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Last Topic's Ratings:
Agile Warrior F-111X - GAAB - 50% {4}
Brightis - AAA - 50% (3)
Fifth Element, The - BABB - 13% (4)
Future Racer - AA - 50% (2)
MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch - BBBBB - 0% (5)
Roland Garros French Open 2001 - BB - 0% (2)
This was not pretty. The less said about this topic the better.
Games for this topic:
Action Man: Destruction X
Atelier Marie Plus
Hive, The
Jaja Uma Quartet
Skydiving Extreme
Tecmo Stackers
I thought the first Action Man was actually pretty good, so I'm interested to see what they did with the sequel. Jaja Uma Quartet also looks kind of interesting. Also, as before, there's a translation for Atelier Marie, though it's the PS2 version and it has some differences, so bare that in mind if you're using that one as a reference.
Action Man: Destruction X - A
ReplyDeleteAtelier Marie Plus - A
Hive, The - B
Jaja Uma Quartet - B
Skydiving Extreme - B
Tecmo Stackers - G
Action Man: Destruction X bares basically no resemblance to Action Man Operation Extreme, instead of being a more straightforward action game it now plays much more like a kid-friendly GTA. The basics of GTA are all here, you'll drive around in a car doing various missions like hunting down other cars, driving to specific spots and back again, collecting certain items within a time limit, and so on, and this part of the game actually works decently well. The controls are pretty solid, you get a decent amount of ammo for your weapons, and there's even some little minigames in some of the missions, though they're usually nothing too amazing. The bigger issue is that inbetween these stages are completely godawful race stages that bring the game down a lot. The game's controls are actually pretty decent for the GTA-style stages where you have to do 180s and such constantly, but they don't work at all for the race levels, where you lose far too much speed when turning and it doesn't feel smooth at all to control. These levels are extremely rubber-banded, which actually works out to your benefit because if you make a mistake the AI won't build up any kind of lead, and the key to winning is really just to save your turbo for the last stretch, but they go on forever and aren't fun at all. There are also exactly 2 action battles in the entire game, the opening and the final boss, which is a shame because these are decent, it would have been nice to have more of them. Overall, it's just sort of okay as a package, there's a decent amount of variety but it still manages to get kind of repetitive and it'd be way better without the terrible race levels.
Atelier Marie Plus is basically identical to the Saturn version. Don't let the "Plus" fool you into thinking this version has extra stuff, the "Plus" is actually just to denote that this version has the extras that were originally added to the Saturn version, as compared to the original PS1 version that lacked them. Even then, these additions are quite minor and you can probably treat both versions of the game fairly interchangeably. The version of the game you really want is the PS2 version, which does feature quite a lot of additional upgrades, but it's still a decent start to the series.
The Hive is utterly atrocious, probably one of the worst games we've covered on the system. It's very similar to Chaos Control, but maybe even worse, it's another space FMV shooter where you're constantly taking damage the second anything comes onscreen, but add to that that it also has among the worst controls ever for this type of game. Your shot cursor is terribly slow and jerky and has an awful sense of acceleration to it that just makes aiming at anything feel horrid, which is bad because that's literally all you do in the game. The one good idea the game does have is that whenever you're not actively taking damage your health regenerates, but as you effectively take damage constantly this doesn't help much. The PC version probably had mouse support, which might have helped, but certainly don't play this version.
I wasn't quite sure what I expected from Skydiving Extreme, but it certainly wasn't what it actually is. Skydiving is a weird sport / activity, but we've seen it captured before in Pilotwings, you'd think you'd have to descend through rings or something before opening your parachute or maybe do tricks or something, but you won't find any of that here. Instead, Skydiving Extreme is a game about accurately pressing button combinations within a short time. For example, you might get a button combo like "up left down", and you have to hit that with no missed inputs within a second or so. This causes your onscreen characters to do some sort of pose, and if you miss it, you lose points. You then do this over and over with increasingly complex combinations and that's the entire game. About the only challenge in the game is that the button prompts are made to be deliberately hard to read. For example, suppose the combo they want you to press is up left right up. This will be shown as an arrow going in a triangle pattern rather than as just the four inputs, and you have to quickly determine that it corresponds to those four inputs. The face buttons can be used too, and the arrows for them are simply a different colour. In any case, once you get used to reading the inputs the game is fairly easy, but it's also so basic that it's really not any fun. I feel like this can only really be called a game in the loosest possible sense, this entire thing could basically be one minigame in Mario Party and it wouldn't even be one of the better ones.
DeleteEven though we've played it before on Saturn, Tecmo Stackers is just such a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of this topic. As before, this is a Puyo variant with two unique rules. First, whenever you make a match, the pieces "reach out" to try to grab matching pieces, which can create additional combos or clear garbage blocks. Second, you can choose one column to protect that garbage can't fall in (and you can change it any time you make a combo). This generally does quite a lot of deal with some of Puyo's issues, for example since you can protect the column that you need to trigger your combo, attempting to harass the opponent to bury their combo point isn't as effective. I also think it's interesting that you can run traditional Puyo builds in this game and they'll work just fine, but once you get better at the game you can start incorporating some unique combo extenders using the stretchy arms, which feels satisfying once you get it down. Top it off with some funny visuals and catchy music and you've got a winner. I highly recommend this to any Puyo fans.