An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.

Last week's look at ESPN Extreme Games and Kileak: The DNA Imperative can be found here.

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Note: Some launch games are recorded as having come out the week before the PS1 launched. I don't buy that. Getting a copy of a game before having the hardware would have been completely meaningless. So practically, these came out on 9/9. I cannot be convinced otherwise.

NBA Jam: Tournament Edition

Release Date: 9/9/1995 (9/5/1995?)

Developer: Midway Games

Publisher: Midway Games

Time to Tired of Being Dunked On: 20 minutes

Confession time: before now, I've never touched any version of NBA Jam. It just never came up before as a thing to do. As such, I have no idea how to properly play this fucker. It will make sense why that matters after reading this summary of the one match I played:

• 1st quarter: I figured out which button was Shoot and which was Pass. This is very important to know.
• 2nd quarter: I figured out how to dunk the ball. I was only able to successfully do this a couple of times.
• 3rd quarter: I realized that the Pass and Shoot buttons can be used to steal the ball and block shots
• 4th quarter: I got my ass beat like a kettle drum

I told myself that only losing by 18 points against the easiest CPU isn't bad for a first ever game. Sometimes self-deception is the only way to get through an experience. Even though I can see how a person could git gud at this thing, I had no amount of fun at any point in the experience…and I hate losing. I decided it was time to bounce after only 20 minutes. If you haven't been able to tell, I'm not big on competitive games what with the low patience and everything.

Maybe I would care more if I had any attachment to the early 90's NBA roster, but I don't. I recognize a couple of names but otherwise I have no context for who these guys are. That was probably part of the appeal when it first came out, right? I'm really grasping for something, the base game was already 2 years old when updated edition came out and it seems to run smoother than I imagine it would have on the Genesis. As with a lot of these arcade ports, it could have been fun playing this with a sibling back in the 90's, but that context is gone. What else…oh right, the heads are already too big so I didn't turn on big head mode and the boomshakalaka is only satisfying when you're the one doing it.

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Power Serve 3D Tennis

Release Date: 9/9/1995 (9/1/1995?)

Developer: SPS

Publisher: Ocean Software

Time to First Fault: 5 Seconds

Time to Completely Done: 30 Minutes

The few times that I have played a tennis game, I always end up comparing it to standard bearer for all tennis games: Tennis for the NES. My criteria is whether I would rather play that than the current game. Here, the answer is YES.

The promise of 3D tennis is right there on the cover and it delivers on that. Exactly that. Only that. You can play singles or doubles sets on three functionally identical play fields and you can choose between 10 players with bizarre names that all play the same. When you finish your game, whether 1, 3, or 5 sets, you get spat out to the title screen. The controls are one button and the D-pad. Yet somehow for such a simple, bare bones game the gameplay experience is still able to feel like trash.

The most egregious bit is that the default camera angle is a first-person view from your character. That could be an interesting way to play a tennis game if that theoretical game had more intuitive character movement and easier to read ball tracking, but this doesn't. The movement is sluggish in almost a high animation priority kind of way and the timing needed to properly hit the ball feels off. What I'm trying to say is: I got my ass handed to me by the CPU for half an hour. Fortunately, after the first ten minutes I was able to figure out how to change the camera to a reasonable 3rd person view, but that only helped me lose slightly less bad.

It seems like most of the effort here went into making the polygonal characters. These people are more detailed and better proportioned with animations that are more realistic than anything else I've seen from these PS1 launch games. I got the sense that this thing was originally meant as a tech demo that you weren't actually supposed to play, and I've got to say that you should not play this game.

Finally, The music is noticeably bizarre. I'm including the track that plays for the profile set-up screen and also randomly during a match. This is an insane bit of I-don't-know-what for an otherwise sedate tennis game and makes this thing more memorable than it should be. I had to listen to this and so must you. (Music at 6:30 because the specific link won't imbed)

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The Raiden Project

Release Date: 9/9/1995

Developer: Seibu Kaihatsu

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Time to Defeated by Raiden: 25 Minutes

Time to Defeated by Raiden II: 40 Minutes

Total: 65 Minutes

Now for our second arcade port of the week. If you've ever seen the Raiden series before, congratulations you know exactly what this is. That second boss, amirite?

For everyone else who is like me: Raiden is a 1991 arcade shoot 'em up, and Raiden II is the sequel/remake from 1993. I'm not an expert on the context of the shmup genre in the early 90's, but I was vaguely aware that this series existed so it must have been one of the good ones.

As far as trying to play these things, the first Raiden is an unforgiving bad time of a game. The main detriment to the experience is that when you die you lose all of your power-ups, which I guess was normal design at some point; but most importantly when you use a continue you restart from a mid-level checkpoint, which means that when you use a continue on a boss you don't get any opportunity to reacquire power-ups before going back into that boss. This design means that boss fights and can easily turn into brick walls swallowing credits until you give up and start over from the beginning. This isn't fun or desirable. Don't play Raiden.

That said, Raiden II is an improvement in just about every possible way. The respawning problems are resolved by having you always respawn right where you died with some percentage of your power-ups being dropped for you to immediately reacquire, this lets you not be completely kneecapped by a random mistake. On top of that necessary improvement, the music is better, the sprites are better, there are more enemies on screen and they are more active. There's a lot of enemy reuse from the first game (including that fucking second boss) but since the whole thing is better done it can be treated as a semi-remake to bring Raiden in-line with what it was probably supposed to be.

Despite my otherwise positive impression of the sequel compared to the original, I still only made it to the 5th level boss and got a game over. That is because this package only allows for a maximum of 9 credits for each game, meaning if you aren't good enough to get through the game on 9 continues then you can go fuck yourself. It irks me when console ports of arcade games only give you a finite number of credits, which happens even to this day. If I had walked into an arcade in 1995 with $10 for the change machine, I bet I could've beaten Raiden II with coins to spare. Instead, this full priced PS1 disc only gives you 9 credits per play and tells you to git gud. This kind of thing annoys me every fucking time I encounter it. The correct answer is to never purchase arcade compilations but to always emulate arcade games in the most illegal way possible, though you didn't hear that from me.

The final insult of this compilation is that the only unique feature on top of these already old and previously ported games is a mediocre polygonal intro movie for the main menu. This is a PS1 game that's only like 20 Mb, that could have fit on a damned cartridge. This thing is a complete rip-off for my theoretical 1995 self. Fuck this collection, but feel free to play Raiden II, I guess.

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Next time we'll wrap up launch day by taking a look at four NEXT GEN video games to usher in the power of the Playstation: Rayman, Riiiiiiiiidge Racer, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, and Total Eclipse of the Heart Turbo.

Launch games almost always ship before the console. When I worked retail, we'd always get them early and back then there was no street date, so we'd call the preorder people to come get them to make launch day easier. I still remember opening a PS2 game in the store and all of us just staring at the blue-ness of the disc in awe.

Secondly, Mookie Blaylock is a legend.

I enjoyed Power Serve at the time. My favorite part of that game was the knock off player names. Andy Legacy (Andre Agassi) and Pete Sunrise (Pete Sampras) come to mind. Those fake names are so goddamn stupid and I love it.

So funny to see a write up of NBA Jam, T.E. or otherwise, like this. Not that it's an invalid response to the game! Like all peak '90s Midway arcade cabinets, from Mortal Kombat II to NFL Blitz to Jam and even San Francisco Rush the game is designed to intentionally deceive players with a simple set of controls and rules that obscure a somewhat technical interplay between expectation and execution. After all, the game had to devour your quarters!

In that sense, obviously these games were best enjoyed both on a home console and with a friend of equal skill by your side because they didn't put much effort into tweaking the A.I. for the home audience. I doubt they even thought about kids of the '90s, let alone adults of the '20s, approaching these games as single player activities even if there are nods to playing the game that way (I think? it's been a long, long time).

But they are simple, and easy to learn! I suppose some knowledge of '90s teams would've helped, but really what more do you need than "Bulls amazing, some other teams good, some other teams bad"? Yes, there are the meme teams I won't rack my brain to remember here that are technically far better choices than your flavor of Pippen+Kerr/Kukoc/Rodman, but if you'd gotten the basic controls down in just one game imagine what you could've uncovered in another two or three! The ecstasy of turning those steal commands on the CPU's ass and knocking them over again, and again, and again...and again! in pursuit of big mean dunks and dagger threes FROM DOWNTOWN!!!

It can also be easy to forget that while the SNES controller didn't have significantly less buttons than the PSX controller, it was a lot more common to play games that didn't utilize every button available (or duplicated functions across multiple nearby buttons) so simple systems like Jam weren't nearly as surprising as they might be today.

Obviously there's no need at all to care about NBA Jam in 2022 - NBA Street Homecourt dropped in 2007 and the underwhelming NBA Jam revival in 2010, so the arcade basketball dream is quite dormant unless you count the bizarre and bland NBA 2K branded whatever-it's-called game - but the old kid/young teen in me wept a bit reading it get tossed aside so candidly, with such swiftness.

Thanks for the post!

I had the exact same experience with NBA Jam for PlayStation. I played it for the first time last year. When I was a kid I played and really enjoyed a few Jam-likes (Space Jam for PS1, NBA Hoopz), but I never touched the original.

So last year I got my hands on it, booted it up, got my ass handed to me, and never touched it again. Just the way it is.

Excited to read your take on Rayman because I fucking hated it.