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Last Topic's Ratings:
BattleSport - GA - 75% (2)
Megatudo 2096 - BB - 0% (2)
Noon - BB - 0% (2)
ParanoiaScape - AAAA - 50% (4)
Running Wild - AGGGA - 80% (5)
TearRing Saga - GAG - 83% (3)
It's always nice to have one of those topics where the game I'm looking forward to playing doesn't turn out to be awful.
Games for this topic:
Galerians
Grinch, The
International Moto X
Pikinya Excellent
Pu-Li-Ru-La
Trick'N Snowboarder
It's the most holiday-themed topic of all time! Not only do we have everyone's favourite Christmas-hating grouch, we also have cute penguins and a snowboarding game. Heck, even Pu-Li-Ru-La is kind of Christmas-adjacent... I think. It's kind of hard to tell. I'm actually kind of looking forward to playing The Grinch, I've always been a huge fan of the original animated version. Happy Holidays to all from GAB About Games.
Galerians - A
ReplyDeleteGrinch, The - G
International Moto X - A
Pikinya Excellent - G
Pu-Li-Ru-La - B
Trick'N Snowboarder - B
Galerians is another one of those games that attempts to ape Resident Evil without really understanding it. The gist of the game is that it's a thriller of sorts starring a young boy with psychic powers. You wake up in a hospital after undergoing a mysterious operation (a good setup, I mentioned when we covered Parasite Eve that hospitals are great horror settings) and have to kill your way out to undercover a crazy conspiracy. The plot and setting are actually kind of cool and the presentation is solid all around, no complaints there. Gameplay-wise the game is reasonably similar to Resident Evil but not nearly as good. Controls are largely fine, it's classic tank controls but movement feels decent and so does running, they at least nailed this part. Something that's really annoying is that camera transitions incur very short load time. It's quite fast, but in Rez Evil it's instant, and having the game just randomly freeze up in the middle of combat gets annoying fast. Speaking of combat, it's not great. Rion's offense kinda sucks, he has to charge his attacks for them to do anything and ammo is really limited. You are also somewhat penalized for engaging in combat at all, you have an AP meter which gradually fills up, and when it's full, your next attack causes you to enter an overload state where you instantly kill nearby enemies but take constant damage. To cure this, you need to use a specific item, and if you don't have any you're doomed. AP also gradually builds up as you explore each level, effectively putting the game on a time limit, which is really lame and would be a huge problem if the game wasn't also quite linear. However, none of this really matters that much because enemies in this game are almost totally ineffectual. Unlike the zombies in Rez Evil who will grab you the second you come within arm's length, the enemies in Galerians typically have to try to punch or smack Rion, which is much slower and accompanied by a fairly small hitbox, making running past enemies almost trivial. Rooms also tend to be large and Rion picks up items instantly (no slow Rez Evil crouch here), so it's quite easy to loot rooms and solve puzzles while running in a circle to avoid the enemies, I solved a puzzle where you had to reprogram a keycard and also picked up two items in a room where I was being chased by 3 enemies and it wasn't even a struggle. About the only enemies that are dangerous are the ones with guns, which often force you to take a hit because you have no real ranged attacks, but they don't do a lot of damage and healing items are abundant so getting shot once and then running past is still usually the optimal strategy. This kind of defeats the entire "survival" aspect of the game, as Resident Evil is really a game about item management. Here, you'll avoid most encounters so your inventory will usually be full of items you don't really need, not helped by the fact that there's no item box or anything like that to store items that might allow you to engage in combat a little more often. It's still kind of worth looking into for the story, but the main thing this game gives me is an appreciation for just how completely Capcom nailed it the first time with RE1.
The Grinch is a vastly bigger and more impressive game than I expected. Once you get over the initial shock of it being based on the Jim Carrey version you'll find an extremely feature-rich 3D platformer with a ton of variety. The game is not directly based on the original book, instead it's kind of a precursor to it where the Grinch goes on a pre-Christmas rampage to cause as much trouble for the Whos as possible. The game is divided up into 4 big levels and on each level you're given a number of different tasks for the sake of ruining the holidays. Some of these are relatively straightforward, like breaking snowmen with a ground pound, but many require the use of the Grinch's other abilities, of which there are many. The Grinch can acquire and use disguises to blend in with the locals, and he can also switch places with Max at any time, which is sometimes necessary to solve certain puzzles. There are also many gadgets you can obtain, which requires you to find blueprints scattered across the level, these become permanent additions to the Grinch's arsenal once acquired. The first one you'll get is the Rotten Egg Launcher, which allows you to fire eggs at people and break certain things, which is also essential for some missions (like one to fire eggs into people's windows). As some of the later gadgets are sometimes required in earlier levels, there will definitely be some backtracking involved, especially if you want to try to destroy every present in the game for 100%, of which there's a ridiculous 3000 (thankfully some are worth 3, 5, or 10, but there's still a boatload of them). When it comes to the gameplay, the game generally controls fairly well, but there are a few issues, most particularly the pole swinging, which is terrible in pretty much every game but feels especially problematic here. There's a pole swing that's required to get the last part of the blueprint for the egg launcher that I had to attempt like 40 times, I actually had to consult a guide to confirm it was even possible because the jump is so precise I wondered if I had to come back with another ability. Butt stomping things is also sometimes a bit finicky, but thankfully the game is fairly easy so these issues aren't much more than a mild annoyance. The game's presentation is also very solid. There's a ton of voice acting and the visuals are pretty good, and the game also runs quite well for a game of this type on PS1, nothing has been cut from the Dreamcast or PC versions of the game, only the resolution is a bit lower. There's also a decent amount of charm here, the Grinch's over-the-top evilness is kind of darkly hilarious, and I love the idea that the Whos fight back against the Grinch by giving him hugs. Overall, it's certainly a game that achieves what it sets out to do, and it gives me a lot more than I ever expected from a game based on the Grinch.
DeleteWe've seen many examples of taking a good engine and wasting it by surrounding it with lousy game mechanics, but International Moto X is probably one of the first examples of the reverse, where you take a mediocre engine and squeeze a lot out of it through smart design and mechanics. International Moto X is a fairly basic motocross racing game with a primitive 3D engine. Right off the bat, this game certainly does not look great. Riders are very low poly, texture work is super simple, and the draw distance is quite short. It does at least run very well, pushing 8 riders with no slowdown, but it's not winning any awards in the graphics department. The game certainly at least initially also feels slow, the control is kind of slippery, and collisions between bikes suck. However, the game has a money system and you can buy upgrades for your bike, which goes a long way to making any racing game more playable, and it does good work here as well, giving the game a much better sense of progression as you work through the cups. Unlike many other games, there's also vehicle damage here, being too hard on the bike will damage your upgrades and make it perform worse, forcing you to spend some or all of your prize money repairing the bike, so there's some value in driving sensibly. The game features a pretty decent number of tracks and even a pretty fully featured track editor, and despite the simplistic presentation it does feel like it generally nails the verticality of the sport well. There are undeniably some problems, the short draw distance sometimes makes turns hard to read and the game has an inescapable feeling of being made on the cheap, but it's still decently playable and kind of fun at times. It's still probably one of PS1's better entries in the genre.
DeleteI can't believe it's been almost 10 years since we first covered Pikinya on SNES. Since it's been so long, I guess I'd better go over the basics again. Pikinya is a weird fusion between Tetris and Puyo Puyo. There are 3 types of blocks, which drop in a 2x2 square: Penguins, Ice Blocks, and Frozen Penguins. Ice blocks have to be cleared by making a line, like in Tetris. Penguins have to be cleared by touching 6 or more, like Puyo. Frozen Penguins are Ice Blocks with Penguins inside, you have to clear them like Ice Blocks but they leave a Penguin behind. It sounds simple, but it's actually maddeningly complex. It's very important to keep your board level, since if one column gets really high it's hard to fix, especially columns 2 and 5 since the only way to drop pieces into columns 1 and 6 is to also put pieces into those columns. A simple strategy to mitigate this is "ice blocks to the sides", where you try to put ice blocks on the side columns and keep penguins to the middle, since Penguins are more easily cleared and thus this keeps column 2 and 5 from getting too high, but frozen penguins and enemy attacks can easily mess up this strategy. Trying to dig yourself out of trouble while also not completely wrecking your board in the process is extremely tough, but very satisfying if you pull it off. I feel like this game actually feels almost totally different from all other falling block games, whereas something like Taisen Puzzle Dama is clearly a Puyo variant, the skill needed to play this game well is so different from most other games I feel like my skills don't carry over, though I've often said that the mark of a good puzzle game is that it challenges you to think differently. Compared to the SNES version, it's actually fairly similar aside from a graphical facelift, the most significant difference is the addition of VS Stage Clear and Race modes (in addition to the regular vs mode), and the ability to use the characters from story mode in the VS mode, but otherwise they're quite comparable. Still, the game's cuteness does come out better here and I like the added animations for the vs battles. A very fun game in any case, even if it's challenging to get good at it.
Pu-Li-Ru-La is just as bad as it is on Saturn, which is not surprising as both ports seem pretty arcade perfect. As before, this is an extremely weird game, which isn't limited to just its visuals but its gameplay also feels bizarre and nonsensical as well, with oddly slow attacks and consistently poor hit detection. When compared to something like ParanoiaScape, which is also certainly very weird, this game is obviously way worse, as it really has nothing going on for it beyond its strangeness and its appeal wears thin very fast due to its terrible mechanics. Probably one of the worst beat-em-ups of the era.
DeleteTrick'N Snowboarder is a hard game to rate. First of all, it's important to note that this is a sequel to Steep Slope Sliders on Saturn, and it uses the exact same engine. Despite having some upgrades, I feel it generally feels significantly worse to play compared to that game. Steep Slope Sliders' biggest issue was a lack of content, which they've attempted to remediate here with a story mode, but it's extremely weird and kinda bad. The way story mode works is each course will have four specific points where they want you to do a trick, possibly with certain requirements like including a flip or something, but most of the time the requirement is just to get at least 100 points, which basically any trick will accomplish. The rest of the course literally doesn't matter at all, which is lame. Occasionally you get to do slopestyle events where your time and score across the entire course both matter, these are good, but too infrequent, the entire game should have played like this. There's basically nothing else to the game beyond a free mode which has nothing to unlock, there's no traditional tour mode or anything. There also aren't particularly many stages either, so it has the same issue as Steep Slope Sliders that way. The thing is, SSS's gameplay was at least kinda okay, whereas here it generally feels pretty bad, which I think is down to course design. The courses in SSS were generally fairly open and had a lot of trick opportunities, which played to the game's strength - its trick system. The courses in this game are generally more narrow and have fewer opportunities to do tricks, which puts more strain on the game's biggest weakness - its handling system. The game lacks a proper carve button (you can use the spin buttons but they don't work all that well) and this makes racing style sections generally feel very bad, and if you ever bump a wall it takes forever to get back up to speed and you can even kinda get stuck. The game also obviously faces much stiffer competition on PS1 as PS1 has a fair number of good snowboarding games whereas Saturn basically had none, causing this one to come out near the bottom of the pack, even if you can play as a couple characters from Rez Evil.