|
Post by Sarge on Feb 3, 2024 1:48:39 GMT -5
I think the sequel is considered better. It's been some time since I played it, though.
|
|
|
Post by Ex on Feb 3, 2024 10:07:51 GMT -5
Didn't expect anyone here to be familiar with Snowboard Kids. I wasn't familiar with it until last month, discovering the game while researching candidates for this theme. I may have seen Snowboard Kids on a shelf at a game rental store back in the late '90s, but my brain would have automatically filtered out/ignored something like this back then. I can see how kids may have garnered some fun from Snowboard Kids back in '98, but compared to its peers at the time (better snowboard games, better kart racing games) it's really not impressive in any capacity. Clearly this game traded on its hybridization idea, which perhaps the sequel does better in accomplishing, I'll find out. Turns out there is a (Japan-only) PS1 port of this N64 game: And a third entry on DS:
|
|
|
Post by toei on Feb 3, 2024 10:20:56 GMT -5
"The Snowboard Kids are back and they're no longer strange winter gnomes"
|
|
|
Post by Sarge on Feb 3, 2024 15:06:26 GMT -5
Haha, I actually own a copy of Snowboard Kids 2. Haven't played it much, but I believe it has a story mode and all that jazz.
|
|
|
Post by Chema on Feb 11, 2024 16:27:37 GMT -5
I beat Totally Rad. The final boss was the easiest boss I've ever defeated in a NES game. In contrast, the final mini boss was brutal. They ought to have switched them! The game was fun, but the localization might have been the best thing about it. It's so unintentionally hilarious.
|
|
|
Post by toei on Feb 23, 2024 23:40:48 GMT -5
Though it's not particularly wintery, OverBlood 2 takes place around the Holidays and climaxes on Christmas, so it belongs here. There's even snow in the ending.
I'm going to score it right away: I give it 3 stars and a half, meaning "A little more than good". But it's much more special than that kind of score usually entails. This is one of those flawed good games that could have been very good or great, and sometimes is.
Roughly 100 years from now, humanity depends on cooling systems, large structures that were invented to keep the planet livable following massive climate change decades earlier. There are 87 of those, and so 87 population centers exist. The big city is East Edge, built on the site of the first cooling system (on the East Coast of the USA, I believe); it's become larger and more renown than even New York. It's a gloomy place, seemingly always in the dark and filled with pipes shooting out smoke for who knows what purposes. Street children run unsupervised in the alleys, and you can buy grenades and machine guns on the street corner. That's the downtown block in which the game takes place, anyway; the rich have their own quarters somewhere. Nonetheless, life doesn't seem all that rough, and most of the NPCs seem relatively happy, if a little odd in the head sometimes. And hey, they have flying cars, and even devices that let you jump super high like you're on the moon. Both the cooling systems and the anti-gravity market belong to Hayano Industries, the world's largest corporation.
A youth with spiky hair and a crazy name, Acarno Brani, just landed at the East Edge terminal with the goal of making it big as a Junk Blade racer (high-risk hoverbike races) when he runs into a kidnapping in progress. He fails to foil it, but makes away with a capsule which will get him caught up in a vast conspiracy involving Hayano Industries and the Government.
You could say the game is divided into three parts; the core gameplay segments, referred to in-game as "Episodes"; town segments, in which you run around a pre-rendered RPG-style town, talk to NPCs and shop for things; and cutscenes. Those aren't particularly cinematic, as movies don't normally consist of 10 to 15 minute scenes where a group of people just talk around a table. Typically, you're looking at a good 20-25 minutes of talk total between each of the 7 episodes. Those are usually divided in two - you have the end-of-episode cutscenes, followed by the what-do-we-do-next cutscenes, with a chance to save in-between. I would always take a break in between or it'd just be too much. It would've been a lot faster if they'd used text boxes like in a RPG instead of voicing everything; they could have also cut the word count by half without losing anything with some good editing. I blame it on inexperience on Akihiro Hino's part, who'd only ever worked as a programmer until writing this game. The story is actually pretty interesting, and some of the dialogue is pretty good, but those scenes are nonetheless overlong and overly talky. It has interesting ideas and a strong setting, but the (thankfully uncommon) dramatic moments come off as goofy. Most of the lead voice actors sound good as long as they don't have to act emotional. They're much better at sarcasm and dry humor, possibly because they're British. A few of the minor characters are awful; shout out to the nutcase who voiced the Minister of Defense, who sounds like a South Park character. His delivery of the dramatic line "There's no use... It's all over. And to think it's Christmas. IT'S CHRISTMAS!" almost made me laugh out loud.
Luckily, there's barely any dialogue during the actual episodes; what you get instead is an hour or more of action-adventure in a 3D space. The focus is on the adventure part, particularly exploration; the environments are pretty large and there are items to be found all over the place, most of which are useful and valuable. You can buy some of them in town, but money is limited. The puzzles usually revolve around using items to progress, with many of the weapons affecting the environment in clever ways. You can shoot through glass, freeze or evaporate bodies of water, hookshot around, moonjump, blow a surprising variety of stuff up with 5-6 different types of bombs, put out flames with a fire extinguisher or burn things with a flamethrower, etc. etc. It's a much more physical and involved evolution of the typical adventure gameplay, and I found it very enjoyable. I would have taken more. There are only a small handful of enemies plus a boss in most episodes; combat is basic and unrefined but it's really there to provide a little relief and excitement and it's too easy to ever be frustrating. Shoutout to the Big Magnum and the Katana, which are pretty satisfying to use. There are also a handful of miscellaneous action sequences, including a Junk Blade race, a crappy dance sequence, manning a cannon on a ship, etc. Oh, and there's two other characters you occasionally play as, a female cop and an old scientist/sci-fi pirate.
Sadly, the final episode has cutscenes, mostly one so awful I deducted half a point from the score. It's literally 23 minutes long and consists of nothing but the surprise villain yapping away about uninteresting clichéd bullshit while everyone stands around being useless. It's absurd and stupid and should have never been longer than a couple minutes and is especially hard to sit through when you're ready to fight him the moment you enter the room. It's really the low point of the game. Thankfully there are a few more interesting moments after that, so it doesn't end on a sour note. In fact, it ends on a Christmas miracle.
Most of the team behind this game left Riverhillsoft thereafter and founded Level 5, which would go on to become much more successful. Level 5 games are typically bright, cartoony, and colorful, the opposite of this game in many ways. In the PS2 era, they were also known for popularizing cell-shading (along with Jet Grind Radio earlier); I wonder if that focus on appealing visuals was a lesson learned from this game, which isn't particularly pretty to look at. I would have liked to see another game in this vein, just with better story pacing / editing.
Summary: A unique, sometimes clumsy action-adventure game for patient gamers who enjoy exploration and gloomy, offbeat worlds and stories. ***1/2.
|
|
|
Post by Ex on Feb 24, 2024 12:42:50 GMT -5
Kudos to you for finishing this one, a respectable obscure beat. An interesting read. Your perseverance highlights some intriguing aspects, but the lengthy awful cutscenes and awkward long dialogue would be hindrances to my entry.
But didn't some of this team go on to create CiNG? And CiNG's games are not all colorful and cartoony. Quite a few were serious and somber. Glass Rose, the Kyle Hyde games, and Again for example. And the Ashley Robbins games get rather dark and sullen at times as well.
|
|
|
Post by Sarge on Feb 24, 2024 14:19:50 GMT -5
Looking up some footage... I don't even know if I was aware of this game, but it does look and sound pretty interesting in ways.
|
|
|
Post by toei on Feb 24, 2024 19:55:25 GMT -5
Ex There's only one awful cutscene. But they're all too long. Other members of Riverhillsoft formed CING, but at a glance, they weren't the ones who worked on OverBlood 2. CING was formed by veterans from the early days of menu-based adventure games at Riverhillsoft, mostly Rika Suzuki and Takuya Miyagawa. OverBlood 2's staff was mostly newer, except Akihiro Hino who had been a programmer for about a decade. They probably recruited a lot of them when they started making 3D games. Suzuki and Miyagawa both seemed to have stepped away from active game design between JB Harold: Blue Chicago Blues in 1994 and Cing in the early 2000s. They only get Special Thanks-type credits in between. Maybe they focused on the business aspect. OverBlood 1 was horror, as was its spiritual predecessor Doctor Hauzer, so maybe that's why OB2 is somewhat dark and gloomy despite not being horror. I wouldn't say that they were serious horror though. That plus the conceptual influence from FF7's Midgard section. It's funny that Akihiro Hino went on to write Professor Layton and all that. Also, Riverhillsoft made one last big game after most of the Level 5 people left, Vermillion Desert for the Dreamcast in 1999. It's a SRPG/RTS hybrid, or something, involving soldiers and mecha. Looks like it might be a little too repetitive, but it's definitely intriguing.
|
|
|
Post by Sarge on Feb 27, 2024 19:48:11 GMT -5
Almost doesn't count... but there's some sliding ice in a level in Shatterhand. Still a great game. Still brutal checkpointing in that last level. Although at least if you do get to the final checkpoint, you can continue there as well, so you've got three lives to try to make it.
The key, of course, ends up being abusing the super suit. If you get it at just the right time, you can carry it into the boss room, and absolutely rip through them.
Anyway, 9/10 game for me. Natsume firing on all cylinders here.
|
|