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Last Topic's Ratings:
Cool Boarders 4 - GAAAA - 60% (5)
Gekisha Boy - GA - 75% (2)
Italian Job, The - AAAGAGAA - 63% (8)
Omise de Tensyu - GA - 75% (2)
Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman - BGGGGGA - 79% (7)
Sound Qube - GGA - 83% (3)
A pretty highly rated topic. I was surprised but happy to see so many ratings for The Italian Job and Rising Zan. It's nice that these topics are still this active when we're approaching #200.
Games for this topic:
Clockwerx
Legend of Heroes 3
Nessa no Hoshi
R-Type Delta
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2
Tank Racer
The early Legend of Heroes games are so wack. Legend of Heroes 3 has a remake on PSP, as "Legend of Heroes 2", but the game called "Legend of Heroes" on PSP is actually Legend of Heroes 4. I'm aware that technically LoH4 is a prequel to LoH3 but it's still a mess. This makes Final Fantasy's numbering seem almost normal by comparison.
Clockwerx - B
ReplyDeleteLegend of Heroes 3 - B
Nessa no Hoshi - A
R-Type Delta - G
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2 - B
Tank Racer - A
Clockwerx is the same as on Saturn, but I feel like on PS1 it's more obviously B due to more competition. The game has all of the same flaws, namely that it has super unintuitive controls and is way too hard, which is a terrible combination. Just navigating the levels is a brainbuster in itself, when you add having to dodge the arrows into the mix, which it feels like you have basically no control over, it just instantly gets too frustrating to be worth dealing with.
There's quite a few versions of the Legend of Heroes 3, it was remade on both Saturn and PSP, but the PS1 version is a port of the original and it's by far the weakest version. Apparently this was a PC game that came out in 1994, but it feels far older, I would have guessed this game at 1992 at the latest, as it is significantly more primitive even compared to most 16-bit RPGs and is really showing its age by now. This game has a ton of problems in almost every area, but we'll start with the presentation. This game looks absolutely awful, easily one of the worst-looking PS1 games. In particular the usage of colour is terrible, I imagine this game might have only been 256 colours on PC or something, but the palleting is terrible. The presentation of the game is extremely dry, there are no character portraits so text is just a bunch of plain boxes, and sprites have extremely limited animation. Area maps are huge but empty and uninteresting, and overall it's an extremely drab game to look at that would look terrible even on a 16-bit console. The plot is also extremely basic and dry. One of the game's biggest issues is actually the lack of focus given to the characters, which the remakes try to improve by giving them significantly more dialogue, but this is actually a surprisingly quiet game a lot of the time with very long stretches with minimal dialogue. This might actually be kind of okay as the story is easily one of the weakest parts of the game, but the game world feels extremely empty and boring. The original version has bizarrely few random battles, with you getting one only every couple of minute or so, which is unfortunate because the battle system here is actually kind of decent, it's nothing super noteworthy but it's a basic strategy battle system that uses the encounter locations to set how you can move, similar to Popolocrois (though that game is way better in every way). There's also basically never any treasure to find on the maps, leading to maps that feel like they just have a ton of empty space (the Saturn version also has this problem). This is finally fixed on the PSP version where they completely loaded up each map with tons of enemies and cut down on the size of the maps significantly. In any case, if you are going to play this game, this is absolutely not the version you want, but even on Saturn or PSP I wouldn't say it's a particularly good game, though those versions are both worlds better than this one. I still can't believe this game originally came out in 1994.
Nessa no Hoshi is an interesting game that's almost quite good but doesn't quite play to its strengths enough. The basic gist of it is that it's a strange combination of a Myst-like game and a fighting game, somewhat similar to something like Yellow Brick Road but with a different battle engine. You'll travel through areas in first person, periodically being interrupted to do fights in standard 1vs1 style. Surprisingly, this game's fighting engine is actually really solid. It's a fairly simple string-based fighter, but everything flows well and you even have access to launchers and juggle combos, which are fun. The best combo I was able to find was Square Circle Circle Circle Circle (this hit is a launcher), then Triangle Triangle -> forward forward Circle, but many other options exist. There are even throws and crossups, and when you beat bosses you learn new special moves. These fights are actually quite fun, but the game's biggest flaw is that you do way too many of them because the encounter rate is too high. I would guess the chance of getting a fight on every step is around 50%, which is way too much and makes solving the game's puzzles an absolute nightmare, especially as they are often super cryptic and can involve searching random unmarked walls for key items. I eventually had to consult a playthrough video, but even knowing what to it's still kind of tedious due to the encounter rate. It's a shame too, I feel if the encounter rate was about quartered this would probably be a G-level game.
DeleteR-Type Delta is basically the first semi-counterexample to my previous statement that "shmups should never be 3D". That said, it's not an especially incredible game or anything, I would say both R-Type 3 and R-Type Final are superior, but it's still a totally competent game, largely because despite using 3D visuals it still mainly plays like a 2D shmup. If you've ever played R-Type before you know the basics, the game largely revolves around the "force", a little ball you can attach to your ship or fire out that can block shots and amplifies your attack power. You also have a charge shot with two different levels, and you can absorb power with the force to charge up a hyper shot that can absolutely wreck bosses (but takes an insanely long time to charge up). The gameplay is generally pretty classic shmup action, thankfully without many compromises despite the swap to 3D. Enemies and bullets are still numerous and visibility is generally pretty good. One lame thing is that the game does feature checkpoints instead of instant respawn, but whether or not this was a technical limitation or a conscious design choice is hard to say. There are also definitely some cheap shots, one that immediately comes to mind is at the midpoint of the second stage where a pillar falls from above and if you're at the top of the screen you just instantly die with no warning, a better game would put an alert symbol here before it falls. It's definitely not quite on par with the best shmups of the era (in particular Gradius Gaiden and Darius Gaiden are both easily better than this game) but this is a completely serviceable entry in the series and it's certainly way better than something like Raystorm, which it was apparently designed to compete with.
Ready 2 Rumble Round 2 remains pretty poor. As noted when we covered this game on N64, there are minor improvements, but the game generally still feels pretty mashy and basic. One big problem is that the PS1 version doesn't run nearly as well as the N64 version (it's probably 30fps to N64's 60) and it also looks worse, which makes reacting to punches and other things going on much harder. In general, stamina just comes back too fast in this game, which makes it too easy to simply spam punches with no real strategy and there's not really anything you can do against an opponent who attempts this kind of strategy because there aren't many real combos or other ways to take advantage of playing this way. We've seen a couple other boxing games this gen that are actually starting to figure out how to convert the sport to game format, which leaves much less room for mashy titles like this that clearly haven't figured it out.
DeleteTank Racer sucks. It doesn't suck in the same way that Ready 2 Rumble 2 sucks, where there's just nothing good about it, it sucks in the sense that it actually has a lot of potential but a couple bad design decisions prevent it from being good. The gist of this game is that it's a racing game where you control tanks, and you have a turret on the top of your tank that you can swivel and fire at any time, you can even fire behind your tank. Trying to drive competently while also using the shoulders to aim the turret at enemies is actually an interesting challenge, which would probably make for a good game IF THE TURRET DID ANYTHING AT ALL! See, the entire problem with the game is that turret shots literally don't matter. Tanks do not have health, and being hit by a shell slows you down by like 10mph for half a second, it's completely irrelevant. You can also pick up various powerups and fire them at enemies using the turret too, but these also barely matter apart from the one that gives a turbo boost. It's a shame too because the game actually runs fairly well and the courses are pretty decent, they have a number of branching paths and some stuff you can blow up, but the gameplay just doesn't feel rewarding enough. If, say, taking 3 shots caused you to get blown up and you had to wait a second to respawn, that would actually probably make for a really fun game. I really wish some of these older games had been playtested more because I feel like many of their issues could have been found and fixed easily.