An explanation of what we're doing here can be found in my introduction post.
If you want to know what happened with the Playstation in 1995, you should check out the 1995 Round-Up.
This round-up covers the following entries of All PS1 Games In Order:
Part 015: Cyberia, Revolution X, Philosoma, and Goal Storm
Part 016: World Cup Golf: Professional Edition, The Chessmaster 3-D, Assault Rigs, D
Part 017: Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior's Dream, College Slam, Johnny Bazookatone, Krazy Ivan
Part 018: Striker '96, Alien Trilogy, Psychic Detective, Brain Dead 13
Part 019: Rise 2: Resurrection, NBA Live 96, NBA ShootOut, Panzer General
Part 020: Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire, Descent, In the Hunt, Magic Carpet
Part 022: Bottom of the 9th, PO'ed, Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits, Return Fire
Part 023: Hardball 5, Starblade Alpha, Slam 'n' Jam 96 Featuring Magic and Kareem, Skeleton Warriors
Part 023A: Special - Namco Stuff
Part 024: Battle Arena Toshinden 2, Silverload, Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition, Tecmo World Golf
Part 025: Top Gun: Fire At Will, V-Tennis, A-Train, Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
Part 026: Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors, NAMCO Museum Vol. 1, Epidemic, International Track & Field
Part 027: Olympic Summer Games, True Pinball, Fade to Black, Shellshock
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Early 1996
1995 turned over into 1996 and the world kept spinning. Global events were exactly what you would expect from the 90's, with post-Soviet chaos and a rising pitch of terrorism in southwest Asia. Serious, grown-up political news in the U.S. was as vapid and stupid as at any other time in the Clinton/Gingrich era, though Ted Kaczynski got himself got during this time. In pop culture, Hollywood put out a long string of notable movies, including massive hits like Twister, The Rock, Mission: Impossible, and that year's entry in the Kingdom Hearts canon with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Though, as big as those movies were, I think we can all agree on the most important film of that year. Other than that, cable television was busy exploding into the fetid hellscape we would all come to know and the less said about popular music the better.
As far as events in video games, the Amiga was finally, mercifully, dead and both of the 32-bit early adopters, The 3DO and Jaguar, would be soon to follow. This time also saw American Adventure game development fall decidedly into decline after the boom of the early 90's. This is also a low period for the cRPG genre in its lead-up to the Infinity Engine revival. PC gaming was transitioning to the era of dominance by Shooters and Strategy games, with Duke Nukem 3D and Quake releasing in the first half of '96 and the effects of the recent Warcraft II, Civilization II, and Command & Conquer coming into focus. Arcades were also beginning their multi-year decline, especially in the U.S with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 providing one of the last few big hits for the format. It wasn't all decline, though; the console business was booming.
The Playstation and Saturn kept on selling right through and after the 1995 holidays, though the PS1 was more quickly moving off of shelves at a ratio of anywhere from 2:1 to 5:1. While most of the software released in early '96 was neither original nor inspiring, the smash hit that was Resident Evil gave existing owners something to latch onto while new owners could rely on that and the previous year's hit releases. I've seen it written that the console enjoyed a game-to-console attach rate of anywhere from 4:1 to 6:1. It got to the point that Sony had to hurriedly spin-up additional CD manufacturing in North America. From what I could gather, Sony had shipped a million systems by May, with somewhere between 1 - 1.5 million units sold by the end of June. That would make it the first or second fastest console to a million units sold at the time. We'll discuss the Saturn in its own series, and while its first year on the market wasn't great, it was still ok enough when not compared to the Playstation.
Both systems caught a boost in sales, if not profitability, when they mutually lowered their prices to $199 at E3 '96. That pricing arms race would hasten along the end of the SNES/Genesis generation by making the new hotnesses highly affordable. In fact, both of those older consoles would spend the year winding down, with the last handful of significant games for the SNES (Mario RPG, Megaman X3, Kirby Superstar, and Donkey Kong Country 3) seeing their releases in the lead-up to the N64 launch. The PS1 was quickly becoming the primary console in the market, which was an almost unparalleled success for a new entrant into the industry. At this point, I can only chalk that up to fantastic timing, rational hardware design, and a deep marketing budget. Sony took its new gaming division seriously and was poised to conquer the world video game market.
Focusing back on the main event of the season, the second E3 happened in mid-May. Other than the aforementioned price cuts, this was when Nintendo revealed the N64 and its pack-in Mario game. Like Sega, they were forced to price the new console at a rate competitive with the PS1. By the end of '96, both the Saturn and N64 would be incurring a per-system loss for their respective parent companies. This is a standard result of the tactics Sony was using. Since Playstation was one piece of a much larger conglomerate with deep pockets, they were able to position themselves as loss leaders, forcing the smaller existing companies to price match and bleed themselves dry. At some point we'll get to the well documented effects this had on Sega, but it also needs to be noted that Nintendo likely would have suffered a similar fate were it not for the overwhelming success of the Game Boy. I'm not going to go into excruciating detail about the games shown at those conventions, because we will get to them with time.
It's important to keep in mind that even though Sony did a fast and thorough job of running Sega out of the hardware market, they were not the main target.
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Calling a Mulligan
I've ranked 101 PS1 games over the course of about 13 months. That's cool and all, but it's caused the inevitable problem that comes with such a project. Some of the early games have stuck themselves further up the list than is warranted. This is a phenomenon that occurs because some game or games become a kind of barrier for newer entrants in a way that protects those initially ranked above it. My best guess in this situation is that Cyber Sled and Hi-Octane have filled that role. The consequence of all this is that there are a few early PS1 games that have ranked waaaaay higher than they should. Usually, the answer for this is to commit to the bit and leave things as they are, but this project is of the highest scientific importance, and as such I'm going make a (hopefully) one-time adjustment. I'm going to move ten games from the top 35 downwards to more appropriate positions. I don't imagine this matters to many of you, but it matters to me, dammit! The table below summarizes this change.
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Numbers!
Now that we've gotten our sacrilege out of the way, let's fulfill our pathological need to quantify everything. That's right, it's time for the glorious return of the BORQ! Remember that the BORQ score for any individual game is determined by taking the as-is ranking list, dividing it into quintiles, and assigning a score from 1 to 5 to the games within those quintiles. This time, because we've ranked 101 games, the quintiles are groups of 20 with the middle quintile having 21. While the inclusion of the 52 games we've seen so far in 1996 and the above mulligan have shifted some of the scores for the 1995 releases, we're not going to dig into that quite yet. Instead, we'll focus on this current batch of games and let the heavy analysis be future me's problem. (Note to my future-self reading this in preparation for 1996 GOTY: eat shit lmao)
That also means we aren't yet going to do anything with GOTY, and even if we did Resident Evil would probably be the objective pick so far. We are instead going to run the BORQ scores for these games by original system and development region like last time so that we can compare how things have gone for the PS1's software library. As such, below are the numbers for system of origin.
From an initial look, we can see that the pattern from the previous year still largely holds true. Arcade ports are by far the best, followed by original development, with PC and Multi-Platform games consistently being the worst. An odd change is the drastic improvement in 3DO ports, which were bolstered by Starblade and D. Interestingly, those are also the only two Japan developed 3DO ports that we've seen on the PS1. This might also be the last we see of the 3DO refugees, as we can see those releases trailing off going into the Summer. Additionally, I broke out the Cross Gen games from the Multi-Platform titles. I feel that at this point in the console cycle the games shared between the PS1 and Saturn are inherently different from the games shared between the SNES and newer systems. So, if I labeled a game as Cross Gen, it was also on the SNES or Genesis and if it's Multi-Platform it's only on the PS1 and Saturn. This is going to stop being an issue once we get into 1997. Feel free to draw any other conclusions you want from this analysis.
Now on to the development regions, we see the same overall trend as in '95, but with the number of releases evening out between North America and Japan and those North American games catching up in terms of quality. The exceptionally unsurprising thing is the already low quality of European games falling off a cliff with an equal number of releases as the previous year. Only three European games scored higher than a BORQ of 2, which were Striker '96, Assault Rigs, and Extreme Pinball. In contrast, of the nine games to end up with BORQs of 1, seven were European. This seems to largely be a consequence of the collapsing British game industry after the death of the Amiga. We know that the Tomb Raider and Wipeout franchises will help keep Eidos and Psygnosis relevant, and DMA Design will eventually matter. I'm personally curious what the rebounding, if any, of British console games will look like going forward. Though, even if that rebound happens, French game development will still hang around the European game industry's neck like an albatross.
Finally, we can see the quality spread across the 13 blog entries covering this time period. What's most surprising is the relative consistency from post to post, with that one major exception. When taking into account the release time periods, we can see some truth to the old stereotype of early Q1 serving as a dumping ground for trash. We can also interpret the preponderance of weeks with BORQ scores above 3.00 as indicating an overall increase in quality compared to the '95 releases; keep in mind that these scores incorporate the existence of games released before this time period. We can see this increase quantified by the overall BORQ of 3.04 for the first half of '96.
This metric will invite much deeper analysis the further we get into this project. For example, I looked into a basic analysis of these games based on genre. You aren't going to see that here, since I identified 26 unique genres in this batch of 52 games. The floodgates are going to really open in the back-half of '96, with 122 games on my list released between 7/1 and 12/31 of the year. That's going to more than double the sample we have to work with, so I'm expecting this section to get a lot deeper in the year-end round-up. Though, we have one additional, and immensely important, piece of statistical business to attend to.
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Sports?
Yeah, bro, SPORTS. Nothing celebrates the blood, sweat, and tears which go into athletic victory quite like sitting in your room staring at a CRT television. That's why the sports genres have always been among the most prolific and best-selling games on any system. But what can we learn about these sports from those games? Other than trivial details like game rules and strategy, we can answer the most important question in the human experience: What's the best sport? These things are all about winning, and there's no winning like topping game rankings. Of the 52 games released in the first half of '96, 14 were sports titles covering seven specific genres. A math dork would tell you that's more than a quarter of them. Since the BORQ is the single most powerful ratings system ever devised, it can finally bring us closure through A RANKING OF SPORTS. The sports represented by those 14 games can are ranked below.
This is a sad day for America, and thus the world. This table is saying that Soccer is the best sport and Baseball the second worst. The BORQ is inarguably correct in all things, but we need to look at more than just these games, this has to be a fluke. What happens when we add the previous years' 8 games to the list?
This is just as bad. There's nothing less American than Canada and there's nothing more Canadian than Hockey. What's this with Football and Baseball in the bottom half? Has the world finally fallen to communism? At least we can all agree that the Olympics sucks. The second half of '96 better clean up this mess.
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Let's talk about box art
Mid-1996 was a momentous time for the PS1 in North America, because SCEA finally bit the bullet and began allowing games to be shipped in CD jewel cases. As such, the last weeks of June saw a crossover where some games were in long boxes and others in jewel cases. By the time we get to Fall, the changeover will be complete, and we will finally be able to consider American covers in our BAOTY discussions. That's still a way off, however. For now, I want to showcase some of the truly abysmal box art that cursed store shelves in the first half of '96. As such, I present to you the LONG BOX HALL OF SHAME!
Box Art Most Likely To Frighten Its Target Audience: Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition
Box Art That Should Not Have Used In-Game Assets: Destruction Derby, Shellshock
Box Art That SHOULD Have Used In-Game Assets: In The Hunt
Box Art Depicting The Last Thing You'll See If You Cheat At Baseball: Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
Ports That Should Have Used Their Original Box Art: Doom, Fade to Black
*Very Loud Incorrect Buzzer*: Loaded, College Slam, Silverload
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What's Next
I honestly did not expect to make it this far. This blogging project will go on leave next week to prepare for the next round of Saturn games, which will take us up to the end of June with that system. We will also continue our descent into madness with the 3DO in about three weeks, and we'll see about getting through all of the Jaguar's 1994 games as a break from the 3DO. This should easily take us through to the end of 2023. We're likely a good 14-18 months away from getting to the end of 1996 for all five contemporary consoles, and that will mark the end of the first phase for this generation.
For the time being, in two weeks we'll look at the April 1996 Saturn releases of X-Men: Children of the Atom, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, and Guardian Heroes. That might end up being the highest quality week thus far. The week after that, we'll go to our last batch of explicable 3DO games, with Off-World Interceptor, Strahl, Shanghai: Triple-Threat, Starblade, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Slayer.
Finally, because you've read this far down, I'll clue you in on a surprise blog I have in the pipe that I'll drop during the off week. The subject matter is going to be not-at-all controversial and definitely not antagonistic towards a large and vocal contingent of video game weirdos. This is a threat.
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Hall of Unused Screenshots
Revolution X
Philosoma
Street Fighter Alpha
College Slam
Alien Trilogy
Psychic Detective
Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire
Descent
In the Hunt
Bottom of the 9th
PO'ed
Return Fire
Battle Arena Toshinden 2
Silverload
Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition
Top Gun: Fire at Will!
V-Tennis
A-Train
Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors
NAMCO Museum Vol. 1
Epidemic
International Track & Field
Fade to Black
Shellshock
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