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Last Topic's Ratings:
Atelier Marie - GAA - 67% (3)
Cho Aniki: Kyuukyoku Muteki Ginga Saikyou Otoko - AAA - 50% (2)
Clockwork Knight 2 - AAGABG - 58% (6)
Herc's Adventures - GGAAAA - 67% (6)
Street Fighter Alpha 3 - GGGGGGGG - 100% (8)
Tenchi Muyou Rensa Hitsuyou - AAA - 50% (3)
I was quite surprised that this topic only had one game in the high range despite having quite a few big names. Though actually, Clockwork Knight 1 didn't make the high range either, which I had actually forgotten until I was updating the list.
Games for this topic:
Advanced World War
FIFA: Road to World Cup 98
Independence Day
Sega Ages: Fantasy Zone
Shining Wisdom
Sound Qube
It just occurred to me that the "Qube" in Intelligent Qube and Sound Qube is just intended to be pronounced as "Cube". I've always pronounced it as "Kwoob". If they wanted the normal pronunciation they should have just spelled it properly.
Advanced World War - B
ReplyDeleteFIFA: Road to World Cup 98 - G
Independence Day - G
Sega Ages: Fantasy Zone - B
Shining Wisdom - A
Sound Qube - G
Advanced World War is basically Advance Wars with a single new mechanic, though unfortunately that new mechanic is so terrible it pretty much ruins the game. The basic gist of the game will be familiar to anyone who has played Nintendo's series, move your units and attack the enemy to gradually wear them down so you can capture their towns and bases. Air units work a little differently, there's basically an upper grid that air units occupy, but it doesn't change the game that drastically. The big new mechanic here is that units have morale, and morale determines how much damage they do. Every time a unit engages in battle, its morale drops, and it can only be replenished by either starting the turn adjacent to a commander unit, taking a turn with no action, or ending turn on a base that you control. The problem is that morale drops absurdly fast, after 3 combat engagements you'll be at 0, which makes it impossible to do any damage at all, and even after 2 attacks your morale will be so low you'll barely do any damage. Making matters worse, high morale units are almost impossible to damage, baring extreme luck (there's a ton of damage waiver), so the entire game pretty much revolves around this mechanic. Obviously, most of your time will be spent keeping your units morale high, which generally involves having your commander unit shuttle back and forth between your units to keep them all topped up. Note though that the commander also has morale and can't get it back this way, so they must either rest of go to a town to get morale. Air units also must return to the airport to regain morale, so they can basically only make a single sortie before they have to return. Offensively, the strategy is obviously just to dogpile a single enemy unit with all of your forces so they can't counterattack and become vulnerable, which gives the game very little strategic depth, and the need to constantly retreat to bases or to a commander unit to do any damage makes battles take forever. I think this could have been an okay mechanic if morale dropped way slower (maybe if you lost 10% per battle rather than 33% or something), but as it stands it's basically just AW but way slower and AW does not benefit from being slow.
We've seen our fair share of awful ports to Saturn, but thankfully FIFA Road to the World Cup 98 isn't one of them. This version is maybe a slight downgrade from PS1 (textures are worse and it has very occasional frameskipping) but you almost certainly wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for it and the core gameplay is totally intact. The comparison with NHL 98 in the PS1 topic is interesting, as compared to 98, the core gameplay here isn't quite as solid. It controls all right, but it's not quite as smooth or fast as NHL, but that basically doesn't matter because unlike NHL 98, the goalies work properly here, which is to say they barely work at all. The goalies here have almost Wayne Gretsky's 3D Hockey (N64)-level freeness to one-timers, though this is fine in soccer because you have far more players on the field to interrupt these, but if you allow a 2 man breakaway you might as well just put one on the board because the chance to score is extremely high. Corners are similarly super dangerous, as they should be, to encourage tight defensive play in your own zone. I really can't stress enough how vital this is to making Hockey and Soccer games play properly, and thankfully they nailed it here. On the presentation side, this game also looks and sounds quite good, being noticeably a cut above most other Saturn titles visually and having full commentary (I particularly find it hilarious that the commentators are always impressed by even the most routine saves from the goalkeepers, probably since this is about the extent of what they're capable of). You could probably make a reasonable case for this being Saturn's best sports game, though obviously that's not a strong field.
DeleteSpeaking of surprisingly solid Saturn ports we have Independence Day. Unlike virtually every other multiplatform title between the two systems, here, the Saturn version is 60fps while the PS1 version is 30fps, and the Saturn version also has increased effects and draw distance as well! It's not a pure win for the Saturn version, though, the big caveat here is that the PS1 version is locked 30fps, while the Saturn version has fairly frequent framedrops, and the controls and lock-on also feel significantly touchier on Saturn (perhaps they weren't properly adjusted for the increased framerate?). It's not a huge issue and the Saturn version does look quite good in motion, though I think the PS1 version feels slightly better to play overall. Version differences aside, this remains a pretty fun arcade-style dogfighter with fast-paced gameplay and decent mission variety, and it's almost certainly Saturn's best option for a game of this type. Even though I slightly prefer the PS1 version I definitely have to give credit to the port team to making a real effort to adapt the game to the hardware.
I can't even with Sega sometimes. Sega Ages: Fantasy Zone is literally just the arcade version of Fantasy Zone from 1986 and that's it. Obviously, Fantasy Zone is a good game, on Master System, which has a pretty solid port of it. Don't bother asking if this collection has any extras because of course it doesn't, about the only thing you can say for it is that at the time, this was the first home console port of the arcade version of the game, but by this gen arcade perfect ports of shmups became common and almost all of them come with way more stuff than this release does. Couldn't they have at least included Fantasy Zone 2? I mean, it's also a Master System game, but it'd probably have at least bumped the collection up to A. If you love Fantasy Zone, just get the collection on PS2, which includes 10 games, one of which was completely made from scratch for that release. At least they put more effort into their Sonic and Phantasy Star collections on Saturn.
Shining Wisdom is similar to Advanced World War in that it's a promising title with a single flaw, though it's not as crippling in this case. For starters, forget everything you know about the Shining series, Shining Wisdom bears no resemblance to them, being instead a Zelda-like game instead of any flavour of RPG. Still, as Zelda copycats go, it's not a bad one, it pretty much nails the core aspects of Zelda dungeon design and while somewhat basic, I also enjoy the game's story. It is definitely a bit lacking presentation-wise, as it was originally a Genesis title that was ported to Saturn at the last minute, but that's not really a major concern. The biggest issue with the game is its running mechanic. You can run in this game, and you frequently have to, for example to avoid crumbling floors, to build up enough speed to push blocks, and even to attack in some situations, but in order to run you have to mash buttons. You don't have to mash that fast, but as you'll want to be running almost all the time, you'll basically need to be alternatingly tapping two buttons near-constantly as you play the game. This causes the game to be somewhat tiring to play and I had to take breaks while working on this review, which is definitely annoying, it would have been far better if you could just hold down a button or double tap a direction to run. The game does have some interesting ideas beyond this, like some magic orbs which can alter the properties of your weapons, so if you do stick it out you're reasonably rewarded for it, just get yourself a turbo controller or map an autofire button to save your wrists.
DeleteSound Qube is a weird game, so it's time for another installment of "Tero explains the game". The gist of Sound Qube is that you have to dismantle a structure made up of cubes. You control a cursor that points towards the cubes from the outside, and you can press a button to send a sonar pulse through the current row. As it passes through each cube, it will make a noise, which tells you if it reacts to your current cursor or not. By rotating around the structure, you can turn your cursor from red to blue, and different cubes will react differently to each colour. Essentially, the cubes are secretly divided among four main types. Red cubes react only to red, Blue cubes react only to blue, White cubes react to neither, and Core cubes react to both red and blue. To win the stage, you have to identify any core cubes by testing them with pulses, then mark and remove them from the board. In theory, this just involves pinging each cube from both sides to find which one reacts to both, but the game is timed and you usually don't have time to test every cube. However, a key piece of the puzzle is that the game tells you how many of each colour are present on the board. For example, suppose a stage has 6 red cubes, 0 blue cubes, and 1 core cube. Clearly then, the secret is to ping the cubes from the blue side, since we know any cube that reacts must be a core cube because there are no blue cubes. A further complexity is that although you can win by simply removing the core cubes, you can get bonus points and items by also removing the red or blue cubes, but the catch is you must mark all of them at once in order to remove them. This is quite tricky on bigger stages, but it's worth a ton of points if done correctly and is key to getting high scores. There's not too much more to the game than this, there is a special jammer cube that blocks your signal that can be a pain, but generally it's a fairly simple game of deductive reasoning. It's maybe a little borderline between A and G, but I think it's decently fun for what it is.