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Last Topic's Ratings:
Jungle Wars - AA - 50% (2)
Madden 95 - GGG - 100% (3)
Maru's Mission - AG - 75% (2)
Missile Command - AAAA - 50% (4)
Pagemaster, The - BBBB - 0% (4)
Super RC Pro-Am - AGGG - 88% (4)
It feels so weird seeing Madden be a carry title on the retro systems considering the reputation it would later develop. It was really solid back in the day!
Games for this topic:
Blodia
Ghostbusters 2
Kung Fu Master
Peetan
Starhawk
WWF Superstars
When I first saw Blodia I figured it would have some connection to Cyberbots (it's the name of Jin's mech), but it turns out it has nothing to do with it, it is in fact so named that because it's a simple rearrangement of the word "Diablo", which is the game's title on most other platforms. My mind is blown.
Blodia - A
ReplyDeleteGhostbusters 2 - G
Kung Fu Master - B
Peetan - A
Starhawk - A
WWF Superstars - A
Blodia is a simple action-puzzle game about guiding a marble through a maze while moving the blocks around, slide-puzzle style, to create a path for it. If you ever played the Hampton bonus stages from Buster Busts Loose, it's exactly the same concept, except that tiles get used up as the marble passes them. The puzzle solutions frequently involving moving the piece the marble is currently in, which is often faster than moving the pieces around it, though of course the window for this to be done is very short. The game's biggest issue IMO is the controls. You'd think this would just control with the dpad, where you move the hole around and thus the pieces with it, but instead you control a cursor and you press A to warp the cursor to the next location in a row, moving all the pieces along the way. It's functional, but it feels a bit imprecise, especially when trying to do circular moves. Additionally, you can still move the cursor while paused, though you can't move any pieces like this, but this means a very strong strategy is to constantly pause, then move the cursor where you need to go, then unpause and do the move and repeat, though this feels very lame. Overall, it's an okay game, it has a ton of levels so if you like it there's a lot of it, but I feel it would be quite a bit better with a better control scheme.
I didn't expect much since the series has a history of having terrible games, but Ghostbusters 2 on Game Boy is actually pretty good. The basic gist of the game is that you pick two Ghostbusters, whom you somewhat control at the same time. The first character that you picked uses the proton pack to stun ghosts with A, and the second character follows you and throws out the trap with B. The goal of each stage is to catch all the ghosts, which is a bit harder than it sounds because they don't all spawn in at once so you have to explore a fair bit. At various times you can find the other Ghostbusters or civilians to get power-ups or health, and there are also bosses as well. The core gameplay works surprisingly well, while it can be a little tricky to manuever the second Ghostbuster into position to use the trap, it gives the game just a little bit of extra nuance that helps it stay interesting (you also can't let either Ghostbuster be hit or you'll lose health). It's not an especially long game (there's only 3 sets of stages), but it feels like it represents the gist of the franchise pretty well for a Game Boy conversion. Definitely one of the better early action games.
I expected Kung Fu Master to be a port of the NES game, but surprisingly it's instead a completely new (and worse) game. Compared to the original, I guess you could say it looks better and plays faster, but almost all the nuance has been lost. This is now purely a game about spamming jump kicks, as virtually all enemies in the game can (and have to be) stunlocked by it. For example, the first boss is a guy with a chainsaw. You'd think the strategy is to wait for some kind of opening to hit him with a low kick or something, right? Nope. Even if you crouch his high attack and low kick him you'll immediately get hit, you just have to bulldog in with jump kicks until you push him to the corner, but it's fine because you can take a ton of hits. This is the strategy against almost every boss in the game, except the third boss, whom you must wait for him to come to you (since there's geysers in his arena), then pin him against the wall on the left rather than the right, which allows him to be killed instantly. The final boss also has a devastating dropkick attack, but if you just mash kick he literally can't hit you as you outrange his drop kick. And that's pretty much the whole game. There's only 6 stages, all of which only take about a minute, the game can be finished in under 10 minutes and has no replay value.
DeletePeetan is a fairly basic Arcade-style game. Each stage is divided into multiple layers with seesaw platforms on each layer. You control a hen who is on the top, and your chicks are on the bottom, you need to use the seesaws to get them to the top by laying eggs and launching them by hitting the long end of the seesaw. A dog wanders around the stage and tries to eat the chicks, but you can hit him with eggs to stun him. The stage ends when all living chicks are at the top, at which point the next stage begins with however many chicks are left. After every handful of stages there's a minigame and you can earn an extra chick. That's really about it. It controls fine, but it's a pretty simple concept and most stages are pretty similar, so it gets repetitive fairly fast. At least it's cute, I guess.
Starhawk is a fairly basic but decent horizontal shmup. The most impressive thing about this game is easily the lack of flicker. There's basically no flicker or slowdown in the game, which must have required pretty smart choices regarding enemy patterns, though perhaps it's because very few enemies can shoot projectiles. Gameplay-wise, it's a bit slow, your hitbox is enormous and you don't move very fast, but neither do enemies. Pretty much everything takes a ton of hits, so there's quite a bit of mash, and it's also a one button game where A and B do the same thing. There are two different ships available, which you can transform between with a powerup, one has a piercing shot but less power while the other doesn't piece but hits harder (and faster due to bullet limits), which IMO is superior. Bosses are fairly big and reasonably impressive, though it can be hard to know where to hit them as their hit zones must usually be shot in a certain sequence. The second stage also has a fairly cool parallax effect. There's not too much more to say about it than that, it's a fairly short game, yet the stages still feel like they go on a little long, probably due to the somewhat repetitive enemy patterns and overall low speed of the game. It's decent, but it's definitely not quite on the level of Nemesis or anything like that.
DeleteWWF Superstars is a basic wrestling game, but I kind of enjoy it. This game has an exceptionally limited moveset of a simple grapple attack and a basic strike, but both are reasonably usable, which gives it a decent core gameplay loop. One thing I quite like about this game is that you have health bars, and you can be pinned only when it's empty, which removes any ambiguity about pins. It is a little annoying that health regenerates, which can make matches go on longer than they probably ought to, but by far the biggest issue is that the opponent cheats to an extreme degree in this game, their grabs just win for no reason like 80% of the time as you get later in the game, forcing you to rely almost exclusively on the drop kick (your chance of winning a grab seems to be somewhat higher if you're vertically above the opponent, but even then your chances are 50% at the absolute most). With a slightly more sensible grab mechanic this actually might have been G.