An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week's look at NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, Power Serve 3D Tennis, and The Raiden Project can be found here.
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Rayman
Release Date: 9/9/1995 (9/7/1995?)
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Time to Holding This Against The French: 40 Minutes
I personally enjoyed the more recent Rayman games, such as Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends, so I was expecting to have an OK time with the first entry in the series. Boy, was I wrong.
This piece of shit really bummed me out. Immediately after booting it up I was assaulted by some of the most obnoxious narration I have ever heard and an artstyle that I can only describe as whimsical by way of rotten ass. I'm so mad at this game for being bad. *sigh* I should start over.
Rayman is a platformer that would have been at home on a 16-bit console. You go to the right and sometimes up, You jump and punch enemies and sometimes the levels are obnoxious mazes, this could describe any B-tier platformer of the time. Because we're on 32-bit hardware the characters and objects are big and detailed, the animations are relatively smooth, and the sound quality is - I guess - more. All this extra power and detail was used on an aesthetic that I can only describe as the paragon of 90's shit-whimsy. When I make-up the term "shit-whimsy" I'm trying to label a vague type of aesthetic that popped up in video games in the 90's, usually in games aimed at younger audiences, that attempted to have colorful/wacky environments and characters but also try to have a little bit of 'tude around the edges to show that it isn't for babies. I struggle to point at good examples, but now I have the perfect one in this game. There are probably some old Nickelodeon shows and animated movies that would be covered by the term as well, but I'm not in the mood to research an aesthetic that I hate. And I really do I despise this aesthetic. If anyone has a better explanation or a proper name for this thing, please let me know.
On top of that the music is kinda bad and the voice acting is (again) nightmarish. I could have lived with this if the game was fun to play, but it isn't. My complaints are likely to be related to the design standards of the time, but if that is the case then those standards were hot garbage. This thing combines the worst excesses of maze design and instant-kill level features, the lives/continue system is unforgiving, and the enemies suck to deal with. In the first two worlds most of the enemies either took too many hits, had hitboxes below Rayman's punches, or would actively dodge hits and jump back into your path. That's all on top of the moment-to-moment design choices being either weird or wrong-headed. Here are a few examples that I saw:
- Having a moving platform sequence where you first jump over two long spikes and then jump over one long spike
- A bouncing platform where jumping at the apex of the platform bounce isn't the thing that launches the character
- Platforms that may or may not have collision on the bottom without any visual indication which is which
But even with all of that, the thing that made me walk away after only 40 minutes is the lives system. The game gives you three continues and 5 lives per continue. When you run out of continues you get reset back to wherever you were when you last did a hard save on the overworld with refilled continues. Practically, that means that you can beat the game if you are able to get through a level in less than 15 lives and are determined to reach the end. I did not know that's how things worked going in, so when I ran out of continues in world two I got spat back to before the second level of the game. I really did not want to play any of that shit again so I hit escape.
Looking at the context of the times, there doesn't seem to be any excuses for this game to be so fucked. If you asked me to recommend a 2D platformer from 1995, I would first say that was a highly specific question but then I would tell you to play Ristar without any qualifications. If you asked for a second option, I would shrug and say Yoshi's Island. If you were picky and kept asking then I would list off Donkey Kong Country 2 and Kirby's Dream Land 2. If after that you still kept asking because you were fishing for a specific answer, I would tell you there were no other games. I would lie to your face in order to keep you away from Rayman, and it would be for your own good (yes, I know I'm throwing Wild Woody under the bus, that's where it belongs).
When you combine shitty enemies, annoying mazes, questionable design choices, and any kind of continue system, you get a real bad time. The tricky thing about evaluating old games is determining whether the high or unfair difficulty is because of player expectations, bad design, or economic motivations. This game isn't worth the analysis. Truly an uninspiring first major effort from an upstart development studio. Surely we won't have to deal with this Michel Ancel guy or the Guillemot family ever again…
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Ridge Racer
Release Date: 9/9/1995
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Time to Yelling at The Other Cars: 30 Minutes
Time to Topping the Leaderboard: 55 Minutes
Now here is a goddamn video game. This was probably the best time with this project that I have had since Air Combat, though that isn't saying much I suppose. For any uninitiated who might be reading, this is a port of the 1993 hit arcade racing game. There's one circuit that comes in two configurations, 4 cars to choose from with slightly different stats, and 4 race types. That isn't much in the way of content, but that's looking to be pretty standard for these arcade ports.
Even though Ridge Racer is one of those famous defunct franchises (the last main entry came out 15 years ago, don't @ me) my only experience with it was when I played one race of Ridge Racer 6 in high school and hated it. Mind you, I was going through a Forza phase at the time, so the hyper-arcadey physics were a turn off. Because of that, I'm basically a complete newcomer to this series. That context is worth mentioning because I was ready to come into this blog all excited to write about how Galaxian is playable in the loading screen and how cool that is. Then I remembered that classic Namco games in the loads is one of the two or three things that this series if famous for, so I didn't lead off with that. The concept is still hella cool though and more companies should stick entire classic games into their modern games. What I'm trying to say is that the cowards should have put a fully playable Pac-Man cabinet stashed away somewhere in Elden Ring.
Back on topic, the lack of stuff in this game makes sense considering it was one of the first polygonal racing games to hit arcades, so I'm guessing there isn't much content because even getting this much right was probably difficult. Yet a straight port of it to a home console is just kind of lazy. Sure, it's fast and 3D but there's so little to do that players in '95 would be better off buying a used copy of the original Mario Kart. This game is the archetypical weekend rental. I think that even a year after this release, putting out a game with so little in it would have been a fatal mistake. I'm curious to see when this grace period for old arcade ports is going to end.
For my remaining grievances, the other cars actively get in your way on the narrow track causing frequent bumps and the final boss car has some real-ass rubberbanding going on. Also, I have never once gotten the hang of drifting in any non-kart-based racing game, so the drifting gimmick here was more of a liability for me than anything else.
I've been pretty negative so far, but I need to reiterate that this thing is still a good time. The races run smoothly and the steering feels responsive by any reasonable standards for a launch PS1 game. The navigation through turns mostly makes sense, and there's even a kind of day/night cycle. Somehow both the bumper camera and third person camera work well, when in most games it's going to be one or the other. In spite of the previously mentioned flaws, this is still as good of a racing game as you could get at the time.
Now to the most important feature that I've saved for last: the music in this fucker goes hard as hell and the announcer is hyped. Maybe it was the palette cleansing effect from coming off of Rayman, but I fuckin' love the way this game sounds. I'm dropping the soundtrack below for shits and giggles.
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Street Fighter: The Movie
Release Date: 9/9/1995
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Acclaim
Time to Getting My Ass Kicked So Hard That The Next Chronogaming Wannabee Feels It: 50 Minutes
This game and the movie it's based on have been the subjects of unflattering memes and derision basically since they came out. Largely for good reason, as they are really quite silly…or so I hear. I've never seen the movie, though I probably will after writing this, and this is the first time I've touched the game. All of my knowledge comes from Ryan Davis' classic TANG review and half remembering other times it's been brought up on this site. The upshot is that I was expecting to have an entertainingly dumb time with this thing, and I was half right.
Getting the fun part out of the way, everything about this game is very, very stupid. All of the non-fighting parts of the Movie Fight mode are absolutely hilarious. From the awkwardly looping 1.5 seconds of Cammy opening and closing her mouth during the mission briefings to the toning down of naughty words from the movie to the largely pointless branching paths, there's a lot to love here. On top of that the quality of the rotoscoped sprites is dogshit. There's enough blurriness going on with the characters in the game that I am unconvinced any of the original actors are here no matter what Wikipedia says. The amateur cosplay feel of the character models is exacerbated by the lousy animations. It feels like they weren't able to get all of the animation frames on the disc and had to drop like half of them. This all adds up to the game looking very funny.
Now for the bad part: this is still a fighting game. The main mode, Movie Fight, forces you to play as Guile going through what I guess are the main beats from the movie. The whole thing is on some kind of overall timer of about an hour, so if you lose a match you just start that match over again until you are able to progress. Considering how fast the fights can go, that seems like a merciful set-up. That's what I thought before getting my ass handed to me by Blanca for five matches in quick succession. At that point, I decided to try a different mode but found out I couldn't quit to the main menu without resetting the console. Fun!
In the second and more traditional mode, Street Fight, I was able to get about halfway through the ladder as Ryu by using only Heavy Punch and Throw. When the game started demanding I play it with some amount of skill I got a game over and spat out to the title screen. That's where I was done.
I feel like I need to confront the concept of 2D fighting games. As I was having a bad time playing this thing, I realized that I would do about as well, if not worse, playing something like Street Fighter II Turbo ,which is supposed to be a good fighting game of the era. At that point, what would be the difference between a good and bad 2D fighting game for a novice of the genre? Is the judgement of quality mostly based around the high-level minutiae of character balance and attack frames? It doesn't seem like ease of using combos would be involved, considering how gatekeepy the genre seems to be. Is it just the smoothness and readability of animations, which this game sorely lacks? Other than presentation, I don't think I could feel the difference between a good and bad 2D fighting game of the same era. I can only conclude that on a casual level, this game and the best Street Fighter games are functionally the same.
Note: I watched the movie after writing this and I had a great time. It is monumentally stupid and cheesy, everyone is hamming it up, and the fight scenes are lazy and bad. I recommend the movie wholeheartedly. RIP Raul Julia.
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Total Eclipse Turbo
Release Date: 9/9/1995 (8/30/1995?)
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Crystal Dynamics
Time to Getting a Little Bit Tired: 35 Minutes
I came in here looking to do an extended Bonnie Taylor bit, but I exhausted myself trying to make it work. I felt a little bit nervous, then I got a little bit terrified and a little bit restless. This made me get a little bit helpless and a little bit angry and I know I've got to get out and cry. ♩ Turn around, bright eyes♩
…Alright, I think I have that out of my system. What we've got here is a port of a 3DO game, which might be the most cursed category of game I can think of right now. This is a 3D semi-on-rails flying game where you're in space shooting aliens. I say it's semi-on-rails because even though you're flying in a set path, the level of mobility is more reminiscent of a shmup. Though I guess all rail shooters are just the 3D versions of shmups…genres are hard. However you classify it, the game has you playing as a spaceship going pew pew at things while flying over alien planets.
There are 4 worlds broken out into 4 levels each that are divided between shooting and navigation sections with a limited variety of enemies and power-ups; if you don't burn through lives then this could be beaten in about an hour. The operative phrase there was "burn through lives". The controls feel a bit too loose for the tight navigation sections, the player and enemy shot patterns can seem random and chaotic (to the point that when there are multiple objects firing on screen the whole thing becomes incomprehensible), the enemies take too many hits, and there's a fundamental design flaw that will take its own paragraph to express.
When you have this kind of shooter, the basic concept is that you are moving an object up, down, left, and right in 2 dimensions while that object is moving forward through a third dimension on its own. If you're shooting things, you want the bullet you shoot to take up a large enough two-dimensional section on your screen so that it can effect anything within some respectable percentage of the screen. An example would be the shots in Space Harrier, which are about the size of the character thus giving them a respectable two-dimensional hitbox that you have a frame of reference for. In contrast, Total Eclipse Turbo has shots that are relatively small and take up what feels like a pinprick sized two-dimensional section of the screen. It tries to compensate by having a default three-shot burst that travels in a horizontal line with the ship at the center. This means that when you shoot you would hit something with a hitbox on a narrow line running across the screen. If there are enemies with small hitboxes (such as in this piece of shit) then it will be easy for the horizontal line you're shooting to not intersect their hitboxes. This all adds up to the enemies being kind of hard to actually hit.
To compound that fundamental issue we add back in the aforementioned large number of shots that it takes to kill anything, making it very tricky to destroy enemies. When you further include the visual chaos in the more intense sections, not only are the enemies hard to hit and take multiple hits, but you might not even be able to tell whether you've hit the damn things or be able to track the shots that they are firing at you. I've really tried to make these complaints make sense.
It seems like the developers realized the extent of the flaws at some point in development because everything you can blow up in the game will restore some of your health bar, in theory this makes the game not impossible. Even still, I made it only about halfway through before running out of continues and being shat back out to the title screen. Most of the lives lost were due to a specific section on the second planet where my ship kept exploding over and over again without any clear indication where the damage was coming from. I didn't bother using the password that the game gave me to start back at the second planet because I didn't want to go through that anymore.
I've used so many words on the crap game design that I haven't even mentioned the fact that this thing is fuckin' ugly, even by PS1 launch game standards. You can really tell it started out on the 3DO by how shitty it looks. There's an opening cutscene using bad early 90's CG with bad voice over and a main villain that has a really misguided visual design. That cutscene was the most fun I had with this game. Finally, the music was a collection of forgettable butt rock. When I look ahead and think of how many 3DO ports are coming up: there's nothing to say, a total eclipse of the heart.
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Now that we have finally escaped launch day, I'm going to put up an extra post between now and next week giving my overall take of the Playstation's launch lineup. I'm even going to include a far worse idea than this series that will totally cause problems later!
Next time we'll get through the rest of September and break into October '95 with CyberSpeed, PGA Tour 96, Offworld Interceptor Extreme, and Mortal Kombat 3.
I played this game over on my twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. You can watch the archive below.
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