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Last Topic's Ratings:
Air Race Championship - GGAB - 63% {4}
Lucky Luke: Western Fever - BGAGB - 50% {5}
Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter - GGAGAGG - 86% (7)
Neorude 2 - BB - 0% (2)
Wolf Fang: Kuhga 2001 - GGG - 100% (3)
Yetisports World Tour - BAB - 17% (3)
Two squiggle bracket games last week. I feel like these are becoming more common. Maybe it's because we're getting slightly more overall votes? I hope so.
Games for this topic:
End Sector
Killing Zone
Magical Drop 3
Porsche Challenge
Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001
Slamscape
I recently played through Magical Drop 6, so I'm well warmed up for Magical Drop 3. Also, just in case you're confused, this Porsche game is not the similarly named game in the NFS series (NFS: Porsche Unleashed), it's a totally separate title. End Sector seems like a pretty complex game, but someone has put up a pretty detailed guide to it on its message board.
End Sector - G (SR)
ReplyDeleteKilling Zone - B
Magical Drop 3 - A
Porsche Challenge - A
Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001 - G
Slamscape - B
End Sector is an absolutely fascinating game, but it's also incredibly complicated. The basic gist of the game is that it's a card battle RPG, but it has a REAL TIME BATTLE SYSTEM. As usual, we'll start with a classic round of "Tero explains the game", but this game is so complex that I won't even be able to come close to fully explaining it. The basics of the cards will be familiar enough to anyone who has played CCGs before. There are monster cards, spell cards, and item cards that you can play. Monster cards let you summon a monster to the field. Spell cards let you activate an effect of some sort. Item cards let you equip an item to a monster. That's all straightforward enough. The big complication comes from the fact that everything in this game happens in real time. Taking any action, even playing cards, requires you to charge up first, then the action goes off, then there's a cooldown before you can act again. Monsters also have their own turn bars and also have to charge up to use their attacks and have cooldown afterwards. The length of time for your chargeup and cooldown also depends on the card (or the monster, for monster attacks). To win a battle, you have to reduce the enemy summoner's health to zero, but they can place their monsters on a grid in a way that can block your attacks from hitting the summoner directly without taking out the monsters first. Summoning cards requires mana, which also accumulates over time, but you can discard cards to get mana fast. If you're not actively doing anything, your defense is boosted, but if you get hit while charging an attack, you take extra damage. Besides attacking and defending, every monster also has an ability they can use, which is sort of like a magic card they can use whenever they want, but these often take a long time to charge. It probably sounds like there's a ton of menuing to do in this game that has to be done really fast, and this is true, but thankfully you can input new commands while your bar is cooling down or during animations (which freeze time briefly). When it comes to monsters and spells, there's an elemental cycle where certain elements beat other elements, and certain monsters may fly or walk and have long range or short range attacks, which interact with each other in different ways. There's also a bunch of status effects and buffs, which are frequently inflicted by spell cards and can sometimes cancel your actions entirely. Oh, and of course, it's also an RPG, after every battle both you and any monster cards gain experience and they can level up, becoming stronger and possibly even changing forms. This explanation covers maybe a quarter of everything that's going on in this game. (cont'd)
(End Sector continues)
DeleteDespite that, it actually doesn't feel unapproachable, thanks in part to an extremely well-integrated tutorial which takes place over the course of the game's first four battles. Nicely, you can also skip it if you already know how to play, which is important because this game also has multiple routes and a new game+ system that lets you keep your cards from the previous cycle (this is actually the only way to get all the cards, as many are exclusive to certain routes or story choices). Speaking of, we should probably talk about the game's story and the rest of the things that aren't gameplay, which are actually quite basic. The entire rest of the game is purely text. It is actually quite a story-heavy game, but it's a purely text-based one. The story is actually kind of interesting and mysterious, it's about a boy who is searching for his father through the help of a magical book that can be read only at night where you personally experience the events of the story as you read it, but if you totally skipped the story you wouldn't lose a lot, other than the fact that occasional dialogue choices determine the route you end up taking, which affects which battles you encounter and which cards you can get. Speaking of cards, there's also an insane number of them, there's 500, which is crazy for a one-off game like this. In any case, this is an amazing game, it's actually kind of ludicrous how much care and attention went into this for being a game that people don't really talk about. The only thing I don't like about it is that I kind of feel compelled to make a guide for it but it would probably take like a year and a half to do it.
Killing Zone is another really bad early 3D fighter. Unlike most other early 3D fighting games, this game's problem is actually that its movement is much too jerky and fast, resulting in the game feeling oddly disjointed. Hit detection is also lousy, moves will often whiff right through the opponent and there are certain moves that I don't think can actually contact the opponent at all due to shoddy programming. Spacing big normals is effective and you can generally beat the computer quite easily, but it's never particularly fun. The game also includes a strange "auto mode" where you pick a character and they're then controlled by the AI in a series of tournaments and you kind of give general advice on what it should do without having direct control. This is sort of an interesting idea, but it has basically no depth, you pretty much just hold attack the whole time and hope the AI does something smart. I do like seeing console fighters try out interesting stuff like this, but this one needed a lot more time in the oven.
Magical Drop 3 is generally a pretty good game with one significant problem. Compared to the original Magical Drop (PS1 notably lacks Magical Drop 2), the presentation and content has increased a lot, plus it also now controls smoother. They've also added an interesting new adventure mode that is a fairly cool mashup of all of the different gameplay styles the game has to offer and it helps flesh out the package quite a bit. The only real problem is the game balance. Attacks in this game hit significantly too hard, and the game is much more generous on combo time compared to other games in the series, making it far too easy to one shot someone with a trivial 4 combo right as the match starts. On Saturn, I rated this game as G, because it's clearly better than Magical Drop 2 and Magical Drop 1 doesn't get the offensive balance right either (offense is conversely a little too weak in that game). However, a significant difference between PS1 and Saturn here is that PS1 has Magical Drop F, and to avoid spoiling the review for that game, it handles this aspect of the game much better. This is still an decent game, but you probably want to wait for the sequel.
DeletePorshe Challenge is just ok. For starters, as the name implies, you drive only Porsches in this game, in fact, you drive only a single Porsche, the Porsche Boxster. There are 6 (plus one secret) characters to choose from instead, each one having a car of a different colour and extremely slightly different stats (I didn't believe their stats differed at all initially, but the secret character has a top speed that's 10mph faster than the others, and many people state that the others have slight differences). The basic handling control is not bad, strangely, the game offers both a "Simulation" and "Arcade" option, but the Simulation style controls vastly better, with the arcade style being much looser and more prone to losing control (did they accidentally label these incorrectly?). It's also a fairly nice looking game, notably both the cars and tracks look pretty good, especially for this being a mid-era title. The biggest issue with the game is really the volume of content. For starters, the game has only 4 tracks, which is not much for a game from this time period. These tracks do have variants, there's a "short" and a "long" version that take slightly different routes through the track, as well as a kinda interesting third variant where the route through the track is randomized each lap, but it still feels a bit lacking. There's also basically no progression. There is a tournament mode, but it just runs through all 12 track / variant combinations and forces you to win every race, and all of the secrets are push button codes. It's not terrible by any means, but most aspects of it feel kind of average and it doesn't do much to stand out from the zillions of other racing games on PS1.
When covering baseball games from this era, we've seen a division of the genre into two fundamental types, depending on the batting controls. There's games with classic style controls, where you simply press a button to swing and it's down to timing and correctly reading the direction of the pitch to determine if you hit or not. We've also seen a more modern take where you have to line up the bat with the ball in order to hit, typically via some kind of hud element. This game is actually kind of a cross between the two systems. There's no circle to line up the bat indicator with, but you do have to aim the bat, instead you do this by holding a direction when you swing. Hold up and you swing high, hold right and you swing further out, etc. This definitely makes batting harder, as you not only have to gauge whether the ball is going to be a strike or not but also where you're going to need to swing to hit it, but I like that it preserves the challenge of reading balls and strikes in a way that some of the "line up the bat" systems often don't. Fielding control is instead fairly standard, but it works well. The game thankfully handles camera transitions very fast and is good at placing you in control of the right player so there's never any confusion, but the game seems to give you a decent number of solid line drives and fly balls exactly between the outfielders so offense doesn't feel especially weak, particularly given the more challenging batting leading to more strikeouts compared to some similar games. Presentation-wise, the game is a little basic, but it's still not bad. Certainly, there's still full voiced play-by-play and the camera work is solid and such. I feel like the character models and animations look a little basic for a game that came out as late as this did, not to a degree where it's jarring, but it's certainly not one of the most visually impressive baseball games of the era. Still, it plays well and the presentation is good enough that it's hard to have too many complaints. I can see why this series was apparently decently popular among enthusiasts.
DeleteSlamscape is absolutely atrocious, a strong contender for the title of worst game on the platform. For starters, the game makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You're dumped straight into the game with absolutely no explanation of what's going on, and the game is totally unintuitive in every possible way, so I couldn't make any progress whatsoever until I looked up a playthrough of the game. The goal is to collect 4 glowing orbs in each stage and get to the exit. The orbs are placed higher than you can reach with a jump, to reach them, you must either bounce off something or use the "high jump" maneuver, which requires you to press jump twice really fast and I'm honestly not convinced it's an intended mechanic and not a glitch. Arenas are filled with enemies, some of which you can kill and some you can't, and there's no indication which is which. Some enemies can only be killed if shot with certain weapons, and again there's zero indication of which weapons they might be vulnerable to, so this is pure trial and error. There are these weird crystal things on the ground you can collect to increase your health, but they must be picked up in a certain order, and if you get hit they often fly off your car anyway, so they don't really help. The game's physics engine is complete nonsense and you pinball around everywhere. The music and visuals also suck, with many things in the game being much too small to see properly (particularly enemies and the crystals) and the music being too repetitive and cacophonic. The only good thing you can say about it is that it runs fast, but everything else about the game is such complete crap that this is not really a positive.