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Last Topic's Ratings:
Deep Fear - GGGAAAA - 71% (7) (1 SR)
Fire Pro Wrestling S: 6 Men Scramble - GGAGA - 80% (5)
Grandia - GGAGAAGGGG - 85% (10) (1 SR)
Sexy Parodius - GGGGGG - 100% (6)
Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo - GGAGGGA - 86% (7)
Z - BB - 0% (2)
What a topic! If not for Z this would have been a clean sweep of the high range. Has that ever happened before? I can't recall it happening.
Games for this topic:
Choro Q Park
Farland Saga
Lupin Sansei: Pyramid no Kenja
Mechanical Violator Hakaider: Last Judgement
Virtual On: Cyber Troopers
Zoop
Fun fact: Choro Q Park was my first Saturn game, which I owned for years before Saturn GAB even started, since I have all of the other games in the series. I'm also never sure whether or not to translate the titles of games like Lupin the Third where the series is very well known by its translated name, though in this case because of the subtitle I opted not to. We also have maybe the last appearance of Zoop.
Choro Q Park - G
ReplyDeleteFarland Saga - A
Lupin Sansei: Pyramid no Kenja - A
Mechanical Violator Hakaider: Last Judgement - G
Virtual On: Cyber Troopers - G
Zoop - A
It's no secret that I'm a longtime fan of the Choro Q series, and Choro Q Park was the game that originally piqued my interest in Saturn, as it's a (mostly) classic-style Choro Q game that's exclusive to the platform. The big difference compared to the N64 and PS1 games is the relay system. The cars in Choro Q Park have a limited amount of battery, and when it runs out they drive super slow. To prevent this, you have to choose multiple cars and exchange them, relay-style, at various points in the track. These points are not equidistant from each other, nor is the terrain the same between them, so you can strategically choose different cars based on their individual statistics to best suit each section of the track. As you win races, you'll get more cars, opening up new options for your racing strategy. This is actually a really cool mechanic, and actually, my only complaint is that I wish the game leaned into it even harder. Most tracks allow 4 cars, so you'll tend to field only your best 4, and since the tracks aren't that long and the track features aren't usually that complex, speed and battery power tend to be the stats you'll mainly focus on. I think it would actually be a lot more interesting if you could only use each car once per race, forcing you to select a different set of cars for each lap, which would force you to dig into your ever-growing stock of cars as the courses get longer, and make some hard choices about situations where you might want to try to have a car run two segments. Still, even if it's not always super strategic it's still a nice change of pace and I like how it makes you want to collect all the cars, which is something that has often felt unnecessary in other games in the series. Presentation-wise, it's also pretty solid. The visuals have made the jump to Saturn totally intact, and I think the environments might actually even be a slight step up in detail from the PS1 games, though this does come with some slowdown at times. It varies from track to track and most tracks aren't too bad (oddly enough the tutorial track is probably the worst), but it generally doesn't harm the game too much. Overall, it's another solid entry in the franchise and it's well worth a look for fans of the series.
Farland Saga is a basic but mostly competent SRPG. For a very early title, it's actually a pretty good-looking game, the spritework and animations are good for their time and it has a nice, colourful look to it. The gameplay is quite simple, but it also generally gets the basics down pretty well, movement and experience work how you'd expect, and it even has gradually regenerating mana like in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which helps spellcasters feel a lot more relevant than they did in some early SRPGs. The story is also not bad, it has a fair amount of charm to it and there's also voice acting for many of the story scenes. The game does have one big problem though, and that's that it's very slow. This extends to virtually every element of the gameplay, the most egregious is enemy turns, every enemy takes a few seconds to think even if they're not going to do anything, and many maps have a lot of enemies. Your own movements and attacks are also always a little delayed, and your movement range is not very big, which makes traversing the maps take a long time. Annoyingly, characters can attack and then move, and enemies frequently hit you and run away, forcing you to chase them, and even picking up items feels slow since you have to end a turn on an item to pick it up (you don't even share inventory, so if it's an item you want another character to have you have to then get close to them and trade it to them). Some of this can be mitigated using speedups if you're playing on an emulator, but on a real Saturn this would definitely be a slog.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Lupin the Third, but it's actually a fairly competent 3D action platformer that plays like a more simplistic version of Tomb Raider. From a technical standpoint, the game runs surprisingly well. The draw distance is short, but the levels load seamlessly despite some of them being fairly big and there's no slowdown to be found anywhere, which is kind of impressive for a system who's 3D capabilities many had trouble utilizing. The control is decent too, I kind of appreciate the more traditional platformer-esque controls compared to Tomb Raider, it certainly makes lining up jumps feel more natural, and you also have full camera control as well. Gameplay-wise it's a bit more of a mixed bag. Probably the most noticeable thing about this game is how simple it is. Compared to something like Tomb Raider, the puzzles, combat, and platforming here are super straightforward, and while I do to some degree appreciate it being less cryptic than Tomb Raider can sometimes be, it does tend to result in a game that doesn't feel especially exciting or have a lot of wow moments. By far the best thing about the game are the animated cutscenes, which are great, I am unsure if this is pulled from an episode or movie or if it's original to the game, but either way it clearly has the original animation studio and voice actors, which should be a treat for fans of the show, while being inoffensive enough from a gameplay standpoint that it won't be a problem to get through it.
DeleteMechanical Violator Hakaider is an interesting game. It's a lightgun game based on a Japanese tokusatsu movie, though it's an extremely dark and gritty one. Rather than disposing of mooks with flashy punches and kicks, you'll instead be blowing them to bits with shotguns and other heavy weapons, but they're robots so I guess it's fine. Something interesting to note is that this isn't simply a retelling of the movie, it's actually a sequel set years later that retains much of the original voice cast, so I would imagine that might make it more interesting to those who are fans of the original film. Even if you're not, though, it's still a pretty solid game. By lightgun game standards, this is one of the easiest ones ever made, which isn't to say it's actually super easy, it's just not filled with cheap shots since it wasn't designed to be a quarter muncher. You'll still have to be quick to take out enemies and deflect projectiles, but it generally feels fair in a way that most other games don't. One interesting mechanic to the game is that you have four weapons and they have different strengths and weaknesses, for example the standard gun is a typical all-rounder that does moderate damage and has a decent fire rate and clip size, while the bazooka instead features a huge hit area and does massive damage but has to be reloaded after every shot and fires slowly, so while it has great offense it's very poor at defending you from enemy attacks. You'd think that most of these weapons would have limited ammo, but they're actually all infinite, so you're free to use them whenever you think they might be needed, and swapping weapons to deal with different situations helps give the game more depth. The game is also surprisingly story-heavy for a game of this type, and the action is broken up by first-person exploration segments similar to those from games like Myst. Your choices during these sections, as well as how well you do in certain battles can sometimes cause the story to branch slightly, which helps give it a bit more replay value. Overall, this is a pretty solid title and I don't have too many issues with it. It really makes me wish Shichisei Toshin Guyferd had just stuck to its first-person battles, because this is basically the game that it might have been if it had.
We've taken a look at a fair number of mech fighting games this gen, but now we finally come to the grandaddy of them all, Virtual On. For starters, I want to praise Sega for the conversion to Saturn. Not only does it run flawlessly on Saturn hardware, but this game has a very unique control scheme on Saturn which a traditional controller wouldn't easily replicate, and they've done an admirable job of porting the controls over to a traditional controller in a way that feels natural. In fact, they may actually have done this slightly too well, as the revamped control scheme makes the game so much easier to play that it does kind of expose some issues with the game's design and balance. See, in the original, controlling the mech is fairly complex and getting into situations where you lose your lock on the enemy or have difficulty executing the exact move you want are common, but with the new controls you'll be zipping around the arena like a pro in no time, which makes it significantly harder to actually hit people, not helped by the fact that almost every mech has at least one weapon that's honestly just pretty bad (though one very good weapon is enough to be good in this game). Having better control of the game somehow makes it a little bit more frustrating because it lays bare the game's balance issues in a way that the difficulty of controlling the arcade version could obscure to some degree. Nevertheless, the game is still pretty fun and it's something of a technical marvel on Saturn, even if later games (particularly the Custom Robo series) would refine and polish this type of gameplay significantly further.
DeleteIt's so bizarre to me that Zoop was apparently something of a hit when it came out, being played in gaming competitions and talked up in magazines in the like. I remember buying the game at launch (for PC) with moderately high expectations and after like 20 minutes I was basically done with it. There's really just not much to it, the gameplay is super basic and once you've played for 2 minutes you've seen and learned all there is to know about the game. This game was called addictive? Addictive to whom? I highly doubt even a single person was ever addicted to this. It's not bad enough for B, it's not actively unfun to play, it's not Breakthru, it's just a very vapid and shallow experience.