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

Last week we looked at a round-up of all Sega Saturn games released in 1995.

The last time we were with this series we looked at NBA in the Zone, Zero Divide, Bases Loaded '96: Double Header, and Road Rash.

This time we will kick-off the 1996 PS1 release calendar with Cyberia, Revolution X, Philosoma, and Goal Storm.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cyberia

Release Date: 1/2/1996

Developer: Xatrix

Publisher: Interplay

Time to Losing All Patience: 36 Minutes

I had no idea what I was walking into when I started this game. This is a port of Xatrix's first game, originally released in 1994. Xatrix might not sound familiar, but they would eventually rename to Grey Matter and put out Redneck Rampage and Return to Castle Wolfenstein before being absorbed into Treyarch. That's a weird pedigree, though that doesn't come anywhere close to the insane nonsense that is playing this game.

On start-up we are immediately treated to an indulgently longwinded Interplay logo animation. It's usually a bad sign if those things are too self-involved. Regardless, after entering a file name and selecting the difficulty the game jumps right into the opening cutscene with no context. I'm not going to try and relate the plot, because it makes extremely little sense in the game and has proven to be exceptionally stupid upon closer research. The most I'll say is that you play as a proto-JC Denton who has to take a cyber speedboat to a cyber place to get a cyber plane to go to some mad science cyber facility named Cyberia, which is located in Siberia.

It seems that the main draw of this game was the fully CG graphics. The character models and environments are rendered in that recognizable 90's metallic sheen, kinda like Myst except worse. Now, I will come out and say that it looks terrible and animates badly by any modern standard, but, and it's a big but, this seems like it was one of the earliest games to attempt fully animated pre-rendered CG for everything. When you include the fully voiced dialogue, this feels like one of those early attempts at immersive, cinematic gameplay. Like most of the other early attempts at this, it fails to live up to even Digital Pictures levels of cinematic quality. Even with that, the biggest issue holding this experience back is the part where it's a game that you have to play.

This thing switches between four types of gameplay, all of which are bad. Going from the least to the most egregious, we have Turret Shooting, Rail Shooting, Puzzle(?), and some Dragon's Lair nonsense. I don't want to have to give a blow-by-blow dissection of the play experience, because that isn't really what I'm here to do. Yet, this is difficult to describe otherwise. Keeping that in mind, the one turret section I encountered was mostly normal…except for the abysmal pacing of the enemy attack waves, weirdly tight field of view, and useless radar. The rail shooting segment I saw is generally sub-par with the added wrinkle of needing to quickly hit a final, small target or else restart the entire sequence; I walked away from this game after my third attempt at this.

The puzzles don't really deserve to be called as such, with the one which I encountered being a switchboard with six switches, a timer, and zero explanation or direction of any kind. The solution is to flip exactly two of the switches, touching anything else will blow you up and get a game over. The nature of the puzzle and its solution is learned entirely through trial-and-error. That same logic extends to the primary mode of gameplay; this is the third-person walking around bit, which plays like a really bad adventure game.

You walk Mr. Cyber Guy around environments looking for scripted events that will advance the plot. The thing is, there is no direct character movement going on here, you use Left, Right, and Down on the d-pad to orient the guy in whichever set directions he can travel and use Up to walk to the next spot where he stops, and you do this over again. That node-to-node interface, combined with the fixed camera angles, makes movement awkward and weird. Compounding this is the fact that of the paths available to you, only one is the correct path. The others will result in either a dead end or some kind of instant death. This works like a lazily linear choose-your-own-adventure book. Other than walking around, there are shoddy gunfight sequences thrown in that play like the worst Telltale adventure game. The first one acts as a good example: you need to walk through a door, turn around and lock that door, turn around again and face a slightly off-center angle, move forward, wait for a guard to walk in front of you, and then shoot him at just the right moment. Not locking the door, trying to go back through the door, walking forward instead of walking at an angle, and missing that tight timing window will all result in an instant death and restart. This is truly heinous game design and feels like a relic of the '80's.

This is somewhat counterbalanced by the relatively generous checkpointing in the game. It seems like the walking around segments are divided into small sub-chapters, each of which can be loaded once you reach them. Each of those checkpoints are like a minute apart, which allows for quick iteration, but there's just too much of that iterating for this game's own good. This is why I noped out of the rail shooting section even though it wasn't the worst part of the game; I had run through all of my patience with all of the other crap.

When not dealing with the gameplay, the actual dialogue, voice-acting, and plotting are actively deranged in a way that I'm not particularly comfortable with describing. See for yourself, I guess. Other than that, I guess the music is appropriately cyber when it's there. I don't have anything nice to say about this thing. I never want to hear anyone say "nice kill" to me in a sultry voice ever again.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Revolution X

Release Date: 1/4/1996

Developer: Software Creations

Publisher: Acclaim

Time to Desert Bus For Bullshit: 33 Minutes

Oh good lord, this thing. Revolution X has a bit of a reputation around it, which turns out to be well earned. Originally thrown together under chaotic circumstances and released as an Aerosmith-affiliated Light Gun game for arcades in 1994, it's known for attempting and failing at a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor while still somehow being hilarious in that failure. It's also terrible as a video game, but that will need more explanation.

The game takes place in the dystopian future of late 1996, where everything enjoyed by The Teens has been made highly illegal by a one world government. Somehow, Aerosmith is the last band in existence and they're kicking off the revolution against The Man, man. You play as a random teen who has to take down the New World Order Nation and rescue the members of Aerosmith, who appear in the worst FMV you're going to see. There are six levels, and every enemy, environment, and piece of writing can be infinitely dunked on. Rather than exhaustively go through every half-hearted FMV clip, racist caricature, sexist caricature, dumb enemy type, and the dominatrix-turned-Duke-Nukem-monster final boss, I'm just going to point you at a longplay with the instruction of providing your own rifftrack.

There are more substantive issues to be dealt with, however. First, Revolution X isn't particularly good as a Light Gun game, regardless of version. The stages function in the scrolling-shooting-gallery style that was made obsolete by the contemporary Virtua Cop, though this could be chalked up to unfortunate timing. Even then, the enemy placement and level design is mostly haphazard and uninteresting. If the design feels thoughtlessly thrown together, then why should players care about the game? The boss fights aren't particularly good, and then there's that accursed bus level.

The bus level is one of the more obnoxious things I've seen so far on the PS1. The idea for the "Middle East" level is that you're chasing a Mad Max-ed school bus across a desert, and you need to shoot up each of its various components before it reaches a certain distance. The whole idea of shooting up different parts of vehicles is a reused boss design, so by this point in the game that aspect is normal. The kicker is that the bus will speed-up or slow-down in order to move off the screen, and you need to shoot Speed Up or Slow Down buttons onscreen to try and get the thing back in view. Maybe something went wrong with the PS1 conversion, or I missed the one trick that you're supposed to figure out, but I was never able to quite get the thing killed in time in my multiple attempts. The bus ends up either being partially onscreen or zipping past the screen, especially as it reaches the end of the road. There's no good way to gauge your own speed relative to the bus and sometimes shooting the buttons won't lead to any discernable result. It's a maddening experience, and the dumb nonsense in this game isn't worth the hassle.

Then there's the quality of the conversion. I've been on record as to how much I disdain d-pad controls for Light Gun shooters, and that's just as true here as for anything else. Additionally, this version is significantly worse looking than in the arcade. Most egregious of all, they removed songs from this port. The only recognizable songs here are Eat The Rich in the first level and Dude (Looks Like A Lady) after the final boss. These aren't even the songs you would want from an Aerosmith game. Everything here makes this an inferior version of an already bad game. I'm happy to check this off the list and move on.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Philosoma

Release Date: 1/10/1996

Developer: G Artist

Publisher: SCEA

Time to Looking up Cheats: 23 Minutes

Time to Fertilization Complete: 65 Minutes

I'm not entirely sure how to approach talking about this game. I found myself drawn to it out of fascination with its gimmick, despite my dislike for the Shoot-Em Up genre, and it seems to have been roundly dismissed in its day for reasons that don't make much sense to me. Let's walk through the thing and see where we end up.

We start with a pre-rendered 3D cutscene of a spaceship arriving over a planet and launching fighters. There's some voice-over that is supposed to set-up the plot, but It's hard to get more than a basic gist when going in blind. In any case, one can tell that an unusual amount of thought and care went into the design and plotting of the scene, which began to spark my interest.

Though the first level is visually uninteresting and starts as a typical vertical 'shmup, the game quickly shows off its main feature, the perspective shifts. This is first done by moving the camera from a top-down to a bottom-up view, followed by behind-the-back rail shooting, backwards-facing rail shooting which is bizarre, and then finishing as a horizontal 'shmup. These transitions are done using pre-rendered cutscenes and a great effort is made to make the process feel as seamless as possible. Maybe I'm a sucker, but I think it's really cool that someone tried that in the mid-90's. There are certain design sacrifices that need to be made in order to get that to work, which we'll get to, but that's the kind of creative ambition that I like to see.

The bland first level is followed by a more interesting jaunt through a spaceport and burning city, where the game spends a section as an isometric 'shmup, there’s a backwards-facing boss fight with an evil train, and a multi-view boss fight with an evil cargo barge or whatever it is. This is where the game reveals its true nature as a typical anime cosmic horror story. The last two levels take place in subterranean environments that get progressively biomonster infested. This all culminates in a mechanically uninteresting final boss in a typically hellish meat space. This wouldn't be that interesting without the various perspective shifts and camera zooms, but they're there so it is.

Maybe I'm overly cynical about this genre, but the presence of a coherent story with multiple speaking roles felt refreshing, even though that story is rote by sci-fi horror standards. You play as a nameless pilot in a three-person flight of fighters who are sent to reinforce three previous flights who were themselves sent to investigate a distressed space colony. Turns out that all the automated defenses in the colony went haywire, as they are wont to do, and are shooting at everything. By the halfway point in the game, you've fought your way to the main city and discover that the hostile drones are infested with an alien lifeform, as, again, they are wont to do. By this point the only fighters left are your flight and the wing commander. The four of you fly down into the oddly spacious mines to look for human survivors for the last half of the game. The levels get gooier as you descend and the two characters in your flight get dramatically picked off. Also, the onboard AI turns evil for some reason.

When you finally get to the bottom, you discover the predictable fate of the colonists and fight the moist abyssal horror in its lair before escaping with your traumatized wing commander back to space. The ending gets weird with the insane AI going on about fertilization, followed by some gross imagery and the planet turning into a space embryo. We finally end on the same cliffhanger as Space Griffon, because space horror stories only allowed one ending to share between them. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this story, it's cliché but told effectively enough for the time. That feels especially true when put next to dreck like Cyberia.

The main complication for me is that this is still a 'shmup. You can take three hits before dying, you get three lives per continue, and there are three continues. Using a continue puts you back at the beginning of the level, and each one of those is 10-15 minutes long. This thing isn't that much of a bullet hell, so it'll probably seem too straightforward for genre fans. I'm not at all a fan of this genre, so when I ran out of lives at the first boss, I didn't have the patience to play that level again as carefully as I did the first time and didn't even make it back to the boss on my first continue. If I hadn't cheated and given myself infinite lives, I never would have seen most of the interesting or weird stuff in here.

Which gets us to the crux of the problem with this game. Contemporary reviews of the harp on the uninteresting enemy patterns and easy gameplay. That's what I'm getting at when I say that 'shmup fans would probably be under-stimulated by this game and might not care about the transition gimmick or storytelling. Conversely, non-fans probably wouldn't get far enough in it to see anything of interest. It seems to have positioned itself in a niche that had no audience, which could explain why I never heard of this thing before now. I can't quite place whether this is a hidden gem or failed oddity, but either way it's one of the more memorable experiences I've encountered in this series.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Goal Storm

Release Date: 1/15/1996

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

Time to Finally Winning A Match: 25 Minutes

And we end this week with Soccer. If you somehow thought that 1995 had a lot of sports games, just you wait, because this is a harbinger of things to come. Describing this game as an ill omen is appropriate, even though it isn't that bad, because it's another Konami sports game and there's a reason these don't get made anymore. Actually, I'm being unfair, as this game is apparently the first entry in the Winning Eleven series. I think I recall that that this series was supposed to be the better Soccer franchise during the PS2 era, but I could be misremembering.

I suppose I can see the roots of a good Soccer game in this thing. Goal Storm has kind of a unique feel to it, owing to the combination of a highly detailed control scheme with the most fast-paced action of any Soccer game I have so far seen. Konami decided they wanted to use every button on the PS1 controller, and they sure did find a way to do it. This means that the game apparently features the ability to do headers and curved shots among other things, which are more advanced than I have the expertise to mess with. The basic pass and tackle controllers are still in there as well, so it doesn't take too long to get familiar with the basic gameplay. That's shockingly nuanced compared to what I expect from Konami, but that could just be on me.

There are still some less than great quirks. The passing feels very finicky and tackling/dodging seems inconsistent in a way that doesn't feel good. This is exacerbated by the friendly AI, who don't do very much even on the easier difficulty settings. Additionally, the developers seem to have tried to showcase the graphics by having the camera dynamically zoom in and out on the action, which ends up as more of an annoyance due to the lack of situational awareness that it causes.

The presentation also has its ups and downs. This is by far the most polygonal Soccer game that I've yet seen, and it runs stably enough to earn those polygons. It animates well enough for what it is, with relatively involved animations for players getting carded or for teams celebrating after a goal. Yet, for some reason there seem to be less than 20 or so announcer voice clips, so I ended up hearing the same lines repeatedly in a short amount of time. There also isn't much in the way of game options. You get a single match mide and their off-brand World Cup: the HYPER CUP. All of the teams are national teams with what appear to be made-up players, just like the sports games of yore. This whole thing is bare bones and kinda all over the place.

An uneven experience all told, and yet, I had an ok time with it. The game moves quickly enough that I didn't have any excuse to not play multiple matches, and I got through three of the things in the 25 minutes I spent here. I got enough of a feel for the controls (and knocked the difficulty down) such that I went from losing 1-2, to drawing 0-0, to winning 2-0 for the first time in any of these Soccer games. I can buy the idea that this game gets iterated into the better Soccer series. Yet, I'm highlyry uncomfortable with the idea that Konami made good sports games.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's it for this batch, and as such I am obligated to finally announce the results that you all have been waiting for: The Ranking of Cybers. There have so far been an unusual number of games with Cyber in the title; because the '90's, I guess. I've now gotten to a goodly lull in Cyber releases, so now I can rank the four entries we have to work with, as follows.

1. Cyber Sled

2. Cyber Speedway

3. Cyberspeed

4. Cyberia

If it seems like this ranking is out of step with the overall rankings, just go with it.

Less importantly, here is where this batch fits into the wider Ranking of All PS1 Games:

1. Air Combat

…

16. Goal Storm

22. Philosoma

42. Revolution X

50. Cyberia

…

54. Agile Warrior F-111X

I intend to put out the first entry in All 3DO Games (Kinda) In Order later this week, in which I try to figure out what the 3DO is even supposed to be and look at the one and appropriately named launch title, Crash n' Burn.

Next time on this series, we will close out January '96 by looking at World Cup Golf: Professional Edition, The Chessmaster 3-D, Assault Rigs, and everyone's favorite D.

Man, these All Games series all rule. Thank you for your dedication to the Dark Old (Console) Ones!

Huh! Philosoma does seem intriguing. I might be the weird niche it is targeting with its extra gubbins, distressing meat & (comparetively) less hostile difficulty. ...Philosoma — how philosophy can affect the body? Is Descartes to blame for the fleshening?? Truly a layered work.

I'm not a seasoned footballsman/soccerer, but it was also my impression that Winning Eleven/Pro Evo was The Good One. (Though of course I think there was debate over the different merits of various entries in both franchises)

Well, I know I'm ready for some D! Ahem.

@manburger: Thank you for your continued interest!

I just now got what's going on with the word Philosoma, not that it means much in relation to the game, but what can ya do. There is a Japan-only survival horror sequel for the PS2, but I don't know if I care enough to track down a translation of it.

when i see the D

"That's what I'm getting at when I say that 'shmup fans would probably be under-stimulated by this game and might not care about the transition gimmick or storytelling. Conversely, non-fans probably wouldn't get far enough in it to see anything of interest."

What makes you think there isn't a decent amount of people in-between these extremes?

@alianger:I had to reflect on that some more. My reasoning was that Philosoma received the equivalents of 2's and 3's out of 5 in contemporary reviews, it didn't seem to sell particularly well, and it has no cultural cache, cult or otherwise, in the decades since. That tells me that it didn't find an audience of people who could both get through the 'shmup bullshit and appreciate the weird stuff.

Now, you can make the case that the audience would exist for it these days. I tried to think of story/vibe heavy Shoot 'Em Ups, and I came up with Jamestown and Sine Mora, both from the 2010's. Also, even though contemporary reviewers didn't like it, retro-reviewers seem to have warmed up to it over time, with a guy in 2003 giving it a 3/5 and another in 2014 giving it a 4/5. I'm tempted to arbitrarily give it a 5/5 just to make a clean trendline. Maybe it took 20 years for the gaming audience to grow into Philosoma, and no one knows it. If Sony did some remastering and re-released it on PS5 and Steam it could find a small, but healthy audience. Yet that's not going to happen, and as such this is going on the list as one of the most forgotten Sony first-party games.

---

On an unrelated note, I watched the one available playthrough of Phase Paradox, the direct sequel to Philosoma, and it is a trip.

Not surprised by that although I will say reviewers seemed sick of scrolling shooters already in the last gen, and a bunch of them gave 2D or 2D-ish games lower scores just for not being 3D during this gen. Being story heavy and switching up the perspective seems like a good move at the time though.

Can't say much more without actually playing the game (I will), although visually it's certainly dated and it seems the ships sometimes blend in with the backgrounds. But hey I can get behind a 5/5 for the reason stated.