Showing posts with label beat-em-ups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beat-em-ups. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Rapid Angel (PS1), now on PSN Imports


I bought Rapid Angel on the Japanese PSN a long while ago, intending to do an HG101 write-up, but never put much time into it. After seeing THIS entry on Siliconera though, announcing its imminent release on PSN Imports by MonkeyPaw Games, I thought it time to finally play through.
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I’d first heard about Rapid Angel on obscure games website Twin Dreams (which is where I’ve borrowed all but one of these images from), which is/was kind of like a proto-HG101, covering obscure Japanese games. Sadly it stopped being updated years ago. When Rapid Angel came out on PSN I didn’t recognise the kanji name at first, and the 3 screenshots shown in the preview made me think of Guardian Heroes, sort of. Well, it’s nothing like Guardian Heroes (for that you’ll want Panzer Bandit on PS1), but it is pretty awesome.


I seem to be playing a lot of 2D games recently, including Little Ralph and Hermie Hopperhead (planning a proper feature on this for HG101). And I have mixed views on all three of these. Hermie is undoubtedly the prettiest, with Ralph somewhere in the middle and Rapid Angel coming across as quaintly quirky in the visuals department (though it does have some cool scaling effects). Hermie though is proving too samey and awkward to really enjoy playing; it’s OK, but maintaining three hatched eggs is more work than fun sometimes. Ralph I think is overrated, too obsessed with speedrunning its brutally difficult stages – and I absolutely hate speedrunning. Rapid Angel meanwhile, despite or because of its rough around the edges nature, has proven quite charming.


RA actually reminds me El Viento, in fact it reminds me of a lot of various Telenet games. And the thing is, I love Telenet/Wolfteam/RiOT – that whole messy web of subsidiaries and divisions. None of their games were masterpieces, but they had a kind of dirty charm peculiar to a very specific era in gaming history. There’s a classification of games which doesn’t really have a word (and it’s not kusoge), which I equate to eating a grubby hotdog from a street vendor with all the toppings. You know it’s not top quality food, but damn if it doesn’t somehow manage to taste really good. These are Telenet games. This is Rapid Angel.


But I can’t emphasise enough, this is not a criticism. These types of games, with less polish than others, satisfy a very specific kind of appetite in retro gamers. And I would say they’re fantastic, for what they are at the prices they are, but not for the criteria a commercial magazine would judge them by.


Wyrdwad on HG101’s forum actually did a really good write up on Rapid Angel in 2009, which I’m going to reprint some of (unabridged version HERE):


*****
Shelled out the 600 yen from my Japanese PSN "wallet" to download an intriguing-looking old PlayStation game I never heard of before, called Kaisoku Tenshi, or "The Rapid Angel" (actual official English title, according to the game's title screen)... and to my surprise, it's actually quite good! It's a heavily arcade-influenced beat-em-up platformer, kind of along the lines of something like Battletoads. It doesn't really offer anything new over other games of either the beat-em-up or platformer genre, but it has a lot of variety, a lot of story, and short fun levels with lots of checkpoints.

The coolest thing about this game is that you get a choice of 3 different characters to play as from the start (all of whom have very different attacks), and for each one, the story seems to unfold a lot differently. And as you play, you get an occasional choice to make, which influences the story to come, and also unlocks various other playable characters - including villains - for future story-mode playthroughs.


The downsides to the game are that its character art looks really amateurish (though it's not without its charms!), and its music is COMPLETELY forgettable. But the in-game sprite graphics are pretty detailed, the backgrounds are drawn in a well-put-together combination of 2D and fairly nice 3D (for 1998 especially!), the pacing is fast, the controls are a little sticky but overall pretty good (they feel more like beat-em-up controls than platformer controls, but anyone who's played beat-em-ups before shouldn't have any trouble getting used to them), and there's also a lot of crazy humor and over-the-top action, presented very well.
*****

What intrigues me most is that MonkeyPaw are releasing it with the Japanese dialogue choices. I lent my camera to someone for the week so can’t take pics of my PS3, but I did take a photo when I first downloaded it, of one of the dialogue choices (pictured). They’re not game breaking, rather they alter things slightly as Wyrdwad mentioned. I guess this gives a good reason for replays (especially since there are several characters to unlock), and kinda harks back to the old days, when you’d import and have to work your way through a game with broken Japanese, or none at all, which in itself is kind of interesting. They do always provide translated manuals on their website though, which is neat.



Rapid Angel is an extremely obscure title, and also totally awesome if you're the kind of person who enjoyed Telenet's offerings back in the day. Well worth investigating if you’ve not already bought it off the Japanese PSN.



EDIT:
Since posting this MPG has released a press release, which also talks about a meat-based puzzler. I've not tried it, but thought it worth reprinting here.
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There have been many food simulation games over the years. Something about balancing the art of cooking while pleasing your patrons fits video games well. The act has that compelling tension that fosters strategy and quick reaction. So with an extended drumroll we bring you a foodie game of Japanese cuisine and eating etiquette. Yakiniku Bugyou is a restaurant simulation based on that favorite food, red meat. Yakiniku are thin slices of a various meats barbequed over flaming charcoal. Like our upcoming summer project BurgerTime World Tour, this food extravaganza will get you hungry just playing! The frenetic puzzler requires being an extra careful, fast and efficient chef. Just don't overcook the meat and watch your customers for a satisfying result.
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I had to search the kanji to find a picture online - that's how obscure this thing is! Kanji: 焼肉奉行
Posted by Sketcz at 5:08 AM 5 comments
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Monday, September 6, 2010

Scott Pilgrim vs. RPG Elements


The whole Scott Pilgrim multimedia blitzkrieg worked far better than it really should have. Yes, the movie flopped, but quality-wise it was completely fantastic, because the people that made it had an understanding of why people loved the comic. The same goes for UbiSoft's downloadable video game, which makes no excuses for being an updated version of River City Ransom. It's appropriate, given that Scott's universe is largely inspired by this particular game, and also welcome, because not even the original Kunio-kun developers have ever done it properly, instead compelled to remake the numerous sports related games that no one seems to care about (except the dodgeball ones, but those new ones haven't turned out all that well.) Other than the technical glitches, most people seem to like it, with the major criticism being against the RPG mechanics. I've even read some people say the game would be better off without them. Nonsense, I say -- for the type of game this is trying to be, they are essential.

This is because, from a design standpoint, the sidescrolling beat-em-up -- or the belt-scroller, if we're gonna be all hip -- just isn't very good.


That's not to totally write off a huge part of gaming history, or say that we were all fooling ourselves when we put quarters into TMNT: The Arcade Game. No, they're still FUN, because smashing stuff in Final Fight is pretty gratifying even twenty years later. But they're very, very hard to balance if you're going to play to win and not just put quarters into them. The 3D nature of the movement makes it hard to line up attacks. The size of the characters, combined with their sluggish movement and the nature of close quarters combat, makes defense maneuvers difficult. And the chaotic nature of the enemy attacks make it hard to predict their movement anyway. There is some technique required for crowd control, but even that grows nearly useless in a typical boss fight, wherein your opponent is clearly overpowered. And none of that takes into account that they're just really repetitive -- without any platforming or any other activities, it's literally the same action repeated thousands of times, which is usually not helped by the limited movesets. Even the most advanced games grow weary by the time the finale rolls around. It's widely acknowledged that these games tend to live or die in co-op multi-player, not only because it's more fun to bash heads with friends, but because the multiple characters allow you to tip the scales of balance through flat-out attrition.

Knowing that it's hard to be "good" at beat-em-ups -- and you can't make them too easy without being boring, or too hard without being frustrated -- the designers of Scott Pilgrim used RPG elements in an attempt to balance everything out by minimizing the need for player skill. In that way, the difficulty of the game is inversely proportionate to how long you've spent playing it. I know that sentiment sends terror down the spine of the "play games to 1 cc them" crowd, but if you're playing Scott Pilgrim that way, you're playing it wrong.

That might sound like it's meant to waste the player's time, but think of it like this. If you're making a old school style beat-em-up, you can (A) make it an hour long game with infinite credits, like many recent arcade ports, and have people claim that it's too easy and disposable, (B) make it like an NES game and give limited continues, forcing people to replay earlier stages over and over in hopes they get better and don't just give it up, or (C) implement a barrier that artificially slows down progress but gives the opportunity for the player to improve their stats and play over levels at their leisure. I'm not a huge fan of forced grinding, but the way it's presented in Scott Pilgrim mostly works, in large parts because the graphics and music is brilliant, and the core action is fun enough that it feels gratifying without getting too repetitive. I don't think I played a single level more than twice before I beat it, other than occasionally visiting some old stages for fun.


It's still got issues, though. When you stick RPG elements into an action game, you get a conundrum with your "starting point" at level 1 - do you stick your character in neutral state, that is, with skills on the level to a game without RPG elements, or do you nerf the character and weaken them, forcing them to climb the ranks to get skills you would otherwise commonly start with? Scott Pilgrim picks the latter route, and I'm not a fan of that. The first stage or so is really slow, because you're slow, and you don't have many skills, and it's not a lot of fun. It gets astronomically more enjoyable once you level up, but that's an awful way to start a game, especially when you're depending on sales from a demo.

Scott Pilgrim's other mistake is that leveling up is so haphazard that it's easy to turn the game into a complete cakewalk and become completely overpowered. This also happened to be the same exact issue with River City Ransom, so the developers must not have felt it was a concern, but it feels weird to beat a boss you've encountered for the first time in a handful of seconds.

It's not quite as well done as Castle Crashers, a game which Scott Pilgrim owes its very existence to due to its extraordinary success, but while it could've used some adjustment, it's still another fantastic example of how you can take an old-school arcade-style game and update it to a modern console mentality, and have it appeal to more than just a handful of people.


Posted by Discoalucard at 1:10 PM 17 comments
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