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Last Topic's Ratings:
Alnam no Kiba - BB - 0% (2)
Bike Race: Kamen Rider - BB - 0% (2)
Eagle One: Harrier Attack - GAA - 67% (3)
Excalibur 2555 AD - GGAGA - 80% (5)
Pool Academy - BB - 0% (2)
Tokimeki Memorial - AG - 75% (2)
A pretty quiet topic, I was hoping to see a couple more ratings for Tokimeki Memorial, because I do feel that this is one of the more accessible games of its type out there. Maybe when the sequel comes along.
Games for this topic:
Ball Breakers
Burger Burger 2
Hyper Securities 2
NASCAR Rumble
Puchi Carat
Super Shot Soccer
For some reason, Puchi Carat always feels very familiar when I see the name, but I'm pretty sure I've never played it. We also have a couple sequels to Japanese strategy games here. Having played Tokimeki Memorial I can now see that the original Hyper Securities definitely borrowed a few things from its formula.
Ball Breakers - A
ReplyDeleteBurger Burger 2 - G
Hyper Securities 2 - A
NASCAR Rumble - G
Puchi Carat - G
Super Shot Soccer - B
Ball Breakers is an interesting game. It's kind of a physics-based action game where you have to complete a variety of different challenges. Some of these are what you'd expect, like the combat and gauntlet (reach the end) levels, but there's a bunch of other things too, like collecting items in a short time limit, racing, a pseudo-sports game involving throwing balls at a target, and even golf. It actually makes a fairly decent first impression, as the initial arenas are fairly fun, but as you get further the limitations of the game start to become more apparent. One of the game's biggest issues is stunlock. When you get hit by anything, you can't attack for a long time due to a lengthy flinch animation, which tends to make combat feel pretty bad, especially because attacks aren't animated very obviously so it's sometimes hard to tell whether you're even attacking or not. The game is generally very momentum-based and the controls feel kind of loose a lot of the time, which isn't a huge issue at first but becomes more significant as the levels start demanding more precision. Every level also has a gold time which opens up bonus levels, but many of these are extremely tight and I don't think the game is fun enough that someone would want to grind these levels over and over to get them. The game is also kinda basic in terms of presentation for how late it came out, it doesn't look awful or anything and it runs at a good framerate, but animations are limited and models are pretty low-poly. Easily the most impressive thing about the game is how varied it is, but later on it'll probably start to test your patience.
Burger Burger 2 is a pretty solid improvement over the original. The basics of the game are the same, it's a hamburger chain simulation game where you open restaurants, create your own burgers, put together your menu, then try to crush the competition. Right off the bat, the biggest addition is the new Scenario mode. If you've played any other tycoon game before, like Sim Theme Park or Rollercoaster Tycoon or whatever, you probably know vaguely what to expect, there's a variety of different scenarios across different maps with different goals to achieve. This definitely helps significantly increase the playtime compared to the original, which offered only what this game calls the "free mode", which is a less structured mode on a random map. Of course, a better progression system doesn't mean a lot if the game isn't fun, but I found I was having quite a bit more fun this time around than I remembered having with the original, similar to when we covered Afraid Gear Another. To make sure my memory wasn't hazy, I booted up the original to compare, and while they are similar, there's a bunch of minor improvements that add up to the game being quite a bit more fun. One of most significant ones is that it's now quite a bit easier to make money. It seems like the typical volume of sales and the amount people will pay have both been raised, making it far easier to turn a tidy profit in the early game. This alleviates the issue I noted with the first game where you can't use the burger creator too much because money is too precious, you can now use it quite liberally now and as this is probably the best part of the game it makes the experience quite a bit more fun. I greatly enjoy trying to come up with wacky concoctions and see if I can get people to eat them, sadly the Japanese are fairly health conscious and thus my Mega Meat Burger, which consists of a Beef Patty, Fried Chicken, Bacon, and Sauteed Onions was not enormously popular (this thing would slay in the US!) but I was able to make a pretty good Yakisoba Burger that actually made solid money after I toned down the level of hot sauce. Another improvement is that the interface is generally snappier and better organized. A simple comparison would be for adding seasoning, in the original this is a separate menu, in the sequel you just press a button. Many menus now give you the option to quick jump to other menus you'll probably want to go to next, and menus load quicker in general, making it easy to adjust your menu and then instantly see the impact on your bottom line, which is an important upgrade as finding the exact right price point for your burgers and set meals is essential to doing well in this game. As with the first game, once your awesome menu is put together, there is a fair bit of waiting for the money to roll in, but it seems like a lot more events occur this time around. A lot of new buildings open up, like sports arenas and colleges and the like, which alters the profitability of certain potential restaurant locations, you can offer a limited time menu item once a year, there's burger awards, and a bunch of other stuff like that. Of course, your greedy staff members also want raises periodically, which cuts into your profits, so you'll have to find ways to gradually start making more money, like making better burgers with new ingredients and such. Overall, it feels like a game where they made some pretty good improvements based on feedback from the first game and I'd definitely recommend playing this one over the original.
DeleteHyper Securities 2 is fairly similar to the Saturn game. Like in the first game, this is sort of a weird police simulation game where your goal is to direct your three police officers to train and do traffic patrols to increase your standing throughout the city. Sometimes while doing patrols you encounter criminals, which you have to battle, and if you win you increase your reputation there a lot. To its credit, it does improve a few things from Saturn, most especially that dealing with the various zones is now better. They are now properly identified by number in the UI, and when you do a patrol or do a battle there you can now directly see the effect on the sector stats, which is a big improvement. Speaking of battles, they're also somewhat different. Instead of the purely card-based system from before, they're now rendered in 3D as a full car chase, though you still essentially use cards to attack each other and the goal of eliminating one of the opponent's gauges remains. You now gain new attacks (cards) via an R&D area, which gives you some additional customization for this part of the game. They've also added the ability to chat with one of the girls each week, which makes them more motivated if you choose the correct dialogue choice, so I guess it feels a little more interactive. One new mechanic I don't like is that there's now a new "standby" work type, where you can have your employees wait for a call. These calls occur randomly, and could occur either during the day or at night. You get a big boost if you're on standby at the time, otherwise you just waste your whole day for only a small reduction to fatigue. This system just feels like it introduces an unnecessary degree of RNG into an already very RNG-heavy game. I also continue to feel like battles are too infrequent, the number of patrols you have to do to get them even somewhat consistently feels impractical, and the impact of your training also feels hard to see a lot of the time. The game doesn't seem to be that difficult so you probably don't have to totally optimize it, but I don't enjoy this quite as much as something like Prism Court where the impact of your actions was much more concrete.
DeleteNASCAR Rumble has nothing to do with NASCAR, but it's still pretty solid. I mean sure, it does have the official NASCAR drivers and cars, but not the tracks or the gameplay, instead of oval racing it's much closer to a kart racer, where you'll be driving through crazy off-road courses and firing powerups at each other. Despite the kart racing setup, the cars still drive like cars, which makes it feel somewhat like Blur, just two generations earlier. Course design is pretty varied and the cars control well, so the fundamentals are pretty solid. I like how open the courses are, there's a fair number of shortcuts and some parts of the tracks are memorable. On the third course there's a triple hairpin, which is obviously lame, but it's on a downhill section, so you can just drive over the side and jump the entire thing, which is really fun. The game's presentation is also pretty strong, I guess the music is a bit generic and the announcer is annoying (you can turn him off), but the game looks quite good and has a rock solid framerate. About the only thing you might complain about is that races can go on a little long. Races are 4 laps and many courses are around 90 seconds for a lap, making for a 6 minute race time, which is generally a bit beyond the recommendation for a kart racer, but as the game is fun this isn't a huge strike against it.
I still don't know why I feel like I recognize Puchi Carat, but it's a pretty fun game. The game is effectively a combination of Breakout and Bust-A-Move. You have a paddle and ball, just like in breakout, and you use them to break gems that come from the top. Like in Bust-A-Move, if you break one of the gems that is holding the other gems up, they fall and this creates an attack that is sent to your opponent. Like in Bust-A-Move 99, different characters have different attack patterns, but they don't seem to matter all that much, as long as you're dropping a decent number of gems you're going to be doing pretty well. Something I really like about the game is the method of getting more gems on the screen, because if you're playing well you can start to run out, which means you can't make big attacks. The way you get more gems is to miss the ball with the paddle, which causes your stack to move down by 3 rows. This just feels ingenious in a way I can't fully describe, it's just such a natural way to do it, but obviously it's also really bad if you do it when you don't intend to, as you'd expect it to be. In any case, the gameplay is quite fun and unique. In terms of content, there's a fairly standard selection of modes. Besides the VS Com mode, there's also an endless mode and a line clear mode, as you'd probably expect, and all of the modes also have various difficulty settings and other options. The presentation of the game is pretty good as well, the characters appear in the background of the battle arena and are quite vibrantly animated, and there's also full voice acting as well of course. The one thing that's definitely on the lame side is the story, before each battle the characters talk to each other but these conversations are of absurdly low quality, basically almost always consisting of "hey, give me your stone", "no, you give me YOUR stone". It's so bad I actually checked the Japanese version to see if they just didn't feel like translating it, but it's actually accurate. Oh well, it's not like anyone plays these sorts of games for the story anyway, and if you're playing on an NTSC system you're probably stuck with the Japanese version anyway, at least you know you're not missing anything. In any case, it's a pretty cool game and an easy recommendation for anyone who likes Bust-A-Move.
DeleteSuper Shot Soccer is somewhat unique, but it's not very good. The basic gist of it is it's an arcade-style soccer game where every team has access to some super moves that they can perform using a meter. There are up to 3 such moves per team, generally some kind of super shot, a super pass, and a super defensive move. The biggest problem with the game is that 90% of the super shots and super passes are useless. Let's take france for example. Their super pass is a very fast pass that is hard to block. That sounds good! However, after receiving it, you can't move or do anything for about a full second, making it totally useless. If you could immediately shoot or something, it'd be a great move for one-timers, but you can't. Their super shot is a series of dekes that is hard to stop. This also sounds great for moving the ball into a scoring position if you could cancel it into a shot or a pass. However, you can't interrupt the sequence at all and it lasts much too long to be useful. Their defense move places the Eiffel Tower on the field and it shocks everyone nearby, immobilizing them for a while. This move is incredible, as it virtually guarantees a turnover. Pretty much every team is like this. Their offensive moves suck and their defensive move is incredible. This has the effect of making the game extremely defensive, because any time anyone gets anything going you can just use a defensive move to shut it down. This issue is compounded by the fact that the AI's positioning is terrible and they almost never get open for passes, and passes are slow and unwieldy anyway. It combines to make a game that's far too defensive, even by Soccer standards. In the extremely rare chance that you do get a good shot off, it is of course just luck if it goes in or not because the goalie performance is extremely random. In terms of presentation, it's very dry. There's no commentary and the visuals aren't especially great either. The super moves have some particle effects I guess, but even they're not nearly as flashy as they could be (and there's also the aforementioned issue that most of them are useless). Overall, this is just a game with some decent ideas but poor execution.
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