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Assault Suits Valken / Cybernator PS2 - any good?

M

mosaic

go eat paint
I was puttering around the net reading about old games, when I discovered that there was a PS2 remake made of Cybernator (Assault Suits Valken).

Come to discover, it was just released in English in PAL countries. Now I'm wondering if I ought to import it.

Anyone played it? Any good?

http://www.jeuxvideo.com/jeux/0001/00015254.htm

Those screens seem decent. 2D FTW!
 
Stay the fuck away from Valken on PS2. I bought it a couple years ago in Tokyo on a whim and couldn't wait to get home and play it, thinking maybe it'd be touched up, better graphics, whatever. Nope. Lazy port numbah 1. I felt like I had a SNES emulator running on my PS2. :P

The music is redbook (I think), so I guess that counts for something.
 
mosaic said:
Cybernator on PS2!?
Click to expand...

yes.gif


chespace said:
It Stinks!
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A_DmickeyTN.jpg


Man, my hopes. Feels like the time I learned that there was a new Cybernator game on Saturn.... but only in Japan.

Damn the Patriots!
 
Sucks to hear about the shittness of the PS2 AS Valken.

As for Cybernator for the Saturn...it was actually Assault Suit Leynos 2...it was lame. I was so crushed by the absolute mediocrity of it... Too short and just nothing even close to the first game (Target Earth) in quality and appeal. NCS/Masaya was something else for the first two AS games and Warsong, though.
 
MightyHedgehog said:
Sucks to hear about the shittness of the PS2 AS Valken.

As for Cybernator for the Saturn...it was actually Assault Suit Leynos 2...it was lame. I was so crushed by the absolute mediocrity of it... Too short and just nothing even close to the first game (Target Earth) in quality and appeal. NCS/Masaya was something else for the first two AS games and Warsong, though.
Click to expand...

OMG, don't even get me started on Leynos 2 for Saturn. JUST DON'T GO THERE.
 
Sad news... my curiosity has left me addicted to Cybernator and Metal Warriors, and my brain had high hopes to import some recent-gen 2D mech goodness. Man, how do you screw up a remake that should be so easy to improve? I know Konami wasn't the creator of the Assault Suits series, but since they basically did Metal Warriors themselves, I'd love to see them do an update, say on the Nintendo DS, a la Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow.
 
...What?

I bought Assault Suit Leynos 2 for the Saturn because I liked Target Earth so much, but haven't been been able to play it since I don't have a modded system or a game shark.

And now you tell me it sucks?
 
chespace said:
Stay the fuck away from Valken on PS2. I bought it a couple years ago in Tokyo on a whim and couldn't wait to get home and play it, thinking maybe it'd be touched up, better graphics, whatever. Nope. Lazy port numbah 1. I felt like I had a SNES emulator running on my PS2. :P

The music is redbook (I think), so I guess that counts for something.
Click to expand...
Oh, come on. That first level (horizontal shooting) wasn't in the SNES version, and neither are all the lighting effects and stuff. It's kind of half-assed, yeah, but to claim it sports nothing new is just plain wrong.

I never liked the original Cybernator, but I thought the PS2 port played like the original. I really don't see what you have to lose if you're a big fan of the original...
 
Hmmm, I think I'd actually buy a remake of Cybernator if it played the same and only looked marginally better. The UK release is only 20 GBP anyway.
 
aku:jiki said:
I never liked the original Cybernator, but I thought the PS2 port played like the original. I really don't see what you have to lose if you're a big fan of the original...
Click to expand...

Well, you stand to lose around 45 bucks for the import. :P

Yeah, the game certainly isn't any worse than its SNES counterpart (at least from what I can remember), but what a shame they didn't take advantage of the hardware to basically re-create Valken with some TLC.
 
chespace said:
Well, you stand to lose around 45 bucks for the import. :P
Click to expand...
That's the beauty of it, the PAL version is like 9 GBP or less... with shipping, that's the same as picking up a $20 budget game. I'm very tempted, since it seems to be a graphically upgraded SNES game... and not just a bad game in its own right.
 
mosaic said:
That's the beauty of it, the PAL version is like 9 GBP or less... with shipping, that's the same as picking up a $20 budget game. I'm very tempted, since it seems to be a graphically upgraded SNES game... and not just a bad game in its own right.
Click to expand...

Graphics marginally updated, you mean. It really still does look a lot like the original. In fact, I didn't even notice the shadows or whatever.
 
anyone know if the pal version has a 60hz mode? importing from euroland is so confusing. might as well risk it...it's cheap and i love me some cybernator.
 
nice. thanks. uh, anyone know of a site that'll ship it to the us? play.com doesn't seem to ship outside europe, and gameplay.co.uk doesn't seem to list it.
 
chespace said:
OMG, don't even get me started on Leynos 2 for Saturn. JUST DON'T GO THERE.
Click to expand...

Sorry for the bump, but I HAVE to know why. I've heard from other sources that its great, to the point that I feel bad for passing it up the first time, and I'm constantly on the fence about getting a copy.
 
My memory is pretty hazy and I tried to block out a lot of the horrible disappointment that I suffered when I bought the game when it came out in Japan...

Slowdown city...everywhere.

Shitty scaling that worked with really low-res principal sprites...it made them very chunky/aliased/pixely a lot of the time.

Art design is more generic-feeling and seemed like it was done from renders and not pixel art...might be wrong, but that's what I remember.

Explosions and overall sprites are more numerous on-screen, as you'd expect from a Saturn game, but lacked the oomph that the first two AS titles had, IMO.

The control is too loose, from what I remember and the action too random feeling.

The game is also too short. And the mission design was pretty standard, which is the worst thing about it...overall. The AS games had amazing depth and variety to their mission/stages.

ASL2 just sucks...flat out.
 
All of the above, yeah.

And I really want to stress that the art direction was FUCKING TERRIBLE. I don't demand anime-style or manga character designs in all my games, but Jesus H., I didn't expect, nor want the Leynos series to take on a shitty generic american spandex superhero comicbook style either. The characters in this game are hideos.
 
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