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Macross VF-X2
  PS1Shooter_3DJ  
  opened by paleface at 03:15:53 08/25/03  
  last modified by paleface at 12:25:50 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PS1; cat=Driving; reg=JPN]
           
Well, a friend of mine who knows a lot about Japanese games heartily recommended this one, so I got it despite having the suspicion that all the PS1 Macross games were licensed crap. And I can't say that this game has done much to dissuade me of that opinion.
 
The controls are completely incomprehensible until you switch on the Forward view (handy thing, being able to look the way your vehicle is pointing) that is disabled by default. Sm-art. Even then you still feel like you're a gyroscope pivoting in place as things fly in circles around you, rather than a powerful jet fighter. Hitting any kind of moving target with your gun pod in fighter mode is pretty much a crap shoot but fortunately they give you 500 missles or so, and locking these on is kind of fun.
 
That's about all you do though: battle start, spin around, hold down the missle lock button and try to lock a missle swarm on to the little dots before they spin away again. There's absolutely no reason to transform into battloid or gerwalk modes until you get to one of the land missions, at mission four or five I think. And the land parts suck big-time: the control is still the pivoting-on-gyroscope feel but now you actually have to run around buildings and things and the framerate is worse--have a barf bag handy. When you find something shooting at you, such as a destroid or gun turret, you just juke back and forth and hold the fire button down for about 45 seconds until the thing blows up. Yay. Actually a lot of the dogfighting segments went like that for me as well, except half the time was spent in "evasive maneuvers" as the enemy fired missle barrages at me and the other half was spent swirling around trying to acquire a target.
 
It doesn't help your patience that two of the major sound effects, the bullet impact sound and the warning-missle-lock sound, are really, really irritating, and the others aren't much better. And to top it all off, there are no appealing characters here, no aliens (at least not in the first 4 or 5 missions), and no anime cutscenes. The graphics are pretty decent for the PlayStation but I'm tired of the spin-missle-lock routine and don't see much reason to spend more time with the game.
    
references:
· The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (PS2)

 
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