The marathon continues. Last week, we reviewed five machines from the Games Room in the Union’s Rathskeller. Daytona USA clearly took a lead over the competition, but can it hold its place as number one? Read on and find out.
Crisis Zone
The latest and greatest light gun game ever! Ok, maybe not. I won’t say that Crisis Zone is the best gun game ever, but it is pretty good. Gameplay is more or less the same as most other gun games: The camera moves, bad guys with guns pop up, and you shoot them. Crisis Zone also borrows the pedal from its predecessors, the Time Crisis games, allowing you to duck out of the line of fire as you reload.
A lot of attention has been put into the smaller details. The game’s developers spent a good deal of time researching how guns fire, how bullets ricochet off of different surfaces, and so on. For an added sense of realism, the gun has a force-feedback mechanism.
Unfortunately, most players will never notice all the cool stuff about Crisis Zone, simply because the play time on one credit is so short. My only other gripe is that Crisis Zone is only a one-player game, simply because no two player version exists. Overall, Crisis Zone is a good game but don’t throw too many quarters into it—it’s not that good.
NFL Blitz
One of the more interesting machines in the games room is the NFL Blitz/NBA Showtime combo machine.
The first half of the machine, NFL Blitz is everything that Vince McMahon would want the XFL to be. If you were to tape the games off the screen and show them on TV, the ratings would probably be higher too. Basically, Blitz is football with no rules, and it’s also a lot of fun.
Other than the lack of rules, NFL Blitz plays a lot like most other football games … except for that physics part. I’d almost like to say that these games are being played on the moon, because the players fly about six times farther than they would under normal gravity. This is not a bad thing, though.
As far as bang for the buck goes, Blitz is pretty good. Each quarter of play time costs 50 cents and lasts for three minutes, which puts it toward the top of the category when compared to the other games in the Games Room.
Unfortunately, gameplay in Blitz is nearly incomprehensible, despite instructions on the machine and in game. Amazingly, though, it doesn’t impact the fun of the game—it’s still a fun game to play. But it’s not the best one out there.
NBA Showtime
Blitz’s brother, NBA Showtime is basically a kind of 3-D NBA Jam with a big NBC advertisement slapped on top of it. It’s a decent game, too, but not really anything special.
For the most part, you pick an NBA team and then a player, and you go at it from there. After that, it’s all just exaggerated two-on-two basketball. There’s not too much else to it, really.
The one thing that’s really obnoxious, though, is the fact that NBC practically bought the game. The "NBA on NBC" logo is plastered throughout the entire game. Sure, it looks like you’re watching a game on TV, but it just gets to be disgusting after a while. If I’m going to have the advertisement thrown in my face like that, the game ought to be free. Unfortunately, that’s not the case—the pricing follows that of NFL Blitz.
Overall, the game is not that great, but it’s still worth playing if you’re a sports fan. By the way, if anyone from NBC is reading this, my check can be sent to the Poly office.
Frankly, this week’s selection of games doesn’t shine all that much. Fortunately, next week’s choices are a little better. Will they be able to top Daytona? Wait and see for yourselves!
