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Last Topic's Ratings:
Blue Breaker: Ken Yorimo Hohoemi o
Gekirindan
Shutsudou Miniskirt Police
Steep Slope Sliders
Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire
Virtua Cop 2
I was looking back at my review of the original Real Bout Fatal Fury, and I note that I had said I preferred it to RBFFS, which is interesting because I didn't specify why and I no longer feel that way. I wonder what I was alluding to at the time? I guess that's how you know we've been doing this too long. I'm also actually kind of surprised Sonic R didn't get a squiggle bracket, but it just barely missed it.
Games for this topic:
Blue Breaker: Ken Yorimo Hohoemi o
Gekirindan
Shutsudou Miniskirt Police
Steep Slope Sliders
Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire
Virtua Cop 2
I'm kind of cautiously curious about Shutsudou Miniskirt Police. Everything about it looks so stupid and ludicrous that I kind of have to play it, though it might turn out to be another Denpa Shounenteki Game.
Blue Breaker: Ken Yorimo Hohoemi o - A
ReplyDeleteGekirindan - A
Shutsudou Miniskirt Police - B
Steep Slope Sliders - A
Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire - A
Virtua Cop 2 - G
Blue Breaker is a fairly unique RPG. The first thing that's quickly apparent is that it's very streamlined. There's no field map or town exploration, you just select things from a menu, and even in battles the game is predominantly auto battle, though you can issue commands to use items or techs whenever you need to. It's also quite nonlinear, the game is divided up into a series of areas connected by roads (you get into fights on the roads) and you can travel pretty much anywhere you want at any time. Every major area has a guild (more on that in a second), as well as potentially a cave that you can loot for treasure or a dungeon that probably plays some role in the overall story. The guild is the one stop shop for everything you need, it's a shop, it's an inn, it's where you make the party, it's where a lot of story events happen, and so on. Speaking of the party, there's a ton of characters to choose from, and they're all women, as this game is also part dating sim. You can first encounter them by going to various places in the world, then add them to your party at the guild, though the party selection process in the game is quite complex. For starters, every time you go to the guild, your current party disbands. When forming a new party, first, one of the girls is added to your party automatically. If you're not happy with the game's choice, tough beans. Second, you can choose a second girl to accompany you, but not all girls will be available and some may refuse to join. Some of the girls also don't like each other and will complain if you pair them up. After putting together a party, you can run through a couple towns looking for events until you have to go to a guild again, then repeat the process. The core set up is reasonably entertaining, it moves along at a good clip and I was easily able to find a lot of the girls even without using the guide. However, there are a number of minor annoyances as well. The biggest one is trying to make the girls like you. The girls are ABSURDLY picky and almost everything you can possibly do pisses them off. Here's a short list: Fighting too few battles before going to the guild. Fighting too many battles before going to the guild (too many is like 2 more battles than too few). Letting them be knocked out in battle. Being nice to any of the other girls. Giving them orders via the tactics menu in battle. Meanwhile, the only thing they like is doing exactly the right amount of battles and then resting and talking to them, (there's also a present menu but it also basically does nothing). Combined with the fact that you have limited control over your party this makes the dating sim aspect of the game super annoying. Oh, and the game is also timed, and if you take long enough to beat the game you just outright lose. It's not super tight, but when you have to juggle everything else it can be a bit of a nuisance. There are also several versions of this game and the Saturn version is usually considered the worst, most particularly because there's a bug that prevents you from getting some of the hidden characters. The PS1 version also has a number of small improvements, but we'll come to that when that version comes up. Even then, the Saturn version is not bad by any means, but if you want to play it you'll probably want to play the PS1 version.
Gekirindan is a basic vertical shmup. It's going to sound really weird for a shmup, but the most notable thing about it is the plot. The game begins in space with you chasing a giant battleship. After defeating it, its core is revealed to be a robot, which then opens a time gate and escapes to the past. You then chase it through stages set in different eras, starting with WW2, then the present day, then various future stages. This doesn't have a ton of impact on gameplay, but it does make the game somewhat more visually interesting than some of its contemporaries, which is good because its gameplay is very basic. It plays very similarly to Raiden 2, except perhaps even more basic because there are fewer weapons. Still, Raiden 2 is a good game, but in many ways it feels like a bit of a downgrade. One thing I noticed immediately is that the number of enemies onscreen at a time is often very low. It's a little better on the past stages, but generally the enemies tend to come at you only a couple at a time, which tends to get a bit repetitive. The game also has very strange sound balancing, there's almost no sound effects in the game, causing it to feel very muted from an audio perspective, even the music is surprisingly mellow a lot of the time. Don't let that fool you, though, the game is quite hard, in particular there's a lot of homing projectiles which can be hard to deal with. Also, something that really bugs me is I swear I've fought the stage 2 boss in another game (it's a building mounted turret that transforms into a walking tank after you destroy it). Anyone got any ideas? It's not relevant to the score or anything, but it's kinda driving me crazy.
DeleteShutsudou Miniskirt Police is so atrocious there's almost nothing I can even say about it. It's a terrible minigame collection which is intended to have a fanservice element, though it completely fails at it. Of all the games in the collection, the only two that are kinda tolerable are the breakout and concentration clones, and even then they're not good, they're just not as awful as the other games. Should you beat any of the games (which really isn't recommended), you can watch a video of one of the girls in some situation where you can see her panties, which I guess is a big thing in Japan, but compared to, say, Haunted Casino letting you see the girls totally naked it definitely doesn't have quite the same impact. This game is so bad it's not even funny bad. It might be better than Denpa Shounenteki Game, but even that's a toss-up.
Steep Slope Sliders is kind of a classic Sega Saturn title, even though Sega themselves didn't make it. Like many of Sega's games for the system, this is a pretty impressive title with a good engine. It's not quite on the same level as MTV Sports Snowboarding, but it's a reasonably solid snowboarding game with a decent sense of freedom and speed. You can do tricks pretty much anywhere, but an interesting wrinkle is only your 5 best tricks count, so it's really more about quality than quantity. Unfortunately, also like many Sega titles, this game has very minimal progression. The number of courses is not that bad, but there's no progression mode of any kind, there's just single races. Beating the high scores on those courses actually can unlock some stuff, but you can unlock everything easily within 30 minutes to an hour and after that there's really just not enough to do even with the game's engine generally being pretty solid. It's still definitely your best snowboarding option on Saturn, I just wish there was more to it.
DeleteTime to make myself unpopular and say that I think Vampire Savior is only an A-level game. As I mentioned when we covered Night Warriors, Darkstalkers is kind of like a prototype for Capcom's VS series, featuring the same chain cancel system that the VS series would make famous, but being more primitive in other ways. However, something really important happened between Darkstalkers 2 and 3, which is that the VS series came into existence. Even X-Men vs Street Fighter is a drastically better game than Vampire Savior, but the Saturn port came out so late that even Marvel vs Capcom was already out! Compounding this problem is that Darkstalkers 3 really just doesn't innovate much from Darkstalkers 2. If you compare, say, Alpha 3, which added the entire Ism system, Darkstalkers 3 basically just feels like more of the same. Its only notable new addition is pushblocking, which is easily its most hated mechanic, to pushblock in Darkstalkers 3 you have to mash, with it requiring you to hit all 6 attack buttons within a 12 frame window for a guaranteed pushblock. This mechanic is so obnoxious that a big component of high level play involves ending chains early to try to frame trap the opponent with an accidental input when they try to mash pushblock. Again, X-Men vs Street Fighter was already out, Capcom already knew the correct way to handle pushblock was a 3P input, so why did they do it this way? God only knows. It's also actually really inexcusable that a fighting game released this late into the generation has no training mode. Like I know this game's combos are super simple because you still can't cancel chain combos into specials (this desperately needed to be fixed for this installment), but it's still something that should be there. It's certainly not all bad. The characters and art in the game are still cool, and it's great that it has all 18 characters, but it just loses out as a package compared to most other fighting games released around this time. It's not just Marvel, but also things like KOF 98, Alpha 3, and Real Bout Fatal Fury Special all have the edge on this game. Fighting games advanced fast in this era, and Darkstalkers kind just didn't keep up.
Virtua Cop 2 is one of those games that's so borderline that I had to review it twice, with one review giving it A and one giving it G to see which argument I felt was more compelling. First thing's first, presentation-wise this is a pretty solid update over Virtua Cop 1. One of the things I complained about when we covered the first game is that the scenes are too static and despite the use of 3D there's almost nothing in the stages you can break and both are addressed here, the scenes in Virtua Cop 2 have far more movement and are vastly more dynamic, and there's a lot more extra stuff you can shoot. I somewhat derided the choice to use a 3D engine in the first game but it feels like the game takes much better advantage of it this time around. However, there are still some problems. The first is one that the first game also had, which is that it's very short. The game has only 3 stages (with a final boss if all are cleared) and it can be finished in about half an hour. New to Virtua Cop 2 are some branching routes, which helps a little, but you could still see everything in the game in a few hours. The second problem is new to Virtua Cop 2, which is that the controls for controller are worse. Virtua Cop uses a 3-button setup for Controller, with one button shooting, one reloading, and one making the crosshair move faster. The problem is the speedup button. In Virtua Cop 1, the speedup button does almost nothing, it makes you move maybe 25% faster or something, but you already move fast and it's rarely needed. In Virtua Cop 2, your default speed is maybe half what it was in Virtua Cop 1, and the speedup button doubles it to the original, unboosted speed. The default rate of speed in 2 is so uselessly slow that you'll never use it, effectively forcing the speedup button to be held the entire game, and even with the speedup button you can never go as fast as you could in 1 when using the boost. As a result, the controller experience is pretty bad. Now of course, you'll probably say "well, this is a light gun game, you're not supposed to play it with a controller", which is a valid argument, but I still feel it has relevance in situations where you perhaps own only one gun and want to play 2 players, in any case there's not really any excuse for this being worse than the first game. We now come to the complexity in rating it. This is probably the third or fourth-best lightgun game of the era, depending on how you feel about Area 51 (the top two are House of the Dead and the Point Blank games, which I group together). House of the Dead is similar and is clearly superior in pretty much every way, it looks better, it has more content, and it also plays better. This creates an interesting contrast with Vampire Savior, where that game's rating is pushed down by the presence of numerous superior competitors by the time it came out, but in Virtua Cop's case, it actually benefits from the existence of House of the Dead, because they both need the same special hardware. If you're investing in the Virtua Gun for House of the Dead, you'd probably like another game to play with it, and Virtua Cop 2 suddenly becomes an easy recommendation. While I think it would likely only be A alone (I certainly wouldn't recommend buying a Virtua Gun if House of the Dead didn't exist), it does quite well as a companion game to HotD, offering something that's just different enough when you need a break from that game. It's a niche circumstance, but if it describes you, go ahead and pick it up, otherwise it's fine to skip.
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