"Monster Ass!" ~ Low Effort Review
The dying years of my favorite system weren't exactly glorious ones. The Sega Saturn and N64 got to die somewhat respectable deaths, meanwhile the PS1's reward for triumphing in it's generation was to effectively become a zombie system that low-effort localizers used to cheaply bring over games to pull double duty in attempting to swindle less-fortunate PS1 owners without a PS2, or PS2 owners themselves with cheap games to play on their backwards compatible system.
Monster Bass is one of those games. Effectively being a Sega Bass Fishing-like, but enticing the player with an ultra-schlock Resident Evil-type plot of the bass being some kind of bio-engineered superweapon of sorts I guess. The trouble with this potential stealth slapper is that pretty much everything pertaining to gameplay is troubling. The frame rate runs somewhere between "Star Fox SNES" to "currently being lapped by a Powerpoint Presentation", and the game decides to leave you in the dark as to which direction to fight the fish since the prompts in Training aren't used in Story Mode, which in itself isn't helpful since Training doesn't simulate the frame rate tanking or the camera whipping all over the place with the fish often not even being on-screen. In the meantime you get to enjoy the ultra-stock "horror" music, and the incredibly annoying tension gauge beeping into your ear before your line breaks for the seventh time. If it was one of twelve PS1 games I had as a kid I might've had the patience to adapt to the crap factor, but I'm a very busy person who has a lot of Atari Jaguar games to play and an evergrowing backlog of more interesting garbage to get to.
The ultimate lesson here I believe is that you can make a fun and entertaining bass fishing game without the wannabe horror rubbish, just make it fun and easy to pick up, and make sure it has a funny announcer that sometimes vaguely sounds like Terry Bogard.
The dying years of my favorite system weren't exactly glorious ones. The Sega Saturn and N64 got to die somewhat respectable deaths, meanwhile the PS1's reward for triumphing in it's generation was to effectively become a zombie system that low-effort localizers used to cheaply bring over games to pull double duty in attempting to swindle less-fortunate PS1 owners without a PS2, or PS2 owners themselves with cheap games to play on their backwards compatible system.
Monster Bass is one of those games. Effectively being a Sega Bass Fishing-like, but enticing the player with an ultra-schlock Resident Evil-type plot of the bass being some kind of bio-engineered superweapon of sorts I guess. The trouble with this potential stealth slapper is that pretty much everything pertaining to gameplay is troubling. The frame rate runs somewhere between "Star Fox SNES" to "currently being lapped by a Powerpoint Presentation", and the game decides to leave you in the dark as to which direction to fight the fish since the prompts in Training aren't used in Story Mode, which in itself isn't helpful since Training doesn't simulate the frame rate tanking or the camera whipping all over the place with the fish often not even being on-screen. In the meantime you get to enjoy the ultra-stock "horror" music, and the incredibly annoying tension gauge beeping into your ear before your line breaks for the seventh time. If it was one of twelve PS1 games I had as a kid I might've had the patience to adapt to the crap factor, but I'm a very busy person who has a lot of Atari Jaguar games to play and an evergrowing backlog of more interesting garbage to get to.
The ultimate lesson here I believe is that you can make a fun and entertaining bass fishing game without the wannabe horror rubbish, just make it fun and easy to pick up, and make sure it has a funny announcer that sometimes vaguely sounds like Terry Bogard.
5 Comments
It's come to my attention that the method to reel in fish is much more braindead and not reflected in the training mode at all apparently, that said it's still shit and I'm sticking with my review so the Monster Ass community that makes up like four people can seethe.
funny you mention terry bogard cuz i think the devs behind this one also worked on some fatal fury ports lol
They're apparently most well known for Shogi games, and I guess this title is the result of them branching out into the sport of angling. Better luck next time I guess.
More like Monster Aoh wait a second...
Detchibe
1 year ago
Yes