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Last Topic's Ratings:
Assault: Retribution - GAB - 50% {3}
Bealphareth - AA - 50% (2)
Ebisu Yoshikazu no Ooana Keiti - AB - 25% (2)
In the Hunt - GAGG - 88% (4)
K-1 Grand Prix 99 - AA - 50% (2)
Kileak: The DNA Imperative - AAGA - 63% (4)
Very mixed. I always think it's funny when a game gets a "GAB" rating.
Games for this topic:
Blademaker
Cheesy
Germs
Star Gladiator
Winning Lure
World's Scariest Police Chases
Fun fact, I actually put off covering Germs during the height of the covid pandemic out of sensitivity to people who might have had relatives become sick with the disease. I figured it was probably safe to put it up now, only for me to come down with covid myself. Game is probably cursed. I am looking forward to see what Star Gladiator is like, though, having played Hayato in Marvel vs Capcom 2.
Blademaker - G
ReplyDeleteCheesy - A
Germs - A
Star Gladiator - A
Winning Lure - B
World's Scariest Police Chases - G
Blademaker is a bit of a slow burn, but it's actually very fun and I ended up playing it for a very long time for this review. It actually plays like a simpler version of the recent indie hit Potionomics, where the goal of the game is to operate a store that sells products to adventurers. Near the beginning of each month, six adventurers will come into your store to buy gear, which consists of weapons, armor, and consumable items, and then they will set off on a quest where they'll have to defeat enemies using the items you sold them. The rest of the time, various other customers will come in and will clean out the rest of your stock, but an interesting twist is that the items they want to buy depend on what the adventurers have been using (the game shows you which items are currently in high demand). To get stock to sell in the first place, you have to craft it, and you have various smiths and alchemists under your employ who can create items for you, however this takes time and resources. You can generally craft stuff more efficiently if you're willing to make a lot of it at once, but this also takes a long time so you have to plan carefully, and you also have to have the materials ahead of time, which you can only buy on Sundays. One week after the adventurers set off, you can see the results of their mission, which plays out like a simple RPG battle but it's completely automated. If they win, that's all you'll be seeing of them for that month, but if they lose they'll come back to buy more stuff to try again, which they'll do in the third and fourth week of the month. In theory, you could probably deliberately sell them crappy gear the first time so you could gouge them for better gear the second time around, though I imagine you're probably penalized in some way if they fail to complete their mission before the end of the month. In any case, once each month ends new materials become available, leading to new recipes and better equipment, and you periodically get new employees as well that can help you keep up with your ever-growing need for more items to sell. It's a surprisingly fun gameplay loop and it has pretty decent pacing as well (I like the the sales to the average joes are handled automatically by your assistant), even though I played a ton of it for this review I still kind of want to keep gouging people. This definitely feels like a high priority for a translation, as it's actually a very text-heavy game and I gave up on reading all the story dialogue pretty early on.
Cheesy is definitely not what I expected, but it's a pretty interesting game regardless. This is an early Gen 5 Platformer, and it's insanely ambitious for its time. Basically every level in the game is different, sometimes it's a 2D platformer, sometimes it's a 3D platformer, sometimes it's overhead, sometimes you're surfing on a leaf or riding a minecart, sometimes you're having a bungee battle against a spider, and so on. The 2D platformer segments are probably the most common, and they actually implement 2.5D elements, with some stages taking place on either the inside or outside of some kind of cylinder or box, which is actually kind of crazy for its time. The big issue with the game is its controls, the character feels very heavy to control and has a ton of momentum, but honestly it didn't take me too long to adjust to it and the game is also fairly generous with health pickups, so I wouldn't say it feels especially difficult to play. It's certainly not the most polished game ever, but I have to give them credit for just how much they tried to cram into this game at a time when most developers were still struggling to come to grips with 3D.
Germs might be one of the most ambitious PS1 games I've ever played, though it definitely doesn't successfully deliver on all of its ideas. In many ways, this feels a lot like a modern WRPG, it's fully first-person, it takes place in a massive city that you can traverse either on foot or by car, there are a ton of places you can enter and explore, and the game is quite non-linear and you can follow various plot threads in pretty much any order you want. It's actually kind of bonkers to see this kind of game existing on PS1 and its has its moments of feeling very impressive, though it also definitely has a ton of issues with virtually every part of the game. For example, one of the most impressive things is to explore the city, it's absolutely massive and it also loads completely seamlessly, and there's even kind of an interesting noir artstyle to it since most of it is black and white. However, exploring the city also totally sucks, as walking on foot is super slow and the car also feels like complete trash to drive, it's also incredibly slow and the controls for it are awful, plus you can't pull up the map while driving so you constantly have to stop to figure out where you are so you don't get lost. As such, clearly what you'll end up doing is just using the bus, which basically lets you warp between points of interest instantly, essentially trivializing the city aspect of the game. The indoor areas have similar problems. The game has realtime combat but it is still RNG, for example if you're using a pistol the game will simply display a caret over the enemy it thinks you're trying to attack and when you fire, it will be pure RNG whether or not you hit, and the hit chance is very low. This is not a huge problem because enemies have strictly defined aggro ranges that they won't attack you if you leave, so you can just peek into their range, fire, and peek out again, but this takes a long time and feels kind of lame. You could also just use the melee weapon, which is at least drastically more accurate, though this requires a lot of janky circle strafing to avoid being hit and you get stuck on things pretty frequently. It is still definitely an interesting curiousity and I'm surprised this wasn't somewhat popular back in the day, when people might have been more willing to put up with its issues.
DeleteStar Gladiator is Capcom's take on a 3D fighter, and despite its obscurity it ends up as a pretty typical affair. Like most 3D fighters, this is a string-based game, and also like most other 3D fighters, almost no strings actually combo properly. You're lucky if they simply aren't true combos, as it's also common for some of the hits to just straight up whiff even if the early parts of the combo hit due to janky hitboxes. The game's most unique feature is that every fighter has access to a universal counter mechanic, done by pressing back + guard and A / B (yes, you block with a button, you'd think Capcom of all people would know better), these can counter A and B attacks respectively, which is very satisfying when you land it. Kicks can't be countered, generally making them the best combo starters. The game has a number of other generally irrelevant mechanics, for example most characters have access to a super combo finisher that can only be done at the end of specific strings, but since almost no such strings combo properly you'll almost never be seeing it. It's mostly a game of pokes and counters with the occasional throw or ring out. It's not terrible, but it's lacking in polish in a very similar way to most other early 3D fighters, clearly Capcom's experience with 2D games didn't quite allow them to avoid the typical pitfalls of the genre.
Winning Lure is not completely atrocious, but it's still a fairly weak fishing game. In most ways, it plays very similarly to Big Bass Fishing, but it's a little worse than that game in most respects. Like in Big Bass Fishing, this is an extremely simple fishing game where you have 3 minutes to catch as many fish as possible. Fish bite easily and often (assuming you have a good spot), so that's not a big problem, and then the fishing is a very simple "reel with 1 button and watch the tension meter" style, so there's not really a lot of skill involved. Fighting fish takes fairly long (longer than in Big Bass Fishing), so you can generally only get 3 fish in your 3 minute time allotment, and it basically just comes down to "were there big fish nearby?" to determine how well you do, which very quickly gets dull. It's especially lame if you pick a bad fishing spot, as there might only be a couple small fish present which instantly dooms you to failure. There's almost nothing else to say about the game other than this, it has very few modes and all of the fishing spots feel the exact same. It's clear that fishing games are starting to figure it out, but it needs more nuance than this.
DeleteWorld's Scariest Police Chases is way better than I expected. It is, in some ways, exactly what you'd expect, it's a driving game where your goal is to pull over criminals, somewhat similar to the pursuit mode in NFS Hot Pursuit on PC, but it executes on this concept extremely well. For starters, the control is great, which is obviously important for a game where you're going to have to make sharp turns and pull 180s with a fair degree of regularity. You have the option to shoot a gun while driving, and this also works pretty well, it mostly autoaims (though you can fine tune it with the stick) and you can fire with R1, though you won't be doing this for every mission it's surprisingly simple to drive and shoot at the same time, which very few other games are able to get right. When on a police chase, you have two methods for busting criminals, you can either disable their car or simply tail them for long enough that they surrender, though the latter takes long so you'll probably usually try to disable them instead. There's a decent amount of mission variety and the city is impressively large for a PS1 game. The best aspect of the game though is the presentation. Each level is set up like an episode of the show, complete with cheesy intros and outros from the show's original announcer, which sells the concept of the game surprisingly well. There's not really a ton more to say about it than that, it's just a surprisingly solid rendition of the show that had a lot more care put into it than you'd probably expect.