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Last Topic's Ratings:
Blodia - AA - 50% (2)
Ghostbusters 2 - GAGG - 88% (4)
Kung Fu Master - BBBB - 0% (4)
Peetan - AA - 50% (2)
Starhawk - GAA - 67% (3)
WWF Superstars - GAAG - 75% (4)
I was pretty surprised that WWF Superstars did pretty well, usually people are not too kind to retro wrestling games.
Games for this topic:
Akazukin Chacha
Hiden Inyou Kikouhou: Ca Da
Magnetic Soccer
Mercenary Force
Nail 'N Scale
Side Pocket
I feel like a solid 10% of GAB is rating a million different versions of Side Pocket, RotK, and Race Drivin'. People always talk about how many times Street Fighter 2 and Doom got ported but these games were also everywhere.
Akazukin Chacha - A
ReplyDeleteHiden Inyou Kikouhou: Ca Da - A
Magnetic Soccer - B
Mercenary Force - G
Nail 'N Scale - G
Side Pocket - B
Akazukin Chacha is a pretty weird game. It's a roguelike dungeon crawler of sorts, at the start of the game you pick one of 6 characters (who all play somewhat differently) and are given a mission by your teacher, which is random every time, but it's always to go to a certain dungeon near the school and retrieve some kind of item. Before you can leave, you have to talk to a few of the other students for information, but you can easily accomplish this by simply checking every location in the school (there aren't many) until it shows you the dungeon and lets you leave. Once you reach the dungeon the gameplay completely changes. Dungeons are divided into screens, and the first time you enter a screen you get an event. These are frequently battles, but sometimes you take damage, get warped somewhere, have an item stolen, or various other things. If you do get a battle, you have four options you can choose, the top left is the character's (usually weak) default attack, the top right is to try to run, and the bottom two options are the two items you're carrying, if applicable. On almost every screen in the dungeon you'll be able to find a treasure box containing an item, most of which can be used to attack enemies, but some heal you or cause various other effects. You can only hold 2 items and if you pick up another item one of your items will be replaced, so you should get rid of any items you don't want so you can pick up others. This game is technically an RPG and you do sometimes level up, which increases your maximum HP, but with good items you can one shot most enemies. If you die, you just get kicked out of the dungeon and can try again. The game impies that there's a time limit, but I don't think there is, I tried entering and leaving the dungeon a ton of times and I didn't ever seem to run out of time, so you probably have as many tries as you need to clear it. At some point in the dungeon you'll find the boss, who is noticeably more powerful than the rest of the enemies, so hopefully you have some good items for that. If you do manage to win, you can take the treasure there and leave, then go back to the teacher at the start to beat the game. In theory if things go well it's very possible to beat a scenario in like 10-15 minutes, though because they're random and there's a bunch of characters I suppose the game has some replay value. Still, I feel like it's a little too mechanically simple to stay interesting for particularly long.
Hiden Inyou Kikouhou: Ca Da is a fairly simplistic puzzle game. The basic gist of the game is that you control an orb that can be either white or black. There are various little balls around the stage, which will change you to the same colour as them when you pick them up (and a spinning one that swaps you to the opposite colour), and your objective is to get all the balls and get to the exit without getting stuck in some way. Your colour affects how you interact with various things, most particularly there are arrow tiles on the ground and if you're the same colour as them you jump much higher, so you have to plan the order you get the balls in to take advantage of these tiles to reach certain areas. There are also enemies, but they don't kill you, they just push you back, but this can sometimes cause you to hit an orb you don't want to. You can also stand on them and use them to reach higher ground. This game does have limited lives, but it also has passwords for every level so they kind of don't matter. There's only 50 stages in the game, which is a little on the short side, and the core gameplay doesn't strike me as especially amazing, but it's fine for the most part.
Magnetic Soccer is a fun concept, but I don't think it's very good. The basic gist of the game is that it's intended to be a digital representation of Foozball. As such, you have two main actions available to you, you can move your player left and right and you can press a button to kick the ball forward. There is actually one more action, which is that you can catch the ball as it passes by you from behind with the other button. This lets you do a power shot that can stun the defenders, the problem is that this move is very slow to charge, which makes it very easy to deflect. That's about all there is to the game. The goalie takes up way too much room so it's very hard to ever score, and the power shot is too easily deflected to feel particularly consequential. I feel like the power shot mechanic was kind of unnecessary, the players should have just been slightly smaller (especially the goalie) to open up offense more. It's not a game that stays entertaining for more than a couple minutes.
DeleteFunny, I thought I owned Mercenary Force, but upon starting it it didn't seem familiar at all and I realized I was thinking of Fortified Zone. It turns out it's a very cool game anyway. The basic gist of it is it's a horizontal shmup, but one with a ton of unique mechanics. Rather than controlling a ship or something, you play as a squad of mercenaries, which you have to hire with money. There's 5 to choose from, each of which has a different firing pattern and amount of hp, and you can hire up to 4. In game, you control only one (the leader, which you can rotate with select), and the others will follow you in one of a couple formations. Each of them can be individually hit, and a lot of the challenge involves trying to carefully position them so they don't take too many hits. When you defeat enemies they drop money, which you really want because you need money to buy recovery items or hire more mercenaries, but the money only stays on the ground for a short time so you have to be aggressive to get it, which can cause you to be hit. There are also shops you can enter to buy items to heal or change your characters. After levels, you can hire new Mercenaries to replace defeated ones, though you can't discard the ones you already have so you might want to use their transformation attack (A+B) instead, which sacrifices the mercenary for a powerful attack if you have one that's very low on health. Overall, this is just a really fun game with a great core gameplay loop. Even if this was on console this would still be an excellent shmup.
Nail 'N Scale is a great example of doing a lot with a little. It's a puzzle platformer where your main action is that you can throw a nail forward in an arc. If the nail hits something (except metal blocks), it will stick in it and become a platform. As you might remember from other games that have a similar mechanic (ie, Megaman has a few weapons that work like this), this is very versatile and there's a lot you can do with it, which this game milks for all its worth. A very simple example is jumping and firing many nails to climb a vertical wall, but there's tons more you can do, like jumping from wall to wall by sticking a nail in the opposite wall, firing a nail downwards and then standing on it for an extra boost, firing a nail as you jump and landing on it at the apex of your jump, and lots more. The game's jumping and nail physics feel good (you can also perform a move similar to the DKC roll jump where if you fall from a ledge you can then jump later, which is sometimes crucial), and scaling the game's stages feels fun. There are also boxes you can break by putting a nail in them and jumping on it and other minor puzzle elements, though the game is generally more heavy on the action and platforming end compared to the puzzle side. There's even boss battles and they also make good use of the nail mechanics, as you often have to climb walls and such to dodge their attacks. About the only real issue with the game is that there's no way to save, there's no passwords and the game has 50 levels. At least you do get infinite continues, but having to beat the game in one sitting is a bit of an ask. At least the game feels fun enough to control that the early levels are still fun to play so if you do have to repeat some stages it's not a big deal.
DeleteWe've covered Side Pocket about a million times, but this version here is probably one of the weakest ones. The gameplay is mostly intact, but the available modes have taken a huge hit, most particularly in the fact that there's no ability to play against the computer this time. This makes the core 8 ball mode fairly pointless, it basically just feels like a practice mode since even if you pocket the white ball it doesn't matter, in fact it's kind of a bonus since you get to place your ball whereever you want. This feels like a game that should definitely at least have "hot seat" multiplayer where you pass the gameboy back and forth, but it doesn't, you have to have a link cable to play with 2 people. The only other mode is a trick shot mode where you try to earn points by pocketing balls in special shots, but it's generally way too hard, not helped by the fact that on gameboy you have much less control over you shots because the balls are a lot smaller. It's such a shame that they didn't port Lunar Pool instead, it's much better as a single-player pool game.