This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Delta Force: Urban Warfare - AAAA - 50% (4)
Disney's 101 Dalmatians 2: Patch's London Adventure - BBBB - 0% (4)
GT Senshuken Max Rev - BB - 0% (2)
King of Fighters 98 - GBA - 50% {3}
Pinball Fantasies Deluxe - AGA - 67% (3)
Sensible Soccer - BBB - 0% (3)
Ouch. 3 games with 0% and not a single game in the high range? Let's just move right along.
Games for this topic:
Daibouken Deluxe
Fishing Koushien 2
Silverload
Soukoban Basic 2
Three Stooges, The
Vib Ribbon
This is an eclectic set of games, but I think it looks pretty cool. I've played Vib Ribbon before but I remember almost nothing about it, so I'm interested to look at it again.
Daibouken Deluxe - G (SR)
ReplyDeleteFishing Koushien 2 - B
Silverload - A
Soukoban Basic 2 - A
Three Stooges, The - A
Vib Ribbon - B
Daibouken Deluxe is a fascinating and very well-made game that plays like a cross between Dragon Quest and Uncharted Waters. Like in Uncharted Waters, you'll travel the world by boat, stopping in at different ports to trade goods and buy supplies, but your overarching goal is to save the world from an invasion of monsters, which you'll have to do by tracking down their lairs and wiping them out with good old fashioned sword and sorcery. The game manages to tie these two systems together with surprising cohesion. For starters, before you can do any monster slaying, you're first going to have to find the monster hideouts. Like in Uncharted Waters, you begin with only the knowledge of your home port, to find anything else you have to sail near it, and the world is absolutely massive. Furthermore, sailing depletes food, water, and supplies, storms can damage your boat, and hostile ships can attack you on the open water, so you're going to have to stop in at ports regularly to restock and repair, so you'll also want to buy cheap trade goods and sell them at a profit to keep your finances healthy. You'll quickly start to come across some red-coloured ports in your travels, which are ports that are besieged by the monsters. Shopping in these places completely sucks, everything costs more and sells for less, but it does tell you you're on the right track. Something I appreciate is that if you talk to the NPCs in these towns, they'll often point you in the right direction of the monster nest or give you some advice about the enemies in the area, or at least have some useful hints about the overall game systems, so I didn't have any trouble progressing through the game even without a guide.
(Continued)
Once you finally find a monster nest, the style of gameplay completely shifts, so we should probably take some time to talk about the battle systems. When you get into a naval battle, it plays out on a hexagon map like an SRPG. Your goal is to destroy all enemy ships, which can either be done by destroying their hull with cannon fire or boarding them and killing their crew. Each turn you get a few movement points, which you can spend to either move forward or turn, but you always have to move forward before turning, so that adds some nuance to lining up your cannons to hit the enemy, particularly as they can fire back if you're also in range of their cannons, so you'd prefer to shoot them from somewhere they can't retaliate. While your captain does somewhat increase their power by winning naval battles, the quality of your ship matters a ton here, so you'll need to invest some of your money into buying better ships and cannons eventually. On the other hand, the battles in the monster lairs play out like Dragon Quest, with a standard "attack magic tech item" menu system. To do well here, you'll need good equipment, and probably to hire a few mercenaries to help out, which you'll need to finance through your trading endeavors (monsters don't drop much money), and you'll also need some good old fashioned grinding to make your heroes more powerful (though mercenaries don't level and will eventually just need to be replaced). Even magic is a bit interesting here, magic comes in the form of magic stones that you can find from bosses, and they have limited uses before you'll need to retreat to a church to recharge them. As you might have guessed, the game is also pretty much totally open-ended, basically nothing stops you from sailing wherever you want other than your ability to handle the enemies in that area. This is still only barely scratching the surface of the game, but I think one of the things that impressed me the most is that despite how much is going on in this game, it doesn't feel at all unapproachable the way some similar games can, a lot of which just comes down to strong overall design. Easily one of my top finds of the PS1 GAB. Incidentally, there's also a Saturn version of this game, but they're drastically different from one another, despite being called "Deluxe" this is really almost a full remake of the game from the ground up and the gameplay differs drastically between them. We'll discuss it more when we come to the Saturn version, but if you don't want to wait the TLDR version is that this the version you want to look into first.
DeleteThere's something incredibly weird going on with Fishing Koushien 2. As far as I can tell, there appears to be a game-breaking bug in the PS1 version that renders this version effectively unplayable, which isn't present at all on Saturn. The problem is that on the PS1 version, reeling fish has no effect whatsoever, no matter how much you reel or what you set the tension to it will never pull fish closer to you at all, rendering fish completely impossible to catch. On the Saturn version, reeling works completely normally and this bug doesn't exist at all. In this kind of situation, I'm always suspicious that this could be an emulator issue, so I tested it with every available emulator and even on a real PS1 and the problem persists. I also saw some videos on youtube of people encountering the same problem, though I did find one playthrough of the Japanese PS1 version where it was seemingly working normally, which I can't explain. Is this some kind of overzealous copy protection on PS1? A later revision of the PS1 version with this bug fixed? I have no idea, but unless someone else can figure it out I'm forced to declare this version of the game unplayable, which is unfortunate because on Saturn this game is actually not bad at all, certainly a massive upgrade over the original.
Silverload is an interesting but highly flawed game. For starters, this is not a simple port of the PC version, unlike pretty much every other adventure game port on the system, this game has instead been rebuilt for the ground up for PS1, which comes with a lot of benefits. Besides simply running well on the platform, with minimal load time and no other porting issues, the art has been redrawn and generally looks a lot better, the voices have been re-recorded in much better quality and all text-only lines from the PC version now have full voice acting, and they've added light gun-style segments for the shootouts which actually work pretty well. Speaking of the game's presentation, it's quite good. The visuals in the game have tons of personality, and the voice acting is very good as well. The game's setting and story are also pretty interesting and creepy, so there's a fair bit to like here. The problem is that the game's interface is one of the worst in any game of this type. It uses a standard point and click interface, which actually isn't too bad on its own, the problem is the hit zones to navigate with most things are really small and hard to interact with, especially for moving between scenes, which is also totally arbitrary. After switching to the boot icon, you usually have to click on a zone which might be only 10-20 pixels in size, with no indication of where it might be. Need to leave a room? Maybe you click the bottom middle. Maybe you click the right side. Maybe you click the left side. Maybe it's randomly somewhere towards the middle of the screen? Expect to do a ton of mashing in order to get anywhere, which also makes navigating the main town a nightmare. If only they had used a simple menu for moving between screens or put arrows on the screen or something, it would have improved the experience drastically. Beyond this, the game is also fairly short, though it is still a pretty cool experience so it's actually kind of worth it, but it could have been a lot better if they had improved the interface a bit for this port.
DeleteSoukoban Basic 2 isn't a terrible sequel, it's just kind of unnecessary. When we looked at the original Soukoban Basic, I praised it for its well-executed gameplay and edit mode, and pretty much everything is still intact here, there just aren't really aren't many worthwhile changes to make the sequel worth playing if you played the original. The biggest change is the puzzles are significantly more difficult. They're not completely unreasonable and I was still making progress, but the starting puzzles here are a huge jump from the first game. I suppose in a way this makes sense, if you already played the first game you're probably already pretty good, but at the same time I feel like it makes this version feel kind of unnecessary, as I feel like the first game already has so many puzzles and quickly becomes difficult enough that I doubt anyone is really going to be clamouring for an expert pack. The interface is still great (I particularly like that you can undo moves one at a time) and the edit mode is still really solid, so it's certainly not a bad package, I just wish they had done a bit more than swap the levels out for harder ones.
It kind of boggles my mind that the Three Stooges game is still the same as the NES game, but I still can't completely hate it. In case you're not familiar with the NES game, it's a minigame collection of sorts where you have to raise enough money to save an orphanage within a certain time. To do so you have to select squares in a roulette of sorts, but there are some bad squares and you have only a limited amount of time to pick, which does create a sort of risk / reward system where if you try to hold out for the most lucrative square you might end up on a bad square (as the roulette is not guaranteed to go to every square at all). The minigames themselves are all right, they don't have a ton of depth, the one that has the most is probably the pie throwing game because it's by far the hardest. The game does generally capture the idea of the property fairly well, and the use of a lot of digitized audio helps, but I wish they had added a couple more minigames for this port or something, as aside from slightly upgraded visuals (and I do mean slight, they don't look great for PS1) this is still pretty much the same game you've already played a decade earlier.
DeleteVib Ribbon is a cool concept that simply doesn't work at all. The idea behind the game is certainly neat, it's a rhythm game that can auto-generate levels based on any CD you might choose. Unfortunately, in practice it just isn't any fun, largely due to a ton of poor design choices. For starters, we have to talk about the visuals, which are some of the worst ever. The game goes for this bizarre shaky lineart style that is probably meant to look like it comes from an oscilloscope, but it just looks utterly atrocious. Even attempting to read the menus is nearly impossible because the lines are constantly vibrating all over the place, so you can only imagine how bad it is when you actually have to hit precisely-timed button presses and the display is wiggling all over the place. Speaking of, the game is insanely picky about input timing, I suspect the window to hit an input is only a couple frames, and a lot of the time it feels like it doesn't even register your button presses correctly (though perhaps this is due to the aforementioned issue with the imprecise visuals). I imagine this was all done to camouflage the fact that the patterns the game makes based on the music tracks are basically just random nonsense that don't really fit the song to any degree, because if the game used a proper set of controls like those found in DDR or something it'd probably be super obvious that they're way off. In any case, it's basically just a nightmare to play that pretty much no one will put up with for more than a few minutes. This can't even be called an interesting tech demo, it's basically just a disaster.