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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Action Man: Destruction X - AAA - 50% (3)
Atelier Marie Plus - GAAG - 75% (4)
Hive, The - BBB - 0% (3)
Jaja Uma Quartet - BAB - 17% (3)
Skydiving Extreme - BBB - 0% (3)
Tecmo Stackers - GAA - 67% (3)
I always think it's interesting to compare how the same game rates across platforms, particularly when the versions are nearly identical. Atelier Marie rated 67% (3) on Saturn, while Tecmo Stackers rated 50% {3}, which suggests we are pretty consistent across systems (the Stackers vote looks very different but it's a single A to B flip).
Games for this topic:
Croket: Kindan no Kinka Box
Egypt 1156 BC
Lake Masters 2
Mega Man X5
Racingroovy VS
Suzu Monogatari
Suzu Monogatari has been a game I've been looking forward to rating ever since I saw it when creating the GAB list. I'm also curious to see what people will have to say about Mega Man X5.
Croket: Kindan no Kinka Box - B
ReplyDeleteEgypt 1156 BC - B
Lake Masters 2 - B
Mega Man X5 - B
Racingroovy VS - B
Suzu Monogatari - A
Like One Piece Grand Battle before it, Croket is another bad PS1 Smash Bros clone. Visually, it looks pretty decent, and the controls are all right, you have X to jump, Square and Triangle for light and strong attacks, and circle for specials and supers, but where the game falters is its mechanics. Light attacks do no damage and have no hitstun and are thus useless, so this is primarily a one button game, but all strong attacks also put the opponent into a knockdown state where no follow-ups are possible, so there are also no combos. Special moves are done with circle plus some simple motions (thankfully, you can press select mid-battle to see your movelist), but they are limited, to perform a normal special takes a third of the super bar, and a full super takes the whole thing. With no way to combo into these, you kind of just have to hope the opponent blathers into them, which has little depth. The goal of the game (in story mode at least) is to collect enough coins to win each stage, but this takes forever, for example on Stage 1 you start with 300 coins and need 1000 total. Each time you beat someone you take 10% of their coins, so you'll earn 30 per match win at first (enemies start losing coins as you beat them so this amount will drop). Obviously, it would take dozens of wins to get enough coins this way, so the real point of the game is chasing down treasure chests that appear in the stages to get extra coins. Annoyingly, the coins fly all over the place when the chests are opened, so you also have to hunt them down. Certain specials and supers also knock coins out of the opponent so you can also use those, but in any case it will still take 10+ fights against the same handful of opponents to get enough coins. Between stages are minigames that are even worse, like the second stage being an awful Balloon Fight clone that is barely functional since after every hit the target gets invincibility and can just grab their balloon back while invincible, so you basically just wait out the clock while making sure not to lose any balloons. About the only good thing you can say about this game is the presentation is good and there's a ton of characters, but the gameplay is so poor it kind of barely matters. If it was at least possible to combo strong attacks into specials / supers this game might be A, but it feels like the developers just really had no clue how a game of this type needs to work even though Melee was already out by this point.
I was worried when I saw the Cryo Interactive logo pop up in Egypt 1156 BC, and rightly so, as like most Cryo games it is terrible. The game is ostensibly a point and click adventure game, but it's really just more of a pixel hunt, as the game has basically no puzzles to speak of. For example, the game's first "puzzle" is crossing a pit at the bottom of a stairwell. The first time you try it, you will simply fall into the pit and die, as the graphics are too dark and grainy for it to be clear there is a pit there. The solution is simply to pick up a board that you can find by scanning one of the scenes on the staircase and lay it across the pit. This is more complex than it sounds because each scene allows for full rotation in all directions and they are also all very dark and the board doesn't really stand out, but in any case, every puzzle is like this. You will soon come across a Cobra, which has to be dealt with using a stick that is hidden in one corner of a large room that is broken up into many pieces. The game runs slowly on PS1 and the nature of the navigation makes it very easy to get lost, making the exploration quite lame. Making matters worse, your overarching goal is to solve a hidden message, which does not involve solving any kind of puzzle, but instead scanning random walls that aren't really marked in any way, so pretty much the whole game just involves running the cursor over absolutely everything in every scene to see if there's anything there, which is about as much fun as it sounds. The background visuals do look kind of good for their time, but I don't think there's a less interesting game you could have created with them.
DeleteThe original Lake Masters was a strong contender for the title of worst fishing game ever made, but somehow I think the sequel is actually even worse. For starters, it has to be noted that it looks better. Rather than the atrocious mode 7-style graphics of the first game, it now uses scenery based on actual photographs. This looks vastly better, but unfortunately it seems like they used 99% of their budget and programming time on this and everything else is complete trash. First, like almost all bad fishing games, it's way too hard to even find a fish. There are many different spots you can fish and you can rotate 360 degrees, but I don't believe there are actually any good spots to fish (we know from other games that bass like to hang out near obstacles but there aren't really any in this game), so I'm pretty sure the graphics are just window-dressing. The only luck I ever had was by using the earthworm bait, using the second sinker option, and using the third action style (there's far too many choices for how simple this game is, and it's likely the case that like 99% of them will never catch anything). When you cast your line, you'll see a little circle showing the lure (you cannot see underwater in this game) and if you're doing the action well (there's button prompts) you might see a fish shadow pass over your lure every now and then. If you're absurdly lucky, it may try to bite, which causes the tension meter to spike. I have absolutely no idea what you press to hook the fish, it's certainly not anything obvious, the only time I ever had success was by mashing all the buttons and even then it's not reliable. The actual fish fighting is no better. The tension gauge spikes randomly and it feels like pressing the reeling buttons barely does anything, but the fish can snap the line in an instant if the tension ever gets high, which it does pretty randomly, so actually catching anything is nearly impossible. There's really not much else to say other than that both the fish finding and fighting are among the worst of any fishing game ever made, making this easily one of the worst fishing games of all time even in an era with tons of bad fishing games.
Megaman X5 is the point where the series starts to go off the rails, but returning to it I was surprised at how much of a downgrade it actually is from X4. To its credit, the game actually tries to mix up the formula quite substantially from earlier games. For starters, there's the time system. At the start of the game, there are 16 hours available, with 1 hour elapsing every time you do a stage. As the counter goes down, the bosses get harder, gaining more health and damage, which was probably intended to add replay value. Also, unlike X4, you can also now play as both X and Zero in one save file, and there are certain special parts you can unlock under some conditions. The problem is, all of these new ideas are poorly implemented. The time system actually barely matters, because the only thing that eats an hour is starting a stage, you can continue all you want once within the stage with no penalty. Furthermore, getting the custom parts requires you to beat the bosses when they are at a high level, which basically means the hours left must be low, so typically when starting the game the first thing you do is deliberately die a bunch of times to waste enough time on the clock so you can get the custom parts. Speaking of, there are different parts for X and Zero that you can choose from after each boss and you can't get both, so you have to gimp one character, but the ability to switch between the characters doesn't even matter because whichever character you don't pick for the intro stage is hugely gimped (Zero loses his buster and X loses his Fourth Armor), so you will generally just play the game as one character and pick all their upgrades. These issues might be mostly forgivable if the gameplay was still great, but it has suffered as well, particularly in terms of level design. Pretty much every level is focused around some gimmick that's generally not very fun, like speeder bikes, exploding time bombs, or being chased by a giant ship, and even the levels that play somewhat normally are inordinately full of spikes and traps that neutralize most of the speed the game is known for, not to mention the fact that you are interrupted by text boxes every few seconds and can't turn this off. There's so many terrible decisions here that I haven't even mentioned the atrocious localization where they renamed the mavericks based on members of Guns and Roses yet, because the game has so many other issues that it almost doesn't seem worth mentioning. I always thought X6 was the worst PS1 Megaman game, but to be honest it actually might be this one. As much as saving the reploids in X6 sucks at least its level design is a bit better. There is a patch that has been made by fans to fix some of this game's issues, but even with the patch it's A at the absolute most. What a disaster.
DeleteRacingroovy VS is another Ridge Racer clone, but it's one of the weakest ones. Like most Ridge Racer clones, this is a game with only 3 tracks and very minimal progression. About its only notable feature is that it has a fair number of cars, and they're unusually different from each other for a game of this type, with some of the cars almost feeling like they have a completely different driving engine. For example, some of the cars have Ridge Racer auto-drift, while others instead have a "power turn" that requires you to press both gas and brake at the same time, while still other cars have a more standard, non-auto drift. This might in theory give the game a fair amount of variety, but the problem is that regardless of which car you select they never feel very good to drive. The Ridge Racer drift feels a bit too slow and doesn't work nearly as well as it does in Ridge Racer, the power turn is a very strong mechanic but feels incredibly janky, and even the regular drift still feels overly sensitive, though it is the best controlling option. Ultimately, there's just not much content here and what is here isn't very fun.
DeleteSuzu Monogatari is better than the other games in this topic, but it's still not as good as I'd hoped. Easily the most notable thing about this game is that it looks great. It has a pretty unique visual style where it's kind of a colourful pastel take on rural Japan and it's quite appealing to look at. The game is actually a card battle RPG, but the card battle system is one of the most simplistic ever made. Each player has a deck of 15 cards, which are split into 3 types, fire, water, and wood, with each card having a number that represents its power. Players take turns matching up cards, and which one wins is decided by a simple rule - Fire beats Wood, Wood beats Water, and Water beats Fire, if both players choose the same element the higher power wins, then deals damage to the opponent's hp equal to its power. Cards don't have any special effects, so you would always just use the highest power cards you have access to, which means deck construction has no nuance whatsoever. There are also help cards, which do things like "fire power x 2", but these are consumable, once you use them they're gone forever until you either win more of them through battle or buy them, so most of the time you'll want to avoid using them unless you have to. As you can probably tell from the rules, the game is basically rock paper scissors with damage values attached. There's almost no strategy, although you can see what cards an opponent has in their hands, this information is only useful if they have only 2 types (ie, if they have Wood and Water, you can safely play a Wood card with high power, since you know they can only beat it with a Wood card of higher power). You gradually level up and get more HP, and you also find better cards throughout the game, but this doesn't really do anything to make the battle system more interesting, if anything it just makes battles take longer, which is bad because they're not very fun. There's not really a ton to say beyond that, it's certainly playable, but it's also not especially notable beyond its nice artstyle.