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Last Topic's Ratings:
4-in-1 Volume 1 - GG - 100% (2)
Elevator Action - GGGGAA - 83% (6)
Gem Gem - GBG - 67% (3)
Serpent - BBGG - 50% (4)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan - AAGAABBA - 44% (8) (1 SR)
Wave Race - AABAA - 40% (5)
I definitely did not expect the first Sachen game to get a 100% score. I can't wait to see what happens with the others.
Games for this topic:
F-1 Race
Hal Wrestling
Lazlos' Leap
Nemesis
Ultima: Runes of Virtue
World Beach Volley
In stark contrast to the PS1 topic we have absolutely nothing holiday-themed for Game Boy this year. Well, maybe World Beach Volley could be holiday-themed for the southern hemisphere. Oh well, there's always next year, these topics will be going on for a long time. Happy Holidays from GAB About Games.
F-1 Race - B
ReplyDeleteHal Wrestling - B
Lazlos' Leap - G
Nemesis - G
Ultima: Runes of Virtue - B
World Beach Volley - G
When we covered Sunsoft Grand Prix, I noted that it probably would have been better if it played like Pole Position, well, now we have a game that plays like that in F-1 Grand Prix, though I don't think it's actually that much better. F-1 Grand Prix is a game that can be summed up in 5 seconds, it's a pole-position style game where you can press up to use turbo. That's really about it, the game solely consists of trying to overtake all the rivals before the end of the race, which is actually quite tough as the lead car starts with a huge advantage, in fact I think the fact that it's slightly too hard is one of its biggest issues (though this was probably to make up for the fact that the game has very little content). I do appreciate that they put a different music track for each course, though the engine sounds cover up the music for most of the game, and the game also flickers quite a bit when there are other cars onscreen, which when combined with the not particularly great course graphics can actually be fairly hard on the eyes. There's really just not much else to say about it other than this, there's really just not a lot here. You can choose between two very marginally different cars but it barely matters which one you pick, you're going to have to drive near perfectly to win either way. The game does save your progress through the grand prix, which is nice I guess, and races aren't overly long, but it doesn't really help the core issue that the game isn't particularly fun. About the only good thing you can say about it is that it came out early, but even if I had owned it when it was new I doubt I would have spent much time with it, there were simply way better things to play on the system at the time and racing games on the platform will get much better.
Speaking of games that are far too basic we have HAL Wrestling. Apparently this game was made by the same developer as Firepro Wrestling and some people kind of like it, but it's completely beyond me to see why. Like almost all old wrestling games, this is a pure button masher, grapples happen constantly and the winner of each grapple is solely determined by mash, which means mashing is like 99% of the game. There are basic attacks but they don't really do anything, you can never knock a wrestler down by strikes and every time you hit one you will immediately just be hit by one in return so there's no point using them. There are also running moves but they virtually never come out for some reason (run is also mapped to start, which is an atrocious choice). The wrestlers are all largely the same, they have different strikes, but strikes are useless, the only important thing is if they have a special pin mapped to one of their directional slams, but most wrestlers do. Wrestlers are also vastly too tanky and spend almost no time on the mat even when the match has been going on for a while, which is why the special pin is so important as there's almost never time to get a regular pin off. I guess the visuals are kind of decent, but for a game where the fundamentals are as poor as they are here it doesn't hold much weight.
You know we're in trouble when we need the horrible peg-board game to save the topic, but Lazlos's Leap is actually up to the task. I've long derided the peg board game, especially because there's one of the Professor Layton games that has way too many of these puzzles (I'm pretty sure it was called Professor Layton and the Cursed Pegs). The basics are simple and you've probably played this game in a restaurant while waiting for your food. There's an initial arrangement of pegs on the board and you have to figure out how to jump over the pegs (removing the jumped peg each time) so that there's only one peg left and it's in the middle of the board. It's a very simple concept that will slowly drive you totally insane. I do appreciate that the presentation here is pretty good, music and sound effects are solid, and there's also a nice quick restart and undo feature that makes it fairly convenient to play, and it even saves your progress. There's 100 different levels with different initial layouts for the pegs that you'll have to solve. It is admittedly pretty satisfying when the solution starts to come into view and you make the last sequence of moves that solves a puzzle, it almost makes up for the 20 previous tries where you would keep getting stuck in the same place every time (the key is usually to start with a move that you think is bad). This is undeniably actually a pretty good game, particularly for a portable, even though I've already done enough of these puzzles for one lifetime I still ended up playing it quite a bit for the review. It's very frustraddictive, in the way that good puzzle games often are. This is the kind of game you want to play with a sibling on a long car trip so you can pass them the game every time you get totally stuck and tent your fingers evilly while they suffer (or instantly solve it and make you look like an idiot).
DeleteDo you like Gradius 1? Do you wish it ran at 20fps? Well, then Nemesis is the game for you! All joking aside, Nemesis is pretty decent. Somewhat slow speed aside, this is a very solid conversion of Gradius to Game Boy. Although the first level is ripped straight from the NES game, it starts to become more unique after the first stage. I feel like levels go on a little long, but the boss fights are pretty solid. The classic Gradius gameplay is fully intact, which gives it a pretty substantial leg up over most of its competitors, and I actually kind of like the somewhat decreased enemy and bullet counts, it makes some parts of the game, like the volcano boss at the end of the first stage feel much more reasonable. About the only criticism you might have is that it's fairly short and doesn't really have a lot of replay value, but it's a decent time while it lasts.
Ultima: Runes of Virtue is a weird game. For starters, it has little to do with Ultima beyond the story. You don't play as the Avatar, but instead one of his various allies, and you have to traverse dungeons to find the virtues in action-adventure style. The game sort of superficially looks like Zelda, but it's tile-based. Combat is still action-oriented, but it's super basic due to the lack of freedom of movement, it never gets any more complex than "lure enemy to take a shot so you can hit them since they can only have one projectile on screen". The dungeons are full of puzzles, few of which are particularly clever, but it at least keeps things varied I suppose. Still, the game is frequently dull, the dungeons are big but the lack of any kind of compelling action leads to it all sort of becoming mind-numbing after a while. It's not difficult to make progress, I was able to complete the first few dungeons without touching a guide, but it's never really particularly fun. I could see the argument for A in that it is still mostly functional, but I just don't think the gameplay is quite good enough for it. Certainly, this is nowhere near as good as Link's Awakening or Rolan's Curse.
DeleteWorld Beach Volley is actually pretty solid. Volleyball is a hard sport to get right, due to its simplicity. Since pretty much the entire game resolves around the spike / return / block loop, pretty much all of those mechanics need to be very precisely balanced or the game has no depth. There's not much to say here other than that this game gets everything right. Spikes are just fast enough not to be trivial to return, but also not impossible to return without luck, and blocks are pretty good, but they can be foiled by the tap spike, which is otherwise fairly trivial to return. I'd also like to note that this game controls really well, hitting and returning is very responsive and I like that block is a one button action. About the only lame thing is that the players don't all have unique sprites, but otherwise it's also a fairly nice-looking game. You can also do co-op vs the ai with a link cable, which is a nice touch. Definitely one of the better volleyball games we've come across.