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Last Topic's Ratings:
Chiisana Kyojin Microman - AG - 75% (2)
G-Police - GAGGG - 90% (5)
Kagero: Deception 2 - GGGAGGG - 93% (7)
My Garden - GAB - 50% {3}
NASCAR 2000 - AGA - 67% (3)
One on One - AA - 50% (2)
I was surprised at just how popular the Deception franchise was, I always thought it was fairly niche.
Games for this topic:
Hard Rock Cab
Kamen Rider Kuuga
Land Before Time, The: Big Water Adventure
Mezase Senkyuu Ou
Oasis Road
Wild Rapids
Here we have the third Kamen Rider game, which I'm looking forward to after how good the first two were. Also, I've wanted to try Wild Rapids for a while, I always enjoy seeing games that try something different.
Hard Rock Cab - B
ReplyDeleteKamen Rider Kuuga - A
Land Before Time, The: Big Water Adventure - B
Mezase Senkyuu Ou - A
Oasis Road - G
Wild Rapids - B
Hard Rock Cab is a rare instance where the Playstation port is the butchered one. Compared to Saturn, this runs at about half the framerate and has atrocious draw distance. To make matters worse, the variable framerate remains in effect here, but its impact is far more severe, the game's speed will just randomly become like 10 times what it's supposed to be every now and then, which makes the game almost totally unplayable. Avoid this version at all costs.
When we covered Kamen Rider V3, I was worried that it wouldn't live up to the high standard of the first game. These fears were unfounded, though, as V3 is also a fantastic game, but Kuuga is where the quality starts to dip. The most notable change is to the story mode. V3 had an extremely detailed story mode with a ton of stages and lovingly animated cutscenes that did a great job capturing the feel of the show, and Kuuga's story mode doesn't live up to it in any way whatsoever. It's a short sequence of only about 6 stages, and gone are the animated cutscenes in favour of some very limited footage from the show itself. The missions are also much more basic, they're basically just standard one on one fights with some added conditions. Sometimes you have to damage the enemy's health a bit, sometimes you just have to survive for a while, and sometimes you have to finish them off with a certain attack, but that's about it, it basically otherwise just feels like the arcade mode. It's not all bad, the core gameplay is still mostly solid (though I find the combo routes someone less interesting than the first game, which this plays more similarly to rather than V3) and the card system remains intact and still lets you unlock stuff like new modes and characters. The game is still fun and I'd still recommend it to fans of the series, it's just clearly not up to the excellent level of quality of the first two games. There are two more games in the series on PS1 though so I'm hoping the next one is more of a return to form.
Speaking of phoning it in, we have the second Land Before Time game. This is a much lesser effort even than the first game, being one of the most barebones 2D platformers of all time. It's slow as molasses, there are no enemies, and if you fall in a pit you just immediately come back. There are 4 playable characters, but they're all completely identical, however you have to beat the game with all four of them to unlock everything. The closest thing that the game has to an original idea is that there's a fish swimming in the background of most stages and if you press the shoulder buttons he can grab certain collectables for you, but it's still a completely mind-numbing experience that I can't even imagine fans of the film having any patience for.
Oasis Road is quite an interesting game. It's another exploration / trading game, similar to Daibouken, but this time you're on foot rather than in a boat. The basic gist of the game is that it takes place in a Silk Road-like setting where a disaster has resulted in the loss of most of civilization, and you need to travel between towns selling goods, slaying monsters, and exploring ancient ruins for clues about the lost civilization. The game initially seems very complex because it drops quite a lot of information on you all at once, but it's actually not that complicated once you get the hang of it. The basic gameplay loop is that you need fuel and food to explore. To obtain these things you need to buy them with money, which you need to make by trading. Various towns sell goods you can buy, but you can only sell them at certain places, so your first step is to figure out who will buy what. In each town, there's a guild of sorts you can go to and if you speak to the person in the top right, he'll tell you what they need to upgrade, which will either be something you need to buy or something you need to sell. For example, you might find a town that sells flowers, which you can take to another town and sell so they can make dye, then sell the dye to a third town for a healthy profit. This will cause these towns to upgrade, making them sell better products, and you can also get a gift if you go to the square after upgrading a town. There may also be wandering merchants here who can sell you good items at a discount, but you have to successfully persuade them first, which requires charm (and luck). Charm is progressively gained by getting the various presents that the towns give you for upgrading them. Most of the items you'll find are material items that can be turned into various other types of goods with the correct skill, for example you might find a monster claw which could become a pretty decent sword, but requires weaponmaking skill to process. These are obtained from skill books, which certain upgraded towns will sell. Each party member can know one skill, so initially I thought you'd have to find more human members to learn more skills, but it turns out monsters can learn skills too, so you can capture monsters to learn more skills (which is done by using the 4th character's whip skill on a monster with low health). Exploring further will usually require you to win battles, and obviously the further out you go the harder they get, so you'll need to spend some time upgrading towns so you can get better equipment. Speaking of the battle system, it's a fairly basic turn-based system, the main nuance is that enemies can guard, which makes them nearly impossible to damage, but your special attacks (which look like blue gems) can break guard, so use these if you see an enemy blocking. Finally, you'll also need to explore ruins from time to time, like with haggling these also rely on a skill, in this case your knowledge skill, which goes up as you explore ruins and do certain other things, so this is not that difficult other than that you need to be thorough in your exploration so you don't miss them. It's definitely an interesting title overall, it's too bad this one has never gotten a fan translation or anything.
DeleteMezase Senkyuu Ou is all right. It's a very basic falling block game with its only real standout feature being the way its pieces work. They're balls that are dropped in groups of 3, and they roll when placed down, so you can only stack them if they're build up in a certain way. This makes combos somewhat annoying to create, particularly because I find it hard to predict how the stack will collapse when a match is made in the middle. This is another one of those games where the key is just to play fast, since large combos are hard to create and players can easily be buried by repeated small attacks. The game's jam blocks also act oddly, they sometimes eat nearby pieces, which can make dealing with them difficult, but if you do clear them they sometimes result in massive counterattacks. Presentation-wise it's not bad, but the outcome of the match feels very chaotic a lot of the time. I put a decent amount of time into it but I never really felt like I was getting any better, I think a lot of the problem is that it's simply not worth building big combos so there's only so much room for skill.
DeleteUnfortunately, Wild Rapids sucks. Pretty much everything about this game is terrible, I first want to draw attention to the controls. This is a kayaking game, but you simply hold X to accelerate and use the dpad to turn, there's none of the nuance you would usually expect to paddling so any appeal of the specific nature of this sport is lost. The controls also simply aren't up to the task. These are very narrow rivers with tons of obstacles and your controls are simply too sluggish to navigate them properly. Speaking of the rivers themselves, they're also very bland. The courses are essentially divided into short segments that repeat several times per race, even in a 1 minute race you might see the same segment 3 times, which just feels lazy and dull. This was clearly a budget game but unlike most of the superlite series or what not there's clearly not really any good ideas here.