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Last Topic's Ratings:
Astra Superstars - GGAAA - 70% (5)
Die Hard Arcade - GAGGGGGAGGG - 91% (11)
Incredible Hulk, The: The Pantheon Saga - ABBBB - 10% (5)
Revolution X - BBBBBBB - 0% (7)
Shadows of the Tusk - GGGGG - 100% (5)
Shingata Kururin Pa - BB - 0% (2)
It was nice to see that quite a lot of people played Shadows of the Tusk, as it seems like the language barrier tends to put people off trying the Japanese-exclusive RPG and Strategy games. I guess featuring English for the game's menus does help out quite a bit.
Games for this topic:
Digital Monster Version S: Digimon Tamers
GunGriffon 2
Mighty Hits
Pocket Fighter
Salamander Deluxe Pack Plus
Virtual Volleyball
We have another Digimon game here, though the early games in the series vary so drastically that I have no idea what to expect. It's also been quite a while since we've seen a game based on Volleyball, so that'll be a refreshing change from all the soccer and baseball games.
Digital Monster Version S: Digimon Tamers - A
ReplyDeleteGunGriffon 2 - G
Mighty Hits - A
Pocket Fighter - G
Salamander Deluxe Pack Plus - G
Virtual Volleyball - A
Digimon Tamers is all right. For starters, it's not at all like the Digimon World series, it's instead a virtual pet game, just like the toys that kicked off the series. Compared to some other Virtual Pets we've looked at, this one is a little better than most. For starters, the main appeal of the Digimon virtual pets is that you can battle them, and that is maintained here. Doing battles is one of the ways that you can earn money, which you need to buy items like food, medicine, and various other upgrades. This helps give raising the digimon a little more nuance because there's more to it than just "click button to give food", you need to buy various types of food and the ones you feed it determine how it evolves. There are also various training minigames you can do that raise its stats, though they also make it hungry and tired so you have to manage that as well. You can also raise multiple digimon at a time, and I like that when they need to sleep, you can speed up the timer so it doesn't take long. These things definitely help make it less annoying to play, though it's still an extremely simple game. One of the biggest issues is that there's basically zero nuance to battles, you simply mash the buttons to charge your meter so your digimon attacks, then hope you hit. There's similarly no real nuance to training, it's just RNG, and each stage for your digimon has hard stat caps, so you don't really have any freedom in how you build them, either. This tends to make it feel like the type of digimon you raise doesn't really matter, which definitely kills a fair bit of the appeal. If they had gone with a more RPG-like battle system or possibly let you use multiple Digimon in battle at once this actually might have been really cool, but as it stands it's basically just an interesting piece of history that probably not many will want to come back to.
GunGriffon 2 is not a huge change from the original, but it makes enough polish improvements that the game feels a fair bit better to play. When we covered the first game, I noted that it had some appeal but had a number of problems, and basically, most of the problems are fixed. For example, in the first game, one issue was the weapon balance, where the gun is basically all you'll ever use, because the machinegun is too weak and the homing missile sucks. This is no longer an issue, the machinegun is significantly more viable and the homing missile is actually pretty good now. The rocket pod is still a very short-range weapon, but with the other weapons being better it does fine at filling that niche. The first game also had pretty short draw distance, which has been improved, and enemies seem to spam quite a bit less, though you also have less health, which makes the game feel a bit more nuanced compared to the original. There's not too much else to say about it, it's a fairly solid game now, probably Saturn's best mech game since Mechwarrior 2 on Saturn isn't quite as strong as the PS1 version.
I keep getting Mighty Hits and Incredible Crisis mixed up. In any case, this one is the Point Blank-like game that is nowhere near as good as Point Blank. Compared to Point Blank, it has fewer games and way less personality, though there are a few ideas I like, for example on the "shoot the coloured objects" style of games, if you hit the ones of the wrong colour, you simply lose points rather than losing a life, which feels significantly more fair. In any case though, it's very clear Point Blank is a lot better, but Saturn doesn't have Point Blank, and I feel like this is one of the only cases where this is relevant. If you're buying a lightgun for PS1, it's probably for the Point Blank games, and Mighty Hits doesn't even work with the Guncon, so it's right out (its sequel does, but we'll deal with that when we get to it). However, on Saturn, the reason to buy a lightgun is House of the Dead, which Playstation doesn't have. If you bought a lightgun for that game, you probably want something else to play with it, and suddenly Mighty Hits looks like a decent option, particularly compared to garbage like Revolution X and Death Crimson. This is definitely a case where making the port to Saturn was absolutely the right call, though they definitely should have also brought the sequel to Saturn.
DeletePocket Fighter is pretty much totally unchanged compared to the PS1 version. As noted before, this is a very simplified and goofy fighting game, but it's full of full personality and love for Capcom's history that makes it hard not to love. It runs perfectly on PS1, so there's not really too much that could be improved, but good to see that it makes the transition to Saturn fully intact. Capcom really was one of the best developers for Saturn, while many other companies put out sloppy ports for Saturn at least occasionally, Capcom is pretty much always solid.
Salmander Deluxe Pack is great. It's a collection of Salamander, Life Force, and Salamander 2. If you're not familiar with it, Salamander is basically a spinoff of Gradius, with the big difference being that it lacks the Gradius powerup system, instead enemies just drop the powerups, though in Life Force the Gradius powerup system is present. We already looked at the Gradius Deluxe Pack, which contained Gradius 1 and 2, but compared to that collection this one has many improvements. For starters, it contains Salamander 2, which at the time of this game's release was only about a year old and thus had never been previously ported to home console, so that's already a huge plus when compared to the then decade-old and widely available Gradius 1 and 2. Plus, you also get a third game in Life Force, even though Life Force and Salamander 1 are very similar its inclusion is still appreciated. One more great addition is that in Salamander 1 and Life Force, you can choose to eliminate all slowdown and have the game run at max framerate at all times, which is a fantastic addition. There's not really too much else to say about it, these are top quality games and it's a good collection. Salamander 2 probably would have been worth the price of admission on its own, and getting the best version of the other two games just sweetens the deal further. If only the Gradius Collection had gotten this level of effort.