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Last Topic's Ratings:
Daibouken Deluxe - GA - 75% (2) (1 SR)
Fishing Koushien 2 - BB - 0% (2)
Silverload - AAAB - 38% (4)
Soukoban Basic 2 - AA - 50% (2)
Three Stooges, The - BAABB - 20% (5)
Vib Ribbon - GGBAGABG - 63% {8} (2 SR)
Vib Ribbon will probably go down as one of the most interestingly controversial games ever on GAB. It has one of the highest possible ratings for a squiggle bracket and 2 SRs, though one came from someone who didn't rate the game as G. It's definitely a game that a lot of people feel strongly about.
Games for this topic:
Charumera
Firemen 2, The: Pete & Danny
Jonah Lomu Rugby
Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero
Shanghai: Great Moments
Thunder Truck Rally
A few games here that we've seen before on other systems, but I've actually been looking forward to trying Charumera since I first put together the list for PS1 way back when.
Charumera - A
ReplyDeleteFiremen 2, The: Pete & Danny - A
Jonah Lomu Rugby - B
Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero - B
Shanghai: Great Moments - B
Thunder Truck Rally - B
Charumera definitely isn't quite what I expected. The gist of the game is that you run a ramen cart in a 1950s-style Japanese town. Before each day, you can create your ramen using a variety of ingredients, then wander around town serving it to people. The game has no concept of money and you can never run out of ingredients or days, so it's a very low-stress game, this is probably an early example of what modern audiences would call a "cozy" game. If people don't like your ramen they'll complain about it, but you aren't really punished in any way for it, so experimentation is encouraged. By talking to various people throughout the town you can find new ingredients that you can use to make ramen and see various events, some of which require you to impress people with your cooking. One of the first people you can meet will evaluate your creations, which is helpful, but there's not much stopping you from tinkering with the formula each day, and indeed, to impress some people you'll have to figure out what they like because not everyone has the same tastes. There's also something kind of perversely enjoyable about making the most awful-looking ramen and inflicting it on the world, though people were surprisingly fond of my chicken feet and onion ramen (they apparently enjoyed its boldness). It's also a very nice-looking game, the visuals for the town are great, particularly with its day-night cycle, and the ramen also looks quite appetizing, at least when it's not full of chicken feet. There's not really a ton of depth here, but it's a fairly relaxing game I suppose.
Although I know we played it for SNES GAB, I really don't remember much of anything about the original Firemen, so I had to go back to it for this review. It's sort of a strange action game about fighting fires and saving people, as you'd kind of expect, though it's also surprisingly story-heavy and it's also not especially challenging, most of which carries over to the sequel, though it's even easier and even lighter on gameplay. The biggest change here is of scenery, whereas you were previously trying to stop a fire in a somewhat traditional skyscraper, this time the game takes place in an amusement park, but the change isn't really for the better as this sucks much of the tension out of the game. The areas are also significantly smaller compared to the first game and the map is gone, which hurts the sense of scale. The most notable improvement is that it can now be played with two players, but it's such a simple game that I'm not sure if this would be particularly interesting. As before, the main gameplay consists of using your hose's two fire modes to put out fires, most of which are not really of any real threat to you. In theory the danger is that there's a lot of them, but there's never that many on screen at a time so it never really feels like you're in too much danger of being overwhelmed, pretty much the only real challenge comes from the bosses (which is kind of a silly idea for this type of game), which is mainly because they no longer indicate when they're being damaged, unlike the first game. Overall, this is pretty clearly a downgrade from the original in almost every way, which is kind of surprising given that it's more powerful hardware. It's still not totally awful but it's no longer really anything special.
After playing more of it (we've already covered it on Saturn), Jonah Lomu Rugby still sucks, but I think I have a slightly better idea of why it sucks. I think the issue here is that the game generally does an extremely poor job of communicating how your actions affect the game, so it basically just feels like chaos that you don't really have much control over. There are some tricks to cheese the rucks so that you can win more easily, but in general if it would do a better job of explaining who's gaining or losing ground and why, and when the ball can be stolen it would go a long way to making this game less cryptic. It also feels like you have little to no impact over the players outside of rucks, which again comes down to the interface generally doing a terrible job at highlighting where you have control and the effect that your actions have. It boggles my mind that this game is apparently somewhat popular because it feels like it misses virtually everything that's necessary to make a good sports game.
DeleteI know what you're thinking, Mortal Kombat is completely awful as a fighting game, so it can't possibly be any worse as a platformer, right? Well, somehow it is, the platforming in this game is so bad that the fighting is actually the best part of it, and when the best part of a game is a degraded Mortal Kombat experience you know you're in trouble. Somehow they couldn't even figure out the basics of action games, like say, being able to turn around without pushing a button, being able to pick up powerups by touching them, or having decent running or jumping physics. Maybe one of the worst action games of the era.
One of the dangers when playing a bunch of bad games back to back is that it has the effect of making even a marginally competent game seem great, and that's what's happening here with Shanghai Great Moments. I know from previous experience that this game is fairly mediocre, in particular it has poor visuals that make judging the locations of the pieces harder than it should be when they're stacked on top of each other, its control is oddly stiff, and the selection of boards and modes isn't nearly as good as Shanghai Triple Threat, but it's so much more playable than the last two games that it almost feels like G simply because the potential for enjoyment does exist here. I had to go back and play Triple Threat for a while to remind myself that yes, that game is vastly better and there's really no reason to play this game, but I almost still want to rate it A by comparison. Of course, what this really demonstrates is how bad the previous games are, this is still one of the weakest Shanghai games on the platform (and it's a very crowded field), but if I'm stuck on a deserted island with only this game, Jonah Lomu, and Mortal Kombat, this is my new favourite game. It's all relative I guess.
DeleteThunder Truck Rally is also probably B, but it's at least a better B than the middle two games. The game is a monster truck racing game that's divided into two fairly different modes, but both are flawed. The endurance mode is made up of point to point races in fairly open areas. This mode "works", but it's fairly dull and has some issues. For starters, the courses aren't very interesting, since there's no real track you basically just drive in a straight line to the next pylon over whatever part of the stage looks fairly flat. Secondly, the game doesn't alert you of the direction of the next pylon until you cross it, frequently causing you to have to make a 180 degree turn and lose time. There are also more traditional circuit tracks, and these initially seem better but have different issues. The biggest one is the car damage mechanic. Whenever you land from jumps, you take a little bit of damage, and you need to jump constantly on the circuit tracks, basically guaranteeing all but the sturdiest trucks will be unavoidably wrecked after 3 laps. As your health gets lower, your handling gradually gets screwed up and you can get stuck on various parts of the course, which is frustrating, and there's no mechanic to land cleanly and prevent damage. Beyond this, the game also runs at a somewhat inconsistent framerate where it feels like it's running too fast when not much is happening. This doesn't really boost the speed to any crazy levels, it just makes it feel somewhat twitchy. It's a better game than TNN Hardcore 4x4, but it's still not something I'd recommend in any capacity.