An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week's look at Jupiter Strike, Geom Cube, Leaded, and Gex can be found here.
This week, we'll look at NBA in the Zone, Zero Divide, Bases Loaded '96: Double Header, and Road Rash.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NBA in the Zone
Release Date: 12/14/1995
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Time to Barely Beating the Nets: 30 Minutes
We've reached our first repeat sport, kind of. Unlike the last-gen NBA Jam, NBA in the Zone is a 4v4 basketball game. It's almost the real thing! It uses full next gen polygons! It kinda sucks!
But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Even though Konami has had a long history of developing sports games by this point, 1995 is the first year that they tried their hand at Basketball. This game and NBA Give 'n Go for the SNES are their first attempts at figuring the sport out, and it shows. After boot up, we see the by now expected thin game options consisting of different flavors of tournament play and single game modes. Looking first at the tournament mode, we see that it doesn't even have the common decency of a season structure and instead goes straight to a playoff bracket. Getting into an actual match, the first thing to notice is that the games looks ok when not in motion, so they at least got that right. But, as the gameplay starts it's all downhill from there.
The immediate issue is the camera angle. I know enough to know that side-on camera angles were and are the generally accepted standard for Basketball games, so the down-court viewpoint feels odd. Now, just because something is odd doesn't mean it's bad. I gave this feature a chance, but quickly realized that it doesn’t work well at all. This perspective greatly hinders situational awareness, especially when considering that the camera doesn't switch sides when the teams change sides, meaning that you're going to run towards the camera in the back half of a match without a good idea of the placement of the opposing defense. This is all certainly annoying, but is somewhat mitigated by the abysmal AI. Both the opposing team and the player's team make almost no effort at defense. So, even though you can't see opposing players, they probably aren't going to do anything to you anyway. This equilibrium is unbalanced by the fact that the player probably isn't going to do much to AI team either. This is due to the finicky and imprecise defense mechanics. You can in theory steal the ball and block shots, but the input windows are tight and there is significant animation wind-up for the moves, giving player defense a very low percent chance of success. This is made worse by the muddy movement controls and severe animation wind-down when a defensive move fails. Since the camera follows the ball, when a defensive move fails your player ends up almost immediately off-screen and player changing is disorienting enough to preclude most second chances at defense.
With all of the gameplay quirks taken together, the one match I played in this game devolved into the loop of my controlled character running unimpeded towards the opposing side and dunking the ball, immediately followed by the opposing team running unimpeded towards my side and dunking the ball. The only reason I won the match is because I was able to steal the ball from the AI exactly one more time than the AI was able to steal it from me. Usually having a close game is exciting, but this elicited only the rotten combination of boredom and stress. This stress-yawning was exacerbated by several minor annoyances that I'll quickly nitpick. Shooting almost never works for anyone so it's all dunking all the time; the presentation around the gameplay and commentary are almost nothing; the hip-hop muzak got on my nerves after the first 10 or so minutes; and finally the ball physics are janky as hell, with the ball seeming not to go near the rim and but still getting counted as going in. There really isn't anything to recommend with this game, other than the achievement of being the first polygonal basketball game on the PS1 and the novelty of the wrong-headed camera angle.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zero Divide
Release Date: 12/16/1995
Developer: ZOOM Inc.
Publisher: Time Warner Interactive
Time to Whooped By a Monkbot: 30 Minutes
If you thought we could get out of the launch season without another also-ran 3D fighting game, THEN YOU WERE WRONG THERE IS NO ESCAPE. Let's see if this one makes a case for its existence in this crowded genre.
At the main menu we see the typical options of a fight ladder mode and two-player mode. Going further we see the expected roster of eight visually distinct fighters. First Installments of 3D fighting games should have eight fighters, no more, no less. Eight should be the number of fighters and the number of fighters should be eight. Nine should not be the number, neither should seven, excepting that there is seven out of eight. Ten fighters is right out…*ahem* Anyway, all of the characters are extremely polygonal robots in different styles. You fight all of them in a ladder leading to what I assume is a final boss. I'm struggling here. It's a 3D fighting game from the mid-90's, they're all Virtua Fighter but somehow worse. That's all you need to know about the gameplay. It's a slightly bad feeling one of these.
The only features that make this stand out are around the edges of the main action. The biggest gameplay gimmick is that the fighters have a chance to hang off the side of the stage when they get knocked off, giving a chance to recover and continue fighting. This is a halfway step between having Ring Outs and the eventual correct choice of fucking not. This technically counts as an innovation. Also, the visual style in this thing holds some appeal that I can't quite put into words. The music is good if not amazing, and there's something about the ladder screen that I like a lot. Finally, I found the delivery of the announcer lines to be hilarious. If I ever put a soundboard together, I'm putting a couple of announcer clips from this game in it right next to "WELCOME TO THE MAZE OF DEATH" from Space Griffon.
Even with the nice presentation and basic competence, it still suffers the expected problems around sluggish movement. In addition, the correct way to do combos and special moves feels even more finicky than in other, also finicky, fighting games. So much so that I was only able to successfully pull off a throw exactly once. All of these things add up to an experience that I largely did not enjoy. After an abortive attempt at playing the standard robot guy, I switched to the cool ninja robot guy and made it halfway through the ladder before I got tired of the Monk robot handing me my ass. There seems to be infinite continues, so I could have smashed my face against the later fights and maybe eventually got gud. But, I had no reason to. There was almost no lore to grab my interest and the fighting wasn't fun enough to compel me to play more.
As a final note, ZOOM was a small-time Japanese development house that kept trying to make it big but never really got there. They're notable for putting out Phalanx on the NES, though that's only because of the box art, and they would go on to make Mr. Mosquito of all things before petering out in the late aughts. Which generation was it that really saw the massacre of the small-time B-game development studios? The conventional answer is the 7th gen, but the more I see the more it looks like a bunch of those studios never even made it that far. I'm getting the sense that the transition to 3D was a major extinction event for studios that scraped by in the 8- and 16-bit eras. Or does that mainly apply to Japan, and the western B-studios were the ones who got wiped out by XBLA? I'll probably get closer to an answer as this project goes along.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bases Loaded '96: Double Header
Release Date: 12/22/1995
Developer: Jaleco Entertainment
Publisher: Jaleco Entertainment
Time to Owned By Kurt Schilling: 35 Minutes
Speaking of dying brands, we now have to deal with the final game in the Bases Loaded franchise. This series had been around for almost a decade by this time and was one of the big sports franchises on the NES and SNES. There seems to be some nostalgia for those 2D baseball games, so a few of them must have been good for their time. I can't imagine this being one of those.
Starting the game up, we get treated to a bizarrely low quality opening cutscene, and when I say that I mean the FMV shots look like they should be playing on a Game Boy. That was a bad sign, but I kept trudging to the main menu. There seems to be the standard options for season and single game, and digging a bit further into the season mode there is wat looks like a rudimentary player trading mechanic, which is different. There's an odd quirk to point out before moving to the actual gameplay: This game has the licensing to use real MLB player names, but not the licensing to use real MLB teams. I know that developers getting different deals with a sport's official organization and the players' association used to be more of a thing, but it's still super weird to see in practice. With that out of the way, it's on to actually trying to play this damn thing. That's easier said than done, because when trying to start up a match there are way too many menus that have to be navigated. There's a separate menu each for assigning players to each possible role on the field with some kind of distinction for starters. There's nothing to explain how to properly interact with these menus, so I ended up pressing buttons until I got through it. It's never a good thing to get exasperated by a game before even playing it.
That exasperation compounded on itself in the baseball part of this baseball game. The immediate issue is that this game is fuckin' ugly as hell. For whatever reason Jaleco decided to use the NEXT GEN POWER of the Playstation to model the individual baseball players in a way that resembles collections of elongated blobs, almost like very cheap action figures. That was a bad creative choice on its own, but combined with the dark, dead stadiums and the barely there animations we end up with a game that is an unappealing eyesore. It doesn't sound much better either, it overuses the cheesy baseball park organ stings and has almost no commentary. The crowd noise is ok and I don't remember there being any music, so overall not great. The gameplay itself feels like a direct carryover from 16-bit consoles, with a single button controlling pitching, batting, catching, and throwing the ball. I tried to find inputs for different pitch types or base stealing, but I had no luck. That meant that this is practically a single-button game. That was good enough for the NES, and it could have been charmingly old-fashioned like the Wii Sports version of baseball, but the myriad of gameplay problems precludes that.
Speaking of gameplay issues, there are way more than there should be for a game this basic (The correct number is zero, by the way). The timing to hit pitches while at-bat is wonky as hell, to the point that I swear I saw the ball pass straight through my players' bats a couple of times. There's the aforementioned inability to choose pitches as well. When the opposing team hits the ball, getting one of your players to catch the thing is a nightmare because the game defaults player control to whichever player is nearest the ball. This is true even when the ball is in motion, meaning that player control switches quickly and seemingly randomly in such a way as to guarantee disorientation. On top of that, the movement of the outfielders feels bad and somehow the game screws up picking up and throwing the ball to base. At no point did anything feel right in the one match I played.
There really isn't more to be said. That one match ended with me getting my shit kicked in, losing 8-0 against Philadelphia. Funnily enough, most of those points were picked up by Kurt Schilling of all people. The man is a menace to the video game industry in any decade. Maybe the trainwreck quality is due to the specific development team being entirely new for this game. Jaleco apparently took this license from the previous dev studio and tried their hand at handling it in-house, which led to them killing the franchise stone dead. If any game symbolizes the death of the old industry at the hands of the new, it's this one.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Road Rash (1995)
Release Date: 12/29/1995
Developer: Buzz Puppet Productions
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Time to Whacked Over The Head: 70 Minutes
Finally, we arrive at the last game of 1995 according to my calendar; and what do ya'know, it's a port of the 3DO version of a Genesis game. This is the most Playstation year one game you could have come up with. EA apparently developed a 32-bit Road Rash to come out on new consoles as they got launched while also continuing with the main series. That means this game originally came out between Road Rash II and III. This version of Road Rash was already outdated by the time of this release. So, how does a pseudo-3D combat racing game benefit from the generational leap? With basic polygons and loads of FMV babyyyyyyy!
Let's get this over with before I truly lose it. Road Rash is a series of motorcycle racing games where you get to brain your opponents over the head with blunt weapons while racing them. These games also have '90's 'tude, so you sometimes get to run over pedestrians and fight cops like a rebel without a cause or something. The features in this specific entry in the series are more akin to Road Rash II than Road Rash III, which means that the this game is less fully featured than Road Rash III which came out in March 1995 for the Genesis. This wasn't even the best or most up-to-date version of Road Rash available when it came out. That has to make this the most cursed release for the PS1 so far. But how does this game actual play?
It's mostly fine. The steering and acceleration don't feel that bad, the combat works a hell of a whole lot better than in something like ESPN Extreme Games, and there's just enough going on In the courses to keep the races engaging. There are little things like the cops who show up in a couple of courses and a thing where you can ramp off of crashed opponents which add some flavor to the races. When you crash you have to run back to your bike, and there's a decently thought out health system. The controls aren't as bad as they could have been with the combat, and I was able to get a hang of it after about ten minutes. Also, there aren't really any serious draw distance problems and the frame rate is relatively smooth. The core gameplay works and is entirely playable, but that could also describe every previous and contemporary Road Rash game as well. Now, the notable stuff with this release is everything around the gameplay. How is that stuff? Hooooo boy.
I've been trying to pin down the art style for the characters and menu screens. The closest I've gotten is to compare the whole aesthetic in this game with the shitty t-shirts and tchotchkes that are ubiquitous in shitty souvenir stores in trashy tourist towns. In my region of the US, examples of those types of towns that I can think of off the top of my head would be Myrtle Beach, Gatlinburg, or Panama City. There are dozens of those kinds of low rent destinations across the US, and the art in this game reminds me of those places. What I'm trying to say is that the art in this game is trashy as all hell. Looking at this shit was really off-putting for the whole experience. Even more off-putting was the music. [**EDIT 10/27/22: I have been corrected in the comments on my claims about the origins of the song "Rusty Cage". The rest of this paragraph is factually incorrect, though my feelings on the matter remain unchanged. Whoops.**] I think this is the first game I've seen so far that has real licensed music tracks that take advantage of the CD QUALITY AUDIO of the console. Normally this would be a good thing, but the choice of songs in this game led to a very personal and unpleasant discovery. This came about from the song chosen to play in the opening cutscene, which makes it kinda the main theme of the game. I liked Soundgarden before playing this thing…but now I know too much….WHY DID NO ONE EVER TELL ME SOUNDGARDEN MADE A BAD COVER OF RUSTY CAGE?!?!?!???? I like the Johnny Cash version of that song, so imagine the mounting horror as I slowly realized what I was being forced to listen to before I even started playing the game. It's an exaggeration, but this game ruined my life right then and there. The rest of the soundtrack is okay trashy 90's alt rock, but fucking hell that one song messed me up.
If this wasn't bad enough already, the selectable characters all suck in a way that lines up with the rest of the aesthetic, and what writing there is shouldn't have been. The redeeming feature is the frequent and various dumb FMV cutscenes. These play at the beginning and end of each race. There are a handful of short cutscenes that can play depending on the different outcomes of a race, but they're all skippable so you don't have to care if you don't want to. These have a vibe of the development team dressing up in leather jackets and goofing around, which looks like it was a fun time for them. Last thing to note is that the menu navigation is very laggy and generally sucks.
There's something poetic about ending the PS1's launch year with the least bad 3DO port, even if it was already obsolescent when it came out. I was surprised to find out the size and seeming popularity of the Road Rash series back in the day, though I won't say it should be particularly missed. That is with full consideration for the attempted spiritual successor, Road Redemption, and how that turned out. My only personal take-away from this experience is that I need to check the back-catalogs of musicians I like in order to identify potential psychological landmines, such as bad covers of Johnny Cash, so that I can steel myself against nasty surprises.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next time I'm going to take the opportunity afforded by crossing the 12/31/95 threshold to stop and reflect on the Playstation's launch season. Join me then to look back at the PS1's place in the wider video game market, identify the best games, run my own proprietary statistics, take a moment to address some issues, and showcase more bad ideas!
Log in to comment