Last week we looked at Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior's Dream, College Slam, Johnny Bazookatone, and Krazy Ivan.
We also got our first batch of 1993 3DO games done by looking at Battle Chess, Crime Patrol, Dragon's Lair, and Escape From Monster Manor.
This time we will make our way into March with Striker '96, Alien Trilogy, Psychic Detective, and Brain Dead 13.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Striker '96
Release Date: 2/15/1996
Developer: Rage Software
Publisher: Acclaim
Time to What A Crunching Tackle: 33 Minutes
It's been a whole entire month without a Soccer game, and the universe just could not let that stand in the 90's. So here we are again, playing with balls. This time we're getting Rage Software's interpretation of the sport, which seemed to have been one of the main series for this stuff in PAL regions at the time. Striker '96 looks to be the fourth or fifth Soccer game developed by Rage since '92, when the original Striker came out on the Amiga. Now that I'm thinking about it, those Amiga roots make sense.
There's no licensing of any kind in this game, so you get to choose between a healthy assortment of national teams with fictional players. You have the standard single game and tournament modes that we all expect at this point, though the game options are robust yet straightforward, which is always nice. The production values are lacking in comparison to the games we've seen from the big publishers, and there is a budget vibe around the whole package. It looks mediocre, sounds mediocre, and has limited commentary lines.
The actual gameplay is where it gets a bit weird. Not only does this thing use a down-field camera angle, but it also moves too fast. I wouldn't have imagined calling a Soccer game too fast, but there's something uncanny about seeing soccer players go from one end of the field to the other in the same time as players in a hockey game. The upside is that the game maintains a snappy pace that prevents things from getting boring. The controls are simple compared to something like Goal Storm, with only the standard passing and shooting options. The main mechanical gimmick offered by this game is the variable shot power. What I mean is, whenever you kick the ball to either pass or shoot, a power meter pops up onscreen. You hold whichever button you're using to fill up that bar. In theory this would let you adjust how far or fast you're kicking the ball, though it doesn't work that well in practice.
The experience is hampered by a couple design decisions. First, Rage somehow made stealing the ball too easy. This is the opposite problem as other Soccer games, but here we are. All you need to do to steal the ball is to run into the player that currently has it. This works both ways, leading to situations where the AI and I repeatedly traded control of the ball back and forth in quick succession. These situations are disorienting clusterfucks, which tend to walk the line between funny and frustrating. Second, passing is incredibly imprecise. Passing the ball causes it to go flying vaguely towards the nearest teammate vaguely in the direction you're facing. The shot power mechanic interacts with this in a way that turns the whole exercise into a crapshoot. I eventually found that passing was only worth it when yeeting the ball all the way across the field, otherwise direct hand-offs are the only safe way to move the ball between players.
The mixed bag of the game mechanics isn’t helped by the quality of the AI. Depending on whether the difficulty is set to easy or normal, the CPU team is either dumber than a sack of bricks or murderously omnipresent. The whole experience is uneven, but in the end I wound up having some fun with it. I started off trying to play a match on normal and got thoroughly destroyed. After I set the game to easy, I won my second match after burning through overtime and going to the very dumb goal kicking minigame; I finally wrecked my opponent in the third match. This seems like a game where the exploits could be sussed out in a couple of hours and then turned into a mindless toy afterwards. Even with all the problems, this is probably the second-best Soccer game I've played so far, which says more about the genre than anything else.
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Alien Trilogy
Release Date: 2/29/1996
Developer: Probe Entertainment
Publisher: Acclaim
Time to Facehugged: 22 Minutes
Man, there have been an absurd number of Alien games over the years, and only like two of them are any good. Those two games are 2014's Alien: Isolation, which is obvious, and 2011's Aliens: Infestation, which I shall tolerate no slander against. As for the rest of the games, I can say, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Alien Trilogy is one of them. Actually, that's probably underselling the weird place this game occupies in the franchise.
What we have here is a Horror FPS that attempted to join the esteemed gaggle of Shooters that occupied the limited niche of games which built off the standard of Doom II in the two years before Quake came along and reinvented everything. That group includes games like Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3D, and the first two Marathon games among others. For a variety of reasons, Alien Trilogy does not rate inclusion, with the main reason being that it's bad.
You play as a space marine reimagining of Ellen Ripley, who is tasked with single-handedly clearing out the infested colony from Aliens. In fact, this game has nothing to do with either Alien or Alien 3, which should qualify it for a Truth In Advertising complaint or something. You slowly make your way through 20 or so levels that mostly sort of evoke the visual style of the movie. You gradually collect a half dozen weapons across the levels and fight off facehuggers, xenomorphs, and zombified marines for some reason. There are also three Xenomorph Queen boss fights throughout the game, because I guess the designers at Probe ran out of ideas. The levels themselves can have a few types of objectives and showcase functional but dull design. I'm struggling to find nice things to say. Oh, the opening cutscene is well done by the standards of the time. That's all I got.
The first problem any player will encounter is that the levels are too dark for their own good. There's atmosphere and then there's not being able to see jack shit, with this game decidedly erring towards the latter. The second thing you'll notice is that the combat massively sucks. I could just say that the shooting feels bad, but that's too vague. The terrible feel is due to a confluence of three gameplay flaws. The first one should be obvious: the movement is sluggish and cumbersome. Turning is too slow and the lateral and backwards movement is leisurely, which does not complement the zigzagging tomfoolery of the AI. This is exacerbated by the shooting itself feeling inaccurate. There's no reticule like in a modern FPS, so you shoot in the direction of enemies and hope for the best. Most or all of the Shooters from this era work this way with generous aim assistance to compensate, but not here. The basic semi-automatic pistol seems to put bullets all over the place, which makes hitting small targets like the facehuggers a pain in the ass. The cherry on top of all this is that the xenomorphs and zombie humans are bullet sponges. Even on the easy difficulty, it can take up to 50 pistol rounds or 20 shotgun rounds to kill a single alien. Some of that is from inaccuracy, but they also absorb most of those hits. In the end, the combat boils down to not being able to see what you're shooting at, if you see it you can't hit it, and if you can hit it nothing happens. This isn't fun, and it turns the otherwise short levels into annoying slogs.
I made it halfway through the fourth level before being attrited to death, and I didn't feel like loading my save. The fact that I made it about 1/5th of the way through the game in 20 minutes doesn't bode well for the overall value of the package. There are also a ton of additional quibbles I can harp on. Most health packs only restore a single health point, which is hilariously insulting. The crappy xenomorph sprites are supposed to have motion captured animation, which is not at all noticeable. The automap is absolutely critical to the gameplay, but it's only available in a pause menu instead of an overlay. Then there's the whole discussion that can be had about how the xenomorphs function basically the same as Doom's Pinky Demons, which entirely misses the point from the movies. Actually, everything about this game completely misses every theme from the source material, which is kind of an accomplishment.
I want to write Alien Trilogy off and laugh at the contemporary reviewers who gave it high scores. Yet, somehow, this thing was probably the best Alien game made to-date, which is kinda sad. The presence of any kind of stylistic atmosphere and a visual design reminiscent of Aliens was enough for people at the time. When we additionally consider the fact that Alien: Resurrection would come out the next year, this game isn't even the worst thing to happen to this franchise in the late-90's.
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Psychic Detective
Release Date: 3/1/1996
Developer: Colossal Pictures
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Time to Village Idiot: 36 Minutes
Have we finally reached peak FMV? God, I hope so. I know that this era of FMV dies out after '98, but when did it reach its zenith? I can see an argument for this game being the inflection point. Or, I guess I should say "game", because Psychic Detective is an Interactive Movie that is only technically interactive.
It's difficult to untangle everything going on in this game from its breakneck, incoherent pacing. The major scenes are inherently intersected by and interspersed with bizarre distortions, abrupt perspective shifts, flashbacks, red herrings, and barely intelligible audio that makes the experience feel like a haphazard fever dream. Yet, digging through the nonsense, what you end up with is a live action Choose Your Own Adventure novel. The story plays out regardless of what you do, leading to 14 possible endpoints. This is another run-based game in a similar vein as Tom Zito's shenanigans, where you need to play multiple times in order to see different video clips and eventually piece together what you're supposed to do. Each run can take anywhere from 30 - 45 minutes, and it's probably supposed to take somewhere between 3 and 10 runs to get the true ending.
You play as some asshole named Eric, who has the psychic ability to touch an object and see flashbacks related to it. The game begins with him meeting a young woman, Laina, who is probably supposed to be Russian, and learning that he can also mind jump into other people's minds and see through their eyes. She needs him to use all his abilities to help her solve her father's murder, and he agrees to help because he thinks she's pretty or something. The motivations of any of the characters are hard to parse. The first major scene takes place at the father's wake, from which the story could branch off to a handful of different scenes before usually ending at the nondescript offices of a self-help cult. There are a dozen or so named characters who all have something going on, and it takes multiple playthroughs to figure out what's up with any of them.
As far as I was able to tell from my one playthrough, the plot revolves around Laina's ex-KGB father's mad science experiments with psychic powers. Those experiments were too successful, leading him to get murdered by a guy named Max, who wants to use his psychic powers for world domination. There are four cylindrical McGuffins that Max needs, and Eric has to eventually confront him in a psychic duel for the fate of the world or something. There's some stuff about Laina and her sister, the weird old grandmother who is the only person that knows everything, some KGB guy, and Max's murder-happy henchwoman. I dunno. In my playthrough, Eric was arrested because a Sergei guy got murdered by some random goons. He spent his five minutes in jail reflecting on his own psychosexual hangups, which I didn't need in my life.
The interactive sections of the game are played with the footage in a small central window with options to see other clips popping up around the edges. The main footage keeps going, even when you select other clips to see, and the options to see those clips are time sensitive, sometimes lasting only a couple of seconds. There are a few places where you get to make a choice that branches the path, but usually you're choosing between multiple mutually exclusive film clips to view. You need to replay the game to see different options, and no one playthrough will let you see enough to have the story make any sense. Across multiple runs, there may be a worthwhile narrative to piece together, but this game inherently puts a wrong foot forward at the start and creates the worst first impression for itself. It doesn't give a good reason to invest the time and effort that it demands.
This isn't even touching the bizarre board game that serves as the final boss. That thing definitely takes multiple playthroughs to figure out and serves as a hard wall for anyone playing this thing. You can probably figure it out well enough using save states, but players in '96 didn't have that luxury. Speaking of, reviewers at the time seem to have been mixed on this thing. It was too weird and incoherent for most people, but everyone seemed impressed with its handling of mature themes. I reluctantly agree with that sentiment. There are sexual aspects to the story that could have easily turned into softcore smut, but the game seems to be able to keep itself out of the gutter. That would have been an achievement in the mid-90's, since it seems like games back then were either asexual or juvenile with no in-between. Though, we can't judge too much, as that dynamic didn't really change until the 2010's.
Regardless, this thing baffled the hell out of me, and I miserably failed the final boss fight, resulting in what is probably the most common bad ending. It should go without saying that the dialogue and acting are bad, and the audio and video quality are trashed by compression. Even then, I was mildly impressed by the number of actors and locations used in this thing, making it feel more produced than most other FMV games.
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Brain Dead 13
Release Date: 3/6/1996
Developer: ReadySoft
Publisher: ReadySoft
Time to first death: 5 Minutes
Time to Completely Giving Up: 15 Minutes
It was bound to happen at some point. I made it 119 games into this project before reaching my first wholesale write-off. I was unable to play this game. I made it to the first input screen and the game rejected everything I tried to do. I gave it about a dozen tries to get the game to accept any of my inputs before I gave up and walked away.
Brain Dead 13 is an Interactive Movie in the tradition of Dragon's Lair, but without Don Bluth's involvement. This means that the gameplay consists of watching animated video clips and pressing the correct button input at the correct time, in a proto-Quick Time Event kind of way. Being the final iteration of this sub-genre, there’s frequent checkpointing, infinite continues, and an open-ended structure that tries to give a sense of physical continuity between locations. Yet, I can only guess at the quality of the end product, because I get to the first screen and hit a wall. You start in the intersection of a hallway and can press any of the directional buttons to move to a different scene. If you don't press a button, you get killed after like five seconds. Dying there forces you to rewatch the roughly one-minute cutscene that plays beforehand, and I couldn't take it anymore after the first dozen or so viewings. There's an audio cue that tells you whether or not you hit the correct button, and I always got the negative cue no matter what I pressed. There might be something wrong with the emulation or my control settings, I don’t know. The upshot is that I did not see enough of this thing to pass any kind of judgement on it.
This is all highly demoralizing, but this game came out on everything that had a CD drive back in the day, so there will be ample opportunities to try again. I'm calling a mulligan on this one, and it probably sucks anyway, so no big loss.
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The first quarter dumping ground continues to inflict immense harm on all who view it, but the end is in sight. Surely things aren't going to get worse from here-- THAT'S IT, I'M GETTING RID OF THIS CURSED MONKEY PAW. Anyway, the Ranking of All PS1 Games demands attention.
1. Air Combat
…
19. Striker '96
35. Psychic Detective
43. Alien Trilogy
…
65. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
N/A. Brain Dead 13
Next week we’re going to play with a lot of balls and click on Nazis as we dribble our way deeper into March 1996 with Rise 2: Resurrection, NBA Live 96, NBA Shootout, and Panzer General.
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