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

Last week's look at FIFA 96, Defcon 5, Space Griffon VF-9, and Viewpoint can be found here.

This week, we'll look at NHL FaceOff, Hi-Octane, Thunderstrike 2, Shock Wave Assault.

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NHL FaceOff

Release Date: 11/30/1995

Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Time to Beating The Jaguars: 30 Minutes

Just like with Soccer last week, it's time for me to announce that I have no attachment whatsoever to Hockey in any way. I liked the Mighty Duck movies as a kid and I saw that movie Slapshot once and didn't get it. That's my entire relationship with the sport. But now, my lack conception has been entirely replaced by my experience with this game. That new conception is: Hockey is a better version of Soccer. Which, transitively, makes it a better real-world realization of Blitzball. That's a glowing recommendation coming from me, and that's because this game is fine. It's ok. I had an alright time with it. It seems to have the appropriate number of features for a sports game in this era, it runs smooth, controls well enough, and has a couple of small but appreciated touches.

As I said, this game has all of the features that you would hope for: single match, season mode, team customization, and two-player mode. In the actual hockeying itself, the game runs pretty smooth and the camera is close in enough on the action that I could track the puck and differentiate between the teams, which automatically makes this better than FIFA. Another thing that greatly helps the experience is the speed of play. The players zip around real fast in a relatively small play field, which makes the pace more engaging than in something like FIFA or NFL Gameday. It's almost as though Hockey has a rhythm closer to Basketball. Though, I guess these kinds of comparisons work as poorly for the video games as the actual sports. Anyway, NHL FaceOff seems like a good video game representation of the sport, and it seems that way because it's kinda fun. Sports usually don't exist without being at least a little enjoyable, so if a sport's video game is fun then that means the game is able to capture something of the appeal. That's my current theory, at least.

Other than it being what it is. There are a few nice touches. The transition between the pre-match menu and the match you're playing is a smooth camera pan instead of a load screen, which feels very modern. During the matches you get some of the real world shitty sound effects and music stings that would play during a real-world match. The other nice sound gimmick is that the spectators will boo the away team and cheer the home team. That's really all there is to say here other than just explaining Hockey, which I've already announced that I can't do. The last thing of note is that we are again looking at an SCEA original. It seems that when Sony couldn't get third party games for certain sports lined up for the PS1's first Christmas season, they went and made them themselves. That would explain why a Japanese company would go through the trouble of setting up the western publishing and development infrastructure to make Football, Hockey, and Xtreme Sportz games. I'll stop saying this at some point, but this is another example of how deadly serious Sony was about dominating the international console market.

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Hi-Octane

Release Date: 12/1/1995

Developer: Bullfrog Productions

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Time to Slightly Irritated: 45 Minutes

Here we have what is somehow the third futuristic Combat Racing game of 1995, and I'm not sure if this is the worst one or the best one I've seen. On other words, this is a Peter Molyneux game.

Starting with the good: it basically works and it'll let you progress to more races when you finish lower than third, which I guess has become my pet peeve. Now for the bad *inhale*: it looks bad, the draw distance is shit, the controls are too floaty and feel bad, the menus are a nightmare, the UI is too much, the combat sucks, the races are too long, the fuel/shield/ammo replenishment system works poorly in practice, and one of the eurobeat songs has a click track that sounds like a meaningful sound effect but isn't which fucked me up a bit. So, this is a bad game. But I was able to win races and progress through it! But it sucks! I'm torn.

Let's work through some details. There are nine tracks and maybe a half-dozen racers to choose from, all of the racers have different stats but also seem kinda unbalanced in the same way as Cyberspeed. The combat defaults to the typical infinite pea shooter, with the added twist of a visual effect which makes it extremely difficult to tell if it is firing or hitting anything, and pickups which either refills for your limited missile ammo or act as upgrades for the gun or missiles. The racing vehicles have shields that will deplete when attacked, and when you run out of shields your vehicle breaks down and you need to wait for a tow from some Lakatu knock-off motherfucker. On top of that there is a limiting fuel system in which the fuel you start with will not last an entire race and needs to get refilled. The limited missile ammo, shields, and fuel are all addressed with refill zones which are placed around each track. In theory, this adds some tactical considerations for when you need to go out of your way to hit these stations and lose a few seconds of lap time. In practice the stations either are so easy to hit that you can figure out a path through the circuit where you can hit all three every lap with no time loss, or so cumbersome to get to that they aren't worth attempting at all.

When I say that 'the draw distance is shit' what I mean is that when racing at speed, you can only see what is about a second or two ahead of you. That requires either quick reactions, which the floaty controls prevent, or memorization. That memorization is made feasible by how long each goddamned race is. It's somewhere between 10-20 minutes per race for a fast paced combat racing game that requires quick reaction times and wrestling with the controls. It's both exhausting and devoid of any fun. None of this is alleviated by the aesthetics. The menus are nightmarish in the way I now expect from Bullfrog, the UI is cluttered and largely incomprehensible, the actual levels and vehicles don't look that good, and the music is bottom-tier techno. There's a lot to dislike here, but In spite of all of that it was basically playable and I was able to win two out of the three races I played. When I got to the end of the third race I was torn between the urge to continue playing, because the game wasn't really preventing me from doing so, and my building annoyance at this hunk of crap. I decided to bounce before my irritation turned into full anger.

That's where we end up. Everything about interacting with this game feels, looks, and sounds bad. Yet, unlike the other busted games I've played, it doesn't do any one thing so egregious that it becomes unplayable. In conclusion, Hi-Octane is a land of contrasts.

Seriously though, there is one thing of note about the development before moving one. According to Molyneux, this game was made from scratch in six weeks in order to heroically save Dungeon Keeper from being rushed to shelves for the holidays by the wicked overlords at EA. You can notice my skepticism of any claims made by Molyneux. Even then, other accounts seem to put the development at eight weeks with a team of maybe 18 people. That is still incredible as a feat of game development and puts the underbaked and fuckey features into context. I suppose it's a miracle that this thing exists at all and can be played, but maybe it shouldn't have been made and rushing Dungeon Keeper might not have been the worst thing in the world.

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Thunderstrike 2

Release Date: 12/4/1995

Developer: Core Design

Publisher: Core Design

Time to Winning The Drug War: 45 Minutes

For whatever reason, I'm under the impression that the Super Nintendo had a whole bunch of helicopter themed top-down shooters. In my mind, these games played similar to that weird final combat helicopter mission in Pilotwings. I have no idea why I'm under that impression. I bring this up because for most of my time playing Thunderstrike 2 (or Firestorm: Thunderhawk 2, which is a name that leaves my mind the moment I look away from it) gave me the impression that this is a SNES top-down shooter with polygons and a cockpit camera.

Let's take it from the top, this game is a Flight Combat game in the sub-sub-genre of Helicopter Combat games. There are 8 short campaigns of about 4 missions each scattered around a world map in a similar way as Agile Warrior, which is an unfortunate thing to get compared to. The mission conceits are also similar to Agile Warrior, though without the FMV. The one campaign I played through was placed over what would be Bolivia and involved fighting a militarized drug cartel. Stay classy, 90's. The actual missions themselves are on decently sized maps that look like they belong in Mode 7. The few polygonal elements are either buildings you have to shoot, vehicles you have to shoot, or buildings you have to defend.

The actual flight and shooting feels iffy. There's a very low height ceiling, and aiming at ground targets is awkward. Before each mission there's a screen to choose a weapon loadout on the three sets of wing hardpoints. There are lock-on missiles, rocket pods, and mission specific bombs. These provide a realistic amount of ammo per weapon, which isn't great considering the unrealistic mission objectives. The gun is, as usual, infinite ammo and thus becomes the main weapon, even if it is tricky to aim. Also, there are no health pickups nor any way to repair the helicopter mid-mission, which ends up causing a balancing issue as there are more enemies on each map than can be dealt with on a single health bar. This leads to the tactic in every level of bee-lining to the mission objectives, which are precisely indicated on the shockingly helpful map, and avoiding all other combat.

There are at least a variety of objective types. The one campaign I played had missions in this order: destroy a runway and some radio towers, defend a UN base from an armored assault, hunt down fleeing convoys, and destroy a large industrial center. There was also an odd event where I failed the third mission when one of the convoys escaped the map, but the game continued on anyway. The game does keep a scoreboard for each campaign, so maybe failing a mission just lowers the score. Not that a high score actually matters in an offline console game, but that's a topic for a different time.

That's it. That's the game. The polygonal pop-in is pretty bad, but there's a good draw distance on the flat map for what that's worth. I remember nothing about the music or sound effects, so that should tell you something. This is a really hard game to write about because there isn't much to say other than it feels like a spruced up SNES game. There is the trivia of the developer being Core Design, who would go on to create the Tomb Raider series. A series that they would pump out on a yearly basis right until they pumped it straight off a cliff with Angel of Darkness, but that's a PS2 game and thus not my problem. We'll be seeing a lot more of this studio going forward, and it's weird that this little piece of not much was their first PS1 release.

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Shockwave Assault™

Release Date: 12/5/1995

Developer: Advanced Technology Group

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Time to Sick of Being Negged: 45 Minutes

We're closing out with a category of game that reliably produces steaming hot schlock: a 3DO port. That failed console that is haunting me from its grave, may it rest in piss. This time we have a FMV heavy semi-on-rails shooter that feels like crap, looks like crap, and treats the player like crap.

Starting with what is always my favorite part: the premise is that it's the far flung future of 2019 and aliens are invading Earth. There is exactly one UN space carrier that has exactly 1 fighter squadron. It's kind of like a low rent Independence Day. A store brand War of the Worlds, if you will. We play as a young lieutenant who is the newest member of this squadron. We see a bunch of the captain of the main space carrier and our mission handler lady, but we spend little to no time with our squadmates. That felt odd, as those squadmates are all fully acted by real people in FMV and seem to have been developed with at least one-dimensional personalities that most games would want to subject you to at least once each. I hear you asking: "With all those production resources put into the cutscenes, what is the gameplay like?" The answer may surprise you! (it's dogshit)

When I called this thing a "semi-on-rails" shooter, what I mean is that while there is free movement like in a flight sim, you can turn around bright eyes all you want, the mission areas are tightly confined corridors bounded on all sides by an invisible kill box. Like in modern battle royales, leaving the mission boundary will cause your health to drain until you die. This makes the one and only gameplay loop as flying inside the lines on the minimap until you see an alien, shooting it until it dies, and moving on. There's a health and fuel system, fuel drains as you fly and health drains as you take almost impossible to dodge hits. There are a couple of checkpoints per mission and the game will have refueling stations placed along the path at the points where the developers thought players would run out of fuel. Of course, the flying feels bad and the weapons are unsatisfying to use. This is due to the default laser gun having no oomph to it and the lock-on for the limited ammo missiles being finicky. Also, the flight level is too close to the ground to offer any of the strafing or dogfighting that you would want from something pretending to be a flight combat game.

Also, this game is butt ugly. The maps are carpeted in a hilarious map texture that looks like a very low-res version of google earth without the 3D buildings toggled on. That texture is layered over uneven terrain, because this is supposed to be a 3D game. This doesn't help the combat, as the low flying altitude and inability to pitch up or down makes it obnoxious to shoot things around the terrain. The enemy designs are also questionable, but the game seems real proud of those art assets. I also have no memory of either the sound nor music, so let's chalk those up as mediocre.

Now on to the memorable feature of this fucking thing. Several aspects of the game design and a lot of the writing portray a shitty attitude towards the player. There are little things in the level and encounter design. An example would be having the second group of enemies in the game spawn out of the bounds of the map; because I didn't know about the whole thing with the boundaries, I flew towards and passed the point where they were standing, which brought me far enough out to kill me. There appears to be an overall carelessness with the player experience. That wouldn't be enough to condemn the developers, were that not combined with the writing and direction. For example, at the beginning of the first mission, the briefing lady shows up on a screen in the cockpit and berates you with "This isn't a GAME, Lieutenant!" for no particular reason. Later on and in every mission, the onboard computer voice negs the player with shit like, "You have gun sights, use it" again for no particular reason.

This was exacerbated in the first two stages that I played with some questionable/offensive shit. The first level is set in Egypt, where you are supposed to fly down the Nile to Cairo and destroy the alien invasion there. You get the typical nonsense of pyramids scattered everywhere, even along the Mediterranean coast, and flying through the main tourist destinations on the way to the city. The questionable grasp of geography is to be expected, what got my attention was the last objective in that mission: liberate an oil field south of Cairo. This is an odd thing to throw in with Giza, The Valley of Kings, and Cairo considering that Egypt is only something like the 27th largest oil producer in the world. It isn't exactly famous as an oil exporter, and there are much larger oil producers nearby, which probably answers the question of why an oil refinery was included. Middle East = Oil, which is important for some reason even when there are spaceships. What's worse are the short clips of news reports from the rest of the world about the alien invasion. The first one is from Tokyo, and I sat the fuck up real quick when that came on. I was going to spend my entire write up shitting on the Mickey Rooney-ass voice over for that less than 30 second clip, but later on there are other news reports that are equally offensive about France and Mexico. It was at that point I concluded that the writers/designers of this game weren't specially racist, they were just general purpose dumb assholes.

And that's the conclusion I came to: this is a game by assholes, for assholes. I feel no desire to mince words about it. I think as I go on in this project, I'm going to become less forgiving of the shithead vibes coming off of a lot of these games.

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Next time we'll continue scraping the bottom of the December release barrel with Jupiter Strike, Geom Cube, Loaded, and Gex.