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Last Topic's Ratings:
Battle of Kingdom - AB - 25% (2)
Ishido: The Way of Stones - BBB - 0% (3)
Milon's Secret Castle - BAAA - 38% (4)
Monopoly - GGG - 100% (3)
Nintendo World Cup - GAA - 67% (3)
Ponta to Hinako no Chindouchuu - AB - 25% (2)
It's kinda nice to see some redemption for Monopoly after it's been dunked on for all these years, both on GAB and elsewhere.
Games for this topic:
Jungle Wars
Madden 95
Maru's Mission
Missile Command
Pagemaster, The
Super RC Pro-Am
I've wanted to cover Maru's Mission for a while due to its hilarious boxart. Also, after covering many early sports games, here we have a sneak peek at a later one in Madden. Missile Command has a GBC version, but it's pretty much identical except for colour, so you can cover either one.
Jungle Wars - A
ReplyDeleteMadden 95 - G
Maru's Mission - G
Missile Command - A
Pagemaster, The - B
Super RC Pro-Am - G
Jungle Wars is a very simplistic RPG for beginners. In some sense this kind of reminds me of Shounen Ashibe, except that it has actual RPG mechanics, but it has a similarly kind of whimsical tone, very simple maps where it's always obvious where to go, and pretty good presentation for its time. As noted, this is a very simple Dragon Quest-style RPG. It's very easy and straightforward and you should pretty much never get lost as the NPCs are very good at telling you where to go and what to do (and there aren't many places to go anyway, the game is also very linear). Unlike Shounen Ashibe, this is an actual RPG, you have hit points and money and do level up, though you will not have to grind due to the low level of difficulty and low cost of items. Gameplay is very basic, it's kind of nice that the characters are different from each other (one is a mage and the other is an monkey who can use various fruits that you can pick up), but the basic gameplay is super simple and just mashing attack will carry you through most of the game. It's not a bad game by any means, it's just so straightforward that there's nothing particularly compelling about it.
Madden 95 is super solid. This is probably the best sports game we've covered so far, everything about this port is just dead on. We'll start with the presentation, which is excellent. The graphics are clear and readable with minimal flicker, the players animate well, and they even retained the little ref animations and voice acting fron the console titles. The gameplay is spot on, too. It plays much like the console titles where you press a face button to pass, in this game there are only 2 so there's only 2 pass targets to choose from, but it still works totally fine. Something this game gets right that many fail at is that there's a good balance between running plays and passes. You can fairly reliably run for 4-5 yards if the opponent doesn't guard it, which will get first downs reliably. This makes you want to go for blitz or tight defense plays, which then opens up the pass. This is a very simple concept but very few games actually get this right. There's also appreciably few interceptions and fumbles, so good play calling and clock management will generally see you through. An excellent conversion overall.
Maru's Mission is a very weird game, but I kinda dig it. It's a 2D platformer with a number of somewhat weird mechanics. For starters, you can jump insanely high in this game, basically the entire height of the screen. You can also throw tons of ninja stars, or various other weapons that you can pick up along the stage, so regular enemies are usually not too much of a threat. Enemies drop souls, which are your health, and you have tons of it, you start with like 300 health points and most enemies do about 10, but you can get up to 999 hp by collecting these souls. Every stage has 2 bosses, and these fights are quite intricate, with them having at least a couple attacks and specific ways you have to hit them. The first boss of every stage gives you a special weapon that you need for the second boss, with one of my favourites being the battle against Medusa, where you have to use the mirror shield to reflect her beam back into her. It's quite a goofy game and there's a lot of slowdown, but it's quite fast-paced and varied and it's generally pretty fun while it lasts.
Missile Command is all right, but suffers from the main issues of being overly simplistic and repetitive as most other Gen 2 games. For starters, this is a pretty accurate conversion of the arcade game. Apart from the fact that you only get 2 missile silos instead of 3, this is otherwise a perfect match for the arcade. In case you're not aware of how the game works, you fire counter-missiles at incoming missiles which are denoted by lines showing their contrails. To blow up a missile, you don't need to hit it directly, but instead lead the missile so it hits the explosion from your counter-missile. This leaves a lingering explosion which can destroy further missiles. There are also planes that fly by and will launch further missiles if not destroyed. You have 6 cities at the bottom, and the game is lost when they're all destroyed, but you can earn extras by getting enough points. That's about it for the game summary. As noted before, the conversion to the GB is accurate, everything fits on screen just fine, the only real issue is that the game is very repetitive. The GBC version (which is identical to GB in almost all ways) does give you a little cutscene after every 2 levels, but its appeal still wears thin pretty fast. This is still probably one of the better arcade games from this era, but even on Gameboy you need a bit more variety than this.
DeleteThe Pagemaster is a classic bad platformer. The game is vastly too zoomed in, so you can't see much and every time you jump you scroll the screen, effectively making all jumps blind since you'll scroll the ground away when you jump. Enemies constantly pop up right in front of you and you die in one hit (it's possible to get powerups that let you take one hit, but they're rare and easily lost). The use of colour is also atrocious, screens are far too busy and objects use too many colours, frequently making it hard to tell background and foreground objects apart, and the Super Gameboy palette choices are awful. This is what happens when a game focuses entirely on graphics and not on gameplay, though the presentation of the game still isn't even that great due to the aforementioned colour issues. The game doesn't even have sound effects, either, there's only music. It's just an extremely shoddy product all around.
Super RC Pro-Am is mostly the same as RC Pro-Am on NES, except that it has different track layouts and it's somewhat slower. IMO, the reduced speed actually somewhat improves the game, it's still fast enough but being a little slower gives you more time to react and makes the handling feel more responsive. It looks great on GB and controls perfectly, and the tracks are very visually readable thanks to smart colour choices. Pretty much all the mechanics of the original NES game are retained. You can still use weapons to blow up other cars, you can still spell NINTENDO by picking up letters on the track to get a better car, and you can also pick up car upgrades on each course, too. And of course, the Yellow Car can still cheat and go at like 10000 miles per hour (well, I suppose they're all gray cars now, but we all know which one the cheater is). In any case, this is one of the best racing games on the system and easily the best of the ones that came out early.