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Last Topic's Ratings:
Davis Cup Complete Tennis - GA - 75% (2)
Dragon Quest 4 - GGABG - 70% {5}
Game of Life, The - BAB - 17% (3)
Rugrats in Paris: The Movie - AGABB - 40% {5}
Puzzle Action: Ganba no Bouken - GA - 75% (2)
Tenchu 2 - GGGGGBBA - 69% (8) (1 SR)
A rare occurrence of the 70% squiggle bracket (the highest possible squiggle bracket). I feel like squiggle games are almost always closer to the low range (as is the case with Rugrats here), though Tenchu 2 almost fell into that category as well (it just would have needed 1 more A vote, since the rule is at least 20% of the total rating must come from each grade).
Games for this topic:
Hot Wheels Extreme Racing
Incredible Hulk, The: The Pantheon Saga
Las Vegas Dream 2
NCAA GameBreaker 2001
Slayers Royal
Wing Over 2
You might not recognize the name, but Las Vegas Dream 2 is the sequel to SNES cult hit Vegas Stakes. This was one of my favourite games as a kid, so I've been anticipating trying out the PS1 sequel for some time. The main reason I learned to read some Japanese in the first place was to play Japanese-only sequels to some of my favourite games, but I actually didn't know this game even existed until we started GAB.
Hot Wheels Extreme Racing - A
ReplyDeleteIncredible Hulk, The: The Pantheon Saga - B
Las Vegas Dream 2 - G
NCAA GameBreaker 2001 - A
Slayers Royal - B
Wing Over 2 - G
Hot Wheels Extreme Racing is all right. The first thing is, this does not in any way feel like a Hot Wheels game, in fact I wonder if this was an original title before getting the Hot Wheels license at the last minute. It's a combat racing game where most of the focus is on using weapons to blow each other up. There are three vehicle types, cars, planes, and boats, and you'll typically race at least 2 on every course, transitioning between them at certain points. Much of the game involves picking up and using weapons, which are scattered all over the course and there's a decent variety of them. Vehicles have health and can be destroyed, which takes them out of the action for a pretty long time. There are various cups to do, with challenges being unlocked (like getting enough points) after you win them. The basic structure of the game isn't too bad, but there's a lot of jank, owing mostly to the game's physics engine. Cars get flung around constantly, steering always feels slightly off, and a big annoyance is that whenever you destroy someone their wreckage gets left behind and you almost immediately slam into it in most cases. It's certainly playable and it's not really all that hard, but it frequently feels kind of sloppy. It's also very generic in terms of presentation, which doesn't really do it any favours. It's playable, but I don't think I'd really recommend it to anyone.
The Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga is marginally less bad than on Saturn, though it's still bad. Compared to the Saturn version, this version has better draw distance and also seems to run at a better framerate. This does make it somewhat more playable, but it doesn't do much to address the fact that the game simply isn't fun. It's still really stiff and the controls are arguably worse on Playstation, as despite offering 7 different control schemes there isn't a single option where X is jump. Even if you could remap the controls combat still feels like garbage anyway, with attacking airborne enemies being especially terrible. You're also bizarrely frail for being the Hulk and there's no lives system, so if you die you have to restart the whole stage over again, which you obviously won't want to do. Probably one of the era's worst action games, even the Iron Man game is WAY better than this.
Las Vegas Dream 2 is a hard game to rate. Compared to Vegas Stakes, it's definitely a bit scaled back. The biggest change is that there's no longer multiple casinos, there's only a single casino. The goal of the game remains the same, to take a small amount of money and turn it into a million, though the game is now timed and you only have 7 in game days to do so, though this time limit is not generally very tight. The four friends from Vegas Stakes are also gone, instead there's various people you can meet after playing a round of any game. They appear with little FMVs and interestingly they speak english (except for the one Japanese guy), and you get a handful of dialogue choices when you talk to them. Unlike in Vegas Stakes, most of these people are fairly helpful and offer ways to make money. For example, you can meet a glamourous-looking woman named Tina who asks you to take her shopping. This seems like a trap, but if you choose the right options she'll give you a gold watch, and if you choose to keep it rather than selling it, she'll become enamoured with you. Afterwards, she may periodically stop by to tell you that she's won money on the slot machines and she gives some of it to you, which is actually super profitable because she is the best slots player of all time apparently. Some of the events are luck-based (a failure generally wastes a bit of time or a small amount of money) whereas others are more like challenges, for example a smarmy guy keeps challenging me to blackjack, and if you beat him you can earn money, though obviously you lose money if you lose. These interactions help to liven up the experience and give it some character, which is good because these sorts of games can sometimes be rather dry. In terms of the Casino games themselves, there's only 6, Slots, Blackjack, Roulette, Craps, Poker, and Keno. Compared to some other games from this era, this is a fairly small selection, and this is the main thing that makes me unsure of the rating, I feel if there were like 2 more games this would be an easy G, though you could probably argue that at least these are the most important games and it does feature Poker, which certain other games from this era (like Caesar's Palace 2000) didn't. The presentation of the game is generally pretty good, the visuals and music are both solid and the interface for the games works well, I have no complaints there. I feel like you could either make the case for A or G here. I feel like this game is probably somewhat worse than Vegas Stakes, largely due to having a smaller scope and not really improving much, though it does retain most of what made Vegas Stakes a good game (namely having a goal to work towards and some charm). I guess I lean towards G simply because I was having fun playing it, I generally mostly tend to stick to Blackjack and Poker anyway and the character interactions help to make these modes a bit more fun than in most games. I still kind of wish they had done a bit more with it, though.
DeleteNCAA GameBreaker 2001 is okay. It's sort of broadly functional but nothing about it is amazing and it has a number of small issues with its gameplay that don't make it a top choice on the platform. The game's biggest issue is probably that passes are kinda bad. The pass interface is totally fine, like in many games you press a button to bring up the pass, then press the corresponding button to throw it to that pass target, no issues there. The problem is that even if a player is wide open, passes are usually not very accurate and the QB often massively overthrows the pass target, leading to a lot of incomplete passes and interceptions, especially on long throws. You can kinda make short passes work by pressing the triangle to jump when the pass is about to arrive, but even these always kinda feel like a crapshoot. The problem is, since passing is weak, defensively there's basically no reason to choose anything besides a blitz, which also tends to make running plays fairly weak as well. Offensively, about the only plays you ever want are shotguns, as besides the ability to make somewhat reliable short yardage, you can also easily convert these plays into a running play if the opponent goes for a zone defense. Generally better football games have a better push and pull between blitz and zone, with better reward for successfully fooling the defense, but here it feels like it's all down to your ability to successfully execute the same handful of plays over and over which makes the game a bit dull strategically. The game's commentary is also fairly basic, it feels like the commentary lines are chosen mostly at random and don't have much to do with what actually happened at the play, and the lack of any color commentary also leaves it a bit on the dull side. The game does feature a decent number of options and play modes, but I feel like its core gameplay is too simplistic for these to really count for much. It's certainly playable, but I think it's towards the lower end of football games from this era.
DeleteI was incredibly confused when I started working on Slayers Royal, because I went to Saturn GAB to see what I said about the Saturn version and I couldn't find it, despite the fact that I was sure I played it. I went through the various topics to see if somehow it was just missing from the list and it was not, we indeed didn't cover it, even though I was still sure I had played it, which is super weird. So I booted up the PS1 version and after 10 minutes I immediately remembered why this wasn't covered. Slayers Royal is basically a combination of a Visual Novel and literally the worst SRPG ever made. The game is split into two parts. The town exploration is generally the more competent of the two. You can look at various things and talk to people, eat food, stay at the inn, and occasionally shop for better equipment. These sections are extremely text-heavy as the party often interjects as you move around, and there are events and battles you can get into by wandering into the correct spots, but these are generally optional and progressing the main storyline isn't difficult, generally you just have to stay at the inn and then leave town to move forward with the story.
(cont'd)
(Slayers Royal cont'd)
DeleteWhen outside of town, you'll usually get into battles, so we should probably talk about the battle system. Simply put, it's the most incompetently-made SRPG battle system of all time. Initially, all your characters are on auto-battle, which honestly might be the best way to play this game because it's so bad, but if you really want to you can control the game manually. You have three main battle commands, one covers basic actions like moving an attack, one covers defensive reactions, like countering or evading, and one covers spells. Attacking in this game is completely worthless, because attacks do no damage. Gourry is your swordsman and he does about 15 damage when he attacks (starting enemies have around 200 hp, and the boss of the first encounter has around 1000 hp). The other characters hit for 1 damage. This also means the defensive system has no depth. Obviously you just choose evade, because why would you ever counter when attacks do no damage? So okay, obviously our only real offense is spells. Lina is a famous mage after all, so maybe that makes sense. You have like a million spells. This is not an exaggeration, you start (and end) the game with 7 full pages of spells, 90% of which are useless. The vast majority of the spells do no damage even if they hit, despite looking like damage spells and the game claiming they have attack power. There's pretty much no indication which attacks will do damage to enemies, so it's just trial and error, and also some spells have splash damage or other effects that the game doesn't indicate in any way either, so good luck with that. Sometimes even the spells that do damage don't do anything for some reason (I can only assume enemies resist certain spells, but with how nonsensical everything in the game is maybe they just sometimes randomly don't do damage). So just use different spells if a given spell isn't doing anything to an enemy. Once you find a spell that does actual damage, just spam that to win, the game is not hard. Essentially, the whole game is "move into position to use a spell, then choose a spell that does something, then repeat this a few times to win". Oh, and for no reason, the game will repeat your commands automatically unless you press a button to stop the auto battle, so make sure to do that. Really, the entire battle system is a complete mess and it's clear they had no idea how SRPGs were supposed to work. In the first battle you're supposed to protect this elven boy called Lark. It literally does not matter if he dies, so feel free to just nuke him and the enemies surrounding him with a big AOE to end the fight faster. You never level in this game and fights also don't usually yield money (not that there's much to spend it on) so there's basically no strategy here, and battles are generally trivially easy to win. That basically leaves only the story, and it's not terrible, there's a lot of voice acting and there's also a decent number of very high quality cutscenes (it's clear where all the budget went), so I can see how you could maybe make the case for A if you're a huge fan of the series, but I can't in good conscience rate this anything above B with how atrocious the gameplay is considering this generation has no shortage of mechanically good SRPGs with good stories. This brings us back to why the Saturn version was never rated - I had checked this game out to see if it was viable with minimal Japanese knowledge, and between the extremely wordy story and absolutely atrocious gameplay I simply decided it wasn't worth our time to cover it, but translation tools have gotten better since then and we're generally more thorough now so I will allow it, especially because apparently the sequel is much better. In any case, it boggles my mind that this game was seemingly pretty popular, I guess the popularity of the license and the cutscenes did a LOT of heavy lifting here.
When we covered Wing Over 1 I noted that it was a fairly flawed game but maybe the sequel might be more polished, but I didn't expect the sequel would basically just be a completely different game that bares almost no resemblance to the original. While the original was a team dogfighting game, the sequel is instead sort of a more serious take on Pilotwings, with the focus of the game being on a flight academy which teaches you how to become a pilot in meticulous detail. Each lesson starts with a briefing, and you also have an instructor who tells you what to do every step of the way (and deducts points if you mess anything up), which reminds me a lot of taking my driving test way back when. Though the game is somewhat complex, it's not THAT complex, this is not simply a lengthy tutorial, the pilot academy basically is the game. While combat is present, you won't be getting to it for a good long time, so if you're just looking for dogfighting this is not the game you want, this game's Japanese title "Become a Pilot!" is a much better description of what you'll be doing in this game and who it's targeted towards. As you might imagine, this game's pacing is not at all fast. Lessons are long, and you cannot fly flat out or skip steps, for example on the turning lesson, you have to maintain a certain speed, altitude, and level of banking. Though you COULD take the turn tighter by flying faster and banking more, you get docked points for this. There is definitely a bit of a unique feel to this game, for example on the stage where you learn to take off, you also have to taxi around the runway and wait at points for clearance from the control tower, which I don't think has ever been represented in any game. When I finally got my clearance to take off and got to the right speed to lift the nose up and have the plane take off, that was actually kind of cool. There are some mild annoyances, like in one stage you have to do a deliberate stall, then recover from it. You have to do the stall at 2000 feet, but starting the stall causes you to lose about 200 feet of altitude, and they'll then complain that you have to go back up to 2000 feet to do it, the correct answer is to quickly gun it and ascend to 2300 feet or so before starting the stall. Lessons cost money, and if you fail, you simply have to pay to take the lesson again. To get money you can fly various side missions that reward money when you complete them. These missions are also not fast, for example the first mission is to deliver someone's lunch, which is a simple "fly from point A to point B" (you don't have to take off or land here). Using the Cessna, this take 5 minutes (I'm afraid to ask how long it would be in a slower plane). These missions do still teach you some stuff, for example in this mission you have to learn how to use the nav computer, but I'll confess I resorted to speedup here. I guess we should also talk about controls and presentation. The control is totally fine. It's actually reasonably intuitive most of the time, certainly this engine could have been used for a more action-oriented game, but it won't give you any real problems. The presentation is also fairly decent. Draw distance is kind of average, and the music is actually pretty good, and it also has full voice acting. At any rate, this game is pretty immersive but it's undeniably a slow burn. I think this is actually a pretty good game, it's just a good game for a very specific audience. While I definitely prefer something like Deadly Skies, there's no question that this is interesting and unique in its own way, and I also think it's substantially better than Pilotwings in pretty much every way.
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