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Last Topic's Ratings:
Beat Planet Music - AGG - 83% (3)
Capcom Generations - AGGG - 88% (4)
Galaxy Fight - BB - 0% (2)
King of Bowling 3 - BA - 25% (2)
Langrisser 4 - GG - 100% (2)
Shellshock - AGGAG - 80% (5)
A pretty highly rated topic, I feel like we haven't had 4 games in the high range in one topic for a while. Despite that, I was surprised so few people played Langrisser 4, given the series' popularity. The fan translation seems to be of pretty good quality, try this out!
Games for this topic:
10101: Will the Starship
Crash Team Racing
MLB 2005
Reloaded
Tobal 2
TRL: The Rail Loaders
Nintendo released a report on your overall playtime with Nintendo Switch recently, and I was quite surprised to see that apparently my most played game was the Crash Team Racing remake, even over absurdly long games like Monster Hunter and the Xenoblade games. I actually never played the original all that much so I'm interested to see how they compare. Beyond this, I also think Will the Starship seems like an interesting game.
10101: Will the Starship - G
ReplyDeleteCrash Team Racing - G
MLB 2005 - A
Reloaded - B
Tobal 2 - G
TRL: The Rail Loaders - A
Will the Starship is a very interesting game, but it's also very complicated, so I'll do my best to explain it. The basic gist of it is that it's a space exploration RPG where the goal is to find a new planet to colonize, while also fending off an alien race that's trying to destroy humanity. Gameplay is broken into four main components. The bridge, where you can interact with the crew, the field map, where you fly the ship through space, space battles, where you have to fight off aliens using your various weapons, and salvage retrieval, where you have grab salvage crates using the ship's arm. Let's talk about flying through space first, which you do by pressing X when on the bridge (X also returns you to the bridge) The ship flies forward automatically and there's no brake, all you can do is turn, which you do by using the pointer to point at where you want to go. As you fly, you will consume energy, which is basically the master resource in this game. It's used to power the engines, fire weapons, refill shields, and pretty much everything else, and if it ever runs out you lose the game. To refill energy, you can dock at stations and pay VP, which is basically a combination of money and experience and is gained after winning battles. While flying through space you can periodically see flashing blue crates, these are salvage crates that you can pick up to get ship parts. When the salvage begins, you'll see a timer counting down and see a box flying towards you. The trick is you're supposed to line up the crosshair with the box and press the button as close to when the time runs out as possible, because the longer you wait, the more calibrated the arm gets. If you successfully retrieve the box, you'll get a ship part, but it will initially be unidentified and you can't immediately use it. To identify the item, you'll need to ask either the engineer, scientist, or computer to do it, which is done with the icon that looks like a magnifying glass. They each have a certain success rate for identifying various types of items. You can also pay to have it done at the station, but this costs a lot of VP. After identifying a part, you can select the second-last option from the engineer to change your equipped parts. Parts have a ton of stats and sometimes there's tradeoffs, but your initial parts are pretty bad and you'll want to upgrade them as soon as possible.
(Will cont'd)
DeleteYou can also sometimes find parts after space battles, so let's talk about those now. Space Battles give you a menu with 6 options, from top to bottom, left to right, they are "main gun", "secondary gun", "special weapons", "charge shields", "reposition", and "escape". When you select Main Gun, you'll see a crosshair and a timer will start counting down, similar to the salvage arm, and it works the same way. The closer to the timer expiring you press the button, the more damage you do. This can be hard to aim though, so you can also use the secondary gun, which allows rapid fire but typically does less damage. There are also special weapons, which require a lot of energy but can be a godsend, particularly the Slow weapon, which makes enemies move slower. Charging the shields is pretty self explanatory, if they go down you die, but like everything else this consumes energy. Reposition is an interesting one. All enemies can be engaged at two ranges, long range and close range. Generally, at long range enemies move slower and are easier to hit, but the secondary weapon can't be used, and some enemies are more or less offensively powerful at certain ranges. And of course, escape attempts to run from the battle. After you win a fight, you get VP, which can be used to refuel the ship or identify items, but has an important secondary purpose. Your Engineer and Communications Officer can both upgrade parts using it, but somewhat unusually, this doesn't consume the VP, you just have to have enough to do the upgrade. For example, if an upgrade needs 10000 VP, the second you have that much you can do the upgrade at no cost. These upgrades often make parts significantly more powerful (I had an energy bank go from 120000 to 800000 capacity), so you want to check on these from time to time. Finally we need to talk about the rest of the bridge functions. We already pretty much covered the engineer, computer, and scientist, and the captain, who is in the middle, basically doesn't matter. That leaves the communications officer, pilot, and radar operator. They have the ability to toggle various special modes which consume energy but have useful properties. The radar operator can activate the item search, space radar, and enemy search functions. The first makes those salvage crates more visible on the map. The second lets you see a map of the area, which is very useful. The third increases the encounter rate. Besides upgrades, the communications officer lets you read your emails and activate the jammer, which reduces the encounter rate. The pilot can enable Eco Drive, refill the shields, and warp between space sectors after finishing sector 2. Eco drive makes you marginally slower but halves the energy consumption of the ship and thus should almost always be used. Oh, and last but not least, your systems can sometimes malfunction, like for example the radar can blink or the success rate of identification might drop to zero, when this happens you need to talk to the relevant staff member and select check to have them fix their systems.
(Will still cont'd)
DeletePhew. That about does it for the basics, now we can talk about the game itself. The game is divided into sectors, with you typically having to do some objective to get through each one. On the first sector, you just have to find and fly into the wormhole, but on the second sector you have to solve some puzzles to fly through some gates to get to the end (and also fight a boss). To make any progress, at the start of each sector you'll need to fly around and look for items to power up the ship, while periodically returning to the station to refuel. A great trick is that the refuelling cost depends on the size of your energy bank, so you can equip the smallest bank just before you pull into the station to refuel cheaply, then swap back to the biggest one right afterwards and it will still be full. Gathering new parts is generally pretty fun, there's an absolute ton of them and there's sometimes some interesting nuance to them, like how some parts can become a lot better after upgrading them or how different weapons fire different numbers of projectiles and have different charge rates, and such. There's an absolutely ludicrous number of parts to collect (it's well into the hundreds), though you can only hold 10 of each at a time, afterwards you'll have to discard something when you get a new one. Probably the hardest thing about the game initially is navigating the ship. It doesn't turn quickly at first, though of course you can upgrade this with improved rudders, so that will be one of the first things you'll want to seach for. It's also a little annoying that identifying items can fail as it's generally too expensive to pay VP to do it, but you can always save scum your identifications to make sure they succeed. Battles can also be a little frequent. Of course, you can use the Jammer, but you'll need that VP to refuel so you don't really want to Jammer too much unless you're in danger of running out of energy before you get back to the station. We also haven't talked much about the presentation or the story yet, which are fairly basic, but the game does feature full voice acting. Overall, it's a pretty interesting game and it's very unique for the platform, even if it does have a bit of a learning curve. I ended up playing it for way longer than would have been necessary for this review just because I wanted to see what would happen when you got further in the game.
I played an absolutely obscene amount of CTR: Nitro-Fueled on Switch (it is apparently still my most played Switch game, even over both Monster Hunters), so when coming back to the original my biggest question was whether or not it would still mostly feel the same or if I wouldn't really remember anything about it. It was definitely mostly the former, after a few minutes I was zipping around Crash Cove again and I even beat N. Tropy there on my first try (I beat all the Velo trials on Nitro-Fueled, though I recall it being a nightmare). However, we're getting ahead of ourselves, we should probably talk a bit about the game first. Crash Team Racing is a cart racer with a ton of content and a focus on the adventure mode, similar to but probably a fair bit better than Diddy Kong Racing. Like in DKR, each stage offers multiple challenges, besides the standard single race there's also the CTR Challenge, where you have to collect 3 letters at finish the race in first, and the Relic Race, which is a time trial where you have to collect crates to reduce your time, somewhat similar to Beetle Adventure Racing. The highlight of the game is its controls, particularly its drift system, which remains fairly unique to this day. While drifting, a meter will fill up, and you can press L1 to get a drift boost, up to 3 times per drift, with the third one being a big boost. The ability to boost while continuously drifting makes this a very snaking-friendly game, arguably this is the first kart racer where snaking was a major strategy. You can also get additional boosts from big jumps, and it's often a strategy to try to get a lot of speed going into a jump to get an extra boost. There are also a ton of shortcuts, which also sometimes require boosting and jumping to reach. Something I'm impressed by is how good the track design is for its time, the tracks have surprisingly good flow for a game of this vintage. Clearly the developers were actually pretty good at this game, as seen through the time trial ghosts, which require significant mastery to beat. Overall, this is a very strong kart racing game with great controls and a ton of content. Realistically, this is probably SR quality, even though these days you'd probably just play the remake instead. There's certainly at least a reasonable argument to be made that this is the best kart racer of the generation.
DeleteWhen playing MLB 2005, my first thought was "I feel like I've played this before". It's a fairly standard Gen 5 baseball game with a "aim the bat towards the ball" system, so I wasn't sure if I was remembering previous entries in the series or other games, so I loaded up MLB 98 to compare, and despite the 7 year gap they're basically the same game. Sure, the presentation has improved, the graphics are a bit better and the commentary is noticeably improved, but everything else is almost unchanged, right down to the control scheme for the pitches. Unsurprisingly, I have pretty much the same thoughts as I did when we played the first game. It's all right, but the pitching system takes too much of the nuance out of reading pitches. Since you can always tell exactly where the pitch will go, it's trivial to not swing at balls and thus you can generally make contact every time. The game does generally sort of account for this by having an unusually high percentage of fly balls, but it makes the game feel like it involves more luck compared to better baseball games. Since the first game came out, we've also seen baseball games that strike a better balance between having nuanced swinging controls and having batting not be totally trivial, like Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001, and while its presentation is really good, it's not necessarily the best on the system either. It's nowhere near bad enough for B, though I do think it deserves a little extra scorn for reusing the same engine for like 7 years.
DeleteRe-Loaded is a vastly more competent game than the original, but it's still bad. Compared to the first game, this game is now functional. The first game is basically just a mess of projectile spam and constant slowdown in tight corridors where you can basically never see anything and avoiding damage is nearly impossible. This is mostly fixed for the sequel. The stages are now generally much more open, most enemies are now melee and those that shoot projectiles shoot much slower, and there's less slowdown. Oh, and the map now shows where you've been, which would have helped enormously in the original. So, problem solved, right? Well, not totally. I think you can fairly easily make the case that despite being significantly more functional as a game, the series lost a lot of its identity with this instalment. The stages feel significantly more generic and the reduced enemy counts and very limited enemy variety tends to result in the game feeling fairly repetitive and dull a lot of the time. Kiting and strafing are all totally functional, but there's only so many times you can shoot the same 3 enemies on a big, largely empty map and remain engaged. Despite the fact that the game is far more playable, I think you could actually make the case that the original is superior because it was at least broken but unique, whereas this game is much more aggressively mediocre. I wish they had stuck a little closer to the original design but simply improved it rather than totally reinventing the wheel here.
It's a huge shame that Tobal 2 wasn't localized, because it's a drastically better game than the original in almost every way. For starters, Tobal is somewhat unique among 3D fighters in that it allows full 3D movement. This is not limited solely to sidesteps like some other games, you can move in all directions at all times here, and as such, blocking and jumping are both mapped to buttons. This feels a little awkward, and to be honest I don't think the game would have lost much if it was locked to a 2D plane, but it's at least mostly functional. A huge change since the original game is that the game is now much more combo heavy. The original really only has downed attacks as potential combo follow-ups to the basic strings, but the second game has drastically increased juggle possibilities as many strings now leave the enemy in an airborne state that allows for a follow-up. This definitely does a lot to help add more nuance to the game's offense as different strings now have drastically different damage potential and thus looking for opportunities to land your big combo starters is now a major focus of combat, though these moves are often either slow or unsafe so that gives faster, safer strings more use as well. Of course, characters also have larger movesets with more options as well, like guard cancel attacks. There is still a little weirdness, one thing that I had to look up was that some attacks can only be performed after crouching or after a low attack (for Chuji, his hop kicks, which is one of his best combo starters, is performed this way), but overall, combat just feels much smoother and better compared to the first game. Besides general combat, like in the first game, this game also includes a quest mode where you go through dungeons, fight monsters, and acquire items. Compared to the first game this is now quite a bit more fleshed out, there's now a town area outside the dungeons, and they've also sort of trimmed the fat in this mode, making tit much more focused on combat rather than platforming as in the previous game. I still feel like the main mode is clearly somewhat better overall, but it's still extra replay value I suppose. Oh, we also haven't talked about the game's presentation yet, but it's excellent, the game's visuals are very strong and it also runs really well, this is easily one of PS1's top 3D fighters from a visual perspective. It's really a shame this one didn't come to the US because as sequels go there's not much more you could ask for.
DeleteThe Rail Loaders is a very weird game, though I was kind of enjoying it after I started figuring it out. This game is essentially a shmup where you control a train, and as such, your movement is limited to forward and backwards movement along a track. You have three actions available, you can shoot with X, jump with Square (though you cannot jump off the tracks, this is solely used to avoid certain obstacles) and flip switches with Circle. Flipping switches is important, as this is essentially your only method of having any control over your pathing, and it's sometimes necessary to avoid dead end paths and the like. The track is littered with power-ups (and power-downs, which you have to jump over), and enemies often come at you either along the tracks or from the sides, which you can shoot, though without powerups you can only shoot straight ahead so you sometimes have to wait for enemies to line up to hit them. The main gameplay works fine for the most part, but there's a few small issues. The first is the second player. This game is entirely built for 2 players and because you sometimes need the train on the other side to hit a switch, the game includes an AI train to cover the other side if you're playing alone. They're invincible, so you don't have to worry aobut them dying, but they have a tendency to flip switches when you may not want them to. If you're trying to take a particular route and you're on the same track, they may constantly flip the switch back so they can go the way they want, which can be annoying. Obviously this is not as much of an issue if you're playing with a real human player, but it can be a nuisance in single player. The second issue is the bosses. The bosses do not use the standard mechanic of riding on the rails, instead you get picked up by a fairy for these fights and have full 2-dimensional movement. The problem is that your hitbox during these fights is absolutely gigantic, notably even bigger than the visual of your train, which is already really big. As such, the boss fights simply suck and will eat up a ton of your lives in ways that feel very unfair. It's too bad, because the rest of the game is kinda decent, I wish they had tried to incorporate the track-based gameplay into the boss fights because I think that would have been a fair bit more interesting.
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