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Last Topic's Ratings:
Brian Lara Cricket - AGA - 67% (3)
Choro Q Marine - GG - 100% (2)
Momotarou Dentetsu 7 - AA - 50% (2)
Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus - AAGGGGAAGGG - 81% (11) (2 SR)
Starborders - BB - 0% (2)
Visiteurs, Les: La Relique de Sainte Rolande - BBB - 0% (3)
I was quite impressed with Oddworld pulling down 11 ratings. I never think of the Oddworld franchise as one of the most recognizable on PS1, but I guess it actually is.
Games for this topic:
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2
F1 World Grand Prix
Game no Tetsujin: The Shanghai
Nagano Winter Olympics 98
Ningyo no Rakuin
Strider 2
Ha ha! For once we have a very timely game to be rated here. If we didn't do Winter Olympics 98 now we probably would have had to wait another 4 years, so I'm glad we didn't miss it. Speaking of not missing things, I recently went through the list of PS1 RPGs and added a few more that weren't originally part of the list but I think are now feasible due to improvements in translation technology, Ningyo no Rakuin is one of them. And of course, we finally have Strider 2, which we are rating alone, as Strider 1 was rated a long time ago.
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 - G
ReplyDeleteF1 World Grand Prix - B
Game no Tetsujin: The Shanghai - A
Nagano Winter Olympics 98 - B
Ningyo no Rakuin - A
Strider 2 - A
As I alluded to when we covered it on N64, the PS1 version of Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 is really good. In many ways, it's quite similar to the original, being a goofier (and much better) take on the Army Men franchise. Besides having tons more personality compared to the more serious games, it also boasts a far better engine that controls vastly better. I suppose you could argue that it's a fairly simple game, it has generous auto aim so strafe shooting will handle most situations, but the missions are reasonably varied and well-paced. New to this game are some missions where you control Vikki, though she's fairly similar to Sarge apart from having a different main weapon so it doesn't change the game that drastically. I suppose if you were to have one complaint it might be that the game isn't super long and may not have a ton of replay value, there is multiplayer and it runs well but it's just basic 1v1 deathmatches on a few stages that probably won't stay interesting very long, the campaign is really what you're here for. Still, even if it is a bit of a short game, it's a fun time while it lasts. This game and its predecessor are definitely some of the best third-person shooters on PS1.
F1 World Grand Prix is a game that has some promising aspects but has way too many flaws to be good. For starters, like many other F1 games of the time, it offers both an Arcade mode and a Simulation mode. The Arcade mode is basically nonsense. Going off the track has no effect at all in this mode, so the course itself is mostly just a suggestion. Despite this, it still doesn't play particularly well and you often go flying off the course at what feels like at random, which is largely because the course is very hard to read. This is one of the game's biggest flaws and I found myself constantly wishing for a track map, the problem is the game's low resolution, not great framerate, plus the low viewing angle of the camera makes it extremely hard to get a read on the track in front of you, which is really important when you're going fast. The game also has an annoying issue where sometimes when you're turing, the camera will shift to a rear view which shows you what's behind you, which is obviously completely unhelpful and will cause you to crash. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on, it turns out that this is actually activated by pressing Down on the stick. This means if you ever hit any kind of downwards diagonal when turning, you'll instantly have your camera flip and you'll wipe out. Insanely, you cannot even remap this, and this makes the game nearly unplayable. The simulation mode begins with a license test which feels completely horrible to play. Besides not properly explaining what you need to do, the controls here are impossibly oversensitive, the car will spin out constantly and you also instantly lose if you spinout or go off the track. If you beat the license test, you get access to the main simulation mode, which is the best part of the game. There are some interesting features here, like the fact that you can upgrade your car with race winnings, and the settings of the simulation engine can be customized. On the "Easy" settings, it actually controls kind of tolerably, your brake is very strong and you don't spin out nearly as much, though the issues where the course is nearly unreadable and the stupid issue with pressing down to view behind you persist. Sadly, it still doesn't play well to any degree and the license test is so obnoxious I doubt anyone will even really bother getting this far.
Game no Tetsujin: The Shanghai is identical to the Saturn version. As before, this is a three game compilation of Shanghai, a Shanghai variant called Rong Rong, and a port of the Genesis puzzle game Shikinjou. When we talked about it on Saturn, I noted that Shanghai was the obvious standout of the package, with the other two games being somewhat weaker, though after playing it a bit more I feel like I was a little too hard on Rong Rong. This game is still clearly not quite as good as Shanghai, but there's a bit more depth to it than I originally thought even if it is definitely somewhat on the easy side. The game I probably wasn't hard enough on was Shikinjou, which besides having no real place in this package also has a ton of boards that are just way too hard and can easily completely wall you out of progress in the story mode. At any rate, this is still clearly somewhat weaker of a package compared to Game no Tatsujin and Shanghai Triple Threat is a much better game. The version of Shanghai presented here is still decent (notably, it has a pretty decent number of boards), which stops it from being one of the weakest Shanghai offerings on the system, but Triple Threat is just such a good game that you really don't need much else.
DeleteNagano Winter Olympics 98 is a massive downgrade over the N64 version, which is kind of shocking considering I already didn't think the N64 version was that good. For starters, while this doesn't affect my rating much, the UI is way worse. The N64 UI has quite a bit of style, whereas the PS1 UI is vastly more basic, it's night and day between the two versions which got more effort. The PS1 version is also missing some sports, notably snowboard halfpipe is totally omitted here in favour of two more speed skating events (which are just the same thing on a smaller track) and an extra skiing course. The bigger issue is that the gameplay is drastically downgraded. The downhill events are drastically worse, they run at half the framerate AND half the speed, so the sense of speed is completely gone. It's actually kind of embarrassing how slow the snowboarding is, you might as well be walking down the hill instead. Even the courses are way worse, for example the downhill skiing course has an obnoxious angled jump at the midpoint that almost forces you to miss one of the gates unless you know exactly where it's going, no such thing is present on N64. At any rate, this is a very weak effort, with almost all of the sports having their speed totally butchered there's pretty much nothing good to say about this one. Definitely play this on N64 if you're going to.
Ningyo no Rakuin is a fairly basic SRPG with a somewhat interesting story. Gameplay-wise, it's competent but very simple. The maps are fully 3D and have height, similar to something like Final Fantasy Tactics, and you have the same kind of move and attack system that it and similar games have. Like in FFT, you cannot choose the order that your units attack in, it's based on a speed stat. MP is needed to attack, even basic physical attacks require it to use, and it does not regenerate over time, so you have to use your strong attacks somewhat carefully. You can sit still for a turn to recover either HP or MP or use items to recover it, so you can't totally screw yourself over, but running out is still pretty bad. Something to note is that the game has no customization whatsoever. Characters gain new abilities purely through levelling up, and although you can find and equip weapons and armor, they're purely for stat boosts and there's no money or anything like that. The pacing of the maps is reasonable (you won't be facing dozens of enemies on a single map, like in some games) and so is the difficulty, so there's really no problems with the gameplay, but it's probably not something that you'll be blown away by. The real reason you're here is for the story, which is fairly unique. Without spoiling too much, it's kind of a mystery horror game with our protagonists being stranded on a island full of cultists and strange rituals. There are some branching paths in the story and multiple endings, so if you're into that kind of story there's stuff to like here, though I wish the presentation was a little stronger. Compared to something like Black Matrix, which is also a very interesting game from a story perspective, the presentation is undeniably a lot more basic, and it also doesn't have the strategic depth of games like Funky Fantasy or DeviceReign. Probably the best example of a similar game might be Vandal Hearts, and while I did give that game a G, it also had the advantage of coming out 4 years earlier. This is still a decent game and might be worth looking at if a translation was released, but it wouldn't be at the top of my SRPG recommendations unless you're really into the theme.
DeleteWhen we first covered Strider 1 I debated about whether to do it separately because I don't think most people would really care about playing it on its own, but I'm kind of glad I did. Strider 2 is significantly better than the original, but it's also a very different game. For starters, unlike Strider 1, which is from 1989, Strider 2 was new when this port released. Besides looking way better, it also has vastly better control. You can now run and double jump, which expand your movement options tremendously. Wall climbing has also been greatly refined and the new wall jump feels much better to use, in general movement feels quite good in this game. However, beyond movement, there's also been big changes to the structure of the game. Rather than being a kind of standard platformer as it was before, Strider 2 now heavily resembles a boss rush game like Contra Hard Corps or Alien Soldier, is composed of many short vignettes, often taking only a minute or so, typically a few small platforming challenges and a mini-boss, or a single boss fight. Strider is generally very powerful, but you have to complete many of these sections in a row and your health does not refill (health pickups can occasionally be found but are rare), so you have to avoid damage as much as humanly possible. One thing we haven't talked about much yet is Strider's attack, which kind of sucks. Strider's main attack is his blade, which has moderate range. Strider can attack about as fast as you can press the button, allowing for completely ludicrous damage output if you mash really fast, often allowing you to take down bosses in seconds but making this easily one of the mashiest games of this generation, and this is one of the things I like the least about it, it gets quite tiring to play after only a few stages. Furthermore, this heavy focus on mash also means that you can't focus too much on actually avoiding enemy attacks, while mashing it's hard to see what the enemy is actually doing so you kind of have to memorize their patterns ahead of time to know exactly how long you can mash and when you have to dodge, which simply doesn't feel as good as most of the boss battles in the games it was based on where the combat is more heavily based on ranged attacks and thus is more reactive. In some ways, I feel like this game's structure actually acts against it, generally the platforming sections are by far the most fun, but they're quite limited and short, if this game was structured more like the original Strider it would probably be G, but strangely they chose to focus very heavily on boss battles despite most of them not being that interesting. It's still a cool game at points, but I don't like it quite as much as any of the games it's based on or some of Capcom's better action efforts like Megaman X4.
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