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Last Topic's Ratings:
10101: Will the Starship - GA - 75% (2)
Crash Team Racing - GGGGGGGGGGGGG - 100% (13) (2 SR)
MLB 2005 - BAA - 33% (3)
Reloaded - ABBAABB - 21% (7)
Tobal 2 - GGGGG - 100% (5)
TRL: The Rail Loaders - AA - 50% (2)
I'm happy to see CTR pull in the big ratings even after this many years of PS1 GAB. While not the highest number of votes (which remains 17 for Spyro 1), it's still a pretty respectable number.
Games for this topic:
Aztec: The Curse in the Heart of the City of Gold
Miracle Jim no Bassing Beat
Rally de Europe
Oujisama Lv1
Pong: The Next Level
Warpath: Jurassic Park
Rally de Africa was one of my favourite early finds from GAB, so I'm happy to finally cover the sequel. I also initially thought we had already covered Pong The Next Level, but that was instead Breakout, so I'm curious to see what they did with Pong.
Aztec: The Curse in the Heart of the City of Gold - G
ReplyDeleteMiracle Jim no Bassing Beat - B
Rally de Europe - G
Oujisama Lv1 - A
Pong: The Next Level - B
Warpath: Jurassic Park - G
Aztec: The Curse in the Heart of the City of Gold is another one of Cryo's historical adventure games, in the same style as Atlantis: The Lost Tales and China: The Forbidden City. Like those games, this is a first-person adventure game that resembles Myst, but with a drastically better engine that allows you to explore the areas in full 3D by rotating your perspective in the scenes, which makes the game far more immersive. While the general concept is the same, this game has seen a marked improvement in terms of plot. In previous games, you were tasked by someone important to investigate some sort of crime, but here, it's a crime you're implicated for, with your entire family held hostage and guards pursuing you every step of the way, which gives the game a far greater sense of urgency and makes the plot quite a lot more compelling. There's also been some improvements to area design, with areas generally being a little smaller compared to previous games to make navigation somewhat easier, these two factors combine to make the game's pacing feel significantly better while not sacrificing any of the strengths of the previous titles. You still definitely might need to occasionally use a guide (in particular, some interactables can be hard to spot with the game's 360 degree camera, but that's pretty par for the course, it's certainly vastly more intuitive than Myst or Riven. Definitely worth a look for anyone who's a fan of these sorts of games, or maybe even people who aren't because they found most of them to be too cryptic.
Miracle Jim no Bassing Beat is a game that get some things right, but also enough things wrong that it's still not very good. When we talk about fishing games, I almost always have one of two complaints. First, in many games it's simply way too hard to actually land a fish, so you spend all your time fruitlessly casting, waiting, and casting again ad nauseum. This is not the case here. Finding and landing a fish is easy. You can see fish swimming around in the water, but these are irrelevant, which confused me a bit at first. Instead, just cast your line somewhere and start reeling it in using the classic "reel a bit, pause, reel a bit" strategy. When a fish nibbles it will make a "gloop" sound and the tension will spike, then press L1 to hook the fish. If you're not finding any fish, move to a different spot (you can roam around the maps in 3D), but it's usually not hard to find any. The second major issue is that the game's progression might be lame. It's often the case in many fishing games where the only mode is a tournament mode where only Bass count and there's no way to identify Bass so the game is just a crapshoot. That's also not the case here. Each stage has a goal for a number of fish to catch, and some simple rules about which fish count towards the total. The time limit is quite generous, and even for the stages where you can only catch bass, there's quite a few types of bass and they are common, so it's not generally too hard to progress. Beating stages unlocks harder versions of those stages that take place in different seasons. So surely this game is G, right? Unfortunately, everything else about the game sucks. We'll start with the actual fish fighting. When you hook a fish, you have to reel it in without overly stressing the tension meter, like in many other games. However, the tension meter is WAY too sensitive, maxing out with even the slightest amount of pressure. Fish seemingly have infinite stamina, and with your almost nonexistent ability to reel, if they ever get any distance on you you're doomed. You have access to rod movements, but they don't seem to do anything. They also sometimes just randomly escape without snapping the line. This makes it sound like catching fish is impossible, but it's actually super easy because there's a simple workaround to catch any fish effortlessly. Simply hook the fish when your line is <10ft from you, then hold down the reel button the whole time, you'll be able to pull it out before the line breaks. Obviously though, this completely trivializes the actual fishing aspect. Then there's tackle selection. There's like, actually hundreds of rods in this game. However, this is irrelevant as the game is so simple this doesn't matter and your default rod is totally fine. Bait rods also have an annoying tendency to backlash when you toss them. I have no idea how to mitigate this, but mashing buttons when casting works, but the lure rods are so much easier that I can't see why you'd bother. Similarly, because the game is so simple, the stages totally don't matter. Like there are different lakes and such, but you're always going to be doing the same thing, there aren't many significant features on the lakes where you'll be hunting out specific spots or anything, at best just find some reeds and start casting away. It's a weird case where the game is playable and you can easily make progress, but it's just not very fun. There is a sequel though and it looks like it's a lot more fleshed out, so maybe it will be better.
DeleteOujisama Lv1 is an interesting game in some ways, but I feel like a few issues hold it back from being as fun as it could be. For starters, this is sort of a mashup between a VN and an RPG. It's not a half-hearted effort like Alnam no Kiba though, which is like 99% VN and 1% RPG (at most), or a game like Slayers Royal which does have battles but they're atrocious, this is a proper dungeon crawler with some interesting ideas. The basic gist of this game is that you play as a young prince who desires to become an adventurer so he joins the local adventurer's guild, travelling to dungeons and getting into all sorts of mishaps. He's accompanied by his longsuffering retainer, who does his best to keep the prince from getting into trouble. It's very silly and they poke a lot of fun at typical genre conventions. The basic gameplay flow is that you take missions at the guild, which have a time limit to complete, somewhat similar to the Atelier series, then you go to the dungeons. You have a time limit for how long you can spend in the dungeon each day, after which you must return to the castle and rest. If you can't complete a mission in time, you lose the game and have to try again, so proper time management is needed, though the game isn't enormously tough. What it is however is enormously text-heavy. Scenes occur constantly, not just when you pick up a new major quest, but also when you visit shops, open treasure chests, fight certain monsters, at certain points in dungeons, and so on. These scenes are often around a hundred text boxes long. Now obviously, the game is intended to have a significant story focus, and to their credit, the game is completely voiced, but it often feels like you spend significantly more time in text than you do in gameplay. There is a text skip function (though it skips crazily fast and is annoying to turn back off), but in general I feel like the balance between story and gameplay isn't as good as it could be. If you consider a game like Xenoblade, which is also extremely story-heavy, they make it sort of clear where story events will happen, and you can just avoid them and explore for a while if you want a break from it, but this is rarely possible here, especially as the time limit basically means you cannot grind and must constantly advance the story to keep up. This is kind of a shame, because there are some interesting gameplay systems here. One of the game's interesting innovations is the skill system. Each character gets to carry 5 skills at a time, which can range from basic battle commands like "attack" and "item" to spells and buffs or even special battle commands like for capturing monsters. The main character is not an especially good attacker, so you might consider just dumping their attack entirely in exchange for attack spells, particularly as they have a command to just take a break for a turn and recover MP. You can also capture monsters to get a third party member, and they vary quite a bit, with some being good damage dealer while others are more like tanks that draw a lot of enemy attacks. It's a potentially interesting system, but it feels like the game doesn't really use it to its fullest due to it generally being kind of easy and you always feeling rushed. Actually, I think that's really the main problem with the game, it tries to mash up two fairly disparate elements and I feel like both of them suffer for it. For people who just want the VN stuff the RPG mechanics will probably be a bother, and for those who prefer the RPG side there probably won't be quite enough here to keep them interested. That said, I still appreciate the effort and I wish more VNs would have experimented like this, as I do think this has some potential if executed well. It just likely requires a little more brevity in terms of the writing and perhaps a slightly more relaxed pace for the gameplay.
DeleteI quite enjoyed Rally de Africa, so I had somewhat mixed feelings to discover that Rally de Europe is almost the same game. On one hand, it retains the great driving engine and progression system of Rally de Africa, which is a great foundation, but it doesn't really take it to a new level the way I sort of hoped it would. The biggest difference is that there's a new car class, bringing the total to four, but the game still sticks to just 5 tracks, and I think the game would have been greatly improved if this number was increased to 8. Like the first game, it's still very hard, though they've slightly adjusted the tournament mode so that it's now broken down into multiple, smaller cups, which arguably actually makes it harder because you now generally have to win every race to get first (ties count as losing, which is kind of ridiculous). The courses are also definitely harder than the first game, which is kind of an issue, by the second track they're already quite brutal and there is probably an argument to be made that this game is probably a little bit too challenging. Spot races still exist and are still used to unlock new cars. I still like the structure of this mode, where it tracks which races you've won with which cars, this is a great way to add replay value. The other thing that has to be said is when you beat the game, the game pulls a Choro Q2 on you and gives you all the tracks from Rally de Africa, complete with their own tournament mode, which boosts the number of tracks to 10. This is a decent extra, but because the games play so similarly to each other (compare Choro Q2, which is much faster than Choro Q), this doesn't feel as novel if you played Rally de Africa already and I kinda wish there had just been a few more easier tracks in the Europe tour instead. It's still definitely a pretty fun game and I still think it's still too good for A, but I definitely think it's somewhat surpassed by the somewhat similar Option Tuning Car Battle series. It's too bad Prism Arts never made any more games after this because clearly they had talent.
DeleteI was thinking Pong: The New Level was the Breakout game we covered earlier (which was actually quite good), but sadly it's not and it's a much weaker game. Pong: The Next Level is a minigame collection that somewhat resembles Crash Bash if all of the levels were the pong ones. It's divided into different stages, all of which have different gimmicks, which range from tolerable to absurdly unfun. The first stage, the penguin stage, is actually one of the best. Here it's basically normal pong but two penguins walk back and forth, and if you hit them they lay an egg which becomes another ball. This is actually kinda fun and if they kept up this level of quality the game might have been decent. After you beat a stage, you can replay a variation of it with different rules, here the second game has a different powerup which tilts the field, but the opponent also cheats here by having a larger paddle. The third variant has wind that makes it impossible to score like 90% of the time and this stage completely sucks. The next stage is a soccer mode where each player has 2 paddles which is easy but boring. You then move onto another terrible level where there are logs in the middle that spin when you get a powerup, and when they're spinning the person they're spinning against basically can't score. Then there's a somewhat interesting puzzle level where you have to shoot balls into a clown's mouth. The next level is an atrocious one where each player has 2 paddles and they can catch the ball where it's effectively impossible for anything to ever happen because the catch shot is too slow. And on it goes. There's quite a lot of levels, but they're rarely fun, not helped by the fact that the controls feel somewhat overly slippery from a game that requires this level of precision. Just like Crash Bash, it's a game that's generally too reliant on dumb gimmicks and it spends a lot of time not being very fun, even if there are a few decent stages.
I'm incredibly shocked, but Warpath is actually a pretty good game. It's essentially a Tekken-style 3D fighter with Dinosaurs, but it's a pretty well-polished one. Character move lists are not enormous, but characters have four attack buttons with a mix of standing, crouching, jumping, running, and a small handful of strings to mix things up. Something I particularly like about the game is that throws are combo starters, for example most dinosaurs have a throw that tosses the opponent up in the air, allowing for a juggle afterwards. This makes you want to block less, which makes regular strings more dangerous, it does a good job of adding decent mixup potential to a game where jump attacks aren't super strong, particularly as tick setups into throws are nasty in this game. Beyond normal offense, there's also a super meter that allows for a Killer Instinct style ultra combo when it's full. These are not inordinately hard to memorize, you basically just have to know which button starts it for each dinosaur, as it allows some variation of the buttons in the middle. This in turn makes them somewhat predictable because you know your opponent will be going for the same starter once they have full meter. Meter also drains if you get hit, the opponent taunts or just take too long to do the combo, so there are definitely ways to play around it. Overall, the basic combat balance feels pretty good. Apparently some people complained about the dinosaurs being too similar to each other, but I don't think this complaint is really legitimate. For example, Acro and T-Rex do share about half their moveset, but the half they don't share does matter quite a bit and makes them still play appreciably different from each other, and characters like Sucho and Styraco share nothing with them. Every character also has their own stage, and some of these contain hazards, like electric fences or exploding barrels, which help add some variety (there's also often little critters in the stages you can eat for a health boost, if you can find time to do it). It's not the most complex game ever, but I don't think it's really trying to be, it's a game that looks and sounds quite good and delivers well on the promise of dino on dino combat. The fact that some people apparently thought Primal Rage was a better game is baffling to me, this game feels vastly superior IMO.
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