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Last Topic's Ratings:
Actua Golf 3 - GA - 75% (2)
Bogey: Dead 6 - BBB - 0% (3)
Crime Crackers - AAABAA - 83% (6)
Kaettekita Cyborg Kuro-Chan - GA - 75% (2)
Need for Speed: High Stakes - GGGGAG - 92% (6)
Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals - BGG - 67% (3)
Not a bad set, but I hope more people will try Kuro-Chan, that's one of my favourite finds in a little while.
Games for this topic:
Akuji the Heartless
Asteroids
Dance Dance Dance
Hard Boiled
Planet Laika
SeaBass Fishing 2
I know what you're thinking, Tero forgot Christmas again, but I actually didn't! Planet Laika is a Christmas game! It's the most bizarre Christmas game ever, but it still counts. Happy holidays from GAB About Games.
Akuji the Heartless - G
ReplyDeleteAsteroids - A
Dance Dance Dance - A
Hard Boiled - A
Planet Laika - A
SeaBass Fishing 2 - A
Akuji the Heartless is very solid, it's actually kind of hard to believe this was made by the same developers as the Gex games (and uses the same engine). It's a fairly simple 3D Action Platformer but pretty much every part of it is well-polished. For starters, it's a very solid engine. Controls are solid, the camera works well, and the game runs very well, I was particularly impressed by how the loading zones are totally instant. I think this is a case of smartly using the game's theme along with the game's technical limitations, the game takes place in hell, so everything is kind of dark and dreary, which helps hide the possibly not overly great draw distance and makes the loading zones (often caves and the like) fit in with the scenery. The gameplay works pretty well too, combat is fast-paced and inoffensive and the spell system helps to give it a little bit of extra depth (though it's not a particularly difficult game and spells are abundant). There's also a decent number of secrets, generally required to find many of the game's collectables, which you'll need to progress. I never found all of the ancestor spirits on my first attempt, but the generally reasonable size of the stages combined with the fast pace of the game makes backtracking not particularly painful. The game even has a decent sense of style to it, the main character is kind of enjoyably dour and the game's setting feels reasonably unique, it sort of feels like a better version of Shadow Man in many respects.
When we covered the N64 version of Asteroids, I noted that by far the biggest problem was the visually noisy backgrounds that interfered with gameplay and noted that it might be A with better background work. Well, we no longer have to speculate because that's basically exactly what the PS1 version is. Save for some added voice acting and cutscenes this is the same game, but thanks to the backgrounds having more muted colours and the asteroids being more brightly lit compared to the N64 version you can actually see what you're doing. Obviously, this improves the game quite a bit, but some later levels still have somewhat overly noisy backgrounds (though never as bad as on N64), and the game does still get somewhat repetitive despite also being fairly short.
Dance Dance Dance is another one of those games that could be awesome but is held back by a single flaw. The basic gist of the game is that it plays like Bust a Groove, but you're playing blindfolded. The concept of needing to hit a button plus optionally some arrows on every fourth beat remains the same, but there's no indication of which button you need to hit or when the correct timing is. Compared to Bust-A-Groove, the game is actually way more lenient in terms of timing, and there's also far more options for which button you can hit next, but if you're not right on the beat you won't get nearly as many points and if you press a combination that's not valid it breaks your combo. You can somewhat just watch your character's animations to get a feel for when to hit the next button (at least well enough to continue the combo), but remembering which combinations can come next takes a long time, not helped by the fact that the sequences are totally different for every character, and in the game's story mode you have to switch characters every level (you play as the same character every time, but you essentially challenge all the other characters using their own styles). Speaking of, the game has a surprisingly fleshed out story mode, though it's a bit weird. The story is strangely dark for this kind of game and it's extremely dialogue heavy, you'll probably go about 20 minutes between dance battles if you're reading the text, and there's also an RPG system where you can find various items that improve your parameters (which affects how many points you get in the dancing battles) which really has no business being in this kind of game. This mode also doesn't do a particularly good job of explaining how the game works, when I finally got to the "tutorial" I was expecting it to explain what to do, but it doesn't do that at all, it just lets you do free dancing to try to figure out the combos but doesn't really explain how anything works, I had to use a guide for that. Even then, the game is ludicrously hard, I probably had to attempt the first battle 30-40 times before I finally won, and even though I was getting 13-14 combos fairly regularly it was still razor close. There actually is a mode you can play where the game shows you the button prompts and this plays WAY better, but it can only be done for single battles so it's kind of a throwaway mode and the main game doesn't use it. It's too bad, too, because the music and animations in the game are actually quite good and even the story mode probably has the potential to be fun, the main gameplay is just really frustrating most of the time.
DeleteHard Boiled is a strange game. I suppose in a certain sense, it's also a fairly simple game, it's a depth shmup that plays somewhat similarly to Starfox, though it's wrapped in a very weird aesthetic and has some strange mechanics. The basic gist of it is that you control a flying taxi and you travel through vaguely futuristic industrial areas, blasting everything and trying not to crash into stuff. Your general rate of speed is somewhere between "molasses" and "turtle", but you have access to a boost you can use every few seconds to go fast for a bit, which is sometimes needed to dodge. There are red rings you can go through that boost you to ludicrous speed until you hit something, which you almost inevitably will almost right away, but in theory this can skip a lot of the course if you can avoid crashing. There are a bunch of weapon and energy pickups and you can get certain powerful subweapons by defeating strong enemies that actually feel pretty good to use, so there are some things to like here, but there's also a fair bit of jank. One of the strangest aspects of the game is that many areas are fairly open, but the game is kind of divided into "tracks" so to speak. You can fly between them, but this often results in your car facing a strange angle and it just generally feels kind of off. Still, it is sort of impressive that the game offers this level of freedom, this is certainly at least one of Cryo Interactive's more polished titles. It's still not something I'd recommend very heavily, among other things it's also fairly short, but it's definitely playable and it's a significant cut above some similar games like Tunnel B1.
DeleteIt's time for another episode of "Tero finishes the whole game", this time for Planet Laika. Planet Laika is an incredibly bizarre game that is difficult to even describe. It's essentially a graphic adventure game, though you control the character directly rather than with a pointer, somewhat akin to something like Grim Fandango. The themes of the game are extremely dark for their time, with a heavy focus on subjects like sexual assault, suicide, and trauma, and it's also extremely weird, featuring a very disjointed narrative with countless plot threads being created and dropped at all times. The gameplay of the game is very minimal. The main character has access to a number of different forms you can take, based on their psyche, which can perform different actions. For example, there's a strong one that can gather certain items and a smart one that can see things the others can't. You can only change forms in a couple of specific places, and some of the puzzles revolve around figuring out a way to change to a specific form in a specific area, though this makes it sound more complex than it is and it's never too involved. There are also battles, and these are also really strange, they essentially resemble pong where the enemy shoots a bunch of balls at you and you need to block them with your paddle. They're generally not very tough or very fun, and the sections where enemies can randomly appear quickly become very tedious, though thankfully there's not too many of them and you can only encounter them while in one of the alternate forms. As such, clearly the story is the only reason to play the game and this is why I finished the entire game to rate it, to see if the thousands of crazy plot threads would somehow come together in some way that made the entire thing make sense, but ultimately they really don't and if anything the game just goes even more off the rails as you get closer to the end. There are a few interesting reveals in the final sequence, but tons of characters and plot threads just drop off the face of the map throughout the game and never receive any kind of satisfying conclusion (for example, your starting group contains 4 characters, the main character and one of the others receive vastly more focus than the other two, who kind of fall out of the story at the 40% mark or so and never contribute to the plot in any meaningful way). There are a fair number of hidden scenes you can see by finding various items that give a bit of insight into the backstories of the other characters, but these are also too short and cryptic and almost never reveal anything interesting. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned yet that all the characters are dogs, though it's implied they were originally humans, and although "how did they become that way" is one of the main mysteries throughout the game, it is never addressed in any way. In general, it kind of just feels like they had far too many ideas that they tried to cram into the game and it would have benefitted significantly from a more narrow focus on a handful of ideas that could have been better fleshed out. It's still kind of an interesting trainwreck, but it's one that's most likely to just leave you scratching your head rather than feeling moved.
DeleteSeabass Fishing 2 is actually a really tough game to rate. See, until now I did not realize that the Seabass Fishing series and the Murakoshi Masami series are actually one and the same. It's not at all obvious with the first game, but Seabass Fishing 2 is a direct precursor to Murakoshi Masami and they clearly use the same engine. This comes with a number of significant upgrades. Visually the game looks great, the underwater and overwater shots both look good, and switching between them to avoid obstacles (which is a major part of this game) feels natural. The fish fighting is also quite good, it's not super complex but it's very responsive and dodging obstacles (most fish you need to catch like to hang around them) helps give it some depth. The game also has some of the same charm as Murakoshi. Murakoshi himself is already present and there are videos where he explains the basics of fishing, but these aren't integrated into the main game mode yet, they're just in a menu you can access from the main menu. There's also a section that gives you recipes that you can use to cook the fish you can catch in this game, which is a cute idea, I like that they're trying to actually teach you how to fish in the real world. There are some big drawbacks though. The biggest one is that the excellent new progression system from Murakoshi is not present yet, you're still stuck with the crummy old Fishing Tournament progression system and it still has all the same problems it always does. Sure, catching game fish in this game actually isn't too hard, fish bite often and if you know where to look, you can find the correct fish almost every time, so that's not too bad, but you're still totally at the mercy of RNG as to whether or not the fish you find will be a big one, and you need to catch a ton of big ones to have any chance of winning. These tournaments also go on quite long and there's not a ton of variety, you'll be catching the same fish dozens of times to try to get a decently sized one, and although the core fishing engine is good this does eventually get a little tiresome. It is nice that they let you save mid-tournament, so you can take a break, and it is still somewhat fun, but Murakoshi's campaign is simply way better. This game is still a cut above most traditional fishing games and you might ask the question of whether or not it's still G or if it would be G if Murakoshi didn't exist, but Murakoshi does exist (and in fact there's 3 Murakoshi games) and I think it falls just barely short of the G range. It's certainly a good A and it lays the groundwork for an excellent game, but it's just not quite all there yet. Still, I applaud the game's developer for making a ton of smart changes with every entry in the series, you don't see that kind of consistent improvement very often.
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