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Last Topic's Ratings:
Ball Breakers - AA - 50% (2)
Burger Burger 2 - GG - 100% (2)
Hyper Securities 2 - AA - 50% (2)
NASCAR Rumble - GGGG - 100% (4)
Puchi Carat - GG - 100% (2)
Super Shot Soccer - BB - 0% (2)
A pretty quiet topic, but actually a fairly highly-rated one. It's always my hope that some people will end up checking out some of these games later on, even if they don't have time when the topic is actually up.
Games for this topic:
Big Ol Bass 2
Ridegear Guybrave 2
Sexy Parodius
Starwinder
Super Hero Sakusen
Thrill Kill
I remember Thrill Kill being a big deal back in the day, so much so that I had actually played it at the time, even though it was never officially released. That's actually kind of crazy to think about with how much less discourse there was around games back then. Of course, I don't actually remember anything about it, so it'll be interesting to see if it was really such a big deal with the benefit of hindsight.
Big Ol Bass 2 - G
ReplyDeleteRidegear Guybrave 2 - A
Sexy Parodius - G
Starwinder - G
Super Hero Sakusen - A
Thrill Kill - G
They finally did it! After two games of being forced to suffer through nonsense control schemes, Big Ol Bass 2 finally allows you to just hold a button to reel. Just go into the options and turn on auto reel and there it is, you can now just hold X to reel after you catch a fish. Anyway, Big Ol Bass 2 is actually the third game in the Fisherman's Bait series, and like the first two it has very nice presentation. A change from the second game is that instead of just showing you a small window showing what's happening underwater when you cast, it now switches to a full underwater view. As before, this is useful since you generally only want to hook the target fish, so for other fish just don't reel when they bite and they won't catch onto the lure. The lake views, which continue to look great, also now show fish shadows, so you're no longer just casting aimlessly. In terms of the gameplay, it's fairly simple, but it has some nice design aspects that I appreciate. When you're trying to get the fish's attention, there's now an appeal gauge that shows how well you're moving the lure. When fighting a fish, the strength of your line is now shown as the thickness of the tension bar, it gets thinner and thinner as your line is about to snap. One slightly unusual design decision here is that the main tournament mode has been mostly axed. In its place is a kind of VS mode where you go up against an opponent in a race to catch fish under certain conditions. It's nice and quick I suppose, but I wouldn't say it has a ton of appeal unless playing against another human player, which means the "World Monster" mode has to do most of the heavy lifting. This is a sort of laid-back fishing mode where you're given a target fish to try and catch, somewhat like Murakoshi Seikai, though the fish are all silly fictional fish. This mode generally works pretty well and there's more content it than you might think at first (there's a number of other areas to unlock), though I kind of miss the main time attack mode from the other games. Still, this is easily the best game in the series and one of the better fishing games on the platform, even if Murakoshi is still generally a little better than this game in most respects.
I went back to Ridegear Guybrave 1 to refresh my memory on it before playing the sequel, but it turns out I completely wasted my time because apart from the fact that they both feature mechs the games have absolutely nothing in common. While the first game was a beat-em-up, the second game more closely resembles something like Starfox 64. Stages are basically corridors filled with enemies where you can move left and right and fire various weapons. The X button activates the boost, which lets you dodge or jump, and a lot of the game simply involves boosting to avoid enemy fire while shooting back with your own weapons. Eventually you come to a boss and these resemble Starfox 64's All-Range Mode, where you can move freely in all directions to duel the opponent until only one of you is left standing. The presentation of the game is notably excellent, with a ton of voice acting, pretty good quality 3D models and sprite art, and a pretty rockin' soundtrack as well. There are a few issues though. One of the biggest ones is that firing your main weapons locks you in place, which tends to make them pretty bad most of the time since standing in one spot gets you hit. Your gun still does a lot of damage and lacks this limitation, so you will use it 99% of the time. Secondly, melee attacks are way too good in the boss battles. They track really well and do a boatload of damage, so there's almost no reason to ever use anything else, especially because even if you could actually hit your main weapon here, firing it leaves you open to a melee attack from the boss. This does tend to make the gameplay somewhat overly simple and somewhat ruins the excitement of finding new weapons, because unless it's a gun or a melee weapon you know you're probably not going to be using it. There's also four different characters you can choose, but they're all mostly the same and mainly just affect mission dialogue. Overall, it's a reasonably solid game, but it does get kind of repetitive after a while and I wish they had done a bit more with it.
DeleteSexy Parodius is exactly the same as on Saturn, which is great because it's a great game on Saturn. As always, the Parodius series is basically just a more whimsical version of Gradius with a bunch of different ships to choose from, which is pretty great because Gradius is already an excellent series and these changes basically just make it even better. There are slightly fewer ships to choose from here compared to some of the later games, but the level designs and spritework are great and so is the gameplay so there's not really much you can complain about. It's also an excellent port to PS1 that runs perfectly and also has 2 player support. Probably one of the best shmups on the system.
I didn't have especially high hopes for Starwinder, but it's actually a pretty good game. It's a fairly unique game, the best I can describe is that it's kind of like if Descent was a racing game. You fly a craft with full 3-axis movement along winding narrow tunnels with magnetic strips along the bottom and sometimes the top. To go fast, the bottom of your craft must be aligned with the strip, which is much more challenging than it sounds because the courses are very twisty and you go quite fast. The courses are also full of obstacles that will slow you down. You have weapons and you can shoot them, but your weapons are limited, and you also have rivals who you probably want to shoot instead as this slows them down (and this is pretty essential as they are generally faster than you are). A pretty cool strategy is that the opponents are just as vulnerable to the obstacles as you are, so if you're in first, you can avoid them so the opponents have to deal with them instead, which is one of the best ways to build up a big lead. The courses quickly get much crazier (after the first sector don't expect to see ceilings often anymore) and when they start adding multiple racers it becomes quite hectic, but not in a way that feels unfair. Something else I want to highlight is that for a game that released as early as it did, it runs amazingly well. It feels like 60fps, but if not it's a rock-solid 30, either way the draw distance and performance are both very good for their time. There's not too much else to say about this other than it's pretty unique and fun.
DeleteSpeaking of not being what I expected, there's Super Hero Sakusen. I expected this would be kind of a lighthearted gameplay-heavy RPG focused on the compati heroes characters, but it's actually kind of the exact opposite where it's a fairly serious, story-heavy game with basic gameplay instead. The story and presentation of the game are not bad, though it does tend to reuse its backgrounds quite a bit, and the story is actually kind of interesting if you're a fan of the source material, but unfortunately battles are fairly infrequent and somewhat overly basic. Each character has a couple MP-using attacks, and you can charge your MP by normal attacking (or even overcharge it by attacking when it's full to do a more powerful attack), but the game is so easy that apart from using the all-hitting Vulcan against groups you can pretty much just spam normal attacks most of the time and have no issues. The game is also extremely linear, at least early on, with many NPCs telling you exactly where to go and frequently stopping you outright if you don't go where they want you to. It's not terrible if you're a fan of the source material, but it does feel somewhat overly basic.
Thrill Kill is certainly an interesting oddity. It's a four-player 3D fighting game that takes place in a square arena. The goal of the game is to attack the opponents enough to build up your meter, at which point you can perform a super attack to eliminate one opponent (which hilariously resembles Playstation All-Stars, albeit many years earlier), with the goal being to be the last one standing. I actually quite like the meter mechanic because it rewards offense, unlike many similar FFA games where it's often best to play it safe and let the other characters beat each other up. Actually, for a game focused on gratuitous violence, it's a fairly mechanically competent game. You've got a fairly sizeable set of moves for each character and there are some decent combos, movement and dashing in 3D space feels pretty good, and there's also parries and throws to give the game a bit more depth, so despite the four-player focus it doesn't feel especially chaotic. It's certainly vastly better than any Mortal Kombat game or other games that tried the 3D arena fighter gimmick this gen, like Xena on N64. There's even character-specific endings to unlock, giving it surprisingly solid production values for an apparently "unfinished" game. I feel like this would have been pretty popular if it had ever been officially released (well, it was fairly popular anyway after the disk was leaked). I wonder why they didn't release it.
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