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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Super S: Various Emotion - BB - 0% (2)
Bust-A-Move 3 - GAA - 67% (3)
Crimewave - GAB - 50% {3}
Sankyo Fever: Jikki Simulation S Vol 3 - BB - 0% (2)
Shinobi Legions - AGGG - 88% (4)
Vandal Hearts - AGGGG - 90% (5)
Certainly not too bad compared to the PS1 topic, Vandal Hearts put up a consistent strong showing on both platforms. Also, Sankyo Fever has now wrapped up a 0% rating for the entire series.
Games for this topic:
Command and Conquer
Final Fight Revenge
Haunted Casino
Macross: Do You Remember Love
Mobile Suit Gundam
Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits: Bushidou Retsuden
We've got a couple off odd spinoffs this time in Final Fight Revenge and the Samurai Shodown RPG. We also get the showdown between Macross and Gundam that everyone has always wanted (though neither of this would fit in the topic title so I had to put Haunted Casino instead).
Command and Conquer - G
ReplyDeleteFinal Fight Revenge - B
Haunted Casino - G
Macross: Do You Remember Love - A
Mobile Suit Gundam - G
Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits: Bushidou Retsuden - B
Though Command and Conquer on Saturn lacks the extra missions from the expansion, I feel that this is likely the definitive console version of the game anyway. The biggest issue here is that this port is simply the most polished and the closest to the PC version overall. For starters, it has the best overall performance. The PS1 version is inconsistent in terms of speed, with most simple missions running significantly too fast, and some more complex scenes slowing down quite substantially, while the N64 version runs at a more appropriate speed most of the time but has slowdown on occasion. On Saturn, the game runs at the correct speed and the game speed settings from the PC version are preserved (even on fast it's slower than the PS1 version most of the time, but the game plays significantly better on this speed). The interface is also a little better on Saturn, with slightly better use of tooltips, for example converting your mobile construction yard into a base has a proper prompt on Saturn where it doesn't on PS1, which also makes it much easier to put it in the right spot. This is also a fundamentally 3 button game so it simply adapts perfectly to the Saturn controller's setup and it feels a bit more natural to play with the Saturn pad compared to PS1 or N64. Load times are also a little quicker here compared to PS1. Overall, you really can't go wrong with this port. The lack of the expansion is a little regrettable but it undeniably plays very well on the console, probably one of the best RTS to console conversions you'll find anywhere.
Final Fight Revenge is terrible, easily the most amateurish game made by Capcom this generation. This is pretty much a quintessential bad fighting game, with nonsensical frame data and poor input detection, it doesn't even allow you to properly remap the buttons like in pretty much every other Capcom fighting game ever made (instead you can only choose from a couple presets). Its unique mechanic is intended to be the fact that you can pick up and use weapons, but this mechanic generally also sucks, as the weapons don't tend to do a lot and usually just cause knockdowns. Each character has a weapon that they're particularly good with (which corresponds to them getting a couple extra attacks with it) but it's in no way guaranteed to be on the stage and you can still easily lose it by taking a knockdown, so it's usually more trouble than it's worth unless you start with it. The game also generally looks pretty bad, with poor 3D models and artwork (Guy's portrait on the select screen is particularly jokey, but most of them are bad). Pretty much the only good thing you can say about the game is that it's funny in some ways. Edi E is particularly great, from him yelling "Bang!" when he shoots his gun to him having a super where he gets to run you over with his patrol car, and the final boss being Zombie Belger is also pretty hilarious, particularly as you can knock off his head and use it as a weapon. Still, for optimal humour, it's probably better to watch someone else suffer through it than do it yourself, unless you want the joke to be on you.
Haunted Casino is a difficult game to rate. It's a weird mishmash of a myst-like adventure game, a gambling game, and a porn game. You explore a casino from hell, solving some simple puzzles to gain access to various gambling rooms. Inside, you find various sexy monster girls you can challenge to a variety of gambling games. These games are all "strip" variants, where as you drain the dealer's money she'll also take off her clothes, going from fully clothed, to lingerie, to completely naked. After completely exhausting their money you'll earn some additional artwork for the gallery depending on how well you did and you're off to repeat the process with the next monster girl. I suppose we'll need to talk about each of these components in turn. The exploration of the casino works fine, but it's very basic. None of the puzzles are more complex than "check this area to find a key", so you certainly won't struggle here. There are a couple interesting set pieces like a dark room where a creepy voice taunts you, but for the most part this aspect of the game feels a bit underutilized, with the best thing you can get from it being a couple special items that allow you to cheat at the gambling games. Speaking of, the gambling games are also fairly basic. There's four total, Roulette, Blackjack, Poker, and a high or low game called Heaven or Hell. Except for the final boss, who you can challenge to any of the three card games, all other opponents play a fixed game. Blackjack is the best of the lot, it's pretty much the same as it always is, which means it has a decent amount of strategy since you can see the dealer's card and use that in your decision making. Poker is more of a mixed bag, it's the 5 card draw variation, which IMO involves fairly little skill, particularly when played against an AI opponent who obviously has no tells. Still, at least you can decide how much to bet on your hand or when to fold. Roulette and Heaven or Hell are straight RNG. Heaven or Hell in particular has a strange issue where whether or not you win each hand is decided before you pick which of the two cards you think is bigger, so if the game has decided you've lost, the cards will change based on what you pick. Notably though, this also applies to the option to choose that the two cards are the same, so it wins just as often as the others, but rewards far more money, so it essentially rigs the odds in your favour. In any case the gambling overall is serviceable at best, and certainly most other gambling games are superior.
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Macross: Do You Remember Love is basically a significantly lesser version of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam Zenpen. Like that game, it's a story-driven shmup interspersed with anime scenes, in this case from the movie of the same name. Gameplay-wise, it's a very simple shmup, with none of the complexity that Zeta Gundam has. You have three main actions, a standard laser, the signature Macross homing missile attack, and a bomb. Probably the best thing about this is that each of these is mapped to a separate button, so it doesn't have the control issues that Gundam had, though the missiles are so powerful that you don't need the other two weapons except occasionally during boss fights. As such, the game is also much easier than Zeta Gundam, which I suppose is a good thing if you mainly want to watch the movie scenes, but I feel like if you want that you could just watch the movie and skip the game entirely. Your ship can transform into various states, but there's absolutely no reason to use the ground mech because it sucks (it has a huge hitbox and can't evade well), so you'll just be using the plane or the flying mech 99% of the time, and on many of the stages you can't transform anyway, so this mechanic feels like it has little to no impact. There's not really a lot else to say about the game beyond this, it's a very basic game which would not be notable without the Macross license. While Zeta Gundam is definitely much better, I think this game is just barely good enough to stay in A, but it's a very low A and I wouldn't really recommend it even to fans of the movie.
DeleteWow, Mobile Suit Gundam was not what I expected. I just got done talking about Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam Zenpen, and it turns out the that original Mobile Suit Gundam plays near-identically to it. Since it does not have the same developer and Gamefaqs puts it in a different category, I thought it would be quite a different sort of game, but the games are so similar that they should clearly be considered part of the same series. What's quite surprising is that despite being two years older, Mobile Suit Gundam is clearly quite a bit better than Zenpen, featuring both better general gameplay polish and also a more impressive gameplay engine that can support many more enemies onscreen at a time. Pretty much every issue I had with Zenpen is not a problem here, in particular the issue with the control scheme mapping multiple weapons to the same button and giving you a toggle to swap between them (which you never have time to do in a boss fight) is not present here, every weapon has its own button, as it does in Kouhen. The lock on feature also works drastically better here, which is good because there's a lot more enemies in this game, so even though it controls better and you can take more hits (your shield comes back way faster here) the game is significantly more hectic so you need the extra firepower. What's interesting is that this also makes the ability to call in support from the mothership far more impactful, so the pre-mission setup screen where you can choose when your allies will assist you and when the mothership will drop supplies is quite important this time around. About the only thing Zenpen added was the level-up mechanic, which while kind of interesting, doesn't make up for how much more polished this game is. It really makes me wonder what the story behind this series was. I would imagine this game was probably pretty popular, it was an early title based on a popular franchise and it was quite well-made, so why did Bandai switch developers when creating a follow-up to it? It seems like this one was developed by a Sega-affiliated developer that went on to work on the Saturn port of Virtual On, leaving Bandai to do Zenpen in-house, and they probably just didn't quite have the same level of experience with the Saturn hardware at the time. In any case, this is certainly a very solid early Saturn title that remains pretty competitive with the third game in the series, but we'll discuss that comparison a bit more when we get to it.
The Samurai Shodown RPG is gorgeous, but that's pretty much all it has going for it. The game is basically an RPG retelling of the storyline of Samurai Shodown 1 and 2, though it makes the somewhat strange decision to break this into two separate quests that you can choose upon starting a new game rather than having them form one continuous adventure. At the start, you can choose 1 of 6 characters to be the main character, and you can then choose 2 others as companions early in the game, but this choice is largely superficial as the plot is always mostly the same, it only affects where you start and a few lines of dialogue here and there. This might not be a big deal if the gameplay was really good, but unfortunately it's super basic. The game uses a standard kind of "attack tech item run away" system, but it has very little nuance. Basic attacks do almost no damage and you get tons of TP, so you'll basically just use techs every turn. Some techs can hit multiple enemies or hit different elements, but that's about the extent of the strategy in the game. Customization is basically nonexistent beyond which characters you choose for your party, and the game is also generally quite easy so you probably won't ever have to grind much or anything. Easily the game's best feature is its visuals. The entire game looks completely gorgeous, from the excellent spritework for the area maps and characters to the extremely detailed battle animations, though the latter comes at the expense of battles being very slow, as there are long animations for every single attack that the player or the enemies use. Speaking of slow, this game also has atrocious load times before battle, clocking in at about 12 full seconds every time an encounter starts. If you use speedups it's not too bad, as these also help with the battle animations (you'll want to keep speedup on for basically the entire game) but I'm sure this would quickly become a total slog on a real Saturn. It's pretty borderline between B and A, but upon reflection I think it's likely B. There's simply almost no RPGs that aren't B that this game compares favourably against, and it loses almost every comparison to A-level RPGs I can come up with, for example I feel like this game is clearly weaker than Suikoden 1, which already isn't a game I'd bother with if it didn't have connectivity to Suikoden 2. I think the biggest issue is that it doesn't feel like an easy recommendation even to fans of the franchise because it simply retells the existing story rather than significantly adding to it, and the characters feel underutilized. Maybe if it hadn't ended up being rushed it would have been more worthwhile.
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