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Last Topic's Ratings:
Blademaker - GG - 100% (2)
Cheesy - BAB - 17% (3)
Germs - AAA - 50% (3)
Star Gladiator - GGAGBG - 75% (6)
Winning Lure - BB - 0% (2)
World's Scariest Police Chases - AGGA - 75% (4)
If you had told me this topic would outrate the Saturn topic I wouldn't have believed it, but here we are.
Games for this topic:
Beyond the Beyond
Klaymen Klaymen: Neverhood no Nazo
NHL 98
Sol Divide
Star Fighter
Unstack
It's a topic for games with repetitive names. There's a translation available for Klaymen Klaymen, which looks like a fairly interesting game. We also have quite a few games here that we've already covered on Saturn.
Beyond the Beyond - A
ReplyDeleteKlaymen Klaymen: Neverhood no Nazo - G
NHL 98 - A
Sol Divide - G
Star Fighter - B
Unstack - B
Beyond the Beyond is a very basic RPG. It's extremely Dragon Questy, the interface has been lifted wholesale from that series, though it also shares a little bit in common with Camelot's later Golden Sun. The most notable thing about it is that it includes action commands, where you can press the attack button at the right time to have a better chance to deal increased damage, or when being hit to have a better chance to block or counterattack. I say chance, because even with correct timing the benefit is not guaranteed, though this is maybe a good thing because the effect of these commands is often too much and trivializes the battle system when they are mastered. However, this is also a contributor to one of the game's biggest issues, which is its pacing. Dragon Quest is very simple, but the secret to its appeal is that its pacing is very brisk. Similarly, for games like the Mario RPGs which incorporate action commands, they all have visible encounter and they limit the party size to keep battles from taking too long. Beyond the Beyond learns from neither, featuring both an extremely high encounter rate and a ton of characters in battle on both sides, which when combined with the long attack animations results in battles taking up far too much of your time. Not that the story is really any good either, it's incredibly formulaic and features only very basic characterization. It would probably be B if not for the fact that it came out super early and it has a pretty good soundtrack, though it's definitely bettered by Suikoden 1 and Lunar.
Klaymen Klaymen is essentially a far better version of Myst. Like Myst, it's kind of an esoteric graphic adventure game with minimal dialogue, but not nearly as cryptic and with far more style. For starters, it has to be noted that the game is absolutely gorgeous. The entire game is done using claymation, and it looks fantastic, the enviroments have a great sense of style that still holds up well and that animations are charming and funny. This alone helps a lot with many of Myst's problems, because the amount of charm makes the game significantly more interesting to explore than the sterile, boring worlds of Myst. Like Myst, the game is pretty light on story and dialogue, instead focusing on various puzzles that can be encountered in different areas. These are by no means easy, but they aren't as needlessly cryptic as the ones in Myst, there's far more where at least what you need to accomplish is fairly obvious, even if how you accomplish it isn't. I was able to solve quite a lot of them without having to rely on a guide, which I certainly can't say about most other games of this type, and even when I did have to look at a guide it was usually just something along the lines of "you can't solve this yet, come back later". This is also a PC game, and it's made the transition to PS1 quite intact, the load times are a little longer but otherwise it still looks and plays great on playstation. It does still have some of the flaws common to Myst-like games (namely, being a bit on the low-energy side and the fact that you'll definitely need a guide occasionally) and I don't consider it anywhere near as good as something like Day of the Tentacle or Sam and Max, but among this type of game it's definitely one of the better ones and one of your best options for a game of this style on PS1.
NHL 98 is an otherwise incredible game with one extremely significant flaw. For its time, this game is incredibly advanced. It looks fantastic visually, and unlike the awful Saturn version it runs like a dream, too, holding 60fps at pretty much all times. It also has pretty good commentary for its time and fast, responsive controls, even the presentation and menus are quite slick. So what's the issue? Well, the fighting sucks (it's almost cartoonishly poor), but that's minor. The real problem is the same as almost every other game in the NHL series and every other bad hockey game, which is that the goalies are simply far too good and that robs the game of any kind of nuance. The goalies will block at least 95% of shots, regardless of shot quality, rebounds, screening, or anything like that, which effectively trivializes everything you do on the ice. You can give up atrocious chances by giving the opponents a 3 on 1 breakaway and let them get 5 rebounds in a row and unless you get extremely unlucky it won't matter, and similarly you can dominate the shot count the entire game and end up losing 1-0 because none of your shots ever went in. This means is there's basically no correlation between the score and the quality of play by each team, which simply cannot make for a G-level game, regardless of how great everything else is. If this game had NHL 94's goalies, it would almost certainly be an SR-level game, as it would effectively be NHL 14 (easily the best Hockey game ever made) 16 years earlier, but alas. It's still an all right game for its time, but Wayne Gretsky's 3D Hockey 98 and Actua Ice Hockey 2 are both significantly superior options on PS1.
DeleteSol Divide is pretty much the same game as on Saturn, and it's still cool. As before, this is kind of a cross between a shmup and an action game, you fly and can shoot projectiles, but you also have a melee attack and the screen frequently stops to have you fight enemies. Regardless of what it is, though, it's a pretty fun game, and one of the best parts is that they added a massive "original mode" to the console release, that plays like an RPG where you can earn items and level up. This greatly extends the game's longevity and makes it one of the best home console ports of a shmup. Definitely check this one out, particularly since the PS1 version is in English.
I was actually kind of shocked that I gave Starfighter an A on Saturn, because it seems like a clear B, so I went back to the Saturn version to compare. A quick refresher, this is a 3D flight game that uses the same atrocious 3D engine from Hi-Octane, so although it controls okay (weapons targetting is not great) it looks atrocious and you can barely see anything. Going back to the Saturn version, it is probably a little better, although the draw distance is better it's much smoother, with the PS1 version having more draw distance but a ton of slowdown, though even if it was identical to the Saturn version I don't think there's any way this game would ever be A on PS1, there's simply too many vastly better flight games on the system for this to be worth your time. I don't think I would have given it an A on Saturn either if we did it again today.
DeleteUnstack sucks. This is an extremely basic, low-effort puzzle game with the most barebones presentation imagineable, and the mechanics are also pretty bad. Your goal is to drop bomb-like blocks into a 3D chamber to destroy the structure present there. The bombs instantly destroy any like-coloured blocks, but they also always flow towards the top left of the plane that they're on, which is a super annoying mechanic because it places extreme limitations on where you can actually place blocks. The game kind of plays tolerably when you're playing alone, it's not hard to gradually whittle down the structure, but it completely falls apart when playing against someone due to the way attacks work. Since bombs destroy any blocks them come into contact with even if it's only a single-block match, it's absurdly easy to make long combos by accident, which sends dozens or hundreds of blocks to your opponent. It's not hard to clear them back out, either, but as the win condition is either to clear your own stack or bury the opponent, this results in matches that take forever to finish. If you simply couldn't attack the opponent at all and it was just "who can finish first" it might be A, but the VS mode is so unfun that it's clearly B and the single player mode simply doesn't have enough longevity to justify anything else.