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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bill Elliott's NASCAR Fast Tracks - BBAAB - 20% (5)
Caesars Palace - BBAA - 25% (4)
Pachinko Time - BBB - 0% (3)
Parasol Henbee - BGG - 67% (3)
Prince of Persia - GAGAA - 70% (5)
Zoids Densetsu - BBB - 0% (3)
Our first very lowly-rated GB topic, with only Prince of Persia making it to the high range and only just barely. I didn't really expect it from this list of games, but I guess Pachinko always has a tendency to be a dead game. I remain hopeful that one day we'll all be blown away by some Pachinko game that totally rocks. Surely there has to be one, right?
Games for this topic:
Castelian
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Family Jockey
Football International
Knight Quest
Palamedes
I thought we had played Palamedes a bunch of times on different systems, but it seems like it's actually only on one other platform, the NES. It must just have a catchy name. I'm also kind of looking forward to Family Jockey. There are like a billion Japanese-exclusive Horse Racing games, but this seems like the first one that might be simple enough for us to properly cover here.
Castelian - B
ReplyDeleteGremlins 2: The New Batch - A
Family Jockey - A
Football International - B
Knight Quest - G
Palamedes - A
Castelian is terrible. Everything about this game sucks, the control is terrible (it makes the nonsensical decision to map attack and jump to the same button, you jump by trying to attack while running), but what's most atrocious is the level design. Castelian is full of obstacles and is timed, taking any hit causes you to fall a long way down the tower and potentially die, but many hits are basically unavoidable. For example, you might enter a door or ascend a ladder, only for there to be an enemy on the other side that hits you the second you come out of it. As you cannot cancel either of these actions, nor see the destination ahead of time, avoiding the hit is pure luck. There are also a ton of unmarked disappearing floors that cause you to lose a ton of progress and the only way to deal with them is to know where they are ahead of time. Add that to a game that's already super basic and doesn't play well and you have a game that no one is going to want to bother with.
Gremlins 2 is a fairly basic and sometimes cheesy 2D platformer. Visually, it looks pretty decent, everything is a nice size which makes it easy to see on GB's screen, but mechanically it's a bit of a mess. For starters, there's Gizmo's attacks, which are among the wimpiest any 2D platformer has ever seen. Gizmo cannot hop on enemies, he instead attacks with a pencil, which you have to find in every stage (thankfully it's usually near the beginning). The pencil has pathetically short range, only about half a Gizmo's length if that, and Gizmo is tiny, it's very difficult to hit anything without taking contact damage in return, particularly as using it on the ground locks you in place (jump attacks are generally the way to go against anything that moves). You can pick up a powerup for a single use projectile attack, but it replaces your primary fire and is almost always made available in situations where you have to fight the handful of enemies it's not good against, like bats. Even the invincibility powerup, a godsend when it appears, is instantly lost if you touch a spike. There are also bosses on each stage and they take a lot of hits. The first boss can kinda be stunlocked, but most other bosses have cycles during which they can only be hit once, which at least sort of removes the issue of Gizmo's lack of range. The stages also become increasingly cheap as you progress, with tons of spikes and pixel perfect jumps. On the third stage for example, there's an awful segment with a moving block and a ton of spikes where I don't think it's possible to do it without taking at least 2-3 hits. You do get infinite continues and the game isn't that long so progress is possible if you're patient, and we've definitely seen worse platformers (at least the core movement control is decent), but this one is probably towards the lower middle of the pack.
Unlike pretty much all other horse racing games out there, Family Jockey focuses on actually racing horses rather than just betting on them, which to my mind is definitely for the better because I enjoy the races much more as a participant than a spectator. The basic gist of the game is fairly simple, but there's still some nuance to it. After picking your horse, of which there are many to choose from with different stat spreads, you press A to whip the horse and B to jump as you try to reach the end of the course first. Your stamina is limited, so you can only whip so many times, which definitely adds some strategy to how much to whip and when, though a strong strategy is to try to get out in front and then block other horses from passing, because if they hit you from behind you get a boost. Certain parts of the track are muddy, which slows you down, and there's obstacles to jump over and powerups to collect on the track as well. The core gameplay is simple, but pretty satisfying, and I also enjoy the game's presentation. Pretty much my only complaint is that you earn money from racing, but the money is totally useless. I wish you could use the money to get access to better horses or something like that, which incidentally, happens to be exactly what Family Jockey 2 adds to the formula, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here. It's a decent early title, I just wish there was a bit more to it because the foundation is solid.
DeleteFootball International is a game that initially seems kinda tolerable but it's brought down by a bunch of different issues. By far the biggest one is that the passing is pretty bad. Unlike most soccer games where passes somewhat aim towards your players, here they're limited solely to the cardinal directions. This is not a death sentence on its own, you can work around it by lining up your player with the person you want to pass to, the problem is that the passes actually don't reliably travel in the direction you aim them. It seems like the ball has some "momentum", for example if I'm running up, then release up and hold left, my pass often goes somewhat up and left when I want it to just go straight left. This makes passing feel incredibly unreliable and makes one-timers effectively impossible. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the game often has trouble figuring out which player you want to switch to when you press the change player button, making it much harder to chase down passes that went awry. The cross sucks too, it's mapped to the same button as shoot and is simply done when you shoot from far away, but when the ball goes high the game zooms out too far, making it impossible to line up any kind of kick, and the ball spends far too long in the air which gives the defenders much too easy of a time to hit it away. So the only form of reliable offense is simply running it down the field, though this actually works perfectly well since the defenders are pretty slow, and the goalies are bad enough you can just kick diagonally to get it past them. This does result in completely nuance-free offense, however, where things like corners don't matter at all. Defense is also largely irrelevant, since you can opt to control your own goalie, and this is VASTLY too powerful. The goalie is super fast and can basically just zoom all over the place, easily blocking any of the slow kicks from the opponent, I never got scored on once despite giving up numerous good scoring chances. Overall, it just results in a game that doesn't really have any depth. If you compare something like Play Action Football, which was very graphically simple but actually had a lot of depth and strategy to it, there's just not much reason to bother with this one.
Knight Quest is a very simple and straightforward RPG. In many ways it resembles Dragon Quest 1, fights are all 1 on 1, there's very minimal plot, you spend a fair amount of time grinding to buy weapons and armor, and it has the same "attack magic item" setup that you'd expect from most basic RPGs. However, Dragon Quest 1 is still a fun game because its fundamentals are solid and that is also the case here. This game's standout feature are its battle animations, which are very detailed for their time. When attacking, you can choose one of four different attacks, which have differing levels of effectiveness for each enemy. Battles are shown from a side view perspective and each type of attack (plus the enemy's attack) is quite well-animated, especially for a game of this age. Which attacks work well against the enemy also kind of makes some sense, for example against a shield-carrying goblin, the attack that hits from above is good because it guards the front, whereas vs a giant eyeball a frontal stab is the most effective and the overhead attack does basically nothing. As noted, the plot to this game is almost nonexistent, but the world map is decently large, and enemies are visible on the map, so you can often avoid them to conserve hp for long trips. The game's biggest flaw is its speed. There's an option to make the battle animations play at double speed which is basically essential, but battles still take a little long and there are a lot of them, though this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that with an appropriate level of power enemies should fall in no more than 3 hits, so it's not too bad and for its time I don't think it would have been considered too much of a problem, it's just that in the modern world we're used to very fast battles. It's also not a particularly difficult game, it's definitely kind of a beginner RPG, but I think this would have been a pretty solid title for GB's early days and unlike most of the other RPGs we've looked at so far it doesn't really have any major faults or issues holding it back.
DeleteFor some reason I always think we've played Palamedes a ton of times, even though we've only actually covered it once on NES a long time ago. In any case, the gist of the game is that dice come down from the top in lines, and you match them by throwing dice from the bottom. You press the A button to cycle your die, and each one matches only the corresponding one at the top (ie, throwing a 2 matches 2s). The nuance to the game comes from the fact that the last 6 dice you have matched are stored at the bottom. If you make certain combinations (generally either many of the same die, or a sequence of 1 to 6 in order), you can use them to clear out a bunch of lines. There is also a VS mode and these sequences become attacks in that mode. It's a fairly simple game and I don't find it enormously engaging, and it doesn't help that the sound is kind of tinny and annoying, but it is at least fairly well adapted to GB (it actually makes pretty solid use of colour and the dice blocks are decently readable on GB's screen) so this is probably the best way to play it if you're planning to.