you could hit a 1-3 note as upright, and then let upleft count as all 3 columns, though even then anything involving using the dpad gets a little problematic as the songs get harder. Like early DDR games songs only have one chart, meaning that regardless of how good you are there will only be a few songs that are a good fit for your skill level, which is unfortunate as the soundtrack actually is pretty good. This is clearly an influential game and it does feel somewhat cool to play, but unless you're willing to shell out for the special controller you're not getting the full experience and I wish a bit more effort had been put into adapting this for console.
MTV Sports Snowboarding was already an excellent game, and while MTV Sports Pure Ride is perhaps a somewhat conservative evolution of the formula, it still makes a couple key changes that make it a fair bit better. When we covered the first game, I note that it felt very similar to Shaun White Road Trip, and it now feels even more like it, to the extent that I wonder if some of the same people worked on it because it almost feels like the same engine. One of the key areas where Shaun White had the edge over the original was grinding, grinding in the original has a dedicated grind jump that makes grind chains somewhat awkward, this has now been changed so that you just grind with the jump button, and you even kinda magnetize to the rail, just like in Shaun White. It does take an extra jump input to grind the rail here (in Shaun White it's automatic as long as you're close to the rail), but once you make this adjustment trick to grind to trick to grind chains are fairly effortless and feel amazing to pull off. I would actually say that Slopestyle events here are now very close to being a match for the ones in Shaun White, which is an amazing accomplishment for a game that came out 8 years earlier. The thing that holds this game back from being an easy SR is that slopestyle events are only one portion of the game. The game also heavily features Halfpipe and Big Air events, and they are not of nearly the same quality. Halfpipe is still halfpipe. It controls all right, but it's inherently kind of repetitive and these events are generally best used sparingly. Big Air is even worse, there's really just not much nuance to it and these events always kinda suck (they also suck in Shaun White World Stage). Luckily, you can choose to just play the slopestyle events and the freeride mode also has a decent number of unlockables tied to it, which is appreciated. In any case, it's easily the best snowboarding game of the era and remains decently competitive against the SSX titles, even if Shaun White will eventually dethrone it.
The PS1 version of Night Striker simply isn't as good as the Saturn version. It's a downgrade in pretty much every way, most particularly the visual effects have been simplified and it's also significantly choppier, I would guess this version runs about 25fps compared to 60fps on Saturn. Considering how chaotic this game can be, this matters a lot, it causes me to take significantly more hits on PS1 and I get a bit of a headache after playing this version for a while, which I don't with the Saturn version. The core game is still pretty cool, but it just doesn't shine to nearly the same degree it does in the Saturn port.
DeletePurumui Purumui is a very cute game, and it's kind of interesting as well. The basic gist of it is that it's kind of like a mixture of Zelda and A Boy and His Blob. You play as a young girl transported into a fantasy world who has to gather 5 medals to prevent the rebirth of an evil god. You are joined by Mui, a little blobby thing that can transform into various things when he eats different foods. A fairly significant portion of the game involves finding recipes and ingredients to cook the foods that Mui needs to overcome obstacles, for example once you get Churros he can turn into a ladder that lets you climb walls. The main gameplay considers of overworld exploration and Zelda-style dungeons, though in both cases you have to make heavy use of Mui's transforming powers. For example, near the start of the second dungeon, you come across a gap that clearly needs the hookshot, though in this case you need the Chocolate Parfait recipe to turn Mui into a hook, which will force you to hunt around the overworld a bit to find the recipe (it's actually in the haunted house, for which you first need to find the Pumpkin Pie recipe to turn Mui into a scythe to get past the tall grass, which in turn requires the Churros to climb up to the second floor of the building outside your home). If this sounds a little cryptic, it can be, though thankfully the NPCs are pretty good at giving you hints about what you need to do next (admittedly I did have to consult a Japanese playthrough to figure out where to use the Churros in the above example). The medals you get for completing dungeons also lets the main character take on different forms with different charged attacks and super modes (which you can activate by pressing L1, though it costs SP). The gameplay probably isn't quite as polished as something like Zelda, but it's competent nonetheless, and the game really is super cute (I love the little animation that plays when you cook food, it's adorable). Even the story seems to have some interesting stuff going on, it's fairly clear that not everything is as it seems to be. This one could really use someone to put a guide together for it.
Speed Power Gunbike is a weird game, but it's clearly not fun. The core idea of the game is that you control a bike that can transform between three modes, a bike, a slightly more controllable bike, and a mech. Each stage is divided into two sections, first you have to race through a stage, predominantly as the bike, and then you have to face a boss, predominantly as the mech. This obviously renders the second bike largely useless, which it is, and annoyingly it's mapped to just pressing down when in the standard bike, which makes it annoyingly easy to swap to by accident. The bigger issue though is that the controls in all three forms suck and the game simply never feels good to play. The mech is basically the only form that can turn, so if you ever have to do a sharp turn as the bike the best option is to go to the mech, then swap back, but the mech is still not particularly smooth to control, it makes wide, sweeping turns and lacks the precision to battle enemies effectively. I feel like the core idea here has some potential, but the execution just isn't there.
DeleteTunguska is complete trash, but at least it's kind of funny trash. The game is hard to describe, even though it's actually very simple. It's a 3D action game with tank controls where you periodically see myst-like scenes, though these are completely trivial and the most common ones are just to open doors. The game mainly revolves around martial arts-style battles with various opponents and these are completely terrible. To fight, you have to enter a battle stance and then the various direction inputs become attacks, but it's extremely stiff and awful. Actually, these fights are very easy to win once you know how. For the vast majority of enemies, all you have to do is hold block (circle), then periodically press right to jab. The jab is the fastest attack in the game, and the enemy will not attack while you're blocking. They will attempt to do an attack when you release your block, but because the jab is faster it will hit them instead and they will flinch, allowing you to repeat the process. A few enemies can hit you through your block so you instead want to use the sweep kick against them (X + down), which knocks them down. Absurdly, this attack can also meaty, so you can just do it as they're getting up to knock them down again until they die. A few enemies can either dodge the sweep kick or counter it, so against them stick to the jab. Eventually you can get a weapon, which muddies the formula somewhat, with the weapon you generally just spam instead. There are also traps that you have to run past, but the timing to dodge them seems to be 1 frame in most cases, in fact there's one in the first area that I don't think is even possible to avoid without being hit, luckily there are a fair number of heals lying around. Anyway, this is basically the whole game, there's no story or variety or anything and it completely sucks, the only fun part is how stupid the combat engine is. Definitely don't play this one.