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Last Topic's Ratings:
Digital Monster Version S: Digimon Tamers - AA - 50% (2)
GunGriffon 2 - GGGA - 88% (4)
Mighty Hits - AA - 50% (2)
Pocket Fighter - GGAGGGG - 93% (7)
Salamander Deluxe Pack Plus - GGGGGGG - 100% (7) (1 SR)
Virtual Volleyball - AA - 50% (2)
Virtua Fighter Kids becomes an incredibly rare game to have over 5 votes and get the squiggle bracket. This topic was pretty divisive in general.
Games for this topic:
Dark Savior
Harukaze Sentai V-Force
Layer Section 2
Mega Man 8
Shanghai: Great Moments
TNN Hardcore 4X4
Layer Section 2 is Raystorm, for those not recognizing it by its Japanese title. We also have the Saturn version of Mega Man 8, which is famous for having a few key differences from the PS1 version, and also never being included in any compilations.
Harukaze Sentai V-Force is a pretty ambitious game that generally succeeds pretty well. It's a fairly basic SRPG, but what stands out about it is the absolutely absurd amount of anime FMV in the game, which is all completely original for the game as this was not based on an existing anime. There's at least a full movie's worth of animation here, each mission (of which there are quite a few) contains at least 2 and often 3 FMVs, which are usually around a minute in length and have both pretty high quality animation and voice acting. So obviously, the presentation is pretty solid, but what about the gameplay? As mentioned above, it's pretty simple, but it has enough nuance to keep it interesting. It's kind of a military-style turn based strategy game, you control a variety of military units, primarily fighter jets but with some supporting units on each mission, which you move in an isometric grid in typical SRPG fashion. The main thing separating it from literally every other game of the same type is that each vehicle carries multiple weapons, which differ both in terms of their power and accuracy against various other types of craft as well as how much ammo they can carry. For example, your basic machine gun can be used a ton of times and can target any other unit, but it's fairly weak, while you can also carry various types of missiles that have much more power, but they typically have more limited target selection (for example, there's an anti-air missile that can only target other aircraft) and you don't get many of them. Before each mission, you can look at the enemy unit composition and decide which weapons you want each of your characters to carry, which gives the game just enough customization to prevent it from getting really repetitive. The actual gameplay tends to move quite briskly due to a pretty clean interface and fast movement animations, as well as the unit counts generally being kept reasonable, which helps prevent these missions from dragging on. I feel that in some ways this game is quite comparable to Sakura Wars, though obviously you just watch the story seqeunces rather than actively participate in them as you do in that game. Compared to Sakura Wars, I feel like this game strikes a much better balance between the strategy gameplay and the story, I felt the missions in Sakura Wars are so infrequent that they kind of feel disconnected from the main game and some of them can kind of drag on, which isn't really the case here. Overall, this is definitely a pretty solid game that I wish was translated.
ReplyDeleteI didn't care for Raystorm at all, but when playing Layer Section 2 it was so bad that I had to go back to the PS1 version to compare because I didn't think it was THIS bad, and it looks like on top of everything else this is another case where the Saturn port is worse. Compared to PS1, this version seems to run at a worse framerate, has more slowdown, and also looks somewhat worse, which exacerbates all of the game's problems to an even greater degree. By far the biggest one remains the fact that enemies can fly under your ship and it's never clear at what point the game considers them to be at the same elevation so they can now be collided with, which also applies to bullets, and having the game run slower means you have even less time to react once it becomes clear that something can actually damage you. This also applies to the bosses, which continue to use up way too much of the screen and thus you get very little time to react to their attacks. Definitely don't play this version of the game, but I would generally say just don't play it period, it's pretty much the quintessential bad 3D shmup.
Thankfully, the Saturn port of Megaman 8 is pretty much perfect, it even has a bit of extra stuff compared to the PS1 version. As on PS1, this is maybe one of the weaker Megaman games, but it's still a pretty great platformer overall, and it both looks and sounds fantastic while not having any performance issues whatsoever. See developers, it's not actually that hard to port your titles to Saturn. Actually, Capcom in general did a fantastic job on the system, pretty much all of their ports are perfect conversions. If only other developers gave the console so much love.
ReplyDeleteShanghai: Great Moments is one of the hardest games I've had to rate in a while. It is, in almost every way, one of the most redundant games of all time. Simply put, everything this game does is done a million times better by Shanghai Triple Threat. Triple Threat looks better, sounds better, controls better, has much more content, and is generally much more fun and better in every possible way. The only thing you can say about Great Moments is that it is still Shanghai and Shanghai is always kind of fun, but it's also one of the worst Shanghai games ever made. In particular, I really have to call out this game's visuals, which are trash. It's very hard to tell which blocks are on top of the others and all of the tilesets that aren't the default one just look awful. The animations that play when you clear blocks actually look not bad, but they take a long time to load which significantly interrupts the flow of the game, so you'll probably end up turning them off. Even the controls kind of suck, they're oddly stiff which often results in selecting the wrong pieces. The game has nothing akin to the arcade mode from Triple Threat and has far less board patterns overall, which also gives it much less longevity. I still think that due to the inherent quality of Shanghai as a game this game is still a fair bit more fun to play than most B-level games, but it's also a game that absolutely no one should ever consider purchasing while Triple Threat exists.
TNN Hardcore 4X4 still sucks, but at least it doesn't suck any worse than the PS1 version. Actually, I think this version might be a little less fugly and it seems to run a little smoother than the PS1 version, so this might actually be the definitive version, but this is still a grotesquely ugly game with some of the worst texture work of all time and physics that are almost as bad (I particularly like how trucks just randomly reset to a neutral position every now and then). I actually think this game kinda has the right idea in terms of the track design, this does at least sort of feel like an offroad game, it's just such a poorly executed one that it's not at all fun to play.