Drill Dozer

[LoneSage]

Looks pretty fun, was wondering if anyone here has played it yet.

[PaCrappa]

I have played it and it sucks. Needlessly convoluted controls, ugly clashing colors, poor level design, poor character (enemy, NPC and player) design, weak music, big doo-doo brown cartridge with weaksauce "rumble" feature, absolutely pathetic enemy AI, you name it...

Pa

[LoneSage]

A shame, it'd be great if GBA would go out with a swan song instead of fading into obscurity.


I doubt I'll even buy it to be honest, be it good or bad. The screens on the back of the box make it look like some good ole' side-scrolling fun, something I wouldn't mind having right now.

Do you know who the developer is? Nintendo?

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

Same guys who do Pokemon.

[Nullsleep]

I haven't played it. But scores seems to actually be pretty good in general:

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platfor ... drilldozer

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Recently, I went down to my local Target and plopped down thirty smackers for it...I like how the rumble effects are generated without the need for a seperate battery and is powered by the internal GBA lithum-ion battery pack.

Meanwhile, over at my local Gamestop store, a brand new copy of GBA Drill Dozer will set you back at $34.99 USD (and that's not including any sales tax either). Why the extra five dollar surcharge for the same GBA game at Gamestop? (Could it be the extra feature of the built-in "rumble effects" mechanism?) At least for the USA portable video gaming market, Nintendo prices it's most expensive GBA games at $34.99 MSRP, that is a given...no higher and no lower either.

Yes, Drill Dozer's developer is none other than the famed Japanese software developer that's known as Game Freak.

I think if a limited edtion version of a crystal-clear see-through Drill Dozer cartridge were manufactured, it would show exactly how the motorized mechanics work to create the "rumble effects" during gameplay (that would indeed be one cool GBA cart to own for the techno gadet fans to oogle at). ^_~

Suppose if Drill Dozer's latest "rumble effects" were incorporated into SNK's Metal Slug Advance (or even the upcoming Metal Slug 1 Advance GBA title) or Treasure's Super Gunstar Heroes, it would've have been pure frosting added to already a sweet gaming experience on the GBA platform. It's fucking insane that Treasure managed to keep the framerate of SGH at a silky smooth 60 frames-per-second framerate but at the expense of axing a 2nd player co-op feature (at the very least, the original Mega Drive & Sega Genesis versions of Gunstar Heroes is a one or two player game running at 60fps framerate).

The only other GBA game title that takes advantage of the 60 frames-per-second framerate is Sega's Arcade Hits that has four classic Sega arcade titles on it. It will drain an aging GBA battery pack in no time flat since the GBA CPU is already overclocked (faster CPU but less battery run time -- kinda like the same deal with the firmware 1.0 & 1.5 PSP running emulation with overclocked CPU's but at the expense of shorter battery life).

I tried out Drill Dozer on the Gamecube Gameboy Player and it does support the built-in rumble pack of the stock Gamecube controller (if selected at the Options screen, one can turn on or off the "rumble effects"). At the very least, the "rumble effects" will be stronger if using a GCN Gameboy Player with a GCN stock controller setup (but the GBA Drill Dozer's internal "rumble effects" mechanism on the cartridge will be disabled).

I recall that some older Gameboy games did take advantage of "rumble effects" technology but was powered by a seperate bulky battery (a single "AAA" battery in this case). It is an amazing engineering feat that was incorporated into the Drill Dozer cartridge that allows for it to be powered without the need for an external battery.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[PaCrappa]

2D arcade style games with rumble? When did Metal Slug rumble in the arcade? What could vibration add to 2D action games? It always struck me as an incredibly stupid gimmick in 3D games that adds nothing to the gameplay experience.

Pa

[PC Engine Fan X!]

2D arcade style games with rumble? When did Metal Slug rumble in the arcade? What could vibration add to 2D action games? It always struck me as an incredibly stupid gimmick in 3D games that adds nothing to the gameplay experience.

Pa

Have you tried out the USA version of Natsume's "Gekioh: Shooting King" on the PSX/PSone platform? Or How about Irem's R-Type Delta for the PSX?

Gekioh's rumble effects were added to that classic 2-D vertical side-scrolling shmup (granted that the original ST-V cartridge & Sega Saturn CD-Rom versions of Shienryu didn't have rumble effects either). Was it an after thought? It's just extra frosting added to the tasty shmup gameplay experience of playing Shienryu on the PSX. And no, you can't turn it off either even if you wanted to on the Gekioh's Options screen.

I can remember buying the original PSX Dual Shock controller the day before the USA version of Gran Turismo came out. Upon trying out GT with the new fangaled Dual-Shock controller, the vibration effects gave me that extra sensation of a driving a car (of course, that was using two motors as opposed to a single motor driven vibration mechanism on the GBA Drill Dozer cart).

It's like asking if playing a gaming session of the Sega Model 1 powered classic Daytona USA arcade racing game and taking out the force-feedback mechanism, does it still play as good as if it weren't included? You decide.

Try playing an entire gaming session of Squaresoft's Internal Section game with a Dual Shock controller, and you'll feel twelve different and distinct vibration effects...that's the most ever presented for a PSX or even let alone a PS2 game.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[PaCrappa]

Internal Section is the only decent game you've mentioned and it isn't the having twelve flavors of rumble that makes it good.

I personally never received any extra sensations that were in any way related to gameplay. "Oh, the boss is exploding. Now this piece of plastic in my hand is vibrating... Coincidence?" "Going around the corner now, oh this plastic thing that is shaped nothing like a steering wheel, gas pedal or brake pedal is vibrating again. This is just like driving at 200 mph!"

I don't get it.

Pa

[BulletMagnet]

Zelda: Ocarina of Time actually used "rumbling" halfway-decently, in my opinion anyways...for one thing, it helped you tell how hard a fish was fighting you in the fishing mini-game (which would affect how you'd try to reel it in without breaking your line), plus there was an item you could find which would make the pak rumble if you came near to a hidden area you could bomb open.

I'm not a big fan of rumbling on the whole, but at least in one or two cases I thought it was used pretty capably.

[Brian]

In my view, only Outrun in the arcade benefited entirely from rumble. Without rumble back in the day, the game would have been great instead of mind blowing.

[Vexorg]

You have to give some credit to games like Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin' though. Admittedly the graphics were actually pretty crummy (it was a few years before anyone really figured out how to do decent looking polygon graphics) but it was pretty cool watching the game's steering wheel steer itself in the attract mode (at least when you're a kid in the arcade back around '87 or so...)

[raiden]

I never liked rumble features before playing Project Gotham Racing 2. In this game, it´s used to give the player a feel for the current grip situation. Of course, the same information could be passed along visually, but in a racing game, you have to concentrate on the environment (distance to the next curve, competitors´ positions). The fact that in a real car, grip information is gathered by tactile methods as well is just a nice side-effect, the thing that matters is the game gets to play better by having this kind of rumble support. But cases like that are rare, most games tend to use rumbling just to add it to their fearure-list. And in 2d games, I´ve yet to see a beneficial usage. R-Type Delta used it just as a flashy effect, not to help gameplay.