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Last Topic's Ratings:
Hard Rock Cab - BB - 0% (2)
Kamen Rider Kuuga - AGA - 67% (3)
Land Before Time: Big Water Adventure - BBB - 0% (3)
Mezase Senkyuu Ou - AA - 50% (2)
Oasis Road - GG - 100% (2)
Wild Rapids - BBB - 0% (3)
I wonder how far into the future it will be before AI translation becomes computationally simple enough that it can be integrated with emulators in a simple way? Retroarch can already kind of do it, but it'd be nice if games like Oasis Road could be more easily accessible to westerners, because there are a lot of interesting games out there that not many people will ever get to play.
Games for this topic:
Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu 2
Darkstone
Expendable
Raiden DX
Soul Blade
VR Baseball 99
The original Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu was one of my favourite early GAB finds, so I'm interested to see what they did with the sequel. It'll also be interesting to see the start of the Soul series.
Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu 2 - A
ReplyDeleteDarkstone - G
Expendable - G
Raiden DX - G
Soul Blade - A
VR Baseball 99 - B
Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu 2 is definitely not quite as good as I'd hoped. Pretty much all the basics from the first game still apply, and that's also the biggest problem with it, barely anything has changed from the first game. The graphics are a touch better and the story mode now has manga-style visuals rather than the photorealistic style of the first game, but that's really about it as far as changes go. I guess the menus have changed a bit too, and now have much less flair compared to the original, and it's also a bit harder to visually paint your truck since you can't see the results before you apply it. This is very minor, but it's hard to overstate how little has changed from the first game. The basic idea is still funny and charming, but it's just not really bringing anything new to the table that we didn't see in the first game. This series does have a ton more games so I do wonder what else they'll do with it, but the first sequel is kind of uninspired.
Darkstone is a Diablo clone, and while it's clearly not as good as Diablo it's still a pretty solid take on the concept for the platform. Something I was immediately impressed by is that this game has proper camera control mapped to the right stick. The ability to rotate and zoom the camera is a godsend and few early games of this type included it. In terms of gameplay, it's quite basic, similar to Diablo 1, you'll spend a lot of time just holding down the attack button and hoping things die before you do (if you're playing a fighter anyway), but the game is pretty fast-paced and you frequently find new stuff so this still works fine. The UI is also generally well-made, there's automap and quickslots for both items and spells and levelling and managing your inventory is a snap, clearly some effort was put into adapting this game for console. Probably the area where the game most significantly pales to Diablo is in terms of its presentation, Diablo definitely looks better and has more style, whereas this game's visuals are fairly generic, but the game still runs very well and its light effects are somewhat impressive for their time (dungeons are dark, bring a torch). Overall, while clearly not dethroning Diablo anytime soon this is at least a worthy runner up which is still worth your time if you like games of this type.
Expendable is pretty solid. Clearly the developers saw how much the PS1 versions of Contra sucked and thought "we could easily do that better" and they did, as this game is basically just 3D Contra but not awful. A smart choice is that this game involves no verticality, so you don't have to fiddle with finnicky jump controls or anything, you just aim, strafe, and shoot things from an overhead perspective while picking up a copious amount of weaponry along the way. There's not really too much more to say about this game other than that it controls and runs fine, though considering that few games of this type have nailed the basics this still gives it a leg up on almost all of its competitors. 2P support is available, which is appreciated, and you're not penalized for accidentally shooting the hostages, which is great because this will happen every time (they are the ones who are truly expendable). There is also a Dreamcast version of this game, but I think the PS1 version is actually slightly better because it's more zoomed out, and like many early DC games the DC version has that overly smooth look that makes it look like it has very little detail. It does run at 60fps though compared to PS1's 30, but I'd take the increased viewing range over the framerate here.
DeleteRaiden DX is sort of a strange product, but it's very solid. For starters, it's probably necessary to explain what this game even is, as this game probably initially seems very similar to Raiden 2. It's kind of a "Raiden 2 Special Edition", which features 3 totally different (and somewhat confusingly named) courses. The "training" course is actually a unique, lengthy stage where you can't continue, and is not really a beginner stage at all, this is more of a score attack mode. The "regular" game is the first 5 stages of Raiden 2. The "expert" game is a set of 9 totally new stages that are unique to Raiden DX. It's basically impossible to talk about this without drawing a comparison to the Raiden Project, which is a PS1 port of Raiden 1 and 2, but I'd say this version is a little bit better, as you essentially also mostly get Raiden 2 and Raiden DX is superior to Raiden 1. This version of the game also includes some bonus unlockables, such as an encylopedia and an alternate soundtrack. Funny enough, there's also a demo of Mezase Senkyuu Ou on the disc, which we covered last week, and it's actually a pretty solid replacement for the full game as you can play against both the AI and another player. In any case, obviously the classic Raiden gameplay is always great, to me this is basically the definitive vertical shmup, and this is a very solid package that has never been ported to any other system, so you can't really go wrong here.
Soul Calibur 2 was a game I was fairly impressed by back on Gamecube, but I also quickly lost interest in it, and when playing Soul Blade I can kind of see why. For starters, it's actually kind of impressive how much of the gameplay of Soul Calibur is already in place with the first game in the series. It has the same string-based combat system as the other games, you can sidestep, guard impact is already present, and even the famous ring outs are already a major factor. Apart from movesets being a little smaller the basics that the series would later be known for are all here, though so are some notable problems. One thing that really stands out to me is that lows are terrible and it's almost impossible to tell what moves are overheads. Combos from lows are almost nonexistent, so countering a high with a low gets almost no reward, and there are tons of illogical overheads that in no way look like they hit high that frequently deal significant damage. As noted before, jumps also suck so crossups definitely aren't a thing, which makes defense somewhat overly simplistic, with guard impact being the only really relevant technique. Offense isn't much better, with most strings feeling totally interchangeable and juggles and other interesting states being very limited, which is something the later games in the series significantly improved upon. The result is a game that feels mashy, which was mostly my perception of Soul Calibur 2 as well, but that game gets away with it due to a fantastically fully-featured single player mode. Interestingly, the Edge Master mode is present in this version as well, but it's vastly less fun here. You still do missions and gain new weapons, but almost all missions involve some kind of stupid condition that prevents you from playing the game properly, like the opponent being immune to all but a certain type of attack like throws or having infinite health and forcing you to ring them out, thereby making the weapons you earn completely pointless most of the time. It's still somewhat of an impressive effort for the system (it's certainly very well animated for a PS1 game) and I appreciate that they did try to add additional content to the arcade game, but I think it's far enough behind most good fighters of the era in terms of gameplay that I'd still rather play them instead.
DeleteWhen I first tried VR Baseball 99, my first impression was "this is so much worse than the original", but it turns out I was actually thinking of 3D Baseball, which is a completely unrelated game. Either way, this game is still really bad. For starters, it's an awful looking game, it's hard to put my finger on exactly what the issue with it is but the 3D visuals just look terrible, it's possible them having very low resolution or something but either way it looks bad. The "VR" aspect of the game is seemingly that the game uses all kinds of insane camera angles that you'd never see in any other baseball game, which you can sort of get away with because the basics of baseball are so simple and you can just look at the base map to see where the runners are, but don't ever expect the onscreen visuals to show the play from any useful perspective. This game also features some of the worst batting of all time. The ball doesn't visually get any larger as it approaches the plate, making pitch timing completely unreadable, you can simply "learn" about how long it takes a pitch to get to the plate and then they're not hard to hit, but like 99% of the time when you contact the ball if will be a pop-up for an extremely easy out, making offense in this game almost nonexistent. Even the sound design is very amateurish, with far too much yelling in the crowd noise that just sounds bad. Easily one of the worst baseball games on the system.