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Last Topic's Ratings:
Arthur to Astaroth no Nazo-Makai-Mura: Incredible Toons - AA - 50% (2)
Brain Dead 13 - BABB - 13% (4)
Magic Knight Rayearth - GAGGGG - 92% (6)
Policenauts - GGAGG - 90% (5)
Sugoventure: Dragon Master Silk Gaiden - GG - 100% (2)
Tenchi Wo Kurau 2 - GAGG - 88% (4)
By contrast to the PS1 topic, this one was very highly rated almost all around.
Games for this topic:
3D Lemmings
Dragon Ball Z: Idainaru Dragon Ball Densetsu
Gulliver Boy
Radiant Silvergun
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels
Thunderstrike 2
Well, it's 2025, and I can now announce that this is the final year of the Saturn GAB. Nothing out of the ordinary, there's just less than 150 games left on the list to rate. That means a new system will start before the year is out, but before that we've got some of the biggest titles left in the Saturn library to get to, starting here with Radiant Silvergun. Besides that, we've also got 3D Lemmings in this topic, which I owned on PC a long time ago, and I'm curious to see how it holds up.
3D Lemmings - G
ReplyDeleteDragon Ball Z: Idainaru Dragon Ball Densetsu - B
Gulliver Boy - G
Radiant Silvergun - A
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels - A
Thunderstrike 2 - A
I thought Lemmings 3D was really cool when I first played it, and to be honest I still do. Sure, the graphics may have lost their luster to some degree (I remember being blown away by the virtual lemming mode when I first got it), but it's still a great evolution of the Lemmings formula. While the original Lemmings is a great game, it suffers from a certain flaw that I've mentioned previously when we've covered the game, which is that once you understand the basics, nearly every level can be solved using the same strategy: First, trap all the Lemmings using powers you don't care about. Generally, miner, digger, blocker, and bomber can be used for this purpose. Next, complete the level using only one lemming. Now, free the trapped lemmings and let them cross the now completed level. There are a tiny handful of stages where you can't do this, generally because of a lot of metal blocks or not enough powers, (or those annoying stages where you get only a single power, like that long strip where you have to make every lemming a digger), but it solves almost every standard level. Due to the way Lemmings 3D works, this is no longer the case. For starters, unlike the original game, figuring out how to solve a level is no longer super obvious just at a glance, you have to get a pretty good view of the level first. Secondly, due to increased reliance on turners, levels that can be solved by a single Lemming are far more limited. It's also significantly harder to trap the Lemmings (gone are the days where you can just mine into the ground for a few hits to create a quick trap), so if you are going to use the trap strategy you need to pay close attention to find a spot where it can be pulled off. Overall, it adds up to a game that still feels very much like Lemmings, but it also feels like a new and fresh experience. Possibly the one issue you might have is related to the interface, but thankfully they've included full controller remapping, as you will definitely want to use absolutely every button on the controller to handle both cursor and camera control as well as assigning and various other hotkeys, but since you can set it up however you like it feels good to play. I do think the PlayStation controller is a little better for this game but it's still very workable on Saturn. It's really too bad they never attempted to make another 3D Lemmings and just started rehashing the original endlessly because I'd love to have seen another attempt at this.
I can see why Dragon Ball Z: Idainaru Dragon Ball Densetsu was popular, but it's so incredibly flawed and dated that it's impossible to enjoy it any more. Credit where it's due, this game was extremely ambitious for its time. Idainaru essentially resembles an early version of Budokai Tenkaichi, in that it's a fully 3D fighter where you can fight on both the ground and the sky. It also allows up to 3 characters to fight at once per side, allowing 6 characters in battle, which is actually pretty impressive for its time, but it comes with a ton of drawbacks. For starters, there's the gameplay, which is among the most simplistic of any fighting game ever made. You have literally 4 actions you can take in battle. You can do a melee attack, you can shoot a ki blast, you can block, and you can power charge, and that's it. You'll notice a distinct absence of "perform a super move", which is because that's not an option. Ki blasts are essentially worthless, so we'll mostly be looking at physical attacks. The entirety of physical attacks revolve around meteor combinations, which have featured heavily in most DBZ games. You can hit the opponent up, down, or forwards, then chase after them and do it again to do combos, though this drains your power meter and if you run out you get stunned, so you must find time to recharge after doing one of these. There is something kinda satisfying about smacking the opponent all over the map and then into the dirt, but the novelty wears off quickly, particularly as you'll be doing it thousands of times. So you're probably wondering about the special moves, they are in the game, but on a very weird system. There's a bar at the bottom that is split between the ally and the enemy colour, and as one side beats the other up, it starts filling more towards one end, until it gets totally full, at this point the controlled fighter from the winning side will do a special move. These are the only attacks in the game that actually deal HP damage, and it takes about 4 of them to kill a character, which is by far the game's biggest problem. Filling it up even once takes minutes of beating the crap out of someone (potentially longer if the fight is at all even), and if the opponent side has 3 characters you'll have to do this 12 times to win, which could easily take half an hour. While the action is initially kind of cool, fights are so brutally slow that I doubt most people would even make it past the first battle with Vegeta and Nappa. If you do, you've already basically seen everything the game has to offer, as every other fight will be the same as this. There are a lot of characters in the game but they're all identical, they do different special moves but these are just cutscenes anyway so it doesn't matter. I can see how for the time this might have seemed like an interesting spectacle for its time, but it's so incredibly slow and repetitive that I can't really imagine anyone putting up with it. In any case, the previous DBZ game for the platform was far superior on pretty much every level.
DeleteWell, it's time to make myself unpopular again and say that I also don't think Radiant Silvergun is all it's cracked up to be. Wait, isn't this the second time I've given an A to a highly popular game in 2 topics? Geez, good thing the Saturn GAB is winding down. Anyway, Radiant Silvergun is a vertical shmup from Treasure. The gimmick of the game is that you have six weapons, all of which you can use at any time (they're available via 3 buttons and double button presses, but wisely all 6 have a dedicated button on the Saturn controller). They tend to have pretty different ranges / firing angles, and the levels are set up so that enemies come at you from different directions and you need to use many of them pretty often. There's also a scoring gimmick to the game. Enemies come in three different colours, and if you destroy multiple enemies of the same colour in a row you get a scoring bonus. That's basically about all there is to know about the game, there are no power ups or anything, and the only weapon that has any nuance to it is the sword weapon, which you can swing around with your movement and it can absorb enemy projectiles to unleash a super attack. My biggest issue with the game is that it feels very dry and static in many ways. The colour patterns for the enemies and the frequently restricted movement options often makes it obvious which weapon you're intended to use to deal with a given situation. For example, if 3 groups of differently coloured enemies come at you from above, you're intended to use the normal shot (which fires mostly vertically) to take them out. If two sets of red enemies instead come at you from the sides, that's a job for the spread shot. If you're moving through a tunnel that zigzags diagonally, that's also a job for the spread shot (the spread shot tends to be one of the most used weapons). In many ways it sort of feels more like a puzzle game than a shmup, and once you know how to solve a given enemy pattern it generally ceases to be interesting on repeat playthroughs. Boss fights are not terrible, but they generally do very little with the weapon system, most of them just attack you from the top so you just use one of the vertical firing weapons while trying to dodge their projectiles, which plays fine but doesn't feel like it utilizes the mechanics of the game all that well. Overall, I just don't generally find it to be that fun. I can see how maybe this would appeal to non-shmup fans since the lack of powerups makes the game somewhat more accessible than some other games, but I also feel like it lacks the speed and intensity that I expect from the genre. I feel like it's also clearly a lot weaker than Ikaruga from both an artistic standpoint and a gameplay standpoint, and I'm not a huge fan of Ikaruga either for many of the same reasons. It's certainly not a bad A and there are some interesting things about it, but on a system with as many good shmups as Saturn it would not be anywhere near the top of my list.
DeleteGulliver Boy is a hard game to rate, because it's a very extreme product. First thing's first, this game's presentation is spectacular. The second you boot it up you're treated to a very high-quality and lengthy anime scene which does a good job of setting the tone for the whimsical and wacky adventure that's to follow. It's a very colorful RPG with great spritework and memorable characters, which is chock full of cutscenes and near-constant voice acting. I have to draw special attention to the boss battles, which look amazing, the game is normally presented in Dragon Quest style with the enemies shown on a battlefield, but when you fight the bosses they take up the entire screen with lavishly drawn anime art, complete with full attack animations for their attacks and even different poses for when their health gets low. Even the story is very solid, it's well-written and frequently pretty funny, but there are some serious moments too and it manages to pull off both of them quite well. However, you'll notice that we haven't really mentioned gameplay yet and that's because there's not really a lot to talk about. The game plays very similarly to Dragon Quest 2, with the most notable change being that it has Earthbound-style visible encounters. Other than that everything about it is super basic, you have your basic "attack / magic / item" setup and that's about it, there isn't even really equipment so your money basically just goes towards consumable items, which renders the game's rudimentary trading system somewhat pointless. Still, the one thing this game has over, say, Grandia is that the gameplay doesn't get in the way of the story. While super basic, it is at least decently fast-paced, levelling is quick and with the visible encounters you can avoid a lot of enemies if you don't really want to fight them, which lets you spend most of the time enjoying the story and characters, as it should be. This is definitely not the game for you if you're looking for a very mechanically deep RPG, but if you're the kind of person who plays these games mostly for the story this will probably be almost exactly what you're looking for.
DeleteI was expecting the Saturn version of Space Hulk to be pretty much identical to the PS1 version, but it actually plays drastically differently. The core game is actually exactly the same, but the entire game runs twice as fast on Saturn. This is not just to say that it has double the framerate on Saturn (though it does), but the actual game runs twice as fast, so movement is twice as fast, enemies are twice as fast, etc. This drastically changes the game, as the increased speed of the game makes the tactical side of the game much harder to use, but it enhances the FPS-like gameplay. Funny enough, the game is kind of divided into two main modes, one of which focuses on strategy and tactics and the other is more traditionally action-based, so not surprisingly the campaign plays a lot better on Saturn, with vastly less slow downtime compared to PS1, but the strategy missions are not quite as good on Saturn. As I think the campaign is probably the more interesting of the two modes I'd probably give the nod to Saturn, but it's worth noting that the Saturn version is clearly the "wrong" port as every other version of the game plays at the same, halved speed of the PS1 version. Too bad they couldn't make the tactical missions run at the reduced speed and the campaign run at the increased speed or something so you could have the best of both worlds.
Thunderstrike 2 is pretty much unchanged from the PS1 version, which is kind of impressive because many full 3D games like this are significantly downgraded on Saturn. That said, as it has almost no changes it still has pretty much all of the same flaws, especially the poor draw distance, which is a killer for a game that's very heavily focused around lock-on. It maybe does fair a little better on Saturn due to a lack of competition, but it's still nowhere near the G range.