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Last Topic's Ratings:
007: Tomorrow Never Dies - BGAAAB - 42% (6)
Catan - AA - 50% (2)
Chris Kamara's Street Soccer - AB - 25% (2)
Soccer Kid - BB - 0% (2)
Team Losi RC Racer - BB - 0% (2)
Tozan RPG, The - GG - 100% (2)
It's interesting how close the two 007 games on this console have rated to each other. There's one more, I wonder how it will fare.
Games for this topic:
Andretti Racing
Chaos Control
Iron Man / XO Manowar in Heavy Metal
Mawatte Mucho
Riven: The Sequel to Myst
Toys Dream
A fair number of games here that we've previously seen on Saturn, but the specifics of the port can always matter. I'm also curious to look at Toys Dream, it seems interesting.
Andretti Racing - A
ReplyDeleteChaos Control - B
Iron Man / XO Manowar in Heavy Metal - A
Mawatte Mucho - G
Riven: The Sequel to Myst - B
Toys Dream - G
When we covered Andretti Racing I noted that it felt a bit better on PS1 compared to Saturn, and while this is true, my overall opinion of the game has soured somewhat since then. As noted on Saturn, this is a racing game with both Stock car and F1 racing, though they use the same tracks so they generally feel fairly except in terms of the machine performance. The PS1 version runs much better than the Saturn version, with much lesser load times, better draw distance, and improved visuals, so this is definitely the version you want. The problem with the game is actually one we don't see often, which is the track design. A handful of the tracks are decent, mostly the oval tracks and a couple of the street courses like Meibashi and King's Beach, but there are also courses like Vancouver and Australia that have way too many absurdly tight 90 degree turns that effectively require you to come to a dead stop and the game's handling engine simply can't handle them. The game also generally feels very inauthentic as an F1 game as none of the courses actually feel like F1 circuits, and while the stock cars are better it still doesn't feel particularly authentic to NASCAR either. You can tell that they later went on to reuse parts of this engine in the NASCAR games and by paying much more attention to track design those games are generally much better. This is okay for an early title but there's not much reason to go back to it.
Well, Chaos Control is one of those games that illustrates why you always have to check every version of a game because it has massive differences from the Saturn version. The big change here is that compared to Saturn, it's much easier, which is good because the Saturn version is outright impossible. Compared to Saturn, I would guess you have quadruple HP and the gun can be fired for twice as long before overheating. This goes a long way towards making the game moer playable. I was able to finish the first stage quite reasonably in this one, whereas on Saturn it took all of my credits plus save state abuse to get it done, and having the gun not overheat constantly also makes shooting feel better. The thing is, despite these improvements I think the game is actually still B. It still has many of the same problems, like enemies firing the moment they come onscreen so you always take unavoidable damage, to levels being overly long and visually uninteresting, as well as the lameness that the game doesn't remove enemies from the scene when they're shot, it just puts an explosion graphic over them that in no way hides their presense. Even when compared to something like Maximum Force, which isn't nearly as good as Area 51, this game is still way behind. It's a significantly better B than the Saturn version (which is near the very bottom of B) and if you are going to play it you definitely want this version, but it's also a game you can easily skip without missing anything as it's still one of the weakest light gun games of the era.
On the other hand, Heavy Metal is effectively identical to the Saturn version. As before, this is an okay Run and Gun game with the most notable mechanic being that you can fly. The flight is actually pretty fun and does a decent job changing up the way you approach certain situations, the only real problem is the flight meter is very limited and comes back too slow, the game would be much more fun if you could use it more often. I also feel like boss battles are generally kind of bad, partially due to this, your grounded movement (which you're forced to use most of the time) just isn't fast enough for you to reasonably avoid most attacks, especially as many bosses are very fast, so you kinda just dodge occasionally and spam a ton of shots and hope you outlast them, which isn't that hard if you have full health but it feels somewhat lame. Oh, I also have to knock on the game for having its music not loop properly, it just fades out and comes back, even though the music is not particularly good and probably could have been done with midi. In any case, this is an all right game that doesn't really have too many major faults, it just doesn't do anything that great either.
DeleteMawatte Mucho is an interesting game. In a certain sense, it kind of reminds me of Live Wire, it's played on a random grid of tiles that you wander around in search of various treasures, but it's way better in every possible way. The basic gist of the game is that you are trying to find the blue chests on each stage. Navigating through the map is a bit of a challenge because it resembles a maze, with each tile only letting you exit from certain directions, but you can press a button to rotate the tile you're standing on and the adjacent tiles to potentially create a way through. There are also enemies on the map who can also rotate the tiles and attack you, sending you flying backwards (though you can sometimes use their to your advantage), and you can do the same to them. Besides the blue chests, there are also red chests which are optional but contain powerups, such as the jump, which allows you to jump from one square to another even if there isn't a path, which is quite satisfying when you can just it to do a big skip. On some stages, there will only be 2 blue chests on the map, with the third lying through a portal that you need to take to another area after getting the first two. Every fourth stage is a boss, where there are no blue chests but instead a giant enemy you must defeat by hitting it multiple times, sometimes these bosses have the ability to mess with the tiles in various ways in addition to potentially attacking you. There are 5 different characters with different abilities, though the guy with the guitar is by far the best since he has a fast ranged attack (he probably should have had less health to make up for it). There's also a VS mode which is a race between two players to turn all of the chests to their own colour, though IMO this mode is not that great and the single player mode is the main appeal. Between the 5 characters and the randomized stages, single player actually stays fun for a decently long time. There's not too much to say other than that this is a pretty unique and fun game.
Rouding out our collection of ports, the PS1 verison of Riven is a downgrade compared to the Saturn version. As with the Saturn version, this is basically Myst 1.5, or even Myst 1.1, as no technical improvements whatsoever have been made from the first game despite the significant time gap. This is quite bad, as the selling point of the original was 100% its visuals, and in the meantime many games that took inspiration from the original game have refined the formula, such as by adding the ability to pan around the scene or adding FMV cutscenes from moving from one location to another, none of which you'll find here. As with the first game, the story and puzzles in this game are largely nonsense, and the new environment of Riven is much less visually interesting compared to the areas in the first game. Compared to the Saturn version, the PS1 version runs worse, featuring longer load times when moving between areas, as well as lacking the cutscene skip feature from the Saturn version, which is quite a big deal as many of the cutscenes in this game are quite long. There's not really too much to say about it, if you want to play this game you want to be playing the Saturn version, but if you want to play a game of this type that's actually decent you'd be much better served by something like Juggernaut or Neverhood no Nazo.
DeleteToys Dream is not at all what I expected, but it's an interesting game nonetheless. The title makes it sound like some sort of Toy Shop Tycoon, but it's not that at all, instead it's basically a more complex Atelier with no combat. The premise is that four kids inherit a factory during the industrial revolution after its owner and their former mentor passes away. Unfortunately, they are also saddled with tremendous debt, so to try to keep the factory running they resolve to take various odd jobs and learn more about manufacturing to pay off the debts. Like in Atelier Marie, you have 5 years of game time to raise a very significant amount of money, and you're given pretty much total freedom on how to go about it. Each day, you can assign a task to each of the four kids, and managing their time effectively is crucial. Early on, the first things you'll want to do are explore the map a little, visit places like the scrapyard and forest to gather materials, and visit the town to take on requests to earn money. As you gain new materials, you learn various things you can make with them, for example upon getting iron you can make simple things like screws, iron plates, and wire, which can be built into more complex machines later. Each character specializes in creating different things, so for example one thing you'll need to do early on is have Mio get some paper and pencils and start creating blueprints for new factory equipment, which increases the number of things you can build once they're created and installed. Travelling from place to place is initially quite slow, taking one day to move a single space, and the map is quite huge, but you can eventually create vehicles that both let you carry more and move faster to increase your efficiency. Besides requests, selling things to shops (each shop only buys specific things, though, so you'll have to take the items to the correct place) and working part time jobs are also ways to earn money. Story sequences periodically occur as you learn new recipes or pay off the debt. It's a fairly expansive game, and it's actually not that hard to play in Japanese once you get the hang of it as the UI is pretty solid (it's certainly much better than Atelier Marie on PSX / Saturn in that regard). A good example of this is how the game will highlight recipes that you've never crafted before, because you get a stat boost the first time you successfully make any new item. Overall, it's definitely a pretty solid game if you enjoyed the early Atelier titles.