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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Guitar Freaks - GAA - 67% (3)
MTV Sports: Pure Ride - GG - 100% (2)
Night Striker - AA - 50% (2)
Purumui Purumui - GG - 100% (2)
Speed Power Gunbike - AB - 25% (2)
Tunguska - BBB - 0% (3)
A pretty quiet topic, I was a bit surprised so few people had played Guitar Freaks.
Games for this topic:
Assault: Retribution
Bealphareth
Ebisu Yoshikazu no Ooana Keiti
In the Hunt
K-1 Grand Prix 99
Kileak: The DNA Imperative
We've finally caught up on the K-1 Grand Prix games after I accidentally did the third one first, so we can finally cover the 4th game. Speaking of doing games in the wrong order, we have Kileak, which is the precursor to Epidemic.
Assault: Retribution - A
ReplyDeleteBealphareth - A
Ebisu Yoshikazu no Ooana Keiti - A
In the Hunt - G
K-1 Grand Prix 99 - A
Kileak: The DNA Imperative - A
Assault: Retribution is essentially a 3D take on Contra, though it's substantially better than the actual 3D Contra games from this gen. A lot of this is because it doesn't overcomplicate things. While the 3D Contra games had awful controls and awful level design that worked poorly with the aforementioned awful controls, Assault is a very straightforward game that controls well. You basically just run and shoot and you hold the strafe button a lot of the time and it works just fine. It definitely doesn't have anywhere near the nuance the original Contra games had, which causes its appeal to wear thin much faster. You can take an absolute boatload of hits and health pickups are common, and platforming is very minimal, so you basically just hold down the fire button and line yourself up with enemies, which works fine but gets repetitive. There are a lot of boss fights, but these don't really help too much because they're basically all the same, you pretty much just burst them down while trying not to get hit too much but it's generally pretty easy to outlast them. Similarly, there's two playable characters and they are different from each other but not enough to matter. You can also pick up different weapons and there is an ammo meter, which is about the most complex aspect of the game, but even then your default weapon is fine almost all the time and it's also quite ammo efficient. It's not terrible, but I can't see anyone wanting to play this for more than an hour or so.
Bealphareth is a weird game but I'm not too crazy about it. At first glance, it appears to be a fairly standard dungeon crawler, but it's really anything but. The entire game pretty much revolves around the game's trap mechanic, where your characters can place little traps on the ground that have various effects. For example, the main character's trap is a little springboard that launches you about 6 tiles in the indicated direction. This can be used to push enemies away from you, push enemies into each other (which does damage), launch yourself over a pit, or launch enemies into a pit, among other things. The other characters have different traps, like one character has an oil trap that makes monsters slow, one character has a bomb, and so on. The game is set up like a dungeon crawler, but it actually plays more like an action/puzzle game, where on each floor you tend to have some kind of mission that you have to accomplish within a certain time to advance the story, otherwise you fail and have to try again. For example, the second mission is to make 500 gold within a certain time limit and without leaving a given floor. The time limit is irrelevant, the real problem is that there's a limited number of monsters to kill, and they don't give anywhere near enough money on their own, the key is you need to use kill chains to get bonus money, and it's actually quite tight even then. The way I eventually solved it was by putting a bunch of spring traps near a pit, then chasing a bunch of the enemies towards them (most of the enemies on this floor run away from you), I was able to get like a 7 combo this way and that was enough, but it took many tries before it worked out (luckily there's a quick retry button). I suppose it was satisfying when it worked out, but it was quite frustrating when the enemies wouldn't cooperate, and most stages have some kind of annoying mechanic like this. One of the biggest issues is the game doesn't really make it clear what you need to do for each mission until you get there, and you can't change your team once you've picked it, so it's difficult to know who to bring, you'll definitely want to save before picking your team and there's quite a bit of trial and error. The game is also extremely story-heavy for this type of game, though to be honest I didn't find the story especially interesting, it just feels sort of inordinately wordy and drawn out (for example there's a massive discussion of why the time passes strangely inside the labyrinth even though this is clearly just a gameplay mechanic and no one really cares), and none of the characters seemed especially interesting either. Overall, it's just kind of a weird experiment that doesn't really work, though I do appreciate that developers were still trying new things in these days.
DeleteEbisu Yoshikazu no Ooana Keiti is another Kyoutei game, though it's clearly one of the better ones. We've covered a couple Kyoutei games already but I'll go over the gist of it again, it's a very specific type of Japanese boat race where 6 powerboats race in a pool. There's a pylon at each end that you have to go around, resulting in an oval-shaped course. They also have a very specific method by which the races start, there's a 15 second countdown and you can begin accelerating at any time, but if you pass the start line too early or too late you get disqualified, so figuring out the exact timing to hit the gas is vital (though you can always ease up if you think you went too early). Races are 3 laps long and generally take under a minute. As you might imagine, with the course basically being a simply oval, going around the pylon is vital, and this is one of the areas where this game does better than most of its competitors, as it has a pretty good "power slide" mechanic that feels good to use and doing it well is key to getting good times. Having good control gives the game enough nuance that it doesn't get super repetitive despite the courses all having the same general shape, though they differ somewhat in length and width. When it comes to progression, there's not much. The game works the same way as real Kyoutei where contestants are assigned a machine at random before each race weekend, which means there's no boat upgrades or anything like that. Worse yet, these boats are not all created equal so if you're unlucky and get a lousy boat it's harder to win (though the difference isn't that drastic). The only thing you can change is your propellor, which affects acceleration and top speed, and I feel the third propellor is clearly the best one (it has the highest top speed). The game's biggest flaw, beyond potential repetition, is the hitboxes around the pylons, a fair number of them are significantly larger than they appear to be, meaning you can hit an invisible wall when attempting to slide around it if you cut it really tight, which also doesn't apply to the AI (I suspect the AI boats have no collision at all). This actually may be an intended feature, as it's different on every course and the advice given by the coach seems to allude to it, but if so they could have found a much better way to indicate how close you're allowed to come to the cone. The game also features a gambling mode where you can just bet on the races, though I have little interest in that. In any case, the core mechanics are not bad and if you want to play one of these games this is probably the one to choose, but I wish they would vary the courses more, even a course with three pylons making a triangle shape would feel very different to race and I don't think it would compromise the feeling of the sport.
DeleteIn the Hunt is fairly similar between Saturn and PS1, with only minor technical differences between them. As before, this is a shmup of sorts where you play as a sub, which introduces a number of interesting wrinkles since the action takes place above and below the water's surface, but you have to stay below the surface of the water, essentially rendering a portion of the playing field off-limits to you. You can attack enemies who are above the water, but must rise to the surface to do so, which is also risky, which I think is an interesting mechanic. Compared to the Saturn version, this version feels a bit less smooth (It might be 60 vs 30fps), but the Saturn version has significantly more slowdown whereas the PS1 version is a fairly rock-solid 30fps. I've noted a number of times that I quite dislike slowdown in my shmups, so I think I probably prefer the PS1 version, but they're pretty comparable overall, particularly after I realized that the PS1 version does preserve 2P support, it's just not mentioned on the title screen.
K-1 Grand Prix 99 is a mostly good product with one very strange design choice. Gameplay-wise, it's fairly similar to its immediate predecessor K-1 Grand Prix, which is good because that game was much better than the previous K-1 games. However, there are some fairly big differences as well. The first and most positive change is to the presentation, which has been stepped up quite a bit. Characters have more detail, and there's now ring announcements and character-specific endings as well. This definitely helps give the game more personality, no complaints there. The far more questionable changes are to the gameplay scaling. Compared to K-1 Grand Prix, most attacks do about four to five times as much damage in this game, resulting in single hits doing utterly ludicrous amounts of damage. You can now literally end fights in two hits, a single strong punch and heavy kick is all it takes to knock someone out. Perhaps this change was made for realism, but I don't think even real MMA fights are usually quite this quick, and it definitely messes up many of the game systems. For example stamina now doesn't matter at all, attacks use less stamina and it recovers faster compared to K-1 Grand Prix, so I never had to worry about running out, and you can't really recover health anymore either since the matches are so quick. Downs are also absurdly dangerous, as if you get downed while your health is less than half that's a guaranteed knockout (in K-1 Grand Prix, you can easily recover from downs until your health is around 20%), so you do have to manage the down bar quite carefully, but there's a fair bit of cheese here too. See, heavy kicks do such absurd damage that even blocking one does a decent amount of chip damage, so you can do something like a jab into a heavy kick to force the opponent to block, which results in a nearly-unavoidable down if their down bar is nearly full, and if they're already below half health that's all she wrote. In any case, regardless of the intention behind these changes, they definitely reduce a lot of the nuance in the game and it's clearly not nearly as good as K-1 Grand Prix. Hopefully the next entry can tone the damage down while still keeping some of the enhanced presentation of this game.
DeleteKileak is all right, though it's clearly not nearly as good as Epidemic. It's a very basic hallway FPS that runs and looks decent for its time, but is held back by overly simple level design. Pretty much the entire game takes place in narrow hallways, which are so narrow you can't really strafe, meaning that when you encounter enemies that shoot back you kinda just have to tank damage. You do occasionally get to fight in rooms and this is much better as you sometimes have some degree of cover, but sadly the percentage of the game that takes place in these sorts of environments is quite small. In Eliminator, the hallways are much wider and the layouts of the levels are a lot more interesting, which significantly improves the gameplay, so you might just want to skip ahead to that one, though if you did have this in the early days of PS1 you could have done worse.