This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Battle Bull - GAG - 83% (3)
Crayon Shin-Chan: Ora to Shiro wa Otomodachi da yo - AA - 50% (2)
J.League Fighting Soccer: The King of Ace Strikers - BB - 0% (2)
Jeopardy - AAAA - 50% (4)
Ninja Boy - AGG - 83% (3)
Puyo Puyo - AAAAA - 50% (5)
It's interesting to compare the performance of the different versions of Puyo Puyo across the GAB topics. The SNES version got 43%, the Genesis version got a whopping 77%, and now the GB version gets 50%. It just goes to show, Dr. Robotnik makes anything better.
Games for this topic:
Home Alone
Rampart (GB)
Pac-Man
Patlabor: The Mobile Police
Torpedo Range
World Ice Hockey
Please note that the GB and GBC versions of Rampart are totally different, so make sure you're rating the original GB version for this topic. I'm also kind of interested to try out Patlabor, after seeing a number of games based on it over the years.
Home Alone - A
ReplyDeleteRampart (GB) - G
Pac-Man - B
Patlabor: The Mobile Police - B
Torpedo Range - A
World Ice Hockey - A
Home Alone is a very faithful port of the SNES game. In case you don't remember, the goal of the game is collect the various valuables strewn throughout the house and deposit them into various chutes leading down to the basement to protect them from the robbers, while not getting killed in the process of course. On SNES, this is not the most impressive game, but it's still sort of impressive to see the entire game shoved onto gameboy, the level layouts are totally intact with the only real issue being the removal of screen scrolling in favour of distinct screens that swap when you get to the edge. The sections at the end of each level where you have to explore the basement and avoid enemies are also changed and are generally somewhat better on GB, and there's also newly added boss battles here as well. The controls are definitely still a little rough and it's probably a bit of a lower A, but as licensed games go you could do worse. Still, it's too bad it wasn't based on the Genesis game because that would have been amazing to have as a portable title.
Surprisingly, Rampart is actually quite different from the NES / Arcade game. It's been a while since we covered it, so here's a refresher on the basics. At the start of the game, you choose a castle, which is surrounded by walls. You can then place cannons inside the castle. The game is divided into rounds, during the rounds enemies will shoot at your castle and you can shoot back at them with your cannons. You don't actually have to kill them to win, but eliminating them helps mitigate damage. After a certain time passes, the round ends and now you have to repair the damage to your castle. Your castle is made up out of squares that represent the walls, and you're given tetris piece-like shapes to fill in the gaps. To survive, you must complete a continuous wall around at least one castle, though there are additional castles on the map and you can also optionally surround them as well. Assuming you survive, you're allowed to place more cannons and the process repeats. It's a simple idea, but it's a bit more complex than it sounds. The damage to your castle each round is kind of random, and you can often get awkwardly-shaped holes that are hard to fill in, especially if you've blocked off a lot of your space with cannons. Setting up the castle to be feasibly repairable is important. For example, you often want to place the cannons in a spot where you have a lot of space to expand, as filling in a gap with little space is hard. You don't have to place all the cannons they give you and you may often not want to. Additionally, later enemies start firing shots that create craters, which are holes that can never be filled in, you just have to build around them. It actually has a surprising amount of depth. At any rate, all of this also applies to the NES / Arcade version, so we should go over the changes for the GB version. The core concept is very similar, but the screen is much smaller, with the enemies attacking from a totally separate screen that you have to scroll to. There's much less space to build, which forces you to be smarter with your cannon placement, and there's also a new mechanic where a treasure appears on the map surrounded by rocks. To get the treasure, you have to blast the rocks first, then surround it like a castle, which is hard but worth a ton of points. It still feels fairly similar to the original version, but I feel like it's a bit more strategic and the different levels feel like they matter more due to the limited space available. Oh, and you also get lives, so you're not eliminated if you lose once. Overall, it's a pretty good conversion and I might even slightly prefer it to the original.
I had written up a previous review of Pac-Man which was highly critical of its zoomed in view that makes it so you can't see the whole screen and basically ruins the game, but someone helpfully pointed out that you can access a mode where you can see the whole screen via a code (just press Right on the title screen) which does make the experience drastically better, but I think overall this version is still B, it's just a better B. Pac-Man is a really basic and repetitive game that tends to get old pretty fast. For the first few levels, the power pellets are overpowered, you can kinda just chain the power pellets to keep the ghosts helpless most of the time, unless you're trying to maximize your points by eating all of the ghosts, these stages are trivial. Once you get to the stages where the game gets challenging, the power pellet becomes weak, and you have to eat a lot of dots while the ghosts are chasing you. This can be a little exciting, but this is where the other flaw with this version crops up. In this version, all four ghosts look exactly the same. They actually all have different behavior (and that is preserved here), and a critical element to navigating the later stages is knowing the position of each ghost. In particular, knowing Pinky's position is vital, as Pinky is the one that tries to trap you. While you can kinda try to determine who's who by watching their behaviour, there's no question that this kills a lot of the nuance of the game and the early levels just don't stay interesting that long. You might think this game would still be kind of okay as an early time killer, but it actually didn't arrive on Game Boy as early as you'd expect, Game Boy had actually been out for almost 2 full years when this game released and you already had quite a few options that were a fair bit better. There are also notably two later versions of Pac-Man on the system that are both clearly better than this one, including the very significantly superior Game Boy Color version, so even if you do want portable Pac-Man I'd strongly advise to wait for that one.
DeletePatlabor is a strange game but it has some significant flaws. It's kind of like a turn-based RPG of sorts, albeit one with a strange battle system and no levelling. The game is divided into distinct stages and you start each stage on a top down map with visible encounters. In battle, each side chooses 5 actions at a time. Some actions cost BP, of which you have a limited amount, but you always have the punch which costs nothing. Sometimes your attacks will miss and sometimes a player can get stunned, so it's sometimes useful to defend, but for the most part you can just choose your strong attacks over and over and if you heal between fights you should be fine. This gameplay is kind of okay, but it's actually not the focus of the game. To clear each stage, you need to enter a certain building and enter a 5 digit code within 3 tries. Every time you beat an encounter, you get a clue towards the code, but these clues are extremely cryptic and there's also red herrings. In the first stage, you get fairly simple clues like 3=5 after fights. You would think this means the third digit is 5 (or the other way around), but it doesn't mean any of these things and in fact none of the digits in the password are the ones they give you. I'm sure you have to manipulate it in some way but it's super complicated and most people would almost certainly get stuck. Compounding the problem, if you get the password wrong 3 times it's a game over and you have to restart the entire thing, and you cannot see the hints a second time, so you'd effectively have to write them all down and then spend 5 minutes staring at them to try to solve the puzzle, which is obviously terrible for a portable game where you probably won't have access to pen and paper all the time. Anyway, obviously the answer is just to look up a guide as to what the puzzle solutions are since they're the same every time, though the rest of the game isn't really interesting enough to carry the experience on its own. It's just a classic case of the core idea behind this game just not being fun.
DeleteTorpedo Range is an okay action game. The basic gist of the game is that you control a sub and have to conquer 5 countries on a large map. Your sub is initially weak, though, so you need to start by attacking naval vessels belonging to each country. When you approach a vessel, it starts a minigame of sorts where you do battle with them. There are four types of ships that all have different minigames, there's an underwater battle against various subs, another underwater battle against an aircraft carrier where you have to fire out of the water to hit the planes, a shooting gallery style battle against some cruisers, and a boss battle of sorts against a battleship where you have to take out its turrets. Each of these battles is rated from 1-4 stars which determines how agressive the enemies are and how much damage their attacks deal. Winning these battles earns points you can use to buy upgrades, either more maximum health and more torpedos, and you can also buy super shots. After every battle, your health and torpedos will recover to full, but the super shots do not recover and thus are really only useful for the port battles. Speaking of, to actually make progress you have to attack the countries themselves. Technically defeating their navy is optional, but the port battles are not winnable without upgrades as you literally won't have enough shots. Once you finish one country, you just repeat for the others, they're all exactly the same, which is a bit lame. The core gameplay loop is okay, but it definitely gets repetitive as you tend to do the same thing over and over. The battleship battles are way too hard, not helped by the fact that you can't attack after you get hit and you're disabled for a long time. You can win them via strafing but they're way harder than everything else and the rewards aren't any better so you'll probably just skip them. I do think the aircraft carrier battles are fun, but ultimately there's kind of not a lot of game here. What's present is okay but I wish they had made every country unique in some way.
DeleteWorld Ice Hockey is a fairly basic Hockey game. It uses a vertical perspective and I feel like the puck speed and player sizes are generally about right, though players skate very fast with the puck so you can kinda just skate the puck down the ice without passing a lot of the time. Goalies have very basic AI and you can score every time by doing a diagonal pass from the correct position, but it's relatively tricky to line it up perfectly so it doesn't totally trivialize the game. Checking and Faceoffs are functional but basic and there's also fighting but you just mash. There's not really much more to say about it than this and honestly this is probably kinda close to B territory, but I think it's just good enough to stay out of it.