An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week's look at Cyberspeed, PGA Tour 96, Off-World Interceptor Extreme, andMortal Kombat 3 can be found here
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Theme Park
Release Date: 10/15/1995
Developer: Bullfrog Productions, Ltd.
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Time to Annoyed By The Barf Sounds: 60 Minutes
Growing up, I played a decent amount of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, so I assumed I knew how these kinds of games work. For the most part, my assumptions were right. Even so, there are two major hurdles for this game to be enjoyable. First, this is the progenitor of the park management genre, so while the ideas are all here, the execution is highly primitive. Second, THIS IS THE PS1 PORT OF A PC GAME DON'T PLAY THIS VERSION WHAT ARE YOU DOING.
The original 1994 release seems to have been a result of Peter Molyneux taking a look at the Business Sim sub-genre and thinking, "What if I made one of these for an amusement park?" Because this came from Molyneux solidly in the middle of the rise phase of his career (distinct from the poisoned-by-hubris, victim-of-hubris, fall, and forced-into-obscurity phases of his career) it was an unambiguous success that not only kicked off the influential Theme franchise but also the Park Management sub-sub-genre that we all know and love to this day. All of that means this game is decently made and contains familiar gameplay concepts such as: designing layout of rides, walkways, and attractions; hiring the right balance of performers, handymen, and mechanics; managing crowd flow; managing R&D; setting prices; and all of the other fundamentals you'll find in Rollercoaster Tycoon or Planet Coaster.
The issue is, because this is the first one of these, you have the fundamental concepts put together in a way that feels primitive. This is combined with some choices that can now unfortunately be recognized as unnecessary Molyneux Whimsy. The R&D screen is a nightmare even though it's possible to see what the metaphor is supposed to be, the gags fall flat, the financial statements are a bit too realistic, and the execution of the labor negotiation mini-game is bizarre. By the way, they put in a whole a labor negotiation mini-game but didn't bother to tutorialize that you need to build toilets or where those are in the build screens. There is also a barfing sound effect that is supposed to signify something, but I was never able to figure out what that was and it played like 30 times a minute by the time I quit. Maybe the barfing is supposed to be a cute way of indicating something with customer happiness or infrastructure, but it gets very tiring after hearing it for 200th time. That's just one example of the kinds of overly-cute/too-clever-for-its-own-good design choices that we know would eventually lead to Molyneux's downfall, though it wouldn't have been obvious at the time.
So, that's Theme Park for DOS. You can probably get it for less than a dollar in a GOG sale, it can run on a potato, and it serves as a decent historical curiosity…but that isn't what I played. I wrestled with the goddamned PS1 version, which no one should ever do. The developers did what they could to fit the menu and sub-screen heavy gameplay into a framework that works with a Playstation controller. Even still, it's a major hassle to use, and is unintuitive and sluggish. You control a cursor with a d-pad, and the square button brings up a quick menu that can be used to bring up the various screens, sub-screens, and sub-sub-screens. Navigating between all the different screens you need to interact with feels slow and is a chore. To make that worse, the game runs without pausing while trying to navigate everything, so you end up with a backlog of things that need to be addressed without the sufficient interface to fully do so.
I'll have more to say about translating PC controls to a PS1 later on in this post, but in summary: don't.
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Cyber Sled
Release Date: 10/18/1995
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Time to Not Wanting To Play Anymore: 30 Minutes
Time to Seeing What It Would Take To Win: 50 Minutes
So far, Namco has been 2-0 with their arcade ports on this console with Air Combat and Ridge Racer. I went into Cyber Sled sight-unseen but with moderately high hopes. While this is yet another well-done port of a two year old arcade game, the game being ported this time wasn't worth the effort.
This is a polygonal 1v1 vehicle combat game where you and your opponent control hover tanks, called "sleds" for some reason. You have an infinite ammo gun that can overheat and missiles with finite ammo. There are obstacles and pick-ups for health and extra missiles across 4 or 5 different arenas. There are initially 6 weirdos you can choose from who all pilot sleds with different stats and distinct visual designs. There's a vague, cyber-dystopian setting that is alluded to as you work your way up the game's tournament ladder. That's the whole game. The music is ok, if kinda generic, but the character art is silly in a way that I enjoyed so that's at least something.
The sleds have independent turning and strafing controls, which works about as poorly as you can imagine on a pre-Dualshock Playstation controller, though it is possible to adjust yourself to the controls over time. I initially did a run with each of the six characters, only making it as far as the fourth match on my best run. I felt done at that point, but something has been bugging me about these arcade ports. I've been poking around the surface level of these things and moving on, mentioning only that there are hard progression blocks making you put in quarters to git gud. Because this game seems very straightforward, I decided to do some save-scumming and math out what it would take to get to end credits in this thing the honest way.
Choosing the character I did the best with initially, Hans Baird a.k.a. the tank a.k.a. the big ugly fucker, I went through the ladder using save states to do quick retries in order to see where this all leads. Turns out there are 11 fights in total against the 5 other playable character, 5 unlockable characters, and a less-than-fair final boss. The third, fourth, and eighth fights took 2, 2, and 3 tries respectively and the final boss took 6 tries before I figured out his schtick. Considering that you are punted to the main screen after only one loss to try again, and the whole ladder takes less than 15 minutes in a straight playthrough, we just need to do some B-student probability math to figure this out. If you don't like math, feel free to overreact with horror in whatever way you deem appropriate. Our first assumption is that it's possible to get an unlucky match against an otherwise easy opponent. This gives us the following probabilities for the first run after understanding the gameplay:
Fight | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
% Chance of Victory | 90% | 90% | 50% | 50% | 90% | 90% | 90% | 33% | 90% | 90% | 16% |
The odds of reaching end credits are bad, like <1% bad. But most people get better at games the more they play them so those percentages are going to go up the more times those fights are encountered at an exponentially deceasing rate. Because I haven't done extensive study, let's just say that after 10 runs I would have seen the first fight 10 times, second 9 times, third 8 times, fourth 4 times, fifth 2 times, sixth 2 times, seventh 2 times, eighth 1 time and stopped there. Let's say that this experience would have increased the odds like to this:
Fight | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
% Chance of Victory | 95% | 94% | 70% | 60% | 91% | 91% | 91% | 40% | 90% | 90% | 16% |
This gets us up to ~1.5% chance of victory. If we continue this progression and skip the rest of the math, it would take me about 40 runs to see end credits, give or take 10 or so runs. So, we're looking at 5-8 hours of very repetitive gameplay to beat this thing normally. Now, you might be saying at this point, "your assumptions are bad, and you should feel bad!" Well, you go ahead and beat Cyber Sled normally without prior experience and tell me how that goes. You'll be the one wasting 5-8 hours of your life and I'll be the one laughing.
The point of this little exercise is to try and show what we already know, most arcade games (or at least this arcade game) are pretty short and the time to become proficient is not that long by home console standards, so much so that it would be cheaper to beat these things in single-player in an arcade than buying the home port. But that probably was never the point, as most of these games are meant for two-player and what I've been playing is just an afterthought.
I don't have anything insightful to say after all of that, I'm just getting tired of these arcade games and I'm going a bit loopy.
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WWF Wrestlemania - The Arcade Game
Release Date: 10/18/1995
Developer: Midway
Publisher: Acclaim
Time to Getting Suplexed or Something, I Don't Know: 25 minutes
I'm not a wrestling guy. Never have been. Probably never will be. All my knowledge of it comes from this site. I knew I would have to confront that in this series, just not this soon. Fortunately, despite the branding, this isn't a wrestling game as we would recognize it: it's just a 2D fighting game with some wrestling aesthetic. And you know what, I had a better time with this than any of the other fighting games so far.
There are 8 wrestlers to choose from, most of whom I actually recognize, with two single player modes and the main two-player mode. I played up to the fifth match in the first tournament mode, and it's fine. There are weak and heavy attacks, guard, run, grappling, and specials. So, you know, a fighting game. The sprites look good and the whole thing runs smoothly. The animations and effects are silly and colorful, so it would be fun to watch if I weren't playing. The movement has an odd, brawler-style 2.5D quality and enough small wrestling-specific touches are added to make it seem like more than the cheap cash-grab that it is. These small touches include:
- Character select music changes depending on who won the last round
- You can get knocked out of the ring and climb back in
- There's sometimes a second wind after getting KO'd
- There's a recovery bar that you have to fill when you get knocked down
- You can run around and bounce off the ropes to gain power
This thing feels fine to play, as far as fighting games go. I had my perennial issues of never figuring out how to do any specials or consistently grapple. This wasn't that bad as I was able to get by decently enough just be using heavy attacks. Also, this has the always appreciated feature of continuing the game at the fight you lost, so that you don't have to go through the early fights over-and-over again, and you even get to choose you character each time as well. So modern! This makes the structure much more forgiving and inviting than something like MK3, which means that this has to be balanced by having the last few fights in the tournament be 2 or 3 against 1. If that sounds unfair, that's because it is. So, the game lets you bang your head against otherwise unfair matches as many times as you could possibly want, which is one way to get quarters I guess. Mark Turmell had bills to pay.
I don't have much more to say about this thing. I had an ok time relative to the typical arcade port. If I had to choose one of the four fighting games I've seen so far to go back and play more of, I would choose this game over the others, though that isn't saying much.
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X-COM: UFO Defense
Release Date: 10/25/1995
Developer: MicroProse
Publisher: MicroProse
Time to Getting My Team Wiped: 100 minutes
Speaking of ill-conceived ports of PC games, we now have this fucking thing to deal with. I've played all of the rebooted X-COM games, and I generally consider myself a fan. I've never gone back to look at the originals because I've known in my heart that they're fucked. Turns out I had the right instinct, the original X-COM is absolutely fucked.
You command an Earth base where you need to recruit soldiers, do research, get equipment, and expand the base all while balancing the monthly income you get from supporting nations. Sometimes UFOs show up and you need to shoot them down and send in a ground team to kill off any little grey men hanging around the wreck. If you've played any modern X-COM game, then you know the gameplay loop. Since this is the mid-90's, the menus are kinda gnarly and the tactical battles are cumbersome, which isn't helped by the 14 person squad sizes.
That applies to the original DOS version of this game, but yet again we are dealing with the PS1 port. This game should not be played with a controller. There was very little effort spent to turn the tactical command bar into something remotely useable, which at least Theme Park had the decency to take a swing at. The combination of button presses between the Start, Select, Cross, and Circle buttons to do literally anything in this game is insane. I put an hour and a half into this thing and only made it part way through the second UFO encounter. An already slow-paced game is throttled down even more by the worst possible control scheme.
Now, unlike with Theme Park, I'm not going to recommend with any qualifications to look at the PC version of this game. There's no effort to help you figure what you're supposed to do and the battle difficulty is actively cruel. The first move I made with the first soldier in the first encounter resulted in that soldier getting immediately lit up from beyond the fog of war and dying. That experience exemplifies the fact that the aliens have longer sight lines and better accuracy from the beginning. The first mission resulted in three of my guys getting killed in exchange for four aliens. The second mission had eight or nine aliens and my thirteen member squad got wrecked. At one point, there was an alien camping the one door leading into the crashed UFO in a spot that neither my soldiers nor the game camera could get a sightline to and the little shit offed like four soldiers in a row. The UFOs don't get deformation from explosives, so there wasn't anything I could find to make another entrance. Not only is that a bad time, but it's a bad time where you have to constantly manhandle a Playstation controller.
PC games of this era with any amount of interface complexity do not belong on consoles, and it is a disservice to humanity to try to shoehorn them in. As for the PC version of this game: If you want my advice, never think about the original X-COM ever again for the rest of your life.
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Next time we're going to finally look at couple of goddamned made-for-Playstation video games with Jumping Flash!, Novastorm™, and Twisted Metal. I am expecting to have a better time with these and I'm sure I won't be disappointed at all.
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