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Last Topic's Ratings:
Hot Wheels Extreme Racing - AA - 50% (2)
Incredible Hulk, The: The Pantheon Saga - BABBB - 10% (5)
Las Vegas Dream 2 - GG - 100% (2)
NCAA GameBreaker 2001 - AAGB - 50% {4}
Slayers Royal - ABB - 17% (3)
Wing Over 2 - GAA - 67% (3)
Well, I'm glad to see we didn't miss out on too much by not rating Slayers Royal on Saturn. Actually, there's a couple more games on the PS1 list that we didn't rate on Saturn, mostly because I went back and did another pass on Japanese-only RPGs about 6 months ago and added more games that I omitted when the list was first created, so those games will get their day in the sun eventually.
Games for this topic:
Dukes of Hazzard 2, The: Daisy Dukes It Out
Gundam 0079: The War For Earth
Liberogrande International
Mizuki Shigeru no Yokai Butouden
Pachi Pachi Saga
South Park: Chef's Luv Shack
This looks like an interesting set. I remember the original Liberogrande being a pretty unique game.
Dukes of Hazzard 2, The: Daisy Dukes It Out - A
ReplyDeleteGundam 0079: The War For Earth - B
Liberogrande International - A
Mizuki Shigeru no Yokai Butouden - G
Pachi Pachi Saga - G
South Park: Chef's Luv Shack - G
The Dukes of Hazzard 2 is unfortunately a bit of a downgrade from the first game. The biggest difference compared to the first game is that this is now an open-world game. Rather than more conventional NFS-style street courses, you now have large maps with multiple routes. Unfortunately, this comes with numerous drawbacks. The first is load time. The game's map of Hazzard County is quite big, but the game can't load it all in at once, so when you reach the end of the map the game has to load for a few seconds to get to the next one, which also brings you to a dead stop. This feels lame and I suspect this could have been avoided with a better engine. The second problem is that although the maps are conceptually open, generally every route except the one they want you to take will be blocked in some way, so if you deviate at all from the intended path you'll slam into a wall, even if that route should go to your destination. The characters will call out the direction the game wants you to turn when you get to a fork, but this instruction is given fairly late, which will often cause you to miss turns. Compounding this problem, the cops are much more aggressive this time around and if at any point you stop the car when they're nearby, you instantly lose the mission and have to restart, and missions this time can be fairly long. The core driving action is mostly the same as the first game, it's very bouncy (as it should be) and the presentation is still pretty good, in particular you do get to see much more of Hazzard County than before, but I definitely feel like the game is significantly more frustrating to play than the first game, which is a a significant problem because this is kind of a "comfort food" franchise where you don't want to be stuck running an annoying mission over and over again.
Gundam 0079: The War For Earth is an interactive movie game, similar to games like Dragon's Lair and Brain Dead 13, though it's much worse than those games. Like those games, the gameplay predominantly consists of guessing which button to press at predetermined action sequences. You have 7 at your disposal, move in any direction with the DPad, Attack, Block, and Interact. Attacking is further complicated by the fact that you carry multiple weapons that you have to toggle with circle. In virtually every situation in the game, only one action will work, while all the others cause an immediate game over, and it's rarely obvious which one it will be. For example, early on you get ambushed by an enemy with an energy axe, which he swings at you. My first thought was to dodge with back, but this doesn't work. Neither does attacking with the vulcan. The only viable sequence here is to first block, then strike with the beam saber when he attempts to attack again. The part about this that makes no sense is the cutscene shows you very slowly pulling out your beam saber, by which time he obviously would have attacked, so realistically the vulcan (which is an instant attack) would have made vastly more sense. Later on you get ambushed by mobile suits and the commander tells you to not to engage them. Obviously attacking is death, you might think shielding might work since they attack with guns, but that also gets you killed, as do down, left, and right, you know, the buttons you might think you actually need to press to evade. No, the correct choice is Up, because apparently this moves you straight up rather than forwards. So we've established you're going to die a lot, but the death animations are also lame. They're all completely canned and have no variation depending on what action you attempted, for example, if you attempt to fire on the enemies, it doesn't show you attempt to shoot them and get overwhelmed, you just kind of stand there and get shot, which is exactly what happens if you take any action except the correct one. This is notably something that most other games in this genre do better. Oh, and if you die by making a wrong choice, you don't just redo that scene, you have to load a save. There are also some minigames periodically, like having to shoot enemies in shooting gallery style. These are maybe marginally less bad but they're still pretty bad. Something worth noting is that in the PC version, when you have to make a choice, generally only a few of the options are highlighted, to suggest what action you should take, but this seems not to be a feature on PS1, even if you reduce the difficulty level (I think this just gives you marginally more time to choose an action). As for the presentation, it's kind of tolerable I guess, the intro shot over the colony looks nice, but the action sequences are very stiff and I feel like this would have been way nicer in anime style rather than the 3D style the game uses. Of course, the game is also very short. In any case, it's not really worth playing, if you want to experience it just watch a walkthrough of the english version on youtube.
DeleteLiberogrande International is a difficult game to rate. For starters, my memories of the original game were somewhat off. I was almost positive I had rated the original game as B, as I remember it being an interesting idea with a lot of problems, and I was stunned to find I had originally rated it as A, as my initial impression of International was it was a huge improvement over the original but still had a fair number of problems. Going back to the original, I found that although International does some things better, it also does some things substantially better than the sequel as well, so in some ways it's more of a "two steps forward one step back" situation. But I suppose we're getting ahead of ourselves, we should talk about the game itself first. Liberogrande is a very unique soccer game where you control only a single player and you view the court from that player's perspective. This completely shifts the way you need to think about playing a game like this, and I think it's a very interesting take on the sport. In the first game, what you can see is very limited and the camera is definitely a problem as it doesn't adjust fast when the ball moves. This is largely fixed, the camera now shows a wider angle and moves much faster to track the ball, the only real problem is that when receiving a pass, it doesn't shift to face the opponent goal fast enough. Another major change is that when you don't have the ball, you can now tell the allies what to do, mainly to pass to you or shoot, which definitely feels like it should have been in the original, though I guess you could argue it clashes with the "you're just one player" approach of the series. However, the changes aren't all positive. By far the biggest downgrade is to passing. Passing in this game absolutely sucks, even charged passes are extremely slow and every time you pass it feels like it kills the momentum of the play. This is notably not an issue at all in the original, where passes are fast and effective. This means that in this game the optimal strategy is almost always to be as much of a ball hog as possible and run the ball down the entire field by yourself whenever possible, and it removes much of the strategy as one-timers and such are garbage in this game due to how lousy passes are. Your entire offense will involve "get close, take a shot, hope for a rebound, kick in the rebound for a goal". Additionally, they implemented a somewhat strange change where if a loose ball is near you you have to press X to control it, which is not the case in the original (or almost any other soccer game) as you merely need to touch the ball to control it. As such, there's some things about this version I really like and some I don't. The camera control and interface generally feels a lot better, but the game is slower and more basic in terms of strategy. I do think this game is probably slightly better overall and I do think you could make the case for G due to its uniqueness, but I really wish there was a third game that combined the strengths of both titles.
DeleteCall me crazy, but I kinda love Mizuki Shigeru no Yokai Butouden. The first thing you'll notice is that this game's graphics are actually complete butt. I'm not sure if this is intentional to give the game more of a weird / campy vibe, because it's definitely kind of endearing in a weird way. From looking at it, you would expect this to be a kusoge, but surprisingly it's very mechanically competent. Easily the biggest thing this game has going for it is it has proper chain combos and cancelling, which is vanishingly rare in early 3D fighters. Each fighter has 2-3 specials, which you perform using the shoulders, and you can usually chain lights into heavy attacks, giving a 3-hit combo string of light, heavy, special. Blocking is properly mapped to back / downback (no button blocking here) and even jumping attacks are not bad at all as this game has a proper hop jump that comes out sensibly fast. There are even supers that you can do when your health is very low, though they do an insane amount of damage and part of the strategy is managing your combos so the opponent never gets into super range. It's a pretty basic setup, but it's still pretty satisfying. Low profiling a high attack with crouching heavy punch and cancelling into Shoryuken may not be the most complex thing ever, but it's always satisfying. The game's 10 characters are pretty varied and after beating the game (or entering a code) you can play as the two boss characters by holding L or R. Also, surprisingly, despite the graphics being pretty basic, the music and voice acting is pretty good, and the game even has character-specific endings. It's undeniably a simple game, but it has a fair bit of charm and it's pretty fun to play.
DeletePachi Pachi Saga is a weird game, but it's also kind of interesting. While it should be obvious from the title (though I missed it initially), this game has some Pachinko elements, though it is also a turnbased RPG. The basic premise of the game is that it takes place in a fantasy world where luck controls everything, so they summon the luckiest person in the universe to be their new legendary hero, who happens to be a nerdy pachinko jockey from our world. True to the premise, the battle system completely runs on luck, with basically everything being decided by the slots. First, you spin the reels to decide who attacks, between one of your characters or one of the enemies. Then, you select what you want to do, like using attacks or magic. You then have to spin the reels again to see how good of a hit it was, if you get a lot of attack symbols you'll do big damage, but with few symbols you may miss entirely. Spells also require spinning the reels, and can totally miss, though thankfully using items is guaranteed (though only the one character who can't use magic can use items in battle). You can, in theory, attack a ton of times in a row if you get lucky, or have the enemy attack frequently if you're unlucky, though this seems rare, perhaps this is because of the main character's luck power, but things seem to go your way more often than not. There's also Pachinko in the game. There are a couple times where you have to play it for an event, but these sections are very short. For example, at the beginning, you have to play Pachinko to power up a machine that will show you where the princess is, but all you have to do is win the slots one time, which only takes a minute or so (which takes very few tries, you seem to win the slots unusually often in this game, again probably due the main character being the luckiest person alive). There's no levelling up in the game, battles yield only money and not experience, however you can power up the characters, you just do it with money. You can buy items called Mini Hearts and Mini Stars to increase your HP and MP respectively, obviously there's also weapons and armor to increase your stats, and you can also buy spells for the main character and consumable items as well. Even many key items have to be bought with money. You absolutely can just grind fights for this, but you can also play Pachinko to earn money in town instead. I kind of like this approach, if you want to play Pachinko you can, and it does give you a goal to work towards, but if you think Pachinko is lame you can just grind random battles instead. The game's storyline is very tongue-in-cheek and self-aware, with a lot of wacky dialogue. For example, early in the game you have to break into a theives' hideout. Someone will ask you if you know the password, and you reply that you don't and thus he won't let you in. Eventually you have to find a note in the warehouse that explains to get into the thieves hideout, just tell the guard that you do know the password. This does indeed get you in and the characters poke fun at it afterwards. The game does have a couple issues though. For starters, towns are really big. The prerendered background art for the towns is actually pretty nice, but it can be a bit hard to find all the shops and stuff at first, especially if you don't read Japanese. Secondly, although combat zones are physically fairly small, the encounter rate is extremely high. A very simple cheat code exists to disable random encounters (just hold R2), so if you get sick of doing battles you can use this. Other than that, it's still a reasonably fun game. It has some charm, the pacing is reasonably fast, and I like that it does things a little bit differently. I don't think this is quite the good pachinko game I've been looking for (mainly because you can bypass Pachinko entirely if you want), but it's still a reasonably solid game anyway.
DeleteChef's Luv Shack is a downgrade from the N64 version, but it's still fun. The core idea of the game is the same, it's a "You Don't Know Jack" style trivia game with minigames and tons of South Park fanservice. Something I appreciate is that the quiz questions are actually pretty reasonable for the most part, and even if you get one wrong hearing your kid grouse about it does help take some of the sting out of it. The minigames are also of fairly high quality, generally being based on classic arcade games and such. There are a couple of changes from the N64 version, most of which are for the worse. The first change is that there's now load time. It's not egregiously long, but compared to how smooth the N64 version is it's definitely noticeable. Another change is that you can't choose the question categories anymore for some reason, they're just given automatically. Maybe this is to try to prevent you from seeing duplicate questions but it feels like a weird choice. A positive change is that the questions in this version are now voiced by Chef, whereas they're just text in the N64 version, though this doesn't change the game much, and you can now no longer buzz in early to screw yourself over (it will reveal the whole question upon doing this, which it doesn't on N64). These changes are fairly minor and it's still a fun party game, though the N64 version is recommended if you have the option.
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