An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last time with the PS1, we looked at the July 1996 PS1 releases of Olympic Summer Games, True Pinball, Fade to Black, and Shellshock.
Last time with the 3DO, we dove into the deepest realms of madness with Road Rash, Alone in the Dark, Way of the Warrior, Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed, and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.
Now, we continue spelunking through the 1994 3DO catalog with Burning Soldier, Demolition Man, Jammit, Supreme Warrior, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Burning Soldier
Developer: Genki
Publisher: Panasonic
Release Date: 10/1/1994
Time to Shot Down: 28 Minutes
There were two immutable constants in the mid 90's, Genki and Rail Shooters. Now, we witness those two tireless engines of mediocrity come together. Burning Soldier was Genki's first foray on the 3DO, and for it they made something that was simultaneously out of their wheelhouse and the most obvious thing ever, an FMV first-person Rail Shooter. Imagine the x-wing sections from Rebel Assault and you'll get the idea.
With this being from the same writer as the Kileak (pronounced "kill-eek") games, you should by now expect this thing to have overly involved and underutilized lore. It's less so the case here than in later titles, but you can see the buds of that proclivity begin to blossom. As the story goes, the year is 2095 and aliens have invaded earth for reasons. You control a human space fighter that can transform into a mech, because of course. You fight those alien bastards through the solar system before descending to the skies above Tokyo and eventually an underground base. It's a straightforward 'shmup plot, but with unnecessary details thrown in, such as why you're only just now showing up, the fate of a human colony on Mars, and specific names for each of the large alien ships. The hyper-serious narration does a lot to underscore the inherent unseriousness of the writing, and I'm here for it.
The gameplay on the other hand leaves a whole lot to be desired. This plays exactly as it looks. You are flown through a pre-rendered CG environment while aiming around the screen with a reticule and shooting anything that doesn't look like a background element. That aiming, done with the d-pad, has bad feeling acceleration and is generally imprecise. When the shooting is both bad and the only mechanic, that sinks the whole experience. There's some rudimentary checkpointing every few levels, from which you can continue after dying. This is all standard stuff, and the in-level set pieces aren't interesting enough to justify the slog. I made it a little under halfway through the game in my half-hour spent playing it. The only part of any note is the generic EDM soundtrack. There's so little to say about this game that I'm gonna stop.
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Demolition Man
Developer: Alexandria, Inc
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Release Date: 10/1/1994
Time to Sending A Maniac To Catch One: 32 Minutes
For some reason the 1993 film Demolition Man is more in the cultural zeitgeist in 2023 than at any other point in the last 20 year. I don't know how it happened, but it's probably caused by some damn fool thing on social media. Regardless of how or why it's reentered the conversation, it's still a prime example of absurdist action-comedy. Also like every other big movie of the 90's, it received video game tie-ins. Most of the releases are standard 2D Side Scrollers, but not the 3DO version, oh no, they had plans for this one.
The SNES and Genesis were only capable of rendering low-res sprites and as such the games mostly were either side scrollers or top-down action games, the same as games had been since the mid-80's. Virgin, like other leading lights in the industry, wanted to make a game of the future for Demolition Man, which was a movie about the future. What were the most cutting-edge techniques available in 1993-'94? That's right, FMV. The plan was to fully transport the player into the story of supercop John Spartan using live action footage seamlessly integrated into the gameplay. They would do all of this utilizing the brand-new and overwhelming capacity of CD gaming on that 3DO thing. The idea practically sells itself!
In reality, Alexandria, inc. spent more than a year struggling to get a functioning interactive experience completed and out the door. While it would have seemed like a godsend to have access to the movie's main actors for green screen stunt reels, it also created limitations on enacting any changes to the game mid-development. Famously, Virgin had access to Sly Stallone and Wesley Snipes during production of the movie, and were able to capture a variety of green screen footage of them directly off the movie set. No other movie tie-in game had gotten that level of access and cooperation from the source production, and it must have seemed like a massive win for the developers. Thing is, that kind of deal wouldn't get you access to the actors for the entirety of production, so you only have what you first get. I don't know if this was a major contributing factor to this subsequent disaster of a video game, but I don't think it would have helped.
It doesn't matter how much you can walk around a movie studio lot; you still need to at least attempt to make a good game, which this very much is not. That's not to say it isn't interesting. I suppose the developers wanted to make the gameplay in any given section match the action of the movie as much as possible, and as such, this thing jumps around between four different genres throughout its runtime. These are: Light Gun Shooter, Fighting, First Person Shooter, and a weird one-off Driving section. With only two exceptions, the action and cutscenes make use of original green screen clips, movie footage, or digitized sprites for all characters. While that may have been novel, the gameplay in each of those sections is individually atrocious. The aiming in the Light Gun sections is nightmarish on the d-pad, the fighting is borderline unplayable, the FPS levels run at the worst possible framerate and look as bad as something like Iron Angel of the Apocalypse. I'm not even going to discuss the Driving section.
I personally made it about a quarter of the way through the game due to the massively hostile lives system. Even though multimedia is the future, this thing follows the old game design standard of making the experience unreasonably hard and punishing to cover for the fact that there's only an hour of total content. Also, the FMV during that hour isn't even good. The movie clips are hella compressed and the digital environments around the green screened characters are very early 90's and not even a little bit comped to the lighting and resolution of the live action footage. FMV games had that problem all the time, but it's worse here because they went through all the trouble to waste Stallone and Snipes' time. This thing is certainly an oddity, and while I'd warn against playing it, if you have the sickness you should look up a playthrough to see the weirdness.
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Jammit
Developer: GTE Interactive
Publisher: GTE Entertainment
Release Date: 11/1/1994
Time to Getting Dunked On: 15 Minutes
In contrast to the previous game, Jammit is an up-ported SNES/Genesis game. This thing is a barebones 1v1 Basketball game with a street sports aesthetic. You choose between three players and a few functionally identical street courts. Other than two-player, there isn't a ton to do here. On top of that the actual gameplay doesn't feel good, with shooting and blocking handled awkwardly. The best thing I can say is that there is a well-defined sense of style, though I'll let someone else judge the quality of that style. For me, this thing likely falls into "hello fellow children" type of fake streetitude. It also very obviously looks like a Genesis game, and it seems that the developers did nothing to make use of the 3DO hardware or CD format. This is such an insignificant piece of nothing that I don't have more than one paragraph of commentary about it.
The one interesting tidbit I did find was related to the development house, GTE Interactive. They were a short-lived subsidiary of GTE, which I guess was a big telecom in California for most of the twentieth century. Before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, they had the idea that cable providers would be the video game distributors of the future and set up GT Interactive to get in early on game publishing. They self-produced Jammit and a few other nothing street sports titles on consoles before pivoting to publishing weird PC games, such FX Fighter and that Titanic game with the bizarre photo-scanned faces. That pivot didn't last long because and that 1996 law sent most U.S. telecoms into a spiral via deregulation. GTE shut down their games subsidiary almost immediately and by the turn of the century they would be forced into a merger with Bell to create Verizon. It's kind of an odd story, and we're not going to hear from these guys again in this blogging project.
Regardless, this game is the most middlingly neutral experience I've yet to encounter on this system, and as such I will begin using it as a dividing line between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' 3DO games going forward.
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Supreme Warrior
Developer: Digital Pictures
Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 11/1/1994
Time to Fighting Like A Drunken Rice Peddler: 33 Minutes
Speaking of unacceptable experiences, we get our first of way too many Tom Zito games that got released on the 3DO. In fact, about half of Digital Pictures' joints saw either ports or first releases on this shambling atrocity of a console, with the rest quarantined to the Sega CD. This is likely to be either their sixth or seventh game during their four-year run of solvency, and somehow, it's the least playable one I have yet seen. Oh, and if you're keeping count, I'm not including those music video things as legitimate video games. There's a lot of unpacking to do, so buckle in.
Supreme Warrior is an Interactive Movie that attempts to play like a first-person Action game. The meat of the experience is the 14 1-on-1 fistfights with FMV stuntpeople wearing silly outfits. These fights are theoretically accomplished by reading tells in your opponent's performance and using the correct attack at the correct moment in the footage. Even after reading the manual and going through the tutorial videos in the game, this is much easier said than done. It feels like the actors you're fighting against are mainly just vamping at the camera and the opening flags were programmed in to fit as closely as possible. The result feels confused and half-assed, which is a shame because this looks like it was the highest budget Zito game we've yet seen. That last point takes us, sadly, to discussing the premise and production of this thing.
While the interaction is the absolute worst thing about the game, that doesn't mean everything else is without issue. Like Digital Pictures' earlier narratives, the premise here takes an existing B-movie genre and tries to add interactivity on top of it. In this case, we get an incredibly arch Hong Kong Action movie story. The game opens on a generic late medieval Chinese village under attack by wacky kung fu bandits. The local kung fu master is too old to fight and his spunky apprentice is not yet ready, so you're tasked with beating up the four bandit lords and their main henchmen. It's a straightforward set-up, but the game spends a whole lot of time explaining it. All that talking is primarily done by that aforementioned apprentice, portrayed by reliable 90's character actress Vivian Wu, who fills the Person Who Talks At You role for the entirety of the experience. While her and everyone else's performances are adequate for what would have been asked of them, the concept itself is questionable.
The big thing is that the plot is tepid and lame, with all the gravitas and sense of stakes you could expect from a community theater performance. What's a bit trickier is the ethics of a bunch of Americans from California doing what seems to be a spoof of Chinese movies. I was prepared to really get into it, but after doing some poking around, Zito and friends apparently gained cooperation from a prominent Hong Kong film studio to use their sets. Also, a lot of the creative talent behind this had backgrounds in martial arts and stunt work. So, they seem to have made a sincere effort, even if the end result is cheap and kind of boring.
That goes to my earlier comment on this likely being the costliest Digital Pictures game. There's wire work, pyrotechnics, stunt choreography, cheesy special effects, multiple sets, and a bunch of extras. That's a lot of effort to put into something that would eventually be compressed down to 3DO FMV resolutions. I think I would even go as far as to say that it was largely a wasted effort. Between this and the contemporary Corpse Killer, I can see how this studio went bankrupt as quickly as it did. It doesn't matter if you put the effort in to produce direct-to-VHS quality footage for a game if the gameplay at the core of it sucks. If I had the inclination, I could really dig into the that gameplay with all of the input and systems choices that went into it, because this thing could likely act as a cautionary tale on every possible level. That's damning for the entire Interactive Movie concept, because even when they put in real budget, creativity, and effort to make one of these, it still turns out bad. This genre was doomed from the start, and they were fast approaching that reckoning by the time this game came out.
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Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Panasonic
Release Date: 11/6/1994
Time to Getting Hadoukened At High Speed: 20 Minutes
Hey kids, have you heard of Street Fighter II? Oh, you saw someone play Street Fighter IV when you were little? Ok. Well, that game was obviously in a long-running series. The second game in that series is the reason why anyone cares about it, and that game originally came out all the way back in 1991! Yes, I know that was a long time ago. Anyway, one of the special things about that game was that it got updated a bunch of times in the three years after it came out. No, not like modern games. See, it was an arcade game, so a whole new physical copy had to be made and distributed with every update. Oh, right, arcades were places which would have a bunch of old video games that you could pay to play one session at a time, and each game was in its own big cabinet that you would stand at. Well, it wasn't weird at the time, ok? Back on track, because it took so long to make each update, they would all have different names and be noticeably different from each other, and most arcade games didn't get updates for as long or to such an extent as Street Fighter II. Not only that, but each version of the game was ported to various consoles and PC in different ways and at different times, so keeping track of it all is real tricky. The weirdest thing about it is that the final version of the game was only ever ported to the 3DO! You have no idea what the 3DO is? Look kid, I don't have all day.
Young'uns these days don't know how good they have it. If my awkward skit didn't clue you in, the 3DO received the only contemporary home port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which added onto the updates from Super while rolling back in the fast game speed from Turbo. This would have been the definitive edition of this game that Capcom's successor series (Darksiders, X-men, and Street Fighter Alpha) would build from. Even though interest for the game had died down by the time this release hit arcades, it's still important and influential. That makes the facts around this port hilarious, because getting a 3DO release means it might as well not have been ported at all.
Not that it's a bad port, this is a completely adequate version of the game. The 3DO was perfectly capable of rendering graphics on par with Capcom's CP System II board. There are apparently some minor omissions compared to the arcade original, but it seems like there wasn't a better home port of this game until the 30th anniversary collection. That's probably kind of significant. As for my time playing it…I've never had a handle on Street Fighter II. I had an ok time with Alpha and later games in the series, but I could never get into this one. As such, I only poked around the surface to make sure it wasn't a tire fire. I'm grateful that this is the only time I'll have to encounter SFII in this blogging project.
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That does it for this week's 3DO games. I was a bit too ambitious about the timeline for getting this post out, so I'll just stick to one post a week for the time being. My own workflow issues aside, this was a far more explicable batch of games than last time. Maybe developers just needed an extra year of lead time to make functioning video games for this console. Whatever the case may be, let's update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and get out of here.
1. Road Rash
…
6. Super Street Fighter II Turbo
11. Burning Soldier
19. Jammit
25. Demolition Man
27. Supreme Warrior
…
34. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
Next week we'll return to the PS1 as we look back at the games released for that system in the first half of 1996 with our mid-year round-up.
When next we come back to the 3DO, we'll reach the end of the 1994 games for which I have release dates when we look at Off-World Interceptor, Strahl, Shanghai: Triple-Threat, Starblade, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Slayer.
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I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and continuing my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.
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