Saturday 23 March 2024

Formula 1 Sensation (NES)


 Only a few weeks after Royal Stone really showed off the potential of the Game Gear, I'm writing about another game that makes its aged eight bit host hardware look amazing. Though I was initially turned off by its psuedo-realisms, F-1 Sensation's amazing graphics kept me playing, and I'm glad they did, as it turns out that the game's a lot more fun than my initial reaction made out. I'd go as far as to say that it looks as good as Final Lap Twin on the PC Engine (probably my favourite racing game on that console, and also impressive on its hardware for its speed and use of split screen multiplayer).

 


But yeah, there were a few things that almost turned me away, reminding me of games I've really disliked in the past, like the Mega Drive's Super Monaco GP, for example. There's no option to drive with an automatic transmission, you have to do a qualifying lap before each race to determine your starting position, and you have to keep track of the condition of some of your car's parts (specifically the engine, tire, and wing. Though it seems to mainly be the tires that are the problem), and go into the pits to have them changed when the condition meters get low.

 


However, these things that I'd originally perceived as negatives all turned out to be incredibly minor! THe qualifying laps aren't as boring as I'd expected, and they actually give a nice chance to figure out the hardest corners and easiest straights on the course. The gear shifting, oddly, doesn't really seem to matter at all: you have four gears, though unlike in most games, you can pretty much shift into the third gear straight away and then into fourth a couple of seconds later. The acceleration pentaly for skipping gears is almost non-existent! And finally, entering the pit comes with a cute little animation of your crew changing your car's parts, only takes a few seconds, and oddly, doesn't seem to affect your race position too much, if at all. In fact, there were a couple of times where I entered the pit while in first place, and it seemed like my lead had increased when I left the pit.

 


So it turned out that this is the fast, fun, and simple kind of racing game I like the most, despite its realist trappings. There are some negatives, though! Firstly, while it is an incredible looking game for the NES/Famicom, in terms of moving at high speed and making a decent-looking attempt at a scaling effect, it's also constrained by being a Formula 1 game. That is to say: every track looks almost exactly the same, with only a slightly different colour scheme, and different sponsor names on the buildings in the background to differentiate them. Secondly, I feel like every race being five laps long might be a little too much. It means that they're all at least five minutes long, some going over seven minutes. It's just too long to be driving around such sparsely decorated tracks!

 


Those negatives are both pretty minor, though. This is still an excellent game, and though I've only played a few Famicom racing games, I'm yet to have encountered one that comes close to rivalling F-1 Sensation (though if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know, the Famicom's not a system in which I have a lot of expertise). I also want to mention that it's part of a small, exclusive club: Famicom/NES games that got released in Europe, but not North America. It wasn't a super popular system here in its heyday, so it's extra strange that a game would get released for it as late as 1993! I guess they were really hoping the popularity of Formula 1 and the NES' status as a budget console by that time would get it some sales from people who were sports fans more than they were videogame fans? Of course, its high quality, lack of language barrier, and late release make it a very rare and sought after title, and there are copies out there listed for close to an entire thousand pounds! Madness.

Friday 15 March 2024

Jack Bros. (Virtual Boy)


 This is one of the better-known Virtual Boy games, but I'm still considering it obscure, because it's still a Virtual Boy game, and like most of them, it's an exclusive to a console that almost no-one owned and has only fairly recently seemed to have attracted the attention of emulator writers. It also has something of a positive reputation, which I think must be entirely based on the fact that it's a little-known, lesser-played action game starring characters and monsters from the Shn Megami Tensei series.

 


There's been games featured on this blog in recent times that I didn't particularly enjoy for various reasons, games I didn't feel like I could recommend, but I think it's been a long time since I've featured a game here that I've actively disliked as much as I do Jack Bros. It's a maze game in which you have to collect a bunch of keys in each stage to open up the exit (or exits) and go to the next stage. One thing I do like about it is that it utilises the VB's 3D in a nice little way: you get to the next stage by jumping off of the side of the current one, and you can always see the next stage floating in space far below the current one. I also like the use of a combined time limit/health bar. That's something you see in a lot of the old top-down racing games I love, and it's rare to see such a system in a game of another genre (the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars).

 


That's about all I like about it, though. The problems start before you even get to do anything: at the start of every stage, a fairy will appear to deliver a few textboxes of information, that you've either already worked out or could have worked out within a few seconds of play. Things like several variations on "there are enemies on this stage that will attack you", or the revelation, at the start of the eleventh stage, that you can attack by using the right d-pad. I've managed to get over twenty stages into the game, and that fairy was still showing up at the start of each one to deliver some worthless advice.

 


Then you start playing, and the game is just so slow and boring and easy. You waddle around the small mazes, find a few keys, and jump off the side to the next stage. Like you've probably already worked out, it uses twinstick controls, though you can only move and shoot in the four cardinal directions. Even with this in mind, the normal enemies are no threat to you at all, and the bosses only slightly moreso. There are three characters, though only one of them is really viable. Jack Frost has ranged attacks, but they're so slow and weak that he's useless. Jack Skelton does decent damage, but only at melee range. Jack Lantern has fast-firing projectiles that do decent damage, so is better than the other characters in such a way that makes them totally pointless.

 


Like I said back in the first paragraph, I think that all of the goodwill people have towards this game comes from its association to a beloved series. Unfortunately, for the first time in a long time, this is a game that was hard to review simply because playing it was such a tedious chore that I would put off going back to it, and wished I was playing anything else the whole time I was playing it. I'm not writing off the Virtual Boy as a console, though: I've played a few other games that have been better and/or more interesting, and I'll almost definitely cover at least some of them here in the future.