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Last Topic's Ratings:
Castelian - BBB - 0% (3)
Gremlins 2: The New Batch - GAAA - 63% (4)
Family Jockey - BAB - 17% (3)
Football International - ABB - 17% (3)
Knight Quest - AGAAG - 70% (5)
Palamedes - BAB - 17% (3)
Hard to say much good about this batch, though at least with 3 games getting the same score it was easy to tally up.
Games for this topic:
Adventures of Star Saver, The
Crystal Quest
Jordan vs Bird
Kininkou Maroku Oni
Turn and Burn
Yoshi
We previously covered NBA All-Star Challenge, which includes a mode that plays like Jordan vs Bird, so here we have the real thing. There's also a fan-translation available for Kininkou Maroku Oni, and I think it looks like an interesting series.
Adventures of Star Saver, The - B
ReplyDeleteCrystal Quest - G (SR)
Jordan vs Bird - A
Kininkou Maroku Oni - A
Turn and Burn - B
Yoshi - B
The Adventures of Star Saver is a really basic platformer that runs completely atrociously. I'm not sure why exactly, nothing about this game is pushing the hardware, it doesn't have too many enemies, everything in the game takes up only a single block, and it has no fancy visual effects or anything, but this game has extreme slowdown pretty much any time anything is going on on the screen, and it also has some issues with screen tearing as well that really make it look quite bad a lot of the time. The basic gameplay is nothing to write home about, it's a basic sidescroller where you control a mech and can shoot bullets. If you get hit, you get put into a depowered state for a while, which requires you to find a P block to get the mech back. There are a lot of hidden invincibility powerups that you can find by spamming regular shots, obtaining these allows you to run through most of the game while ignoring most of the enemies. There are also bosses but they're very basic. There's not really much more to say about it than that, this is easily the weakest platformer we've encountered so far IMO. If it ran properly it might be A, but there's nothing special about it in any capacity.
Crystal Quest is right up there with Lazlos's Leap in terms of its frustraddiction factor. This is sort of an arcade style game where the goal on each stage is to collect all the crystals and then get out before being blown up. This very quickly becomes quite taxing as there are zillions of enemies spawning constantly and mines all over the place, all of which kill you in one hit. Early on, you get lives like candy, often getting 2 or more on every stage, and the super powerful bombs (which wipe the entire screen) are very common too, but as you get farther lives become few and far between and the enemies and mines continue to get more relentless. A particularly cheeky mechanic that I like / hate is that after level 30 or so the exit starts moving, and you die if you hit the wall without hitting the exit properly. It's incredibly satisfying to solve later levels without taking a death (largely because it's rare), but even when you're getting hit by cheap shot after cheap shot it remains fun due to its fast pace and good controls. You will probably run out of lives in like 20 or so minutes unless you're extremely good at the game, which is also about the length of time you'd want a game like this to last, as it makes it a very good "pick up and play" style game. I actually think this may low-key be one of the best of all the classic arcade-style games, due to its fast pace and great variety (there's at least a dozen or so different enemy types, even if you will just be bombing most of them the second you see them). A surprisingly strong title.
After playing a knockoff of it in NBA All-Star Challenge, we have the original Jordan Vs Bird here. Despite being very basic, this is at least somewhat of a good game. The back and forth of clearing the ball and trying to find a good opening to take a shot has some appeal, and getting a successful block or rebound is always satisfying. I like the fact that Jordan and Bird aren't the same, the asymmetrical nature of the game is key to its appeal and feels kind of ahead of its time in some ways. That said, it's undeniably pretty repetitive and it's not likely to stay interesting for more than around 15 minutes at a time, thankfully the option to play to 15 points is available and it's probably about as long as it will stay fun. Still, it's a reasonable fit for Gameboy, it translates just fine to the platform and its short longevity is less of an issue here. Still not something I'd have been running out to buy but if you were a hardcore basketball fan this was probably your best option for a while.
DeleteKininkou Maroku Oni is another fairly simple RPG that has some similarities to Knight Quest from the previous topic. Like Knight Quest this is another purely single-character RPG with a side view battle screen, though it trades the different attacks and smoother animations of Knight Quest for a more traditional magic system. Like in most games, you have MP and a variety of supportive and offensive spells to use it on, which causes the game to play very much like Dragon Quest, at least early on. Once you get far enough you gain the ability to transform into the titular Oni, which changes out your stats quite a bit, making you weaker but much tankier in exchange for not being able to use spells (though you eventually get some Oni specific skills that use a separate resource). You can transform at any time and even transforming on the overworld has certain effects. The game is generally very straightforward, the progression is incredibly linear, dungeon maps are labyrinthine but contain no treasure, there's a ton of random battles, you have to grind a fair bit, and most other stuff you'd expect from an old school RPG. The story is nothing to write home about, but at least it's generally fairly clear about what you need to do next. One thing that's kind of lame is that enemies can deal critical hits, which when combined with the fact that they generally hit hard can cause you to game over almost immediately when they occur. Luckily retries are fast (you get zipped instantly back to the last time you saved), but it can be an annoyance if it happens in dungeons. Still, the game isn't THAT hard and you'll probably be able to make fairly fast progress, especially if you use a map of the dungeons. There's nothing that's really especially incredible about it and I do think Knight Quest is better in most ways, but it's tolerable and doesn't have too many problems.
Turn and Burn sucks. This is just a classic case of trying to do too much with too little. This game bills itself as a dogfighting simulator, but realistically you do almost no dogfighting, it's really a "plane finding simulator", where you have to constantly press start to see the map to try to figure out where the enemies are, then guess what elevation they're at, then continuously circle until you find them and fire one missile and instantly delete them. I have no clue if they ever fire back, certainly the ones I fought never did, the only real threat is running out of fuel or dying or boredom. The lack of anything resembling a functional radar is a huge problem, as is the fact that the sky is only made of two colours, white for the sky and gray for the water, so when you're climbing you literally only see white. Should you ever manage to hit the target, you then have to try to land, which is probably the best part of the game because at least this makes sense, you have to adjust your throttle to control your altitude as you come in on the carrier, though even then this is still annoying, it's just not quite as bad as the rest of the package. This game would have been drastically improved by axing the altitude portion of the game entirely so you could at least find the enemies, though even then I still doubt it would be fun.
DeleteYoshi is kind of cute and I like the music but ultimately it's a very dull puzzle game without much going for it. It's an extremely simple falling block game where Mario monsters like Goombas and Boos fall from above. If they land on a matching monster, they clear. You also sometimes get top and bottom eggshells. If you place a bottom eggshell, you can then stack a bunch of monsters on top of it and drop a top eggshell on top of it to wipe them all out. That's the entire game. There's basically zero strategy to it, other than "place eggshells, build them up semi-high while making matches to keep the stack from getting too big while you wait for top eggshells". Even the line clear mode (mode B) has no real depth because you're just waiting for the right sequence of pieces to clear each stage (and the Yoshi Eggs are mostly worthless here). It is definitely still playable, but very mind-numbing, and on a system with a zillion good puzzle games this stands out as being one of the weaker ones, to the extent that even its decent presentation can't really save it.