An explanation of what we're doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time, we looked at a batch of so-called video games for the 3DO from 1994 with Soccer Kid, Family Feud, John Madden Football, Jurassic Park Interactive, and Shock Wave.
Last we were with the PS1, we sped through May '96 with Hardball 5, Starblade Alpha, Slam 'n' Jam 96 featuring Magic and Kareem, and Skeleton Warriors.
This time we're moving through the end of May '96 by looking at Battle Arena Toshinden 2, Silverload, Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition, and Tecmo World Golf.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Battle Arena Toshinden 2
Developer: Tamsoft
Publisher: Takara
Release Date: 5/23/1996
Time to We Have Virtua Fighter At Home: 36 Minutes
I will never escape this series. We've seen the original Battle Arena Toshinden twice over the previous year, first in the inaugural installment of our PS1 blog series, and in the most recent entry in our Saturn series. A year ago, I was of the opinion that playing the original Toshinden ruined my life. I'm not quite ready to disagree with my past self on that point, but I will admit that Remix on the Saturn is largely playable and unintentionally hilarious. Now, we've made it deep enough into the Playstation catalog to encounter the sequel. Annualized franchise installments are going to become the norm going forward, so let's work out how we're going to handle them.
As a refresher, the Toshinden franchise are 3D Fighting games that pretty much invented the Weapons Fighter sub-genre. This means that every character possesses some kind of pointy object which they use to poke/whack each other. The forgettable cast of characters from the first entry return here with a few extra friends thrown in. I literally just played the game before writing this and I can only remember like six members of the total roster, which I think is 15 characters including the unlocks. Of those, the reasons I remember them are not flattering to the overall product. I know Eiji because he's the Ryu, Sofia for the obvious reasons, Fo because he's hella creepy, Ellis because she was the subject of my best joke about the original, Chaos because he probably isn't allowed within 100 yards of school zones, and Uranus because your anus is unforgettable. That isn't even touching what counts as a plot, which I'm not going to do since doing so is a human rights violation.
As far as the fighting is concerned, it's still Toshinden, though it seems to move a little bit snappier than the original. It feels closer to Remix, though I would still recommend that experience over this. The textures, stages, and animations have all been given an overhaul, but not enough to matter that much. There isn't much in the way of game modes, either. There are two single-player ladders (the first is eight and the second is ten fights, for whatever reason) and two-player. It's a bit barebones, but not any more than VF2. I can't say I had a good time playing this thing, but it's also probably the best Weapons Fighter yet released on the PS1, which is the lowest possible bar to clear. Being only just mediocre makes it less interesting than raging tire fires like Criticom or either version of the first Toshinden. Is it worse to be indifferent towards a game or to actively hate it? That's the kind of question which keeps me up at night.
I keep telling myself that these games are worth it because this eventually leads to Soulcaliber, but I gotta tell y'all it's hard to maintain patience. It's a very long road to 1999 and the first good game in the subgenre. Anyway, I'll leave you with one more fun fact: The original Japanese PS1 release of this game seems to have come out only five days after the arcade launch, which might as well be simultaneous. It's a very interesting phenomena, and that pattern is worth keeping an eye on as the Fighting genre spirals up its own asshole throughout the late 90's.
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Silverload
Developer: Millennium Interactive
Publisher: Vic Tokai
Release Date: 5/31/1996
Time to Fumbling The Menu Navigation: 32 Minutes
Silverload was originally released for DOS in 1995 as a Horror Adventure title about a wild west town full of werewolves and whatever. This game is considered by many listicles to be one of the worst adventure games ever made. I personally have a hard time distinguishing between bad adventure games and all-time worst adventure games, so I'm not taking that consensus one way or another. All that being said, from what I looked up, it seems almost unbearably ugly and jank. Now, talking about bad PC Adventure games is very much not my lane. As such, we're here to look at Vic Tokai's remake of that game, which was released on the PS1 a year later.
This version features cleaned up visuals, drastically cleaned up audio, some CG cutscenes, and polygonal light gun sections replacing the heinous combat encounters from the original. As inept as the end product seems, and we'll get to that, it at least isn't a hell-dimension-ripping-your-eyes-out kind of experience. Remaking a deeply cursed game into something only somewhat cursed should count as an achievement. I was also tempted to complement the fact that this game is fully voice-acted, but I'm pretty sure all adventure games were doing that by this point.
The game casts you as a mysterious drifter who goes to a creepy old west town to investigate a caravan raid, or something like that. The writing and voiceovers are bad enough that I didn't fully parse what was going on. Anyway, you get into town, and it turns out to have been taken over by monsters. This is usually the set-up to an action game, but these guys are willing to talk most of the time. There seems to be a couple hours of wandering and puzzle solving, punctuated by sub-sub-Virtua Cop tier shooting sections. The point-and-click gameplay would be unremarkable, except for one very important thing. Do you remember what that problem would be? You get one guess. That's right, THE CONTROLS ARE ABYSMAL. It's our old friend, unplayable console controls for PC ports. There's something nostalgic about that…reminds me of Discworld. The controls are the reason why I have no comments on plot specifics or puzzle design. I got as far as the general store, where I was physically unable to interact with the store mechanics.
So, interacting with anything is a nightmarish chore, what about the stuff you're interacting with? The first and constant issue is the art. The characters are ugly, and the environments are, let's say, uncompelling. As mentioned earlier, this thing is fully voice acted, though maybe it shouldn't be, with every line read being its own hilarious disaster. Combine that with the mediocre writing and uninteresting plot, and you get something that would be fun to laugh at if it were more playable. There isn't anything to recommend Silverload other than the proven fact that it could have been worse.
The technical discussion also overlooks the, in my opinion, biggest red flag of the entire experience. From what I've seen of the later section of this game, the plot veers in an Evil Native American Curse direction for its explanation of the vampires and werewolves running around. Apparently, the settlers massacred a native village and built their town over the ruins, which angered a native "shaman" who cursed them all into monsters. The player character finds a native ghost trapped in a skull and a wolf spirit at certain points. Fortunately, the bad voice acting tilted in the direction of having native characters sound like random dudes instead of anything more offensive. Though, the few visual depictions are as stereotypical as they come. I want to give the writer points for making the settlers the unambiguous villains who get what's coming to them, but I hesitate to spin this too positively. All parts of the visual and narrative design seem to belay a level of ignorance with the genre being played with or any other cultural factors that need to be addressed in modern Western stories. Now, I'm not saying that because the developer is British…actually, I'm saying exactly that. I trust British storytellers with using the genocide against Native Americans in a story about as much as I would trust Japanese storytellers with literally anything involving Africa.
Silverload gives me deep reservations about the development studio, Millenium Interactive, even though I probably shouldn't hold it too much against them. This studio would create the MediEvil series a couple years after this, though they have that Beast Wars: Transformers game between now and then so maybe I shouldn't go easy on them. Regardless, this game wasn't worth anyone's time and attention back then and it certainly isn't now, unless you're some kind of sicko for obscure Adventure games.
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Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 6/1/1996
Time to Your Best Friend Harry Has A Brother Larry: 35 Minutes
In May 1989 the song Bust A Move was released as a single performed by Marvin Young, under the stage name MC Young. This was the first single released in his young career and became an international hit, with its simple flow and humorous lyrics- wait, hold on. *checks notes* Right. So, Puzzle Bobble was released to Japanese arcades by Taito in June 1994 as a color matching Puzzle game spun-off from the successful Bubble Bobble series. That main series consisted of arcade style Platforming games where you play as these cute little dinosaurs named Bub and Bob. Look, the 80's were a simpler time.
In the Puzzle Bobble games, our intrepid little dinos sit at the bottom of a rectangular playfield and shoot colored balls at other colored balls stuck at the top of the playfield. That mass of balls gradually lowers over time, so you need to match at least three balls of the same color to make them pop, and if any balls get disconnected from the mass, they fall out of the playfield. It's like an upside-down Tetris. I'm kinda crap at explaining it, but you'll get it pretty quickly when you see a screenshot. Anyway, moving on to our actual topic, Puzzle Bobble 2 is the 1995 follow-up to that game. The big difference between the two is the increased emphasis on competitive multiplayer in the sequel. This thing has the expected two-player mode, a single-player battle ladder, and a revamped version of the traditional puzzle mode. That's a decently robust feature set for a puzzle arcade game.
That brings us to the eternal question: is it any good? It's alright, I guess. It controls well enough, but the way the balls bounce and stick doesn't feel quite right. The mechanics are simple enough that there really isn't more to say. It looks ok enough, and the music exists. For whatever reason, I've had it in my head for the last several years that I'm a fan of the Puzzle Bobble series, but I don't have a good time whenever I actually play any of them. I just feel empty when I played this game. Well, more empty than usual. Maybe I only like this game in concept? Everyone probably needs to play one of these at least once to see whether it's their thing, because you won't know for sure until you get hands-on.
I've been referring to this game as Puzzle Bobble 2 instead of the canonical international title, because I neither respect nor acknowledge the name change. I couldn't find why Taito made and forever stuck to that international title, but I personally land on the side of it being a bad decision. The core franchise, Bubble Bobble, didn't receive a name change for its international releases, so anyone who had played and enjoyed the original series wouldn't have known there was any connection. It's almost as though Taito actively didn't want a non-Japanese install base for Puzzle Bobble. On top of that there were some bizarre marketing snafus done for the first couple of games. The most egregious screw-up relates to that terrible box art you can see at the top of this review. Acclaim accidentally used the wrong image when making the localization and Taito didn't care enough to check. This is a cute puzzle game, not frickin' Clockwork Orange. It's indicative of the apathy Taito had for the game market outside of Japan, which likely contributed to why they now only exist as Square Enix's arcade operator. If you ever find yourself in a Taito operated arcade, show them what you think and just bust a move.
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Tecmo World Golf
Developer: Tecmo
Publisher: Tecmo
Release Date: 6/1/1996
Time to Flipping The Birdie: 45 Minutes
We've found ourselves another video gaming cryptid. I haven't found this little information on a game since Center Ring Boxing. The only thing I can tell is that the 101 golf courses in this game were advertised as being based on real Japanese courses, which is almost certainly nonsense, and the original Japanese release might have had 250 courses. That's it. I know literally nothing else about the background of this thing. This is also kind of the best Golf game I've played so far. I have no idea what to make of Tecmo World Golf, I'm positively befuddled.
The first and biggest thing to talk about are the aforementioned 101 courses. That's not 101 holes, it's 101 full golf courses. That means there are 1,818 holes in this game. That's both technically astounding and extremely silly. Now, it becomes obvious how they were able to pull it off when you play more than one course. Every hole in this game takes place in the same biome, which means that every hole uses the same textures for the trees, grass, and sand just in different combinations. Those textures also aren't great, but not so much as to be an eyesore. That means each hole just needs to have unique terrain and shape data, which would cut down on ROM requirements. The trade-off is that each hole basically looks the same, which gets monotonous pretty quickly. There also aren't any spectators or other visual touches. Also, you can't have 1,818 realistic golf holes without the designs blending together in a generic haze. I can't even imagine the living hell that it must have been for the developers who were locked in Tecmo's basement and beaten into working twenty hours a day to create all those levels.
Fortunately, the act of playing the game is completely fine. This thing uses a different shot mechanic from the rest of the Golf games we've seen. Here, aiming is handled on the overhead map just like the good lord intended, spin is handled rationally, and there's even a stance mechanic that I didn't mess with. The unusual part is setting the power and accuracy of the shot. This is typically done using a two-press shot bar. In this case you manually adjust the power level and the accuracy is handled by a timed button press where a shrinking circle is overlaid on the ball. The larger that circle is when you stop it, the less accurate the shot will be. This works surprisingly well and makes for a mostly frustration-free experience.
The only gameplay issue is putting, which sucks, but what else is new. The game tells you the distance and elevation change when putting, but you have to read the stripes on the green to figure out the direction and severity of any lateral curves in the green. This generally doesn't work. I suppose it could be figured out given enough practice, but most bad game mechanics can be overcome with brute force. So, even though most of the golfing feels good, it's too easy to bogey out in the last few feet of any given hole.
Everything taken together, it's kind of a headscratcher. There's more content here than anyone could ever reasonably play, but that content blends together into a blur due to a lack of any kind of audio/visual distinctiveness. It plays fine, except for the putting. The chase camera works well, but that's because the graphics are so basic that there can be quick loading. It wouldn't have been a bad recommendation in '96, I guess. Is this the best Golf game I've seen so far for these consoles? Maybe? Let's just leave it at that.
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I feel somewhat relieved finally getting this batch out of the way. It's like the momentary false relaxation that you get on a rollercoaster a couple of seconds after you start slowly ascending for the first drop. The initial jolt forward is done, and the current movement is slow and steady, even though you know everything is about to go downhill very quickly. But we haven't met that doom quite yet, so here's an update to the Ranking of All PS1 Games.
1. Air Combat
…
17. Tecmo World Golf
36. Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition
50. Battle Arena Toshinden 2
73. Silverload
…
89. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Next time, we'll come back to the PS1 for a truly eclectic group of games with the June '96 releases of Top Gun: Fire At Will, V-Tennis, A-Train, and Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball.
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We're coming up on the 100th Playstation game in Part 027 of this series, which will be in about five or six weeks. To celebrate, let's do an Ask Me Whatever kind of thing. If you have anything you've ever wanted to ask about the early years of 32-bit gaming, dumb questions, or clever insults you can either DM them to me on Giantbomb or us the contact form on the dedicated wordpress site. I'll put the questions and answers at the end of Part 027 as a fun thing for everyone who've been reading this blog over the last year.
Also, I've started streaming again over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. I'm trying to stream twice a week where I either showcase the depravity of the 3DO or continue my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.
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