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Last Topic's Ratings:
Dejig: Lassen Art Collection - GG - 100% (2)
Dragon Force 2 - GGAA - 75% (4)
Mahou Gakuen Lunar - BB - 0% (2)
NBA Live 98 - AAA - 50% (3)
Rapyulus Panic - B - 0% (1)
Suiko Enbu: Fuuun Saiki - GGG - 100% (3) (1 SR)
It occurred to me just now that this topic had only one game that released outside of Japan. I usually try to make sure that doesn't happen.
Games for this topic:
Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack's Revenge
Cleopatra Fortune
Fantastic Pinball Kyutenkai
Soukuu no Tsubasa: Gotha World
Thunder Force 5
Wipeout 2097
I'm mildly concerned that I never hear anything about Thunder Force 5, considering how beloved Lightening Force is. Also, we finally come to the end of the Gotha series.
Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack's Revenge - B
ReplyDeleteCleopatra Fortune - A
Fantastic Pinball Kyutenkai - A
Soukuu no Tsubasa: Gotha World - A
Thunder Force 5 - A
Wipeout 2097 - B
It's hard to believe we initially reviewed Alone in the Dark 2 on PS1 around 6 years ago, but it's certainly not any better on Saturn than it was there. As before, everything about this game is atrocious, from its controls and gameplay to its technical performance. The Saturn version seems to run a little worse than PS1, with even more stuttering and random load times, but the game is so bad it really doesn't matter, there's no way you'd ever want to play it anyway. It's such a shame that Saturn didn't get The New Nightmare, which is actually a pretty good game.
Cleopatra Fortune is a simplistic falling block game that kind of reminds me of Pac-Attack. The gist of the game is that there's multiple types of blocks, stone blocks, gems, sphinxes, and mummies, and making a line of any of them erases them and gives points. You can also encase blocks of any other type within stone blocks to eliminate them, which causes the stone blocks above to fall, potentially creating combos. Blocks fall in groups of a few at a time which you can rotate and fast-drop, just like in most similar games, and that's really all there is to the game's mechanics. Of course, simplistic is not necessarily bad, but it definitely feels less mechanically engaging then many other puzzle games of the era. The biggest problem though is the selection of modes available. The Saturn version only has 2 single player modes, endless and puzzle, which work pretty much exactly how you'd expect. Most notably, versus is not available without a second human player, which is a shame because it's actually pretty decent, I like that the matches start with about half the board already filled with a random assortment of blocks that you have to figure out how to clear or utilize, it makes the early game feel more engaging than it sometimes does in these sorts of games, but the inability to play it against the AI is a huge loss. You might be wondering about the other versions of this game, since it's also available on PS1 and Dreamcast, but they're fairly similar. Both of those versions have one additional mode, a Time Attack mode, which helps a little, but versus stubbornly remains multiplayer-only even on Dreamcast. The DC version also has significantly upgraded visuals and sound so if you are going to play it you might as well play that version, but it's also one you could easily skip. It's serviceable, but there's many better puzzle games out there.
Fantastic Pinball Kyutenkai initially looked very promising but it's not quite as good as I hoped. At first, it looks like it might be an "adventure-style" pinball game similar to something like Kirby's Pinball Land, with the game initially offering 3 characters to choose from with varying abilities and having a new game / continue function, but it's really not. Although the game does have some minigames and there are technically some boss battles that you can eventually run into, it's essentially just a one-board Pinball game with a few small gimmicks, and the one table isn't really super interesting. Probably one of the game's most unique mechanics is that you can save at any time, which is obviously abusable, but it's probably intended to allow you to see the boss battles without having to get inordinately lucky with RNG, though I feel the board generally isn't that hard anyway, there's quite a few ways to get various bumpers and blockers that can prevent you from falling down to the lower areas, in particular it's fairly easy to stay in the top area for a long time. The game's presentation is pretty decent and it certainly makes good use of colour, but ultimately I feel like there's a limit to just how good a one board Pinball game can be, particularly when it's kind of just all right as a pinball table.
DeleteGotha World is quite different from the first two games. As before, it's a strategy game involving planes, but instead of being purely turn-based it's now a sort of pseudo simultaneous turn taking game, which changes things up quite drastically. Rather than being divided into turns, the game now takes place on a timeline. When it's each ship's turn to act, they can move and fire within a certain radius as before, but it now takes a certain amount of time. Let's suppose we're using a fighter and we want to fly forward, turn, and fire, then pass the rest of our movement points. In total, this might take 3 in game minutes, say, from 12:01 to 12:04. We now move over to the next fighter, but their turn starts at 12:01 as well. This means that the state of the game they see is how it was before the previous fighter took its turn, and as they spend their movement they'll see the other fighter perform whatever action it did, so their actions essentially happen at the same time. This gets layered more and more as progressively more ships take their action. If a ship gets fired upon, they can either return fire or attempt to get out of the way, though you get very little movement to evade (it probably depends on the pilot's "reflex" skill), so usually you want to return fire, but an alternative strategy could just be to blow up that craft with your next ship before it can even take that shot. Speaking of shooting, another change is that if your craft has multiple weapons, you can now fire all of them if they're all in range (each weapon has a different targeting range, which s thankfully displayed at all times), which feels cool and rewards good positioning better, particularly as the enemy can't retaliate if their own weapons aren't in range. If this sounds complicated, it's because it is, and to be honest I think it's probably a little too complex, but it's a definite improvement over the extremely slow and dull system of the previous game. Besides the new battle system, battles now tend to involve fewer ships, which helps keep the game moving along at a better clip, and the presentation of the game has been improved a lot too. Actually, the standard air battles are now pretty decent, the game's biggest problem is there's a lot of other stuff in the game. After the second mission, you get an annoying gauntlet of first a target-shooting mission, then a reconnaissance mission where you just have to count the enemies (the answer is 8/0/0 for anyone who doesn't want to suffer through this), then a mine sweeping mission. None of these are fun, and while you do get back to air combat in mission 6, this is far from the last of these gimmicky missions, as they will tend to pop up every few missions throughout the game. At least they're generally fairly fast, but they definitely drag the game down and shouldn't have been included. Overall, it's still not quite in the top echelon of Strategy RPGs, but it's now reached a point where I would have been interested to see what else they would have done with the franchise if they continued it.
DeleteI was worried Thunder Force 5 might be a disaster, but it's not, though it is yet another game that proves the old adage that "shmups should never be 3D". So right out the gate, the game actually doesn't seem too bad. The gameplay from Lightening Force is mostly intact, being able to freely change weapons at any time is still fun, and for a 3D game the presentation is pretty decent. It still mostly feels like Thunder Force, which is good, since Thunder Force 3 and 4 (Lightening) are both really good. However, little issues start to crop up as you play it. The most obvious one is that the game has a LOT of cheap shots. This is most obvious on the bosses, who tend to have a lot of moves that hit large portions of the screen with no real telegraphs. Laser attacks (attacks that travel instantly from the point of origin to the edge of the screen are common), but unlike in most 2D games there's no warning where the laser will be, typically if a laser is about to fire you can see it being charged via a shining ball or some such, but there's none of that here, you just have to know where the attack will hit and not be there. Part of the problem is that that the bosses are massive and the player's ship is pretty big too, typically resulting in you having very little screen real estate to work with and thus always being close to the boss at all times and not having much time to react if they suddenly rush towards you. These sorts of cheap shots are not limited to the bosses, instances of enemies immediately popping out of the background or from off the screen and hitting a large portion of the screen also occur, though somewhat more rarely. Apart from this, though, the game is actually pretty easy. Bosses are fairly predictable with their attacks, so once you know what they can do avoiding their attacks isn't very hard, and the enemy counts are generally pretty low (as is typical for 3D shmups), so the actual amount of the game you spend avoiding enemy bullets is surprisingly minimal. Still, on the plus side, the craw system is fun, I like how it gives you an alternate attack to use, and at least the game still sounds really good, it's just not quite as good as either of the two previous games in the series.
DeleteThe original Wipeout was a promising port to Saturn, but unfortunately 2097 is trash. Simply put, this is just another zero-effort Saturn port that runs like garbage, the game runs at about 15fps compared to 60fps on PS1 and looks incredibly choppy, and despite this it also has reduced graphic detail and more pop-in as well. To make matters even worse, the reduced frame rate also affects the controls, which feel way off in this version compared to PS1, ensuring that this version not only looks like garbage but also feels like garbage to play. There's not really much more to say about this, it's obvious this port was an extremely low priority and you shouldn't think about playing this game on Saturn under any circumstances.