An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week's look at Criticom, Discworld, Destruction Derby, and Doom can be found here.
This week, we'll look at Zoop, Agile Warrior F-111X, Lemmings 3D, and WipEout.
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Zoop
Release Date: 11/20/1995
Developer: Hookstone
Publisher: Viacom New Media
Time to Looking Up Instructions: 15 Minutes
Time to Getting Zooped: 25 Minutes
I was looking forward to this game going in because the only thing I knew was the awful name, the most 90's title treatment of all time, and the fact that it is some kind of puzzle game. That's just enough to garner my curiosity. That morbid fascination was satisfied, because this game got the most wtf's per minute of any game so far.
That's not to say that it's especially convoluted or bizarre, it just doesn’t make any effort to explain itself and the concept is not immediately obvious. Zoop (make sure to repeat that word until you begin to lose your sanity) is a puzzle game where you control a cursor within a 4x4 box in the middle of a screen that looks like a pegboard. Different colored game pieces gradually advance in four columns from each of the four sides of the screen towards the center, if any piece gets pushed into the center square it’s game over. At first blush, it seems like you just move the cursor around that box shooting (or maybe zooping) at the different columns of pieces. Sometimes they just spin around and sometimes they disappear. It was not obvious at first what was going on. To this game's credit, the controls are responsive enough that you can really jam on the d-pad and shoot buttons to spam all of the columns pretty quickly. I got to the second level using that brute force method, but after 15 minutes I still had no idea what was going on.
I got frustrated enough that I had the urge to drop this game right then and there, but I wanted to solve the riddle of this weird thing so I looked up some instructions. Turns out you need to shoot the pieces that are the same color as your cursor to make them disappear, this also swaps colors when you shoot a piece that is a different color from your cursor. So, the point is to match the color of lines of pieces across the 16 different columns while managing the board efficiently enough that none of them advance to the middle. That's a simple and straightforward concept, and it is executed on. I'm not going to say that it was executed competently or incompetently. It was executed. After learning how to play the damn thing, I was able to get through about half of the levels in one run and called it a day. It lost most of the appeal when the mystery was stripped away.
I mean, it's not bad per se, just not terribly interesting. There are no other game options than to zoop. You're either going to zoop or you're returning the disc to Blockbuster. The menus and graphics are simpler and cleaner than the nightmare of a title screen would imply and the music is so low-key and inoffensive that I don't remember anything else about it.
This straightforwardness gave me time to consider that title again: What in the name of fuck is a zoop? It's obviously the name of the game, but nothing in the game seems particularly zoopy, whatever that means. Is zoop a noun or a verb? An onomatopoeia? Nothing in my life's experience prepared me for this quandary. Sadly, I discovered the answer during my playthrough. Apparently, a full column of pieces getting cleared at once is a zoop. I learned this when I got one because a translucent overlay appears on-screen, like J. Allard's head in a Jeff Minter game. Getting a zoop is Zoop's equivalent of getting a tetris in Tetris. They just copied that idea. That's it. I was so disappointed. Fuck this game. I caught myself reflexively telling the screen to "stop trying to make zoop happen".
Zoop was trying to be the next Tetris and face-planted in the attempt. It came out for just about every conceivable system over the course of 1995 and never caught any traction with consumers or reviewers. Viacom even went so far as to do an advertising push with the slogan "America's Largest Killer of Time!", which is a phrase that sucks on so many different levels. I'm going to eventually sound like a broken record, but games like this and Cyberspeed are the kinds of weird, forgotten dead-ends that I'm here to uncover. Like with Cyberspeed, the discovery alone brought me more joy than the actual gameplay.
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Agile Warrior F-111X
Release Date: 11/21/1995
Developer: Black Ops Entertainment
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Time to Shot Down: 50 Minutes
Oof, where do I even start. How about with the titular aircraft that you pilot in this game. The F-111 was first introduced as an American supersonic fighter/bomber in the late 1960's, and was quickly nicknamed "Aardvark" (and eventually the pithier "pig") which doesn't imply an awesome opinion of it by the people using the thing. It was initially much better at bombing the Vietnamese than the F-4 but after that war it was superseded by the f-14 and later developments. That quick obsolescence led to multiple design revisions ranging from version A all the way to K until getting phased out in the late 90's. That context shows that this jet was already very long in the tooth by the time this game was made, and the "X" at the end of the title implies some odd future where that airframe would be iterated on a dozen or so more times until it becomes a cool future weapon. That's very silly and weird when cool future jets like the F-22 were already in known development. Why not call the plane in this game a F-42 and make it a sick future plane with lasers, or call it a F-22 for a more modern setting? Why force the player to pilot around a souped-up Vietnam era plane? It's questions like this that keep me up at night.
Now that my rant about military aviation is out of the way, the actual game Agile Warrior F-111X is a steaming turd of a Flight Combat game with almost nothing to recommend it. In this game you fly a fighter jet around what looks to be 10 or so maps, fulfilling different variations of blow-up-the-target objectives while fighting off a variety of helicopters, jets, and ground vehicles. The maps are fairly large and dense with stuff, which is probably the cause of the absolutely pitiful draw-distance and a framerate that goes down to the single digits if there are enough enemies buzzing around. Speaking of enemies, there are literally dozens of the things on each map. The helicopters and ground vehicles don't offer much of a threat, but the enemy jets tend to group together and are seemingly able to fire missiles out of their asses. This means that when you encounter one of these groups multiple things happen in quick succession: the framerate goes to shit, you immediately start taking damage with no indication of where, and hard to target jets begin to swarm around you in an incoherent manner. All of my deaths in this game came from wandering into these swarms. To make that worse, only one weapon type (AMRAAMs) are able to actually hit enemy jets. Speaking of which, you're given a large inventory or weapons that include: the primary gun, Sidewinders which take multiple hits to kill anything, rocket pods that are almost useless, bombs that are completely useless, Napalm which is just weird, and the aforementioned AMRAAMS.
The gameplay loop devolves into: shooting exactly two Sidewinders at any helicopter, shooting exactly 1 AMRAAM at enemy jets, and using the gun against ground targets. There are apparently little soldier guys on the ground with rocket launchers, which I guess is what the napalm is for, but there's no point in bothering with them. Even with that figured out, getting around the maps to the various objectives is a hassle. The low draw distance makes it so that you can't see anything until it's right in your face and the minimap is useless. There's an objective map overlay that is absolutely vital for navigation but is not at all obvious without extensively poking and holding various buttons on the controller. Speaking of the controls, the plane handles like ass. The low maneuverability combined with the technical issues means that I ended up flying close to ground at all times, as the typical tactics which can be found in good games like Air Combat of flying at around 1000 feet and making runs on various targets can't work in this game.
That isn't even to mention the ammo and health system. Ammo for the various secondary weapons is obtained from literal floating pick-ups that you get from blowing up all the various things you can shoot. These pick-ups can be finicky to get and don't always give useful ammo. Also, your plane has a fuel meter in addition to the health bar. As you can expect, fuel is constantly decreasing during missions and can only be refilled by collecting pick-ups from certain destroyed vehicles or buildings. Meanwhile health pick-ups will pop out of all other ground targets that don't give fuel, though the amount of health refilled with each pick-ups is laughably small.
That all adds up to a bad time. But even then I would have likely tried to beat this game if it didn't have one fatal flaw: the missions don't end when you complete all of the objectives. I eventually did a 20 minute run on the first level of the game in which I was able to dodge the various fighter swarms and blow up all of the targets without running out of fuel. Apparently that wasn't the end of the level. What would otherwise have brought up a level complete screen did nothing. There was no indication on the objective map on what to do, so I flew around for a few minutes blowing up everything I saw until I was eventually taken down by a fighter swarm. As you can expect, there are no checkpoints and only one life per level. After cursing at this damn thing I tried the second and third missions, but those spawn your plane immediately next to fighter swarms, causing a quick and fiery death. That’s when I lost patience with the accursed piece of trash and quit.
As far as positives go, the explosion effect from exploding fuel silos looks nice and the music is unremarkable. That's it. With that positivity out of the way, let's get into what is probably the really fucked thing going on here. The plot set-up for the game and each of the missions are bad, like really bad. The first mission is a desert level in Guiana (which doesn't have any deserts) where apparently a drug cartel has seized massive amounts of military hardware and are trying to launch a satellite into orbit for vague drug reasons. Other than the geographic screw-up, the developers at least knew that there's a spaceport in Guiana, so there's that. Things get a bit better though with the second mission, where you're tasked with preventing a rogue Russian general from INVADING ALASKA FROM HIS IMPENTRABLE ICE BASE. Now, I can enjoy an IMPENTRABLE ICE BASE as much as anyone, so I'll let it slide. But is gets worse again in the third mission, where you have to assassinate a "Burmese drug lord". That level looks the worst, with featureless green terrain and scattered stereotypical stilted huts. Seeing this depiction of southeast Asia clicked something in my brain. The use of the Aardvark, Napalm, and probably racist depictions of the rest of the world leads me to believe that this game is celebrating and trading on nostalgia of the Nixon and Reagan era US policies of wantonly doing war crimes in various parts of the world. I bet this thing is supposed to appeal to the psychos who were bummed that they were born too late to drop Napalm on people. Maybe I'm going too far in my thinking, but this game gives me no reason to give it the benefit of a doubt.
Everything about this game is wrong-headed and poorly executed. I'm saying that even though each mission begins with a corny FMV briefing where an uncredited actor, who I swear I recognize, sternly presents low-res 3D models of the stuff you're supposed to shoot. Everyone reading this should know by now how much I love bad FMV, but it isn't anywhere near enough to justify this blazing tire fire of a video game.
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Lemmings 3D
Release Date: 11/21/1995
Developer: Clockwork Games
Publisher: Psygnosis
Time to Figuring Out The Controls: 15 Minutes
Time to Holding It Against The British: 30 Minutes
While we're on the topic of low-quality bottom feeders: let's look at a Lemmings game. Ok, that was mean but I will stand by that insult. Lemmings is a puzzle game that launched on the Amiga in 1991 and was afterwards ported to every system then known to man and some that weren't. This was the game that launched Psygnosis, my constant companion in this series, to the level of being the largest British Developer/Publisher in the 90's. With that said, I personally never found the appeal of the Lemmings franchise. I've never liked the way the little guys look, the bad midi-sounding classical music covers are grating, and the actual gameplay has always seemed like a chore. Also fuck Amiga games for no particular reason. If I seem like I'm in a bad mood, it's because I didn't play Lemmings but instead I played Lemmings 3D (or 3D Lemmings, I don't actually care what the name is supposed to be) which is so much worse.
The basic Lemmings formula is seemingly in place. Some number of little guys drop out of a box and walk In a straight line until they either encounter a barrier that makes them turn around, walk into a hazard that kills them, or reach the goal. You can program individual lemmings to perform certain tasks, either clearing specific obstacles or forcing later lemmings to change direction. The point in each level is to make sure some number of lemmings reach the goal. As the game progresses the levels get larger and contain more complicated features. That all sounds straightforward enough when talking about a 2D Amiga game. Doing that in 3D levels with a Playstation controller with an interface that makes no attempt to adapt to console controls is a nightmare.
I spent half my time with this game just trying to figure out how to control the damn thing, which is not at all obvious and the controller map in the options is of limited help. After expending most of my patience doing that, I played the first seven levels, which seem to be part of a 20 level mandatory tutorial. I'm all for tutorials, but this game doesn't need 20 fucking levels to get its point across. My frustration very soon turned to boredom and I bounced. There is no appeal whatsoever to playing this game. The art is bad, the graphics are bad, the music is bad, the lemming "voices" made me want to stab myself in the ears, the camera is on another level of fucked, the onscreen cursor is a hassle, and giving commands to the lemmings feels unresponsive. There are no positives to this thing.
Let's spend a moment on the controls. The d-pad controls the on screen cursor that you need to access the different commands and select the lemmings, which is fair enough I guess. The face buttons are used to move the camera forward, back, and strafe left and right. In order to move the camera more you either need to select one of the pre-arranged camera positions (which are unhelpful) or hold L1 while using the d-pad to move the camera up and down and pan left or right. Notice how there is no panning up or down. R1 is used as the equivalent of a left-mouse click, and finally I never quite figured out whatever the fuck L2/R2 are supposed to do. One of the tricks that took me a while to realize was that not only do you need to select a lemming with R1, but you need to double click the lemming with R1 in order for it follow your selected order. On top of all that, the cursor feels bad and every type of command is shown as onscreen buttons that have finicky selection boxes.
Now that you have an image of the interface, you now need to consider that the levels in this game are trying to live up to the concept of a 3D Lemmings in the most literal way possible. You have to wrestle around the controls in levels that have varying elevation and 90-degree turns which are probably hard to get a visual read on in the later levels. Again, I didn't get that far because everything else about the experience is so appalling.
I'm at a loss on what more to say about this game without relaunching into profane pejorative. I think this is the worst single experience I have had with a game so far. I might rank Agile Warrior lower than this solely for that game's casual racism. The only things that are worse than a Lemmings game are actual hate crimes.
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WipEout
Release Date: 11/21/1995
Developer: Psygnosis
Publisher: Psygnosis
Time to Disqualified: 40 Minutes
The severe decline in quality over the last few games left me in a rotten mood going into WipEout. Combine that with my now learned aversion to Psygnosis and skepticism of big name games and I was more than a little apprehensive going in to this. Fortunately, this was a little bit of a palette cleanser in the way that drinking stagnant pond water is a palette cleanser after eating literal shit.
Trying to describe this game from the perspective of the times, I can't help but to say WipEout is like F-Zero's cooler older cousin. When I make that F-Zero comparison, I mean it. This game is a futuristic racing game where you pilot a hover race car around windy, walled-in tracks littered with boost pads and almost useless weapon pick-ups. The kart racing style weapons are a deviation from the F-Zero formula, but it's not a far leap. The other gameplay innovation here is a primitive drifting mechanic that is absolutely necessary to master, and which I of course didn't even come close to getting a hang of. This isn't much to write home about in terms of gameplay, but actually playing this thing isn't really the point.
Right from the start, the primary attributes of this game are the artstyle. graphics, and music. Everything going on here looks futuristic and cool, from the box art to the fonts to the menus to the ship designs. The eurobeat soundtrack captured the feeling from that moment in the 90's of what the future would sound like, and that music still jams. The tracks and vehicles look better than anything else outside of Tekken so far on the PS1. The whole aesthetic first featured in this game still captures even to this day the feeling of what sci-fi sports should look. The influence that the look and sound of this game had on everyone who played it can't be understated.
Sadly, this is an interactive medium and this fucking thing has to be interacted with. The actual racing is inherently floaty to the point that the vehicle bouncing up and down causes problems with the handling. The low draw distance is a huge hazard for navigating the tracks at high speed, requiring extensive practice and track memorization to actually get anywhere. The drifting is essential for negotiating the tighter corners, of which there are plenty, and it feels bad and unpredictable. Also, remember those weapons I mentioned? Well, you shouldn't because everything but the boost are next to useless. Being hit with a missile or a mine only slightly slows down a vehicle, meaning that neither you nor the AI are going to notice it much even if you can hit anything. Though, the computer voice that says the name of the weapon when you pick it up is cool, but that's a style thing and we already acknowledged how good that is.
All of the design and control issues wouldn't be deal breaker if Psygnosis hadn't fallen into the same trap that also ruined Cyberspeed. When in the tournament mode, you can only advance to the next race if you finish third place or higher. Because each track requires that aforementioned extensive practice, I hit a brick wall on the second race of the game. That was very frustrating as the game is divided into cups ala Mario Kart and you can't unlock the next cup without completing the previous one. That means you need to third or higher in all races of the cup you're playing in order to even glimpse at the rest of the game. Between the handling issues and the rubber-banding AI (I didn't find any difficulty settings) it seemed like it would take a while to get past the starting Venom tracks. That's a real bummer and an obvious flaw in what I'm guessing was the prevailing worldview of the times, since I've now seen this twice. Even if a player isn't awesome at your game, you should at least let them see what's there so that they don't get bored by the repetition.
This game ended up being a different kind of disappointment than the other big titles from 1995. I know that the developers at Psygnosis eventually get things turned around because I remember enjoying the PS3-era Wipeout games back in the day. This is also still technically the best futuristic racing game yet released for the PS1, so there's that.
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This week was mentally and emotionally taxing, what with my one-sided feud against British game development and gaining the world record for the most uses of the word "zoop" in a blog. Next week will change the pace up a bit, because we get to shoot all kinds of things and go on a surprise deep-dive when we look at FIFA 96, Defcon 5, Space Griffon VF-9, and Viewpoint.
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