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Last Topic's Ratings:
Home Alone - AAABA - 40% (5)
Rampart (GB) - GGG - 100% (3)
Pac-Man - BBBBA - 10% (5)
Patlabor: The Mobile Police - BBB - 0% (3)
Torpedo Range - AA - 50% (2)
World Ice Hockey - AB - 25% (2)
Wow, I expected to get some pushback for my opinion about Pac-Man, I certainly didn't expect most people to agree with it. Though clearly superior due to the availability of colour, the NES version scored 81%. Of course, that was around 13 years ago, and I wonder if it would fare less well today.
Games for this topic:
Centipede
Fortress of Fear: Wizards & Warriors X
Harvest Moon GBC
Minesweeper
Pocket Stadium
Pri Pri: Primitive Princess
Although I'm listing this under the GBC version, the GB and GBC versions of Harvest Moon 1 are nearly identical and you can rate based on either version. This also goes for Centipede, which also has a GBC version which is basically the same.
Centipede - G
ReplyDeleteFortress of Fear: Wizards & Warriors X - G
Harvest Moon GBC - B
Minesweeper - A
Pocket Stadium - A
Pri Pri: Primitive Princess - B
Centipede is a pretty good port to Gameboy. You might not be familiar with the concept of the game, so I'll start by explaining it. Centipede is somewhat similar to Space Invaders, you play as a little blaster and your goal is to destroy a Centipede that descends from the top of the screen by blasting its segments until nothing remains. If you shoot one of the segments rather than the head of the centipede, it turns into two centipedes, which can make things harder. The field is full of mushrooms, which both block your shots and affects the centipede's movement, and when you destroy a centipede it often leaves a mushroom behind. There are also some other enemies, like Spiders, who hang around at the bottom of the screen and cause problems, fleas, which fall from above and create mushrooms, and scorpions, who create poison mushrooms which can cause further problems. Also, there wasn't really anywhere else to mention this, but you don't have to stay at the very bottom of the screen, you can move up for about the first 30% of the screen, which is helpful to dodge spiders in particular. So, first of all, you can probably immediately tell that there's a lot more going on here compared to Space Invaders. The mushrooms make for a dynamic battlefield (which you can also shape through your own actions), giving the game far more variety and depth compared to most other games of its era. The game looks crisp and clear on the GB screen, and I like that your attack button has autofire, it feels quite nice to play on the platform. It's also a pretty good travel game as playing the game typically takes about 15 minutes, which is about the length of time you want for car trips and such. It still can get a little repetitive and Crystal Quest is still clearly better, but it's clearly a cut above other games from its era like Space Invaders and Pac-Man and it definitely feels like it was ahead of its time.
Wizards & Warriors X is actually pretty decent. This is by far the most straightforward Wizards and Warriors game, which honestly works to its advantage to some degree, as the simpler stage layouts and lack of backtracking help mitigate some of the series' issues, namely that the somewhat stiff movement and abundant enemy counts results in a lot of incremental damage that adds up over time. Since this is a much faster-paced and more linear game, individual actions feel more meaningful and thus avoid taking damage from an enemy feels more directly rewarding. The level layouts are also simpler and tricky platforming sections are lessened (no having to do like 30 pixel perfect jumps to scale a mountain or tree anymore), which also helps. Despite the switch to the game being more linear, stage layouts are still decently varied, making the game still feel like it has quite a bit of content. Something I appreciate is that when you die, you respawn instantly where you were, this actually feels kind of generous for a game of this type. There are also powerups that you can find in chests, but keys are very limited and much of the strategy often involves avoiding chests with weaker items in favour of saving your keys for better items later. Probably the worst aspect of the game are the bosses. They hit extremly hard and fast and will obliterate you until you know their patterns. There's often a fairly simple way to defeat them but it's definitely trial and error to learn it. Oh, and Kuros has completely forgotten how to attack while jumping, but given how inconsistent the jump attack was maybe it's for the best. In any case, this is still a pretty solid game and it might be the best game in the series overall.
Harvest Moon seems like an incredible fit for Game Boy, but the first attempt misses the mark. I'm sure you know the basics of the series by now, but here's a quick refresher. It's a farming game where you take over a run-down farm and try to revitalize it by planting and selling crops and taking care of cows and chickens. In most games in the series, you can also get married to one of a handful of different characters, but this is completely absent here, which is one of the game's biggest issues. The core gameplay of the series has some appeal, but it's always had a big issue with repetition. Each season is 30 days long and you tend to do virtually the same things every day, mainly watering crops and taking care of animals, with occasional crop planting and crop harvesting to slightly break up the tedium. This is where the lack of all social features in this game really hurts, as interacting with the townspeople helps provide a little bit more to do, and the festivals also add a bit more to look forward to but those are also almost totally axed in this game. You can't even forage or fish in this game, well, you can actually eventually get access to fishing, but it barely matters, more on that later. So we're basically looking purely at the core gameplay of animal raising and crop growing here, which gets tedious really fast. Arguably there could be some strategy involving stamina management, particularly as this game does add a groceries system where you can buy food which you eat throughout the day to recover stamina, but this is totally irrelevant because you can always use the hot springs in the tool shed to recover your stamina to full whenever you want, and it doesn't even consume any time to do so, so stamina and everything affecting it is totally irrelevant. As mentioned earlier, technically fishing and mining exist, but the way you get access to them is at the end of each year you get an evaluation from your deceased grandfather and if you've done enough he gives you an upgrade. The first upgrade is to make your farm bigger (which is totally useless since you'd never need that much space), so the earliest you can get the fishing rod is the end of year 2, and the fishing rod basically just makes additional money that you'd never need at that point (2 years is an eternity in this game). The GBC version adds the ability to have the game play itself when it's turned off, which is probably the best way to play the game (it's almost like an early version of an idle game), but this highlights the fact that the game is simply too boring most of the time to be worth playing. You'd think being portable could kinda save it since you could play it in the car or while watching TV or something, but it really doesn't. GBC is already filled with other games that attempt to fill this niche and do this job way better, and this was quite a late release on the platform, notably releasing after Pokemon, which is a vastly better time-killer. Even if you absolutely must have Harvest Moon on Game Boy you're much better served by waiting for the sequels, which address many of this game's problems.
DeleteMinesweeper is pretty much what you'd expect, it's a near 1-to-1 port of the PC game. This is kind of impressive, actually, as the PC game has quite a lot of options, which are mostly represented here. In the basic play mode, you can play on boards of different sizes (with the large boards using half-wide tiles, similar to Sokoban), and you can also customize the number of mines (it will also gradually increase if you keep winning). Controlling the game is straightforward with GB, the two buttons handle revealing and marking just fine, arguably this maybe even controls better than on PC since there's basically no chance of misclicks. The game also includes a story mode of sorts where you go through a handful of preset boards that start with some tiles revealed, and an edit mode where you can make your own puzzles by placing the mines, though IMO the standard version with randomized boards is the main appeal. One thing this version does not have is the protection where your first click is guaranteed to be safe. You absolutely can just select a mine on the first placement and die, which is kind of lame, though you don't really lose much for it. The bigger question is just about how much appeal this game really has. I guess there is something timeless about it, but it's never been a game I've enjoyed playing for all that long. It's quite common for boards to involve some degree of luck (a common situation is your first click will be something like a 2 tile, then you simply have to guess one of the 8 surrounding tiles with no information and there's a 2 in 8 chance that you just lose, and even when you get a board layout that is solvable I feel like it's never super exciting. It is a solid conversion if you ever wanted Minesweeper on the go, but I feel like you could easily do better on the platform and you probably already have access to a free version of this game anyway, so it's really only there for diehard fans of the game.
DeleteWell, Pocket Stadium is absolutely not what I expected. It's a Baseball game, but it plays completely differently from almost every other Baseball game out there. See, instead of being an "action" game, like most other Baseball games where it's about timing and / or aiming the bat as the ball comes towards you, this is instead a strategy game that has no action mechanics at all. When you're batting, you're presented with a grid representing the strike zone. You can select various possible "focus zones", for want of a better term, where the batter will watch a specific zone on the grid for the ball. If the ball enters that zone, he will swing, and if it doesn't, he won't swing. The zones can have different areas, for example, you can aim for a 1x1 tile (which presumably has the most power), or a 1x2 area, or a 3x1 area, and so on. Depending on the batter, they may even have access to a 3x3 swing that covers the entire strike zone, though this is the most likely to ground out so it's kind of a last resort. Note also that just because you swing doesn't mean you hit. You only hit if the ball ends in your hit zone, but there are curves and sliders and such where the ball will move from one square to another, and if it passes your focus zone you will swing and potentially miss. You can actually position your zone outside the strike zone, potentially allow you to hit even if they try to trick you by going outside, or just pick a small zone if you think they're going to throw a ball. After the ball is hit, fielding and running occurs automatically, with you only seeing the result of the swing. When pitching, it's similar, but you instead select and position your pitches. Pitchers also gradually tire, and throwing tricky pitches tires you out faster, so sometimes it's worth just throwing a fastball even if it is the easiest to hit. It's a very unique setup and it is quite interesting and different, and I like some of the strategy behind it, for example if the pitcher is ahead on the count, you probably expect them to throw a ball so you might cover only a small range, though they could then try to be sneaky and throw a top corner fastball or something to catch you napping. There are a couple issues though, most prominently that I feel like ground outs and fly outs are too rare. Even if you use the swings with big hit zones, you still almost always get on base, and with smart use of the system it can be difficult to prevent you from making contact a large amount of the time, which makes offense feel a little overly strong. I feel like the hits with small contact zones should almost always get on base, but the ones with big zones should be a bit less reliable. This also in turn creates relatively little reason to ever bunt and such even though it is an option. Still, it's a pretty interesting core mechanic and I feel like a very interesting game could be created using this kind of system, maybe you could also toss in super moves like in Captain Tsubasa or something. Sadly, it doesn't seem like this game ever got any follow-ups, so it may be doomed just to be an interesting concept.
DeletePri Pri is a basic single-screen puzzle platformer with an obnoxious mechanic that makes it not worth bothering with. The game is unintuitive at first, but it's actually not that complicated. Your goal on each stage is to collect the crystal and then reach the exit ladder, which is usually (always?) in the top right. Your only actions are to walk left and right and swing your hammer. Your hammer doesn't affect enemies, instead it can cause small blocks to fall, potentially squishing enemies and making holes you can fall through. You also have a limited number of "rebirth hammers" per stage, where you can hammer an empty space to create a block (it does not matter if there was originally a block there or not). The basics are mostly fine, the big problem is the existence of the fake blocks. On every stage, some of the ground blocks will be fake and you'll fall through them if you walk on them. This is almost always set up to screw you over, for example you'll hammer a block to create a gap so you can fall and get to the gem, but WHOOPS there's a fake block there so you can't reach it and now you're dead since if you use your hammer to replace the block you now don't have enough to beat the stage. You can sometimes try to guess where the fake blocks might be by looking at what spots would screw you over the hardest if there was a fake block there, but many puzzles effectively rely on trial and error as to which blocks are real and which aren't and it's super obnoxious, especially because you have limited lives. A mechanic like this simply has no business being in a game of this type. If the fall-through blocks were visually distinguishable in some way this game would probably be A, but it makes it such a pain to play I can't recommend it in any capacity.
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