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Last Topic's Ratings:
Carnage Heart - AA - 50% (2)
Cu-On-Pa - AG - 75% (2)
Heiwa Otenki Studio, The - BB - 0% (2)
Mike Tyson Boxing - BGBB - 25% (1)
Rhythm 'n' Face - BA - 25% (2)
Submarine Commander - AB - 25% (2)
A pretty quiet topic, but I guess it's not too surprising when Mike Tyson Boxing is the most well-known title.
Games for this topic:
Blue Breaker Burst - Hohoemi o Anata to
Hydro Thunder
Moon
Shadow Master
Trash It
Waku Waku Bowling
We previously covered the first Blue Breaker game, which is an RPG, but the other games in the series are fighting games. I'm curious to see how it makes the transition. We also have Moon, the famously quirky non-RPG that inspired Undertale. It has a translation available, so you won't have to go through it in Japanese.
Blue Breaker Burst - Hohoemi o Anata to - B
ReplyDeleteHydro Thunder - B
Moon - A
Shadow Master - B
Trash It - B
Waku Waku Bowling - G
Blue Breaker Burst is a classic bad 3D fighter, except it's actually worse than most bad 3D fighters. By far the worst thing about this game is that it's crazily stiff even by the standards of games of its age and type, animations are extremely slow and strings are super limited, even something as simple as crouching takes a few frames so you have to wait to perform a crouch attack (simply pressing down + attack will do a standing attack if you don't wait to crouch). The game has no combos whatsoever beyond its basic strings, there are specials and supers but they are on single button presses. Supers are particularly ridiculous because they all consist of a short posing animation followed by the super flash, at which point time is frozen and they hit in 0 frames, so if you're not already blocking you're eating all the damage, you cannot block after the flash. Speaking of blocking, it also sucks, tons of moves just randomly hit high (even crouching attacks) so you basically just want to be on offense all the time and never block. About the only good thing you can say about this game is that it has a fairly fleshed out story mode that looks like the RPG, but with the battles being as lousy as they are obviously you'd much rather play the RPG than this game.
Hydro Thunder is a pretty fun game, but I wondered how the PS1 would handle it, and the answer is that "it doesn't". I would guess the PS1 port runs at half the framerate and a quarter of the resolution of the N64 version. Unsurprisingly, even though the game seemingly targets 30fps, there's also a lot of slowdown on the bigger levels, not that you're likely to even get that far in this version since the game is so grainy and pixelated that it's nearly unplayable. A huge issue beyond the fact that everything looks like complete trash and you can't see much of anything, is that the water effects have almost been completely eliminated, making it impossible to read the waves or the water level which is essential to playing the game properly. Even if PS1 was your only way to play this game, I'd say not to bother, if you absolutely cannot play the N64 or Dreamcast versions just play Choro Q Boat instead.
Moon is an extremely weird game, but you probably know that already if you know anything about it. Though billed as an RPG (or anti-RPG), it's essentially an adventure game that riffs on a lot of game mechanics, while ironically having a lot of obnoxious ones itself. The basic gist of the game is that the hero has set off on a typical RPG quest to save the world, which he accomplishes (of course) by slaughtering all manner of helpless woodland creatures in his way and stealing everything that's not nailed down. Your job, as the invisible boy (who was playing the game that the hero comes from at the beginning) is to undo the damage he's done, saving the souls of slain monsters and helping out the townspeople with their various issues. These tend to involve typical adventure game tropes of collecting items, showing items to various people, and solving simple puzzles. The game also has a day and night system where different characters will do different things at different times of day, which is often necessary to solve puzzles. One mechanic that I like is that you can obtain business cards related to most of the characters in the game, and if you show this card to other characters, they'll tell you what they think about that person. This feels like a pretty natural way to give hints and exposit on the world of the game, though I wish the puzzles made more use of it. So far the basics of the game sound decent, but there are also a lot of flaws. By far the biggest one are the general game mechanics. As noted, the game is an adventure game, but it is also timed, there is a marker on the time bar and if you do not go to sleep before this time arrives, you die and have to reload. As you gain Love by saving monsters and helping people the time limit increases, but the fact that you lose your progress if you don't sleep in time is idiotic, if they were going to keep the system they at least should have just warped you to bed when it runs out or something. Further compounding on this issue is the fact that you move extremely slowly, there's no option to "run", and screens also load quite slow, which can make the game feel tedious to explore. I think the idea here is that the game wants you to "take your time", but the fact that you will literally die if you don't move fast enough completely clashes with this concept. I also just don't generally think the game is all that clever. I don't want to get into an analysis of the story too much, but the final revelation that the hero essentially wasn't in control of his actions feels like an extreme cop-out, like I get the intention is that he was being controlled by the player but it still robs the narrative of most of its edge. At least one thing you can't really fault is the presentation, the game both looks and sounds quite good, and it is kind of novel I guess, but I definitely think Planet Laika is a superior game among weird quasi-RPGs on PS1.
DeleteShadow Master sucks, but it's funny covering it after Moon in that immediately upon starting it I couldn't help but think "it's so nice to be able to move fast and shoot stuff", so ironically Moon's "games are bad" theme only made me want to play a traditional game more. However, this initial enjoyment does not last, as Shadow Master is an extremely poor FPS. By far the worst thing about it are its controls, which are quite awful, the game has extremely aggressive auto-aim that you can't turn off that frequently takes over your controls to aim at something offscreen and it simply feels terrible. The weapons lack impact and everything in the game (yourself included) is significantly too tanky, so combat lacks any kind of oomph to it. The stages are also huge and the game really needs a map, it's very common to get hopelessly lost with no idea where to go, not helped by the terrible controls probably causing you to miss stuff. Certainly one of the weakest shooters of the era, and even on PS1 there's no reason to bother with this.
Trash It is basically identical to the Saturn version, which means it still sucks. As noted, it's a bad puzzle game with bad physics and controls that generally feels lame to play. The PS1 version has a loading screen minigame, but it has to load the minigame so loading times are longer and you rarely get to play it for more than a second anyway. There's not much else to say about this game other than that its name is an appropriate suggestion for what you should do with it.
DeleteYou know we're in trouble when we need bowling to save the topic, but when I saw Coconuts Japan (the makers of the fairly solid King of Bowling series) I knew we had a chance, and thankfully Waku Waku Bowling is decent. I've mentioned before that Bowling is kind of a hard sport to get right, largely because much of the fun of the real sport boils down to the mechanical skill of throwing the ball which a game can't replicate accurately (at least not until Wii). The best Bowling games are thus those that take a different approach, like The Star Bowling which mixes it with a dating sim, or a game like Waku Waku Bowling which instead focuses on humour and charm. The basic idea of the game isn't really anything too mindblowing, it's just kind of a silly bowling game with very anime-inspired characters, but it's a solid game that nails all the fundamentals while being fun enough to watch that it stays interesting. Probably one of the things that most people might have trouble with is actually throwing the ball, it's a 3 press system like many other bowling games, but the meter is hidden so you have to use the animation to know when to press. There's a training mode to help you learn the timing but it's not too tough once you get it down, while throwing the perfect shot consistently is a bit tough you should be throwing fairly accurate shots most of the time and I had little trouble picking up routine spares. Still, easily the most fun part of the game is the characters. Besides having funny animations when they get spares / gutters / whatever, I particularly like that each character has their own musical theme and unique bowling ball, which I feel like helps bring out their personality just a bit more. There's also a decent amount of content here, there's a league mode where you can unlock content and there's quite a fair number of bowling alleys available, and the general visuals and music are pretty solid. I still don't think this is quite as good as The Star Bowling, but it's probably the best traditional bowling game we've covered so far this gen.