It Cost a Dollah! Reviews
May. 6th, 2012 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI’m a sucker for a bargain. At I-Con this year, Play N Trade Games had a big shelf of $1 game discs. A dollah! How can you go wrong for less than a rental would cost? So I spent a whopping seven dollars on games, with the assumptions that none would really warrant being put on my official backlog list—if I played an hour of each one, I’d certainly gotten my money’s worth.
Namco Museum, Vol. 1 for PS1: A collection of Namco’s arcade releases from the 80s, which features Pac-Man, Rally-X, New Rally-X, Galaga, Bosconian, Pole Position, and Toy Pop. The gimmick is that they’re actually presented as a museum, with displays for the original cabinet artwork, a slideshow of the sprites, and all of the Japanese promotional materials. I tried out everything: Bosconian (an Asteroids-style full-motion space shooter with the gimmick that you fire from both the front and back of your ship), Toy Pop (which seems to be a more gimmicky, action-oriented version of The Adventures of Lolo, with puzzle stages to move through as enemies spawn), Galaga (which I have fond childhood memories of sinking too many quarters into), Pole Position (pretty classic racing game), and the two Rally-X games (you need to drive a car through a maze picking up flags, while one or more red cars try to hunt you down and crash into you). Pac-Man is Pac-Man, of course. It’s likely I’ll revisit the disc, but I suspect long-term play will be limited, because early arcade games are designed to be really hard (so you spend more money on them) but also repetitive (because they didn’t have much memory).
Orphen: Scion of Sorcery for PS2: An action-RPG from the early PS2 era (and therefore sporting graphics and voice acting barely out of PS1 quality), apparently based on an anime called Orphen: Sorcerous Stabber. (They really should have kept that name!) The game reminds me a bit of Granstream Saga, with the rpg-style gameplay and cutscenes but action-based battles with no non-storyline-based character advancement. I played through the intro and the first dungeon segment; depending on my mood, I may try to play more of it.
Rampage World Tour for PS1: A port of the classic arcade game where you play a giant rampaging monster and earn points by smashing buildings and eating people. There really isn’t much nuance beyond that: Take care not to eat poison, balance destroying buildings quickly with knocking out the windows to find extra food, improve your aim when it comes to knocking helicopters out of the sky…really, it’s about smashing stuff. Have fun!
Midway Arcade Treasures 2 for PS2: The best game of the lot, I think. A collection of Midway’s arcade games, and a decent blend of racing games, sports games, fighting games and action games. (Mostly mid-90s titles, but a few of the really old ones, too.) They seem to be pretty much direct ports of the arcade versions, though they’re locked into “Free Play” mode so you either have unlimited continues or can press a button to insert more coins. (Some games also have an options menu or bonus features like promo materials and badly-recorded creator interviews.) It also appears to support multiplayer if you have an appropriate multitap and enough controllers. Notable games include: Gauntlet 2! (Amazingly addictive when you have infinite quarters.) Mortal Kombat 2 and 3! (Much harder than I remember them.) Primal Rage! (If you don’t remember it, it’s like Mortal Kombat, only with dinosaurs.) A.P.B.! (You play a police car and need to flag down speeders and litterers without crashing into too many things.) And…Rampage World Tour. D’oh!
Eternal Ring for PS2: This is a first-person action-rpg dungeon-crawler. The king has dispatched you to the Island of No Return to find the Eternal Ring (or something) and you’ll spend a lot of time running in circles trying to find it. (If there’s a map feature, I couldn’t find it; and the controls are a little iffy.) The voice acting is hilariously awesome, though, as the very first NPC sounds like a plumber from Brooklyn and the absurdity just goes from there. Also, your character is apparently deathly allergic to water: Touch water anywhere on the island, and it’s an instant game over.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for PS2: Ostensibly it’s an adventure game with rpg elements (you have an inventory with healing items and equipment; there are quests to fulfill; etc). Bizarrely for a game that was made as a movie tie-in, the art style is somewhat cartoony and the characters don’t really resemble the actors who played them. Also, the plot follows the book more closely, with the entire opening act being Frodo running around the Shire getting his affairs in order. Of course, before you’ve even fought your first battle, there’s a stealth section where you need to sneak past the Riders out of Hobbiton. I hate stealth sections, especially in 3D, especially when the screen is dark and you can’t see the things you’re supposed to sneak past.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for PS2: In contrast to Fellowship, this game is like playing a movie. It intersperses (unskippable) movie scenes with ugly CGI game-system versions of them. You get a tutorial scene as Isildur; then as Aragorn on Weathertop; then you can choose between Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas for the following missions, starting with fighting your way to Moria. There are light RPG elements, in that you get “Excellent,” “Good” and “Fair” ratings for killing enemies with combos (or something, it wasn’t clear) and can use the points those are worth to buy special attacks. Of course, the system is clunky and the characters aren’t as maneuverable as it feels like they should be; and the only thing that mitigates the horrid CGI representations of the characters is that the game is often far too dark to see what’s going on.
Namco Museum, Vol. 1 for PS1: A collection of Namco’s arcade releases from the 80s, which features Pac-Man, Rally-X, New Rally-X, Galaga, Bosconian, Pole Position, and Toy Pop. The gimmick is that they’re actually presented as a museum, with displays for the original cabinet artwork, a slideshow of the sprites, and all of the Japanese promotional materials. I tried out everything: Bosconian (an Asteroids-style full-motion space shooter with the gimmick that you fire from both the front and back of your ship), Toy Pop (which seems to be a more gimmicky, action-oriented version of The Adventures of Lolo, with puzzle stages to move through as enemies spawn), Galaga (which I have fond childhood memories of sinking too many quarters into), Pole Position (pretty classic racing game), and the two Rally-X games (you need to drive a car through a maze picking up flags, while one or more red cars try to hunt you down and crash into you). Pac-Man is Pac-Man, of course. It’s likely I’ll revisit the disc, but I suspect long-term play will be limited, because early arcade games are designed to be really hard (so you spend more money on them) but also repetitive (because they didn’t have much memory).
Orphen: Scion of Sorcery for PS2: An action-RPG from the early PS2 era (and therefore sporting graphics and voice acting barely out of PS1 quality), apparently based on an anime called Orphen: Sorcerous Stabber. (They really should have kept that name!) The game reminds me a bit of Granstream Saga, with the rpg-style gameplay and cutscenes but action-based battles with no non-storyline-based character advancement. I played through the intro and the first dungeon segment; depending on my mood, I may try to play more of it.
Rampage World Tour for PS1: A port of the classic arcade game where you play a giant rampaging monster and earn points by smashing buildings and eating people. There really isn’t much nuance beyond that: Take care not to eat poison, balance destroying buildings quickly with knocking out the windows to find extra food, improve your aim when it comes to knocking helicopters out of the sky…really, it’s about smashing stuff. Have fun!
Midway Arcade Treasures 2 for PS2: The best game of the lot, I think. A collection of Midway’s arcade games, and a decent blend of racing games, sports games, fighting games and action games. (Mostly mid-90s titles, but a few of the really old ones, too.) They seem to be pretty much direct ports of the arcade versions, though they’re locked into “Free Play” mode so you either have unlimited continues or can press a button to insert more coins. (Some games also have an options menu or bonus features like promo materials and badly-recorded creator interviews.) It also appears to support multiplayer if you have an appropriate multitap and enough controllers. Notable games include: Gauntlet 2! (Amazingly addictive when you have infinite quarters.) Mortal Kombat 2 and 3! (Much harder than I remember them.) Primal Rage! (If you don’t remember it, it’s like Mortal Kombat, only with dinosaurs.) A.P.B.! (You play a police car and need to flag down speeders and litterers without crashing into too many things.) And…Rampage World Tour. D’oh!
Eternal Ring for PS2: This is a first-person action-rpg dungeon-crawler. The king has dispatched you to the Island of No Return to find the Eternal Ring (or something) and you’ll spend a lot of time running in circles trying to find it. (If there’s a map feature, I couldn’t find it; and the controls are a little iffy.) The voice acting is hilariously awesome, though, as the very first NPC sounds like a plumber from Brooklyn and the absurdity just goes from there. Also, your character is apparently deathly allergic to water: Touch water anywhere on the island, and it’s an instant game over.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for PS2: Ostensibly it’s an adventure game with rpg elements (you have an inventory with healing items and equipment; there are quests to fulfill; etc). Bizarrely for a game that was made as a movie tie-in, the art style is somewhat cartoony and the characters don’t really resemble the actors who played them. Also, the plot follows the book more closely, with the entire opening act being Frodo running around the Shire getting his affairs in order. Of course, before you’ve even fought your first battle, there’s a stealth section where you need to sneak past the Riders out of Hobbiton. I hate stealth sections, especially in 3D, especially when the screen is dark and you can’t see the things you’re supposed to sneak past.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for PS2: In contrast to Fellowship, this game is like playing a movie. It intersperses (unskippable) movie scenes with ugly CGI game-system versions of them. You get a tutorial scene as Isildur; then as Aragorn on Weathertop; then you can choose between Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas for the following missions, starting with fighting your way to Moria. There are light RPG elements, in that you get “Excellent,” “Good” and “Fair” ratings for killing enemies with combos (or something, it wasn’t clear) and can use the points those are worth to buy special attacks. Of course, the system is clunky and the characters aren’t as maneuverable as it feels like they should be; and the only thing that mitigates the horrid CGI representations of the characters is that the game is often far too dark to see what’s going on.
