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Last Topic's Ratings:
Croc 2 - AGAAAA - 58% (6)
GP Challenge - ABA - 33% (3)
Hunter X Hunter: Maboroshi no Greed Island - GG - 100% (2)
Logic Pro Adventure - GG - 100% (2)
Soukyuu Gurentai: Oubushutsugeki - GA - 75% (2)
Street Sk8er 2 - AAA - 50% (3)
A pretty highly rated topic this time. Maybe I should watch some of Hunter X Hunter at some point, it's a series I have almost no familiarity with.
Games for this topic:
Beat Planet Music
Capcom Generations
Galaxy Fight
King of Bowling 3
Langrisser 4
Shellshock
Quite a few games here that we've already covered on Saturn, but as always they may have differences from the Saturn version (and Langrisser 4 in particular has some very significant differences). There's also a fan translation available for Langrisser 4.
Beat Planet Music - G
ReplyDeleteCapcom Generations - G
Galaxy Fight - B
King of Bowling 3 - A
Langrisser 4 - G
Shellshock - G
Beat Planet Music is a very odd game that's hard to rate. It's a music game, but a very minimalistic one. The game screen shows a pulse travelling down a tube. The tube is divided into 7 channels horizontally, and you can move between them with the stick. Periodically an orange packet will come down the pipe and you press Circle as it reaches the pulse to absorb it, with a green flash representing the best timing. There are also notes that come inbetween these packets but you just have to stay in the right channel for them. The game shows a warning when you need to change channels. And that's about it. Hitting the packets and notes adds extra "beats" to the game's soundtrack, and there's also a ton of trippy visuals that play as you travel down the pipes. One of the game's most interesting features is that the songs in the game are very short (often only 15 seconds or so), but many stages blend several of them together back to back. When this works well, it's a very cool effect, but sometimes the tracks are too different and it sounds jarring. There's a ton of different stages to play and each has a certain percentage of the packets that you have to hit accurately to win. It's never crazily hard, but I did fail a couple stages here and there. Inbetween the stages you meet some weird menu navigators who can only be described as eclectic. It's a very weird and trippy game and undeniably the visuals and overall vibe are a lot of the appeal, and in that sense I feel like the simple gameplay kind of works well with it because you can kinda just shut your brain off and lose yourself in the game for a while. It's certainly drastically better as an art piece compared to something like Vib Ribbon.
Capcom Generations is a collection of the first 4 Capcom Generations titles, which we already covered for Saturn, or, to put it more simply, all of them except the Street Fighter one. The strongest aspect of these collections is undoubtedly the extra features, which are quite substantial and definitely set the standard for future compilations of this type. My only beef is with the game selection, many of the games represented here have good console releases that add a lot of extra content (ie, 1943 and Gunsmoke on NES and Mercs on Genesis) and I wish the console ports had also been included here. Still, it's undoubtedly still a pretty strong collection for its time and this was the first time the arcade versions of most of these games were available to play on console.
As on Saturn, Galaxy Fight is one of the worst fighting games of all time. Everything about this game sucks. It's an LMH game, but there's no chain combos. You can't cancel normals into specials, so combos basically don't exist. Any hit on an airborne opponent puts them into an invincible flip out state so you can't juggle. Frame data is nonsense, many special moves are totally safe, and you can even do something like run up Shoryuken and due to the way running preserves momentum if you use a light Shoryuken this might even be safe. Of course, it's not like safety really matters since there are no combos or juggles or even supers. It's just way too basic to be entertaining even briefly, even most other bad fighting games are much better than this.
I was hoping King of Bowling 3 might improve upon a number of issues from King of Bowling 2, but it's actually a vastly scaled-down sequel that feels much less ambitious than its predecessor. Nowhere is this more evident than the graphics, which are much less impressive than the previous game, with the well-modeled bowling alleys giving way to a single lane in a black void. The characters are basically removed entirely, you can no longer see them during the gameplay and there's no more talking after frames either. About the only positive thing you can say about it is that they have actually refined the gameplay somewhat, the new meter is much easier to time and quite a bit more forgiving, which does make the gameplay feel somewhat better, but it's undeniably a very barebones affair that's close to B. If only we could port this meter back into King of Bowling 2!
DeleteThis isn't often the case for RPGs, but Langrisser 4 is a drastically different game on PS1 compared to Saturn. I was a fan of the changes they made with Langrisser 3, but apparently a lot of people weren't, so they went back to the formula established by the earlier Langrisser games for Langrisser 4, albeit with the addition of a new Speed system which causes units to take their actions one at a time rather than having all units on the same side take their turn at once. Unfortunately, in the process they completely forgot how Langrisser actually plays as a game, as they separated the actions of commanders and their troops from one another. As much of the strategy in Langrisser involves having the troops attack first to soften up the enemy, this made troops nearly useless in the Saturn version, and they also made the game play much slower because of the way turns were handled. This issue was fixed in Langrisser 5, which changed it so that a commander and their troops now take their turn at the same time. When Langrisser 4 and 5 were released on PS1, they were released as a combo pack, and Langrisser 4 was redone using Langrisser 5's engine, which makes it a vastly better game than on Saturn. While everything about the game still feels very similar to Der Langrisser, that was still a good game and I think you can fairly easily make the case that this game is an improvement to it in most respects even if it's not as ambitious as Langrisser 3. It's just too bad PS1 never got a refined port of Langrisser 3 because with a few tweaks I think that game could have been incredible.
I can't believe it's been 4 years since we covered it on Saturn, but I still enjoy Shellshock. It's a fully 3D tank game with a ton of personality and good core mechanics. As I noted when we covered it on Saturn, I love how fast this game is, your tank is very quick and responsive and the turret control gives it a fair amount of depth, as learning to control the turret separately from the treads so you can strafe shot people is essential to getting anywhere in this game. When we covered the Saturn version, I said they were quite comparable, but this is not completely accurate, upon a closer review the Saturn version does have noticeably better draw distance, it's probably about 30% further. Tanks tend to be a little less aggressive here compared to Saturn so I suspect they've also had their vision range cut to make up for the reduction in draw distance, so at least you won't be getting shot from outside your vision range as can happen in some other PS1 games, but this definitely makes the Saturn version the preferred one if you have the option. Despite that, it's still a fun game on Playstation and it's so far ahead of pretty much every other tank game we've ever looked at that I think it's still G.