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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Centipede - GGGGG - 100% (5)
Fortress of Fear: Wizards & Warriors X - AAGA - 63% (4)
Harvest Moon GBC - BBB - 0% (3)
Minesweeper - AAAA - 50% (4)
Pocket Stadium - ABB - 17% (3)
Pri Pri: Primitive Princess - BB - 0% (2)
A very strong showing for Centipede. I feel like this is sometimes kind of left out of the discussion when people talk about the big games from Gen 2, so it's nice to see it get some redemption here. Also, I was quite surprised to see Harvest Moon get all Bs, I expected to be an outlier on that one. We'll see what happens with the rest of the series.
Games for this topic:
Best of the Best: Championship Karate
Choplifter 2
Dungeon Land
Megalit
Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs' Big Break
Track Meet
TTA: Babs Big Break was one of my friend's favourite games when we were kids, but I've actually never played it. So far I feel like most of the games that were popular when I was young have held up fairly well, so I'm curious to try this one.
Best of the Best: Championship Karate - A
ReplyDeleteChoplifter 2 - A
Dungeon Land - A
Megalit - G
Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs' Big Break - A
Track Meet - A
Best of the Best looks really good, but it's a fairly basic game. The first thing that has to be noted is that this game's presentation is fantastic. It uses rotoscoped graphics similar to Prince of Persia and the visuals look quite great on GB. In terms of the gameplay, it's a pretty simple game. It's basically divided into two parts, a training minigame where you can power up your character, and the actual matches where you fight. The training game is very simple, two of the three games are just mash, while the third is a reflex test which is better than the other two but still feels kind of unresponsive. The matches are basically just mash, you basically just press your best attacks at each range over and over and try to stunlock the opponent. I find it kind of lame that the sweep does basically nothing other than reset the situation, it does pretty much no damage so there's no reward from hitting a sweep. Matches last pretty long and individual hits don't matter much, so it's a pretty mindless game, but at least it looks and runs well.
Choplifter 2 is a fairly decent game with a single significant problem. The basic gist of the game is that you're flying a helicopter through a warzone to rescue hostages. You have to clear out enemy fortifications and then land the helicopter near the hostages to pick them up, then after collecting enough fly back to the dropoff point and repeat the process until you've collected enough hostages to win the stage. The basic gist of the game is solid and the action is fast and fun for the most part. The biggest problem has to do with your attacks. There are 3 possible orientations for the chopper, facing left, right, and forward. The forward orientation is required to attack downwards, which is very important as the vast majority of your opponents are ground targets. The problem is how you change your helicopter's orientation. To change it, you have to release and then tap the DPad. For example, tapping the Dpad left moves you from facing right to facing straight, while if you instead hold it you don't change your direction and instead just fly with the indicated orientation. The problem is, of course, if you ever need to make quick movements, which you do often, you'll often change your orientation without wanting to. It's possible to work around it, but combined with the fact that there are a lot of enemies and you have very little health it is a fairly significant problem. This was kind of an unnecessary issue too, I feel like they should have simply eliminated this mechanic entirely and just made one button shoot straight and the other button drop bombs. There is a super bomb you can pick up periodically (this is what the B button is mapped to), but this powerup could easily have been eliminated or simply replaced your existing bomb and it would have made the game better overall.
Dungeon Land is a strange game that somewhat resembles Battleship. The game is played with 2 players (either another person or an AI), and prior to the start of the game you have to create a maze for the other player. The maze is drawn on a 9x9 grid and consists of a starting position, an ending position, and a number of walls. The goal, for each player, is to move their character from the starting position to the ending position, but you only uncover the maze one tile at a time and every time you hit a wall your turn ends and control passes to the next person, with the winner being the one that gets to the ending tile first. I suppose in that sense it's kind of like an anti-battleship because you want to avoid the walls rather than find them, but the idea is similar in any case. It is a bit less random than battleship can be, though, since you know the opponent wants to impede your progress towards the exit, you can generally rule out certain parts of the board as being unnecessary as you make progress due to the way that the mazes tend to be set up (though you can be diabolical and make a long path that seems to be correct but is actually a dead end, at the risk of your maze being trivially solved if you're unlucky). The game offers a number of variations on this concept, like a version with monsters you have to battle in rocks-paper-scissors style, and there's a quest mode where you do a number of these matches and can get items that let you cheat a little bit, and in some modes after winning a map you get an action-style boss battle, but for the most part the basic gameplay of maze exploration remains the same. Overall, it's an okay game that's kind of unique, but it's undeniably a very basic concept. I wish there were a couple more pieces that you could place in the mazes to let you be a bit more creative with their design.
DeleteMegalit is a simple-looking but reasonably unique puzzle game. The basic gist of the game is that you control a little character who has to dissasemble a tower of blocks so that all of the blocks are placed on the ground rather than on top of each other. In doing so, you have to avoid dropping a block by two or more tiles at once (which will cause it to break), dropping a block on top of yourself (which causes you to get squished), or trapping yourself in some way. The game has a pretty good tutorial (its "easy mode"), which has a good difficulty curve and helps you learn many of the patterns you'll need to use on the harder levels. The puzzles are not usually inordinately taxing, but they still have sort of that "aha" moment when you solve it, even though for bigger puzzles if you get the general gist of it you can probably sort of see what you'll need to do from the start. The game's second mode, the Quest mode, is timed (though the time limits are very generous) and commits the cardinal puzzle game sin of having limited lives, but at least you get a password every 5 stages so the maximum amount of progress you can feasibly lose by running out of lives is fairly small, and if you plan ahead it's relatively feasible not to die anyway. There's not really too much else to say about the game, the controls are fine and the presentation is fairly basic, but it's fairly well-polished and feels like it offers something reasonable unique as puzzle games go.
TTA: Babs Big Break is a fairly standard platformer. In many ways, this reminds me of NES Tiny Toons 1, but much shorter and probably not quite as good overall. For starters, though it doesn't affect the score much, something that bothers me is that despite this game ostensibly being about Babs, Babs herself is not playable at all in this game (she really should have been playable at least for the final boss), in fact the game features cameos from virtually every character in the series except for her, instead you play as Buster, Plucky, and Hampton, trying to catch up to and protect Babs as she goes off to become an actress. You can swap between the three characters at any time, but they're pretty much identical except for their weapon, which is used with B. Buster throws carrots in an arc, Plucky throws pineapples that bounce, and Hampton rolls melons along the ground. These attacks have limited ammo, though you constantly find more in boxes and you can also hop on top of most enemies anyway. The game has only four stages which have a little nonlinearity to them. As part of each stage, you have to find one of the other Tiny Toons characters, who will help you overcome an obstacle at some point in the stage. Sadly, these sections are totally noninteractive, which is unfortunate because playing as these characters would have helped add a bit of variety. You can also collect gems that you can use to play bonus games, but there are only two such games and they aren't that great. Each stage also ends in a boss, though they're fairly simple. Presentation-wise, the game looks pretty great, it's very well-animated and all of the Tiny Toons characters are instantly recognizable. The game's biggest failing is probably in terms of control. The characters are very slow (you can't run), but they're also very slippery, when you release the DPad you take quite a while to come to a stop, which can make precision platforming somewhat annoying and can cause you to take hits in ways that you probably wouldn't in a game with more responsive controls. And of course, the game is also pretty short, especially if you're not really thorough with collecting gems and items, which you really don't need to be. It's all right, but I don't feel it's nearly as strong as something like Adventure Island or Super Mario Land 2.
DeleteTrack Meet is basically what you'd expect. Like all games of this type, it involves an enormous degree of mash. Every single event requires you to repeatedly mash the A button, along with occasionally pressing B to start an angle counter and pressing B again to choose it (this annoys me to no end as in the Konami games, you instead hold and release the B button to do this). A somewhat unique feature of this game is that you play against various AI opponents in the main game, who have certain events that they're good (sometimes even totally unbeatable) at and other events they're not nearly as good at. For example, the first opponent is a dumb lug who can't do many events well but is basically unbeatable at the discus throw and weightlifting. This does help to give the game a little personality, but the immense degree of mash means that you're not likely to see them all unless you have absolutely no regard for your GB or your thumbs. That said, if you buy a game of this type you kind of know what you're getting into and it does still have a decent variety of events and reasonable presentation, even if it's a type of game most people aren't likely to want to play anymore.