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Last Topic's Ratings:
A2 Racer 3 - BAA - 33% (3)
Descent Maximum - AAGGG - 80% (5)
Dragonseeds - BABBB - 10% (5)
Kururin Pa - ABBB - 13% (4)
Makeruna Makendou 2 - GAA - 67% (3)
Sitting Ducks - BABA - 25% (4)
Kind of a weak topic this time. I guess not every topic can have an End Sector to carry it.
Games for this topic:
Dragon Knight 4
Heart of Darkness
K-1 Oujya ni Narou
Sled Storm
Tsuukai: Slot Shooting
Weakest Link, The
We finally get the chronologically next game in the K-1 series after a mere 6 and a half years since we originally covered K-1 Grand Prix (which I mistook for the first game in the series even though it was actually the third). As K-1 Grand Prix was one of my favourite early finds for GAB I'm curious to see how this one turns out. Don't worry, I haven't made the same mistake with Dragon Knight, this is the only game in the series that's on PS1 (there's also a pretty detailed guide for it). I'm also kind of curious to play The Weakest Link, which I remember being a big deal for a few months back in the day but I remember absolutely nothing about it.
Dragon Knight 4 - G
ReplyDeleteHeart of Darkness - A
K-1 Oujya ni Narou - G (SR)
Sled Storm - G
Tsuukai: Slot Shooting - A
Weakest Link, The - B
I didn't expect too much from Dragon Knight 4, but it's actually a pretty solid game. First things first, this is a censored port of a hentai game, and even though the sex scenes have been completely cut, it's still fairly obvious at many points in the story. However, while you might expect this to be a fairly lame game that people would only play for the (now removed) sex scenes, this is actually a pretty solid game in most regards. For starters, and perhaps not surprisingly, the art is great. There's a ton of artwork when talking to various characters and in different scenes, and pretty much every character has a portrait, including generic NPCs. The story is also surprisingly well fleshed-out, there's a ton of dialogue available in each town (though much of it is optional) and it generally seems relatively well-written, certainly the main characters have a decent amount of charm to them. In terms of gameplay, it plays a lot like Advance Wars, albeit with human units that level up and can be permanently killed like in Fire Emblem. Like in Advance Wars, each unit has 10 HP, and their remaining HP determines their attack damage. The strategy tends to be to hold a chokepoint with a defensively strong unit while peppering them with ranged attacks until they're weak enough to be wiped out by a melee unit, but an added complication is that missions are timed and if the time runs out you instantly lose, which requires you to play somewhat aggressively. Some maps have areas where you can heal, but you can't use these too much, and in fact, the enemy can and will abuse them so you sometimes have to focus on quickly smashing through a choke (even at the cost of a lot of health) in order to gain control of the healing point, so there's some decent strategy to be had here. Something else I like is that just like in Advance Wars, you can tap an enemy to see their "threat range", showing how far they can attack, which is vital information in a game that plays like this. Inbetween battles you'll visit towns where can talk to people and do some small sidequests. Each town gives you a chance to recruit a new party member, generally a choice between a male and a female unit, sometimes requiring you to do some kind of small task before they become available to recruit. You cannot get both in a single playthrough, so if you want to use everyone you'll have to play the game twice, but the ability to customize your party a little does help give the game a bit more depth. You can also find some stat boosting items if you look carefully and talk to everyone in the towns, and you'll probably want them because this game is fairly hard. You can also chat up one of your female allies in each town, which can affect the ending. It's a bit formulaic in terms of design as it repeats this battle town battle town structure for most of the game, but on the plus side this does make it relatively easy to figure out what to do even if you can't read what's going on. In any case, it's a pretty-well made game overall, and it's also decently long, if you enjoy games like Fire Emblem or Shining Force it could be worth a look.
Heart of Darkness is another cinematic platformer similar to games like Prince of Persia and Oddworld, and like most of those games it has a fair number of problems. We'll start with the positives first. This game's visuals, and especially its cutscenes, are incredible for their time. The intro sequence is of astoundingly high quality and is quite long, and there are many more cutscenes sprinkled throughout that maintain this same level of polish. The backgrounds and animations in the game are also very good, and the environments in particular look interesting, which gives it a huge leg up over something like Abe's Exoddus and its drab, boring environments. It also controls reasonably well. There's still a little bit of stiffness to the control, particularly for turning around, but gunplay is functional enough (which is essential because there's a ton of it, we'll come back to that in a moment) and jumping usually works, though the control for climbing is generally quite bad. The first major problem comes early into the first stage. After progressing a little bit, a cave wall breaks open and suddenly dozens of enemies will be chasing you. You can blast them with the ray gun, but they respawn infinitely and come at you from both sides of the screen, which a mixture of walkers, crawlers, and jumpers, all requiring you to aim in different directions. They kill you in one hit and their numbers initially seem endless, to the extent that I had to look up a video to make sure I hadn't missed something, but no, you are actually intended to fight them off. After a few screens you encounter the shadow dogs, who are immune to being shot and must be jumped over, despite the fact that there's no indication they can't be shot. I didn't know of the double jump's existence until later so I was forced to make four pixel perfect jumps while also fighting off enemies to clear this section. This entire section is simply ludicrously too hard for the first level, it would barely make sense at the end of the game, and I would imagine 90% of players will never pass this point. Thankfully, after a few screens an enemy eats your gun and this improves the game dramatically, as the enemy counts are greatly reduced and the game starts to focus more on puzzles. Of course, many of the puzzles make no sense at all, for example in the climbing section there's a jump that you can't make. There is a spine on the left that looks climbable, so I went back to the previous screen and tried to grab it, but you can't, the actual solution is you have to jump in place twice on the rock, causing it to collapse and you mysteriously grab the spine on the way down, which makes no sense and I don't see how anyone would ever figure it out. There are, of course, also a ton of cheapshots related to screen transitions as well, like on the second stage where you have to jump across rocks, when the screen changes if you're holding right you will immediately slip off the rock and die. There's a weird section in the next portion where you have to trudge through deep water while avoiding fliers, which initially seems impossible. I eventually figured out you can turn around just as they try to grab you to dodge, which I was going to complain about making no sense, but apparently you can duck underwater here, even though I tried this repeatedly initially since this would make sense but it never worked for me, maybe this is the controls just being overly stiff or some other weird issue with this part. Anyway, this kind of nonsense will continue for most of the game.
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Heart of Darkness cont'd
DeleteYou eventually get a second weapon which is better because it can't fire as fast as the ray gun, so combat involving it is more sensible, but you do reobtain the ray gun near the end of the game and the endless hordes of enemies make a final appearance, but at least they feel a bit more appropriate for the final sequence. At any rate, pretty much the entire game is painful to play and you'll probably have to use a guide a bunch. Still, at least it looks good and has great cutscenes. This is still drastically better than the Oddworld games, and it's actually probably one of the best games of its type, it's just that that's kind of a low bar and I still wouldn't really recommend playing it. You can just watch the cutscenes on youtube and it's a more enjoyable experience.
I was a bit worried about K-1 Oujya ni Narou from the box art and shifted focus, but I was completely wrong to be. You might recall that K-1 Grand Prix was an excellent martial arts game with a ton of focus on spacing and stamina management. This game retains that excellent combat engine, but instead focuses totally on the "create a fighter" experience. Like some similar games we've looked at, you'll control your fighter's training schedule as you try to prepare them for matches, however, unlike most of those games it's not inordinately complex. Each week, you'll pick 5 tasks from a list of about 40. Nicely, the game tells you exactly what stat every option will raise. You can also pick the same training option more than once, and this is generally recommended as it raises the chance of success, so typically you'll only pick around 2 things per week. The impact to your stats is shown directly in a nice UI and the effect of pretty much everything is intuitive, for example your defense is broken down into head defense, abdominal defense, and leg defense, which correspond to defense against the 3 different heights attacks can target. Beyond increasing your stats, you also need to learn new attacks. Some training gives TP, which you can use to buy new moves. At the start of the game you have to choose your fighting style, which limits some of the attacks that will be available, but there's still a lot to choose from. You can freely assign your attacks to different combinations of directional and button inputs, and you can even create combos by linking certain moves together to give them special bonuses. By entering fights, you can earn money, which you can use to hire new trainers who can do various things from offering new drills to increasing how much money you can make. Fights are hard though, even the weak opponents have good stats, so you'll need strong fundamentals from K-1 Grand Prix to do well unless you really train a lot first. Generally letting the opponent tire themselves out before going on the offensive is a good strategy, as this limits their ability to fight back, and if you can ever drop their stamina to 0 you instantly win, though of course the same applies to you. It's also really bad to get cornered as you can get bounced off the ropes to allow for devastating combos. I particularly like how the three heights of attacks have different effects: high attacks reduce max hp and make it easier to get downs, middle attacks reduce stamina, which can cause knockouts, and low attacks make the opponent slower and easier to hit, which feels like it gives the game quite a lot of strategy. There's still a bunch of other things I want to say about this game, like how you can sometimes go to new locations for special training that offer really good training options, but this review is already getting overly long. This is just an extremely well-made game with an excellent combat engine and a ton of content. The degree to which K-1 clowns on every other martial arts-focused series out there is honestly kind of insane.
Sled Storm is a pretty good game. Despite being a snowmobile game, in many ways this feels like a motocross racer: tracks have a ton of verticality, you can do tricks, you have a lean turn, and you can easily be knocked off your machine by landing badly from a jump. One thing I quite like about the game is that there's a ton of freedom in terms of your route through the track. Besides the fact that alternate paths are everywhere, you can also just go pretty much wherever you want, if the track is flat you can probably drive there, there's a fair number of interesting and creative shortcuts you can come up with, from minor corner cuts to skipping entire sections of the course. The game also features a money system and vehicle upgrades, and you can do tricks on the course or break certain objects to get points, which are converted into money when the race ends. There's a decent number of tracks and reasonable course variety, and the game also looks and sounds pretty good. The control in the game is also very solid, and I particularly like that tricks are pretty easy to do, they're done by holding a button and a direction, with certain directions giving more points but having more risk involved. There's not a ton else to say about it, it's a well-polished game overall. It may not exactly be a motorcross game but if it was it'd be one of the top ones on the platform.
DeleteTsuukai: Slot Shooting is seemingly totally unchanged from Saturn. As before, the idea is to shoot 3 matching enemies to make special pieces appear that let you wipe out the enemies, but something I didn't know the first time was that if you match 3 special pieces, this triggers another bonus that makes numbers fall. If you match 3 numbers (or get certain combinations, like for example 435 worked for some reason), you get to play a bonus game where random nonsense falls from the top and you can score bonus points if you can match 3 of them. The bonus stage is not very fun and seems to be mostly luck (I found 7s to be the most reliable things to match), but getting to the bonus stage earns a massive amount of points and this is by far the easiest way to increase your score, which does let you clear the stages somewhat faster. As before, I feel like this game is somewhat overly basic, especially since getting the bonus stage wipes the whole field and thus playing for the bonus stage is the only sensible way to play, but it's not quite bad enough for B.
The Weakest Link is not great. In case people have forgotten how the show works, I'll quickly recap. The game features 7 players, who kind of play as a team. Each is asked a question in turn, if they answer correctly the team earns money, with more money earned for each successive right answer, but the entire total is lost if a wrong answer is given. At any time, the team can opt to bank the money to protect it from being lost, but this forces the chain to start over. Each round has a time limit, with the goal being to accumulate the most amount of money possible, though there is a cap at which point the round instantly ends. After each round, the players choose a player to vote off, with the intention being to pick the person who gets the most wrong answers so they can make more money in the next round, though you can choose whomever you want. This continues until only 2 players are left, at which point they play a head to head round to determine the winner. In terms of the game itself, much like in Who Wants to be a Millionaire, you're answering multiple choice questions. An extremely lame mechanic is that if you're playing on normal, you can't see the answers, only the first letter. This is stupid, and makes some questions effectively impossible to answer quickly based on potential wording choices (if you wait, they'll reveal the entire word). Alternatively, you can play on easy to eliminate this mechanic entirely and have the whole answer be shown, which makes the game play somewhat better. However, a further annoyance is that most of the game is spent watching the computer answer questions, and your ability to make money is based on whether or not the computer gets it right or banks (and the computer banks way too often). In theory, you'd think that at least you could pay attention to who gets it wrong or who banks too much to progressively strengthen the field, but the AI's performance seems to be totally random every round, so there's no concept of keeping strong players around (or weak players for that matter, to beat them at the end, which was a common strategy on the TV show). The AI will also always near-unanimously vote for the weakest player, making your own vote largely irrelevant, though if you vote for someone they will hold a grudge and might vote for you later. Overall, mechanically it's at best tolerable, and only on the easy setting. The thing is, this was the case on the TV show too, the game itself was never the real appeal. The appeal of the show is the host, who is famously caustic and mean to everyone, her sarcastic quips and cruel jabs were really the main appeal of the show. Though the game does have the original host, she doesn't really have a lot to say beyond announcing the rules and commenting on the round results, making for a surprisingly dry and bland experience. While you could maybe make the argument for A, Who Wants to be a Millionaire (and other quiz games like You Don't Know Jack) are way better than this, and I struggle to see any reason to come back to it.
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