Front Page
News
Previews
Reviews
Mini-Reviews
• Crush Roller [NG]
• Neo Cherry Master Color [NG]
• Stranded Kids [GBC]
• Gex: Deep Cover Gecko [GBC]
• Snow Surfers [DC]
• Psychic Force 2012 [DC]
• Theme Park World [PC]
• Panzer General 3D Assault [PC]
Features
Gamer Life
Feedback
Charts
Release Schedule
Next Week
On the website
Chat forum
Demos and Patches
Hints and Tips...
PC
PlayStation
N64
 |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Radical dude - snowboarding on the Dreamcast! It's going to look amazing, go really fast and feature plenty of gnarly tricks, right? Wrong. Developed by UEP Systems, Snow Surfers is Cool Boarders in all but name. It's actually most like Cool Boarders 2 to be precise. This isn't a bad thing - Cool Boarders 2 was a fine PlayStation game - but surely Dreamcast owners deserve more than just spruced up graphics. And why doesn't this version offer the same sense of speed? Surely the machine can handle it. Gripes aside, Snow Surfers is pretty good fun and will probably sell well thanks to a lack of competition. If you simply must have a snowboarding game this Christmas, you won't be too disappointed. However, those of us with limited disposable income would do better to wait until someone actually makes the effort to push the Dreamcast to its limits.
If David Lynch were to make a fighting game, it would probably be something like this. Psychic Force 2012 sees players floating around in a cube, throwing magic stuff at each other for the most part and occasionally nipping in for a bit of toe-to-toe. Gravity doesn't exist in the cube, something that takes a little while to get your head around. The characters are of the Manga school of design, similar to those found in Evil Zone on PlayStation. In fact, it's a shame the game doesn't play a bit more like Evil Zone. Psychic Force has neither the look nor the feel of a next gen game - the moves are simple to pull off, leaving no room for practice, and the graphics would struggle to impress even on PlayStation. Special moves should be more limited as you'll spend most of the time at opposite ends of the arena, bashing triangle to throw magic at each other. It's not really fighting, is it? For some reason Japanese gamers loved it, as will hardcore beat 'em up fans over here. While it's severely limited in terms of depth, it does have a certain unique charm though.
|
||||||||||||||||||
