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Last Topic's Ratings:
Advanced World War - BB - 0% (2)
FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 - AGAG - 75% (4)
Independence Day - BBGG - 50% (4)
Sega Ages: Fantasy Zone - GABBA - 40% {5}
Shining Wisdom - AABGAA - 50% (6)
Sound Qube - GG - 100% (2)
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:
Deep Fear
Fire Pro Wrestling S: 6 Men Scramble
Grandia
Sexy Parodius
Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo
Z
What a list of games! When writing the topic title I originally had Deep Fear, Firepro, and Grandia, only to realize this topic also contains Parodius and Puzzle Fighter! Talk about competition. Also, in case you weren't aware, there's a translation available for the Saturn version of Grandia.
Deep Fear - A
ReplyDeleteFire Pro Wrestling S: 6 Men Scramble - A
Grandia - A
Sexy Parodius - G
Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo - G
Z - B
Deep Fear is basically a Sega take on Resident Evil but it's not nearly as good. Visually it looks the part and it also nails the controls, but it's also fairly clear that they didn't quite understand most of the design factors that make Resident Evil what it is. I can't blame them too much for this, as even Capcom struggled to replicate the formula with Resident Evil 2 (it went through an entire scrapped prototype before being restarted from scratch because it wasn't fun) but many key aspects of the formula are missing here. One of the biggest ones is that the game is completely linear, at any given time you have exactly one place you need to go and there's no real exploration or puzzle solving of any kind. Not that there would be much to explore for anyway, as the game also completely lacks any kind of limited resources, you do have limited ammo but it's very abundant, and you can refill it for free as many times as you want at any weapons locker. As such, this completely eliminates the need to ever dodge or avoid killing any enemies, or even to be careful not to waste ammo, you can basically just go all guns blazing and you'll be just fine. That said, the enemies are not hard to dodge so you certainly could run past them if you wanted, but the gunplay is decent (it pretty much nails the RE controls) so combat is probably one of the highlights of the game. There's also a somewhat strange system where most rooms have a limited amount of oxygen, which manifests as a timer at the top of the screen before your oxygen meter starts ticking down. The timer is almost always so large as to be no threat whatsoever, though, and given the lack of exploration it rarely feels like it matters. It's certainly not terrible, it looks solid and controls pretty well and the story is decent (though the voice acting is atrocious, and not in the funny RE1 kind of way), it's just not in the same league as the RE games.
I've never been the biggest fan of Fire Pro Wrestling and that continues with 6 Men Scramble. For the uninitiated, the primary appeal of Fire Pro Wrestling is its character creator, which, to its credit, is incredibly fleshed out. You have a ton of options for the wrestler's appearance, attributes, and moves, allowing you to create almost any wrestler imaginable. If this is the primary thing you want out of a wrestling game (and for some people it definitely is), look no further. If this isn't something that interests you that much, the game also has hundreds of precreated wrestlers, including lookalikes for a fair number of American wrestlers, so you certainly don't have to fiddle with the character creator if that's not your bag. The game also has quite a lot of modes. The big new feature here is the 6 player support, you can have royal rumbles with 6 fighters in the ring and these are kind of impressive, though there's a ton of other match types available as well. So certainly, you can't fault the game on the amount of content, my criticisms stem largely from the gameplay and presentation. In terms of the gameplay, it's pretty basic and somewhat stiff. One of the first things to know is that the game is 2D, which means you can only move and attack in 8 directions, which is particularly noticeable with running attacks, though running attacks generally suck and you don't want to use them anyway (you have to run for a really long time before you can actually attack). Actually, strikes in general in the game are pretty bad, they're very stubby, easily blocked, there are no combos, and they just generally feel fairly lame to use. This means the game is almost entirely about grapples, which work okay, but it has the effect of making the game feel quite basic. One of the problems with games with a ton of wrestlers is that they all play kinda the same and that is definitely the case here. See, it kinda doesn't matter what kind of move you have for your B grapple, it will always be a mid power move that does a moderate amount of damage, so the general strategy of opening with A grapples and strikes before moving on to B and C grapples is the same with every character. The game's presentation is also super basic. Moves look all right, but there's very little flash, and the game also has no commentary whatsoever (another concession of the character creator), which makes it feel much lower energy compared to most other games. I think this series is kind of an enthusiast product for those who love the character creator, if you're here mainly for the gameplay it doesn't stand out nearly as much, particularly as other Wrestling games have stepped it up a lot this gen. It's certainly playable, but I don't find it nearly as much fun as War Zone or No Mercy.
DeleteGrandia is pretty much the same as on PS1, which is actually kind of impressive given the game's size and scope, though being originally designed for the platform probably helped. When we covered this on PS1, I noted that this is a game of highs and lows. It has great presentation, it has a lot of charm, and the battle system is decent, but there are way too many encounters, battles take a long time, and dungeons are long and tedious, which prevents me from putting in the top echelon of RPGs from this gen. You might wonder whether or not the Saturn version coming out earlier and having less competition in terms of RPGs would be enough to boost it up to G, but I don't think it really is, particularly because the PS1 version has a few advantages. The English voice acting helps increase the charm of the game, and more importantly, battles load somewhat faster on PS1, which is important because you'll be doing a gazillion of them. Still, this game is definitely a million times better than Shachou Eiyuuden (it has many of the same problems but with none of the upsides, the comparison to Grandia helped make it obvious that game was B), and it definitely does have its moments if you're willing to be very patient with it, but if you'd like an RPG that respects your time better you might do better with Lunar or Grandia 2.
DeleteNot surprisingly, Sexy Parodius is still great. I feel like this is secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) one of the top tier shmup franchises, it takes everything that was awesome about Gradius and makes it even better with multiple characters and highly creative presentation. Compared to previous games in the series, the big change this time is that there are now sub missions in each stage that can determine the ending, though they're not greatly intrusive. Also, the UI has seen some upgrades, one of my favourite changes is that the bells now tell you what powerup you'll get if you collect them when they're at a specific colour (though avoiding accidentally shooting them too many times remains as big an issue as ever). There's not really too much else to say, the game looks and runs great on Saturn and it's a lot of fun.
Super Puzzle Fighter is a game where I could never tell you how I'm going to rate it until I play it for a while. We've already rated a number of other puzzle games that play somewhat similarly to it, the gist of the game is that you drop coloured blocks from the top, Puyo style, but simply connecting blocks of the same colour doesn't clear them, you have to detonate them by connecting them to a crash gem of the same colour, which also occasionally show up in your pieces. If not matched with an appropriate block, you can leave crash gems on your field for later use, which forms an important part of the strategy, and if you connect blocks together in certain patterns they form power gems which send a lot of garbage to the opponent when you destroy them. Speaking of, when you send garbage to the opponent, you send numbered blocks that take a few rounds to turn into normal blocks, and every character sends these blocks in a different pattern. The core idea is fun and it is generally pretty fun to play, but it has some flaws. The biggest one is that this is quite possibly the most poorly-balanced game of all time. The vast majority of the cast is complete garbage, their drop patterns result in massive power gems that can be trivially sent back to the opponent by placing a power gem in the correct spot before they attack. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that attacks do much more damage if your blocks are nearly at the top, which makes counterattacks ludicrously damaging, these two factors combined make it almost impossible for most of the cast to ever win against any competent player. Even if you stick to Ken and Donovan (the only two good characters), the game still often feels like RNG because crash gems are rare and long droughts where you don't get a gem of a specific colour are common. Still, it's generally fairly fun and I think it's enough of a classic that it probably is still G, it's just a game that's best not taken super seriously and most of the other top puzzle games are a bit better than it. Alternatively, play the rebalanced PS3 version if you can.
DeleteZ was already a pretty questionable game on PS1, but it's way worse on Saturn. On top of all the problems the PS1 version had, the Saturn version has an extremely inconsistent framerate that makes even issuing simple unit commands nearly impossible, and it takes so long to load I actually thought the game had locked up. I really don't understand how it's possible for such a simple game to run this poorly, I feel like this game should easily have been doable on Genesis (it's not really any more complex than Dune 2). In any case, definitely avoid this version.