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Last Topic's Ratings:
Afraid Gear Another - GG - 100% (2)
Courier Crisis - GGAB - 63% {4}
Divide, The: Enemies Within - AAG - 67% (3)
Surf Riders - BB - 0% (2)
Xenocracy - AB - 25% (2)
ZeiramZone - GA - 75% (2)
I thought Courier Crisis rated much lower on Saturn, but it actually rated 60% {5} there. It seems like it's always divisive.
Games for this topic:
007: Tomorrow Never Dies
Catan
Chris Kamara's Street Soccer
Soccer Kid
Team Losi RC Racer
Tozan RPG, The
Yeah, I don't really have anything too crazy for topic 200. PS1 is the first system to reach this milestone, the previous longest-running system, SNES, only made it to topic 180. Don't worry though, we've still got lots more to go.
007: Tomorrow Never Dies - A
ReplyDeleteCatan - A
Chris Kamara's Street Soccer - A
Soccer Kid - B
Team Losi RC Racer - B
Tozan RPG, The - G
Tomorrow Never Dies is all right. Unlike Goldeneye, this game is a third-person shooter instead of a first person shooter, so it has more in common with Siphon Filter, but regardless of what game you compare it to it's not going to look great in the comparison. It is functional and does a decent job following the events of the movie, but it's also a very by the numbers game that doesn't do anything impressive. Gunplay is very basic, you have strafe on the shoulders, which you'll be using all the time while firing as much as possible (the PP7 has unlimited ammo so you can just spam, and AR ammo is also usually abundant). You take a lot of unavoidable damage, but medkits are common and you can store up a bunch of them for when you need them. Stages are generally very short and small, with many consisting of just a few small rooms. When a lot of stuff happens at once (like at the end of the second mission), the game tends to drop a ton of frames, but it runs fine most of the time. There's a handful of segments throughout the game where you do something other than just the on-foot combat like the skiing escape in the first mission and these are also fine, but nothing mindblowing. I guess the best thing you could probably say about this game is that it's functional. If we compare something like Delta Force Urban Warfare, when that game was at its best, it was way better than this game, but it also ran way worse a lot of the time, whereas Tomorrow Never Dies does generally provide a serviceable 007 experience, just one that won't ever really blow you away.
Catan is a pretty straightforward adaptation of the famous board game. The first thing that has to be noted about this version is that it's only available in German, which is unusual for a European exclusive as they're typically translated into many languages. Luckily, the rules to Catan are well-known so you can easily look them up, which reduces the language barrier somewhat. The basic gameplay is functional, though I feel the UI is not great, in particular accessing many parts of the game is somewhat cumbersome (you have to use the shoulders to build things) and the trading interface is very confusing, which is bad because trading is essential to this game. Beyond the UI, the visuals are basic but serviceable, which is also about all that can be said for the presentation. The game does include a campaign mode that goes through a bunch of different board layouts, so that's something, it helps give it a bit more variety, and the AI opponents seem decent, though they're very stingy with trades (or maybe the interface just makes it hard to tell when they'll accept a decent trade). Overall, it's all right, but there won't be much reason to seek out this particular version when there's so many conversions of this game available.
Chris Kamara's Street Soccer is an alright soccer game. It's a very arcade-style title, it's only 5-on-5, the pitch is very small, it has simple mechanics, and there are power shots. It's not always the most polished game, for example passes can be kinda janky and the cross barely works at all, but the action is fast and stealing the ball is satisfying, particularly as fouls are rarely called so you can be very liberal with the slide tackle (you can even slide tackle people who don't have the ball, ala Mario Strikers, which is always hilarious). The presentation is nothing special, there are a lot of teams and stages, but the visuals are average and the commentary is very basic. There's not really a ton else to say about it, it's a fairly simple game but the gameplay is all right and for a couple bucks you definitely could have done worse.
DeleteI didn't have fond memories of playing Soccer Kid on SNES, but it turns out the PS1 version of the game is a little better. The basics are the same, it's a platformer in which you control a soccer-playing kid whose only form of attack is to kick a soccer ball into enemies. This causes the ball to go flying away, preventing you from attacking until you retrieve it. Luckily, you can hold up and press kick to magically recall the ball to you at any time, which is absolutely essential to get anywhere as the ball can be destroyed, despawns if you get too far from it, or can get stuck in places where you can't get it out. Besides using the ball for offense, you can also do a high jump off of it. There are a ton more moves to the game, but they're generally awkward to pull off and usually superflous because they take so long. For example, you can kick the ball up, which requires you to press kick while not holding anything on the dpad to kick the ball upwards, then hold down, then switch to up + kick when the ball gets to you. If this sounds needlessly complex, it's because it is, but luckily it's not necessary to pull it off all that often as you can typically ignore enemies above you. Compared to the SNES game, this version is slightly easier. You have more health and many enemies take fewer hits, which is good because it's very difficult to avoid damage from most enemies who take more than 1 hit to go down due to the awkward controls. That said, I think this version is still B. Despite being somewhat more playable it's still not particularly fun and I'm very hard-pressed to name another 2D platformer on the system I'd put below this.
Team Losi RC Racer is not great. In many ways this feels like a significantly worse version of Re-Volt, it has a similar aesthetic but without nearly as much personality. It's most unique mechanic is its powerup system, but it's actually quite poor. The way it works is you get powerups by driving through coloured gates. There are like 6 colours, but you don't get a powerup just for going through a gate, instead you have to go through them in a specific order to get a powerup. For example, if you go through yellow first, then red, you get a boost. If you went through yellow, then green, you'd instead get nothing. This means you have to avoid the gates you don't want, but a lot of the time gates are placed in areas like tunnels where you literally can't avoid them. Some powerups need more than two gates, but even the powerups that need 3 and 4 gates aren't too powerful, so generally other than boost they tend not to be worth your time. The game is kind of structured like CTR where there's a hub world, but there's nothing really interesting about it and there's not a lot to do so it feels like it kinda just wastes your time. The controls in the game are okay at best, they're definitely a little on the slippery side, and some of the tracks have a lot of slowdown. It is playable and you could probably make the case for a low A, but I feel like this is one of PS1's weaker racers and it just doesn't do much with its theme.
The Tozan RPG is nothing like what I expected, but it's actually a pretty cool game. It's an RPG about Mountain Climbing, the goal of each stage is to reach the summit of the mountain, but this is not your father's mountain climbing, these mountains are filled with monsters and you'll have to defeat a boss to reach the top. Surprisingly, the gameplay heavily resembles Ogre Battle. You'll create squads of mountain climbers at the base camp, then dispatch them onto the map. You can set their target position and they'll move in real time, as will the enemies. When two units collide, a battle takes place, but battles are mostly automated, just like in Ogre Battle. A key mechanic in the game is camping. Besides letting you recover your health and energy, if a unit is forced to retreat, they'll retreat to the nearest camp, so having multiple units out and putting some camps up is essential to protect your units. Enemy units retain their damage between fights, so placing a camp and assailing the enemy with multiple teams is key to defeating bosses. Climbers are divided into four classes. Attackers do the most damage, and your team must include one or you're not allowed to challenge the summit boss. Climbers make your unit move faster and have the best evasion. Sherpas are tanks (they'll guard for low health allies) and you need one to set up a camp, but you can use a camp set up by another team even if your team doesn't have a Sherpa. Nurses are healers, they can't attack at all but are the only units that can heal mid-battle, so they're quite useful, but they have no special abilities on the map. You might think the most ideal team comp is just one of each, and certainly this is viable, but more specialized squads are sometimes useful, for example a team of mostly climbers can easily recover defeated units or set up camps if paired with one Sherpa since they can move so fast, and having 2 or more attackers really ramps up your damage output against bosses, which can be useful if using the "do damage then retreat" strategy. Another important factor is money. As you explore the mountain, your money gradually drains, and it drains fast when camping. Money is actually the limiting factor, if your squads are wiped out you can retrieve them, but if your money runs out you lose the game, and besides finding a little in caves you mainly have to beat maps to get more of it. You can redo earlier maps to get extra money though. There are also money-costing special attacks you can use in battle which resemble the cards from Ogre Battle, but obviously this will drain your funds even faster. Overall, this is actually a pretty interesting game and I think I actually enjoy it more than Ogre Battle since it's more fast-paced. This game is a perfect example of how the Simple 1500 series always finds some way to surprise you.
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