This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Dukes of Hazzard 2, The: Daisy Dukes It Out - BAAAB - 30% (5)
Gundam 0079: The War For Earth - BA - 25% (2)
Liberogrande International - AA - 50% (2)
Mizuki Shigeru no Yokai Butouden - GG - 100% (2)
Pachi Pachi Saga - GA - 75% (2)
South Park: Chef's Luv Shack - BBBGBA - 25% (6)
Wow, this topic was a smackdown for games based on old TV shows. The results of this topic were pretty much the exact opposite of what I predicted.
Games for this topic:
Croc 2
GP Challenge
Hunter X Hunter: Maboroshi no Greed Island
Logic Pro Adventure
Soukyuu Gurentai: Oubushutsugeki
Street Sk8er 2
A few sequels to games we covered very early in the PS1 GAB in this topic, which means I'm going to have to go back to the originals to refresh my memory on them.
Croc 2 - A
ReplyDeleteGP Challenge - A
Hunter X Hunter: Maboroshi no Greed Island - G
Logic Pro Adventure - G
Soukyuu Gurentai: Oubushutsugeki - G
Street Sk8er 2 - A
Croc 2 features one major improvement over Croc 1 but also brings with it a handful of issues that make it a mixed experience overall. The one major improvement is obvious - Croc 2 supports the dualshock. This means you can now play the game without tank controls, which does make it feel way better. However, the camera is pretty bad (it's way too aggressive at repositioning itself) and jumps still feel a little delayed, so it's still not fantastic to control, it's just adequate. In terms of design, they also tried to make it a bigger game than the original, but I'm not thrilled about how they went about this. Like many 3D platformers of the time, they've incorporated some collectathon and adventure elements where you can collect all the gems on a stage to get a trophy, which is key to fully completing the game. However, many of these gems require the use of special items to get them. Okay, this is not unheardof, many platformers have you learn new moves throughout the game, but these are not new moves that you learn, they are instead consumable items that you have to buy with the gems you pick up in each stage. They're not crazily expensive, but the need to constantly visit the shop to buy more of these (and the fact that you have no way of knowing what you'll need before entering a stage) is definitely annoying. This is a comparatively more minor issue compared to the game's biggest flaw, though, which is that the game has no checkpoints. Well, technically it does, there are checkpoint gongs, but the only thing they do is warp you back there if you fall into a pit. If you run out of health, you game over and have to go back to the hub world. As the levels can be quite long, this feels really lame, especially given the game's somewhat imprecise controls and hit detection, which can cause you to take a lot of unnecessary damage that you cannot easily recover from as health pickups are really rare. The rest of the game is mostly all right, it's cute and there's a fairly large number of stages with a decent amount of variety, but it's clearly still fairly significantly inferior to Spyro, especially Spyro 2, which released around the same time.
GP Challenge is very similar to Sports Superbike, which had the same developer. This is a mechanically competent but very content-barren racing game. The driving engine is actually quite solid, it controls well with both DPad and Analog, and it also looks pretty decent and has a rock solid framerate even when a bunch of other cars are onscreen. It's definitely very arcade-style, grass is kind of just a suggestion and there's no pitting, and I feel like you could say that it doesn't really "feel" like F1 as the cars don't feature the tight control that you'd usually expect, it sort of feels more like a traditional car racing game, but it still plays well enough and it's actually much more fun to drive than many other F1 games on the platform. The game's biggest problem is that they just kinda didn't do much of anything with this engine. There's only single race mode and there's only four tracks, there's no tournament mode or any progression of any kind. It's like, still kind of okay because the driving engine carries the game, but it could have been so much more. It's actually kind of baffling that they didn't just add, say, 4 more tracks and a tournament mode because this game could probably quite easily be G. I do see that this developer later put out another racing game that apparently features 23 tracks and a full tournament mode, so maybe that game will finally showcase the true potential of this engine.
Hunter X Hunter: Maboroshi no Greed Island is a Mystery Dungeon game, similar to Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon or the Shiren games. Like Shiren, your level is reset to one every time you go into a dungeon, but there's a significant amount of persistant progression in terms of your weapons, which can be permanently upgraded with money, making money kind of like a substitute for experience in this game. Obviously, the game is based on Hunter X Hunter, and you can get quite a lot of different characters from the series as companions. They can also level up and their weapons can also be upgraded, and you can even turn on a setting to let you directly control them, though obviously this makes the game a lot slower so you'll probably usually want to let the AI control them. Another unique mechanic for the genre is that you have spells. This game has no hunger meter, instead you have AP, which is needed to attack or use spells. Attacking only takes 1AP, but spells can use quite a bit, but you get more AP from levelling up. Many spells are buffs, but there's also heals, traps, and some interesting effects like duplicating characters. Something else that's worth noting is that the difficulty of the game seems a little on the low side. There's a ton of dungeons, but they're generally pretty short, with no dungeons having more than 10 floors until the postgame. Enemies do hit hard and you can get trashed pretty easily if you don't improve your gear enough, but arguably the focus is a bit more on the grind compared to other mystery dungeon games which focus more on skillful use of items to survive. In that sense, you could probably make the case that some of the other top games in the genre like Shiren 2 are probably superior, but I also don't mind having a bit of a less stressful experience. Plus, the game's presentation is pretty good, there's a decent amount of variety to the dungeons and a ton of characters from the series available as companions. It's a pretty decent game overall.
DeleteLogic Pro Adventure is another Picross game, and it's easily one of the best we've seen so far. For starters, every time we've reviewed a picross game I've complained about the same thing. When you complete a row, the next step is to X out the other blocks. The logical way to do this is to hold the X button and then hold down the dpad to mark all the empty boxes, but in most early picross games, this will erase the boxes you already coloured in. This is the first Picross game in memory that gets this right, holding down the X will never overwrite filled squares. This instantly makes this feel like twice as good to play. It's worth noting that this doesn't extend to the button to colour in the spaces, which it should, so you still have to be careful with that, but marking the entire rest of a row is less common so it's not as much of an issue. On to the unique features of the game itself, as the title implies the most notable feature is the adventure mode. Here, you travel across a world map doing puzzles to obtain coloured crystals, with the goal being to get 50 of each colour. As you do the puzzles, you can get items that you can use to solve parts of the puzzle, similar to Pokemon Picross, which is good because the puzzles are timed and sometimes the time limits can be pretty short. This mode also warns you if you make a mistake, which causes you to lose points, but prevents you from screwing up the whole puzzle. In any case, this mode is pretty accessible and good for beginners. There's also a free mode where you can just solve all the puzzles one at a time, and there's an insane number of them (there's 1000). The graphics and music in the game are also quite good, I quite like the rabbit character with the huge mallet. Definitely worth a look for any picross fans.
DeleteSoukyuu Gurentai is pretty similar to the Saturn version, which is actually pretty impressive as this is a very nice-looking Saturn game. As before, this game is basically a way better version of Rayforce. It has the same lock-on gimmick, but is just drastically better designed in general, having much better utilization of space and better visual readability. This is kind of a bullet hell game, but it never really feels unfair because patterns are quite readable and when you die it usually feels like your own fault. Compared to the Saturn version, the Playstation version seems to look a touch worse (I think maybe its sprite scaling is not quite as good) and there's a bit more slowdown (there's a noticeable part when approaching the convoy on stage 3 for example) but for the most part it still runs fine, and it actually has some extras, like some added cutscenes, voice acting, and a fourth playable ship. I do feel like this version is probably a touch better overall if only because the fourth ship is really fun, though it's a very solid game on either platform and probably one of the better shmups of the era, especially if you're into bullet hell games.
Street Sk8er 2 is actually very different from the first game. The original Street Sk8er is a very heavily arcade-style game where you can only do tricks at certain points and a lot of the game is kinda just about moving from trick point to trick point fast and managing the timer. Street Sk8er 2 features a completely new, vastly more freeform gameplay style where you can now do tricks anywhere, and trick chaining is now a major focus of the game, similar to Tony Hawk, though it retains the general "get from point A to point B within a certain time and score at least X" structure of the first game. It works well enough, but as I mentioned earlier, since the release of Street Sk8er 1 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater came out, and comparisons to that game are totally unavoidable, especially as the game has been redesigned to be more similar to it. Mechanically, it's not the worst approximation of it. Doing tricks still feels decent, grinding works fairly well, and trick to grind to trick combos are just as satisfying to pull off as in THPS. I was surprised that you can even wall ride in this game, though it's square instead of triangle. There are moments when I was pulling off long trick chains when I caught myself instinctively pressing Down Up to try to manual (I play a lot of THPS 1+2 on Switch 2), so it's at least a close enough approximation of Tony Hawk that my brain was briefly fooled by it. Still, there's no question that THPS is way better. One of the biggest issues is that this game simply doesn't have anywhere near the same volume of content. There's 5 main parks, and to their credit, they are actually pretty big and have hidden secret areas and such, but the game doesn't have anything similar to THPS's park goals and isn't as open-ended, it's still a mostly point to point experience and this significantly cuts down on the playtime you'll actually get out of these locations. The game's engine also clearly struggles with some of the areas in the game as slowdown is reasonably common in some maps. It's definitely not a bad game and I do still kind of enjoy it, but there's no question that it can't hold a candle to THPS2, which came out at around the same time. I actually kind of wish they had stuck closer to the style of the first game and just focused on adding more content and polishing it more, because I think that would have helped it have more of a unique identity.