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Last Topic's Ratings:
Cubix: Race 'N Robots - BAB - 17% (3)
Gen'ei Tougi: Shadow Struggle - BG - 50% (2)
Groove Adventure Rave: Yuukyuu no Kizuna - AGG - 83% (3)
Jumping Flash 2 - GGGGG - 100% (5)
Player Manager 2000 - BB - 0% (2)
Vermin Kids - AB - 25% (2)
KFHEWUI and I were unusually disparate in our opinions this time. We were in total agreement again on Saturn though.
Games for this topic:
Agile Warrior F-111X
Brightis
Fifth Element, The
Future Racer
MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch
Roland Garros French Open 2001
I've been sort of curious about MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch for some time. I feel like it's a concept that could be hilarious, but it also feels like something that's likely to be shovelware.
Agile Warrior F-111X - A
ReplyDeleteBrightis - A
Fifth Element, The - B
Future Racer - A
MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch - B
Roland Garros French Open 2001 - B
Agile Warrior F-111X is a decent early effort held back by a few design issues. Gameplay-wise, it plays somewhat like a 3D version of the Strike games, and for its time it runs and controls pretty well. Lock-ons are quick and your machine gun does reasonable damage, so destroying things feels pretty good, but more issues crop up the longer you play. The biggest one is that virtually all enemies are armed with hitscan machine guns that basically just deal damage to you by being within a certain radius. Your only real defense against this is health pickups, which are abundant but don't heal much, and your max health is shockingly low (I would guess you can probably only take about 10 shots). This problem is significantly compounded by the fact that this game has among the worst radars of all time. There are red dots for air targets and yellow dots for ground targets, but the radar is absurdly too zoomed in and doesn't seem to properly indicate the location of the targets to any degree, frequently making it nearly impossible to tell what's shooting you (and you only have a few seconds to find out and kill it before you're dead). This still might be okay as a kind of "high intensity" game, but missions in the game are extremely long, often involving well over a hundred targets to destroy, which is way too much for a game where you can be killed in 20 seconds and have only one life. It's a good foundation that will be improved upon by games like Ace Combat 2, but it's not quite there yet.
Brightis is a hard game to rate. It's a 3D action-RPG that plays somewhat like a more advanced King's Field, or if you're being really generous, a very early version of Dark Souls. By far the most notable thing about this game is that it's kind of impressive to see a game of this type on PS1. The intro castle is nothing special, but once you get out into the overworld it's kind of impressive to see the game open up in front of you the way it does, even if it's technically broken into small areas with short loading zones inbetween them. However, at no point does the game ever really feel that great to play. A big offender is the game's combat system, which is quite stiff and not particularly fun. I guess you could say that once again, it kind of resembles something like Dark Souls, attacks have defined hitboxes and, say, a horizontal slash will whiff against a short enemy like a slime, but the controls and camera are both not great, which makes combat a lot less fun than it might be otherwise. Additionally, this game lacks the concept of Stamina, which makes blocking way too good, especially because the shield poke attack is a low sweep that's very fast and safe, you'll probably just use that move for 90% of the game (and the other 10% will be your jump attack to hit fliers). There are combo and charge attacks but they don't tend to work particularly well and that part of the system feels underutilized. Dungeons are also pretty dull. There's a "light and dark" mechanic (hence the name) where you collect these little crystals that act like torches and also sometimes have to be spent to solve puzzles, but none of the dungeon puzzles or rooms feel particularly interesting, leading to the combat being the main focus and it's just not all that great. The game is also generally lacking in personality or charm, the story is almost nonexistent and the characters are also painfully generic, though at least the music and visuals are pretty decent. I feel like this is a game I might have played if I had gotten it right when it came out for the novelty factor, but it doesn't have a lot going for it beyond that. It's also generally outdone by Crusaders of Might and Magic, which is a more fully realized version of this idea, and also N64 games like Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon or even Ocarina of Time, which also present a large interconnected world you can explore but have far more stuff to actually do in that world.
DeleteThe Fifth Element is atrocious, pretty much everything about it is terrible. It's a third-person shooter, but maybe one of the worst ones on the platform, it ticks basically all the "bad shooter" boxes. Enemies start hitscan shooting you from before they appear onscreen, they're massive bullet sponges where even the easiest enemies in the game take more than a full clip to defeat, and you can't properly strafe, dodge, or use cover to avoid damage. As such, basically all you can do is tank your way through damage, but there's not enough heals to make up for it, so you basically just have to lose lives periodically, though you get tons of them. There are even other hilarious issues like enemies still being able to attack you during cutscenes while you're immobilized, which can easily take off a full healthbar. Shockingly, as awful as this is, there are actually two playable characters and the second character is even worse, as they are a pure melee fighter and without your autoaim guns things are far worse, the hitboxes for the melee attacks are absolute trash and you can't even run past enemies because they have huge collision boxes that trap you. There's really absolutely nothing good you can say about this one, other than the cutscenes which use scenes from the film I suppose, but obviously you could just watch the movie for that.
Future Racer is a strange game. It's kind of a racing game in name only, although it does control somewhat generally like a futuristic racing game, the focus is really more on combat. Each stage begins with a time trial, which plays mostly like a traditional racing game. You pilot a mech through standard futuristic racer style tracks, you have access to a boost that can be used fairly often, you can go into a kind of charge mode that makes you fast briefly but you can't turn, and the focus is on completing the track fast. However, this mode actually kind of barely matters. When you finish a lap, your time is ranked against the other participants and this scores some points, but you can freely quit after the first lap without much penalty. The real match starts after this, which is a kind of strange deathmatch that is based on points, not racing position. The way this mode works is that as you advance through the course, you'll find these yellow barriers. The first person who touches them gets the ball, but having the ball disables your ability to attack. The goal is to cross the next checkpoint while holding the ball, which scores a lot of points, but if you're attacked that person will steal the ball. The strategy generally involves stealing the ball and then using your boost to leave everyone in the dust, which mostly works, though it feels odd and the game would probably work better as a standard racing game. I do like that the 6 characters all have a somewhat different storyline at least, it does help to give it some replay value.
DeleteMTV Celebrity Deathmatch unfortunately completely sucks. As bad as Fifth Element is, this is actually way worse. It's a wrestling game, but it's probably the worst one ever, it can't even get the basics of the genre right, positioning your character is almost impossible and attacks don't lock on properly, so even basic things like running attacks and grapples are nearly impossible to execute. You would hope it would at least be funny, but it doesn't do that well either, the characters do spout some of their signature lines but it's so low energy and everything feels so slapdash that it's really just kind of sad. Apparently the Gen 6 version of this game is somewhat better and this was a zero effort port, so in any case make sure to avoid this one.
Tennis Games that aren't Mario Tennis haven't exactly done well this year, so my hopes were not high going into Roland Garros even before I saw that Cryo Interactive developed it, though somehow it was even worse than I expected. To their credit, Cryo does attempt to learn from Mario Tennis to some degree, when you hold the button to swing your racket, you start building up power and you can see a
targeting cursor for where your shot will go, which is actually not a bad system. Unfortunately, with this being Cryo, it's implemented in about the worst way possible. For starters, you can't really charge while moving, which means you can't hit running shots at all. Cryo did realize that this would make the game completely unplayable, so you can instead hold Square to do an auto return where the AI will just handle the running and hit the ball for you and you just aim it, kind of like an even less nuanced version of Wii Sports Tennis. In theory, the idea is that you should use the charge shot when you can tell you don't have to move far to get the ball and use the auto-return the rest of the time, but really there's not much penalty to just using the auto-shot all the time. Of course, this is incredibly boring, it doesn't even have the timing aspect that game Wii Sports Tennis a tiny bit of depth. I guess Tennis really just isn't going to figure it out this gen.