| | | Reference added: 219
"Super Dodge Ball followups: Rainbow DB and SDB Advance."
This is better than Rainbow Dodgeball (see entry 219). It's got some of the old music from the old NES game, for one thing, plus more strategic depth as here if you pass at the exact height of your jump, you get a super pass which means that the receiver can then attack with the ball using the passer's super throw. Very neat evolution.
The default difficulty provides little challenge but raising it to the highest level makes things quite tough indeed. There's always been a little something missing from these games--a sense of urgency perhaps, since a team can just pass the ball around forever (and the AI actually does this sometimes!). Maybe a shot clock would help.
Anyway, that aside this is darn fine video dodgeball. I wish it had the hulking mammoth players of the NES version but at least here each player looks unique and even his little death angel looks like him, except of course with wings and a white cloak. I also kind of like the ladder championship style where you can choose who you want to play, but the finals didn't really feel that climactic. Exhibition mode is interesting as you can choose courts with wacky effects like slippy ice, low-gravity (argh) and so forth.
It's a lot of dodgeball in one little game and second only to the old NES version, plus it has the benefit of no slowdown or sprite flicker. |
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| | | Having just gone back and compared this head-to-head against a port of the original (which you'll see shortly...), I have to say that this newer version lacks the certain je ne sais quoi that the original had. The characters move slow, which doesn't help, but in general the original had a perfect sense of timing of animations and sounds that few games can equal, especially these days when the emphasis always falls on glitz rather than the intangibles of the fourth dimension. The character sprites also aren't nearly as cool as the old Kunio style.
Oh, and I don't like how strikers stranded out on the enemy's side just get blasted automatically for ridiculous damage. Bleh. They don't really help your offense much against the CPU, so I'm not sure what the point is there. |
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| | | | Yeah, this game sucks more the more I play it (or maybe I suck more). Well, after playing the older versions. The uselessness of the offensive options against the CPU is really annoying, as is the ridiculous number of non-super throw hits it takes to take out just one little dodgeballer. The matches really drag on. Yawn. |
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