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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Beyond the Beyond - AABABA - 33% (6)
Klaymen Klaymen: Neverhood no Nazo - GGG - 100% (3)
NHL 98 - GGAA - 75% (4)
Sol Divide - BAGG - 63% {4}
Star Fighter - AB - 25% (2)
Unstack - BB - 0% (2)
Sol Divide also got a squiggle bracket on Saturn, I think it might be the first multiplatform game to get squiggled on both GABs.
Games for this topic:
Arthur: Ready to Race
College Slam
Ganbare Goemon: Oedo Daikaiten
Puzzle Mania
Shachou Eiyuuden
Ubik
There's a translation available for the Goemon game. Also, I actually intended to put Shachou Eiyuuden as the last game in the topic title, as it looks pretty interesting, but it didn't fit.
Arthur: Ready to Race - G
ReplyDeleteCollege Slam - A
Ganbare Goemon: Oedo Daikaiten - G
Puzzle Mania - G
Shachou Eiyuuden - B
Ubik - B
Arthur: Ready to Race is a surprisingly high quality game for a kid's game. It's actually not wholly a racing game, you do race at certain points, but the game is focused around the kids trying to build a soap box derby racer and you also have to do various other minigames to get parts for it, which requires you to walk around town and talk to various people inbetween the races. Pretty much every aspect of the game is fairly well done, while simple, the controls for the racing and the various minigames are quite responsive and there are also collectables in terms of the bionic bunny cards and soundtrack CDs that you can collect. The game also has pretty solid production values, the environments have a nice cartoony look to them and the game also features full voice acting, complete with alternate sequences if you lose any minigame. About the only bad thing you can say about it is that it's fairly short, it can be finished in about an hour, but it's a pretty decent hour that feels true to the source material. If only the Muppets racing game had this level of effort put into it.
As when we covered it on SNES, College Slam is essentially just a slightly worse version of NBA Jam TE. Gameplay-wise, it's completely intact, but the game has taken quite a hit to presentation. For starters, the game does not have any licensed players, the players are just named by their positions, which makes it feel quite a bit more lifeless. The game also lacks music and there's not as much variety to the commentary. On SNES, NBA Jam TE was so far ahead of everything else that these issues were more excusable, but this generation with games like NBA Hangtime being available, there's not much reason to play a lesser version of NBA Jam TE, particularly considering PS1 already has a solid port of it that came out earlier than this game. It's still completely playable, there's just not a lot of point to it.
Ganbare Goemon: Oedo Daikaiten is another classic 2D Goemon game. Compared to its immediate predecessor Uchuu Kaizoku Akogingu, this one plays much more like Ganbare Goemon 2 on SNES, axing the overhead field map areas and bringing back the entire classic Goemon gang. While it lacks some of the adventure elements of Goemon's Great Adventure, this is still an excellent 2D platformer and its robot battles are probably the closest in style to the ones in Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon of any of the other games in the series. About the only thing you might complain about is that the load times can be a little long, which can be a problem as the game is also pretty hard, but the game itself is super solid and is well worth a playthrough for any fan of the series.
Puzzle Mania reminds me a fair bit of Game no Tatsujin in that it's a combination of a handful of different letter puzzle games, in this case Sudoku, Skeleton, and Number Crossword. You probably know the rules to Sudoku, but even if you don't, the game does have a fairly good tutorial for it. Skeleton is something you probably haven't heard of, but it's actually pretty fun. It's essentially a crossword but backwards, you're given all the words and you need to find a way to fit them into the grid so everything lines up. The nice thing about this is that you don't need to be able to read the words (they're in Japanese) to enjoy this game, you just have to be able to match up the symbols. Number Crossword is a crossword like game where the boxes are numbered, which tells you that the same symbol goes in each box with the same number, and you have to choose the correct characters so that all of the boxes make words. This one requires you to be fairly fluent in Japanese, so I wasn't able to get far in it, but I can't really fault the game for that and it does seem like an interesting concept. In any case, you don't really need it, each of the games has 100 puzzles available, so it'll keep you going for a pretty long time even without Number Crossword. I also appreciate the way the game's interface is put together, for example for Sudoku it shows which numbers are still possible for a given box and for Skeleton it won't let you put down a word if it can't fit. I also like that there's no time limit or anything like that, so it's a fairly relaxing game to play.
DeleteShachou Eiyuuden is the epitome of style over substance. It's a heavily wuxia-inspired RPG, and about the only notable thing about it is the combat animations. When two characters attack each other, they engage in a wuxia-style showdown of strikes and dodges that looks kind of impressive the first time. Unfortunately, these animations take over 10 seconds and you'll see one literally any time any character attacks, so this makes battles take forever. Speedup makes this tolerable, but there's barely anything to the game beyond the long battle animations. The combat system is incredibly simple, you can only attack and use items, so the only real strategy is choosing which attacks to use. Attacks level up as you use them and some attacks use MP, but generally the key is to find a strong red attack and level it up a lot and heal when necessary and that's about it. The game has a fair number of in-engine cutscenes with full voice acting (which is in Chinese), but the field and dungeon maps are incredibly barebones, which makes it very easy to get lost and in general the gameplay side of the game feels like an afterthought. Definitely one of PS1's weaker RPGs and definitely not worth the effort to fight through the language barrier.
Ubik is another Cryo Interactive game, and it's maybe their worst. This game's interface is so ludicrously broken that most people probably won't even make it down the hall to take the first mission. It's an atrocious mishmash of a point and click adventure game with fixed camera angles that makes moving or interacting with things nearly impossible, and it's also extremely laggy and has tons of load time every time the camera angle changes, which it does constantly. If you somehow make it to any of the missions, it's a completely atrocious third person shooter which uses the same awful controls and camera angles so attempting to put tactical action gameplay on top of that just makes it a million times worse. I can't believe I'm saying this but this game would have been a million times better with tank controls, though it would probably still have sucked.