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Last Topic's Ratings:
Ayrton Senna Kart Duel Special - B - 0% (1)
Blockids - BBB - 0% (3)
Lagnacure - B - 0% (1)
Odo Odo Oddity - B - 50% (1)
Soul of the Samurai - GGBB - 50% (4)
Ultimate 8 Ball - GGAA - 75% (4)
If there had to be a topic where no one else played the imports, I'm not sad it was this one.
Games for this topic:
Delta Force: Urban Warfare
Disney's 101 Dalmatians 2: Patch's London Adventure
GT Senshuken Max Rev
King of Fighters 98
Pinball Fantasies Deluxe
Sensible Soccer
I probably mentioned this when we covered the SNES version, but I have some fondness for Pinball Fantasies, as it was one of my first gameboy games, so I'll be interested to see what they did with the PS1 version.
Delta Force: Urban Warfare - A
ReplyDeleteDisney's 101 Dalmatians 2: Patch's London Adventure - B
GT Senshuken Max Rev - B
King of Fighters 98 - B
Pinball Fantasies Deluxe - G
Sensible Soccer - B
I actually like almost everything about Delta Force: Urban Warfare, the issue is that PS1 just can't really handle it. It's a pretty ambitious FPS that reminds me of Goldeneye in some ways, each mission begins with a little cinema sequence telling the story, then you're given a Goldeneye-style list of objectives to complete on each stage. In terms of the UI and gameplay, there's a lot to like here. It's got a modern-style dual analog control setup, switching weapons is a breeze and weapons feel good to use, you have a persistent minimap and radar and you can pull up the list of objectives at any time, you can drag bodies around when trying to be stealthy, and you can even use infrared and night vision whenever necessary to navigate dark areas. Without a doubt, this is one of the most advanced FPS games of the generation, which really makes you ask what it's doing on PS1 and not, say, N64, because the limitations of the PS1 really hold this game back. The game generally runs okay in indoor areas, but these areas have to be kept really small, with the game having short mid-stage load sequences every couple rooms. The framerate generally tanks the moment you go outside, especially if enemies are around, which makes it hard to be precise, and levels themselves are also generally extremely short, rarely more than a few minutes in length, due to the PS1's inability to handle large areas. Strangely, the first level is actually much better done than most of the later ones, it runs well and doesn't feature any obvious loading zones (I imagine it probably loads and unloads parts of the level as you progress through the building, which is how it should be done), but the quality definitely goes a bit downhill after that mission. It's still definitely playable, but it's such a shame this never released on PS2 or N64, because those systems would have been able to run it far better.
Disney's 101 Dalmatians 2 is almost the opposite of Delta Force in that it's also a game that came out very late in the system's life, but it's completely unambitious in every way. The previous game in the series, Disney's 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue was actually a pretty impressive 3D platformer, so I had hopes that this game would refine that formula even further, but instead this is a far less ambitious 3D action game that doesn't really have a lot going for it. The game is basically divided into two types of levels, side scrolling levels and overhead levels, but they play very similarly apart from the later type of level having a bit more exploration. In every stage, your goal is basically just to collect a lot of something, which loses most of its appeal after the second stage or so, particularly because most of the stages are very similar. The game's controls and physics are quite bad, your jump gets almost no height, your bark attack is annoyingly hard to aim, and roll jumping feels extremely janky. The game is super easy so this doesn't matter much, but it ensures it never really feels interesting or fun to play. It even visually looks a lot worse than its predecessor. Probably Disney's weakest effort this gen.
GT Senshuken Max Rev is atrocious, maybe even worse than GT Kai, as implausible as that sounds. From the second you turn on the game it's immediately apparent that this was the team's first attempt at a 3D game, as everything in the game feels wrong. By far the most egregious thing is your brakes, which are a million times too powerful, you can go from 200 km/h to 0 in like a quarter second, and applying the brake also gives you infinite grip, so if your turning while braking you shoot to the inside of the turn like a rocket. In theory, this does allow you to take turns extremely fast, though it feels awful to control and even when I was doing well it still felt like pulling teeth. Speaking of jank, there's also the other cars, which jutter all over the track, and this game features some of the worst collisions you'll find anywhere, with cars just randomly getting tossed to the side when they collide with each other. The entire engine just feels off, like it was designed by someone who knew what a car was but had never seen one in motion. The game's visuals are actually not that bad for their time, but that's not going to matter much when the game feels this bad to play.
DeleteSo I've been pretty hard on the PS1 versions of the King of Fighters games, but playing KOF 98 I realized that I actually haven't been nearly hard enough on them. Obviously, KOF 98 maintains the same issue with the game needing to load for 5+ seconds every time a new character comes in, which makes team play nonviable, but there's always single play, but single play is totally butchered on PS1 as well. See, the problem is that the PS1 version of the game has a ton of frameskipping, and as you might know from Super Street Fighter 2, frameskipping can result in a game skipping cancel frames. This makes combos incredibly unreliable on PS1, as normal cancelled into specials will frequently fail to come out entirely, or they will come out too late to combo. To make sure I wasn't just super rusty or something, I switched over to the Saturn version of KOF 97 (the PS1 version of KOF 97 also has the same problem) and I was hitting all of my special cancels 100% of the time, whereas I was getting maybe 20% accuracy on PS1 (I suspect the frameskipping both eats cancel frames and special inputs). In any case, this makes this version of the game feel like absolute crap to play. As mentioned above, this problem is also present in KOF 97 on PS1, but I imagine I probably missed it due to playing a character whose combos were a little more lenient (I think I was playing Iori) or I may have just chalked it up to rustiness, but after directly comparing the PS1 and Saturn versions the difference is night and day. KOF 96 and earlier actually seem to be fine, but obviously these games aren't nearly as good. In any case, the correct option is clearly just to wait for the Dreamcast or PS2 versions of the game, both of which play way better (and the PS2 version also has a ton of upgrades and new characters).
As I mentioned in the OP, I had Pinball Fantasies on Game Boy when I was a kid, so I'm probably kind of biased towards this game, but I still think it's pretty decent. I had actually somewhat forgotten what the SNES version was like, but actually this version is fairly similar to it, just with significantly nicer visuals and sound, as well as a few more options like smoother scrolling. It's definitely interesting to see these pinball tables on the big screen, as they are clearly the same tables as on GB (I would imagine that the high-rez version came first because I think this was a PC game, but I played it on GB first so to me that seems like the original), and compared to the SNES version the increased production values definitely help it feel a little more polished. The real question is how it fares against other Pinball games on PS1, and I would say not too badly. For starters, something that's nice here is that there's 4 tables, and they're all pretty different from each other. I feel like this is a pretty good sweet spot for the number of tables to have in a Pinball game, but we've played quite a few titles that have fewer than this. Like many modern Pinball games, these tables are filled with various events that are triggered in different ways, but this game doesn't use an LCD screen the same way some of the newest tables (at the time) did, though to be honest I don't greatly miss it, as I feel like some of the silly LCD minigames are really just a gimmick that kind of distract from the core pinball experience. I also like the "head on" viewing angle that this game uses, while it maybe lacks some of the "wow" factor of the slanted perspective, it's definitely the best for visual clarity, and the game's colourful 2D art still holds up quite well even against the games using 3D visuals. Probably the only real downside to this game is that unlike many comparable games, there's no "grace period" where if you lose your ball very quickly after launching it you get to re-launch, here even if you go straight into the gutter off your launch that still costs you a life. This is a little lame, but it's not enough to significantly hamper my enjoyment of the game.
DeleteSensible Soccer is a franchise that has good pedigree, but the PS1 version is a pretty atrocious effort that doesn't live up to the legacy of the franchise. It kind of nails the visuals, the default camera is super zoomed out like the original, but the physics of the game are a complete disaster with almost everything feeling way off. Perhaps to account for how small the players usually are, there's a lot of strange jank with the players teleporting around the field and snapping to the ball in weird ways. For example, if you try to do a steal, as long as you're at least somewhat near the person who has the ball, you'll basically just teleport to them, which feels incredibly weird, especially when attackers do this to you. It's also often the case that you'll have the ball and be running somewhere with it, and then all of a sudden a different player will be running somewhere else with the ball, almost like an online "rollback" except that obviously this is an offline game. Despite the amount of snapping, passing feels awful, with the game having absolutely no sense of flow on offense, and the goalies are completely atrocious, which is often a good thing but not in a game that has this level of jank. It's probably not surprising that this entry is basically never mentioned despite being part of a franchise that's generally pretty popular.