An explanation of what we're doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time, we kicked off Summer '96 with Battle Arena Toshinden 2, Silverload, Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition, and Tecmo World Golf.
We'll now continue through the first week of June with Top Gun: Fire At Will!, V-Tennis, A-Train, and Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Top Gun: Fire At Will!
Developer: Microprose
Publisher: Spectrum Holobyte
Release Date: 6/1/1996
Time to Taken To The Danger Zone: 56 Minutes
In 1986, Tom Cruise became the coolestest and bestestest F-14 pilot in the whole entire world. This was chronicled in the documentary film Top Gun, which was a phenomenal box office hit and crowd pleaser, likely due to its unrelenting homoerotic overtones. Some people misinterpreted the point of the movie as being about how US Navy fighter jets are rad and important, which was actually a secondary theme. That misinterpretation was widespread enough that all of the tie-in media for Top Gun focused on the F-14. As such, the various video games released over the following decade were Flight Combat games of either the arcade or simulator persuasion. None of them had much in terms of plot, until now. I'm probably getting ahead of myself, let's start over from the top.
Top Gun: Fire At Will! doesn't involve shooting guys named William (I couldn't help myself), but instead is a polygonal Flight Combat game that takes some, uh, inspiration from Air Combat. Now, if you're gonna knock off anything, it might as well be the official unofficial best PS1 game to-date, so I can't hold that against Microprose. They at least changed things up a bit by replacing the world map and plane management with a linear cutscene-driven story, which is a valid enough thing to do. Sadly, they didn't copy the parts of Air Combat's design and programming that makes it good. The well thought out combat encounters are replaced by haphazard swarms of enemy planes, even though this game will measure distances in thousands of feet the scale of the environment and planes don't make sense, the flying is less precise, the missiles are almost useless, and it somehow looks slightly worse than that year-old launch title.
Even with its lack of care and attention, this game is still entirely playable. It seems like there are somewhere around 20-or-so levels and it would likely take somewhere around three hours to get through, which is a pretty good amount of content for the era. There are a few minor gameplay and graphical additions here that do something to differentiate this experience from its superior inspiration. There's a flare mechanic where you can shoot off chafe when targeted by an enemy missile, which helps to compensate for the incredible amount of metal which gets tossed around by the AI. There are also cloud textures that you can fly through, which I suppose adds a little flair to the levels. I also noticed an odd thing with the music, which is that the first set of levels use generic Top Gun sounding background music, but the second set of levels use tracks that would sound appropriate coming out of an early Shin Megami Tensei game. It's tonally weird, but nice enough to listen to while mindlessly flying around. Take a listen.
Yet, the gameplay and technical points aren't what makes this a memorable experience. The presence and nature of the story are what's going to stay with me. So, the first thing you see when you start the disc is an extended opening cutscene that uses 100% of the B-roll from the opening credits of the movie, except the credits themselves are changed to show the game staff. It's literally the same footage, just compressed all to hell. If you remember, this is the part of the movie with“Danger Zone”. That song is used here, but I guess Spectrum Holobyte couldn't afford Kenny Loggins, so it's a cover of“Danger Zone” that plays through the cutscene. That's already a surreal experience, but it then transitions into a cutscene that cheaply remakes the opening scene of the movie, where Maverick coaxes his shook wingman into a successful carrier landing, just without any of the close-ups or dialogue. This time, it's a different wingman who has to be coaxed into a landing by a different Maverick. That's right, you play as Maverick, but not the Tom Cruise character.
The game isn't upfront about it, but it seems like this is a narrative sequel to the movie. You play as some younger relative of Pete Mitchell's who took on his callsign for some reason. From the scenes I saw, it's ambiguous as to what the relationship there is supposed to be. Is your character Tom Cruise's Son? Nephew? Second cousin? I have no idea. The story seems to take place in the 90's, so that would rule out being the son, unless Maverick had a secret teenage kid running around during the events of the movie. The only returning character is the carrier captain played by James Tolkan, who was renamed for some reason. The story continues with New Maverick and his co-pilot attending Miramar with a new, much less interesting, cast of fellow fighter jocks. So far, this is a 1:1 recreation of the opening of the movie, just with 5% of the personality or storytelling skill.
This thing really goes off the rails when you graduate from Top Gun after like six missions. The rest of the game has you and the other characters flying missions in military hotspots all over the world with the first location being Cuba. I kid you not, the plot goes from piloting school to Castro invading Guantanamo Bay for no apparent reason. Eradicating the Cuban military normally wouldn't be a strain on U.S. military resources, but in this timeline, Castro somehow got his hands on hundreds of MiGs. This is all very silly and hilariously presented. It seems that every country New Maverick bombs takes up a multi-mission story arc, with North Korea and Libya following Cuba. There seems to be an overarching plot about some elite mercenary pilots who are probably the ones stirring everything up. That's…more plot that I would have expected going in. The surreal nature of this story is exacerbated by the fact that all of the FMV sets are greenscreened in. The thing is, those sets are mostly different kinds of offices or other bland rooms, which are relatively easy to set up practically. It doesn't help that the fidelity of the CGI is very mid 90's and the compositing isn't great.
Everything going on around the edges of the gameplay is just bizarre. I have no idea what to make of it, and I'm probably going to go back and finish this game just to see if anything particularly weird happens. FMV character drama can be used to give something to latch onto for Flight Combat games, with the Wing Commander series being the prime example (yes, I know that Space Combat is technically a different sub-genre, shut up). Of course, FMV only enhances the experience when the game itself is good. I can pick a dozen examples from this same era where FMV either did nothing for or actively worked against an otherwise mediocre game, *cough*Crystal Dynamics*cough*. Top Gun: Fire At Will! Was already probably the third-best Flight Combat game I've played so far, behind Air Combat and Wing Arms, but the weird plot will stay in my mind long after something like Wing Arms has been memory-holed.
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V-Tennis
Developer: Tonkin House
Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 6/1/1996
Time to DOUBLE FAULT: 25 Minutes
Now for something far less exciting than unrestricted air war, Tennis. This is somehow only the second Tennis game we've encountered across this entire project, with the first being the PS1 launch game Power Serve 3D Tennis which I very much do not recommend playing. On one hand I shouldn't be surprised, because who's out there making Tennis games these days, that genre is basically gone. Yet, Tennis was one of the original NES games and there were a handful of Tennis games on each console up until 2006 or somewhere around then. Looking at it that way, this is likely the appropriate moment for a playable Tennis game to make its way onto the PS1.
Did you catch my wording in that last sentence? That's right, V-Tennis is entirely playable. It's fine. You can hit the ball back and forth in ways that largely make sense. Isn't that what anyone wants from these things? There are something like 16 players to choose between, a handful of courts and the standard ground types. That all seems normal, but the game doesn't hide its lack of gameplay modes, with only a one/two player single match and one-player tournament ladder as the only options. It's a barebones experience, but fortunately the game part of this game basically works. You play using the time-tested controls of a d-pad and one button, and the hitbox on the racket is extremely generous, so you don't get the kind of bullshit like in Power Serve where it can look like the ball passes through your swing.
Additionally, this thing has robust camera options, which prevents the worst excesses that a 3D Tennis game could potentially wallow in. Everything adds up to an entirely adequate time, and I could see myself becoming decent at the game after an hour or two. There isn't much else to talk about, other than the generic music and bad crowd texture. The development studio, Tonkin House, also didn't make much of an impression in its decade long existence, mainly producing mid-tier SNES sports games. Maybe you could classify this as cheap shovelware, but at this point in the console cycle it still ends up as the best available Tennis game. This now makes two cryptid Japanese sports games in just as many installments. If you know Japanese, you could probably find something worth writing about by investigating the sports game development sub-industry in Japan from the 80's to 90's and why it dies out.
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A-Train
Developer: Artdink
Publisher: Maxis
Release Date: 6/5/1996
Time to Needing The Manual: 7 Minutes
Between this and the Saturn release of SimCity 2000, I think we've found my weak spot. Management Sim games generally aren't my kind of thing, and the crustier those games are the less I'm able to deal with them. Case in point, I noped straight out of A-Train in less than 10 minutes because I literally had no idea where to even begin with anything. This game throws the player in with no explanations, tips, hints, tutorial, or anything to make it make sense. There's a map, several screens where you can manage train services that I wasn't able to see on the map, and some basic construction options. I don't usually do this, but I'm going to show y'all my notes that I took starting from first game boot to the five-minute mark, they should clue you in on everything you need to know about the experience:
- Choo choo
- Mario sunshine ass music
- Literally no tutorial in this thing. I need an adult.
- I can't. What the fuck is even going on.
There are a couple of bullets after that, but they get a bit more vulgar and libelous. This thing absolutely defeated me. I would need the game manual, a walkthrough, and like an hour in order to even begin to figure this thing out and I'm gonna go ahead and tell you that I ain't doing that.
I encountered just as much confusion trying to research the A-Train franchise. From what I gathered, this game is a modified version of the Japanese PS1 port of A-Train IV, which was one of the system's 1994 launch titles. The original A-Train IV was a '93 release for the PC-98, and now that I type that I can totally see the PC-98 stank in the graphical interface of this thing. This series has apparently been going since the first A-Train came out on the PC-88 in 1985, with the latest release in 2021. This is a very old and successful franchise in Japan, but it has rarely made its way to the rest of the world. Artdink partnered with Maxis to bring various versions of A-Train II, III, and IV to the U.S. under a variety of names, none of which saw much success. The whole thing receded back to Japan until only the last few years, with the latest handful of entries seeing international releases on Steam. I honestly don't know what to make of all this, other than that the developers seem to be under the impression that I should already know what I'm doing before starting the game.
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Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
Developer: Iguana Entertainment
Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 6/5/1996
Time to Ground Ball: 35 Minutes
I've done some math out of my own curiosity, so bear with me for a few sentences. Between the PS1 and the Saturn, this is the 163rd game that I've reviewed. Of the previous 162, five were Baseball games. As of right now, the average BORQ score for the three games on the PS1 is 1.67, which is out of five if you remember. The two games on the Saturn aren't much better, averaging a 2.00. You might conclude that I have some kind of America-hating bias against baseball, but I would say that the reason for those scores is that the games so far have been kinda terrible. I bring this up to give you some context when I say that Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball is the best Baseball game I have yet seen on a 32-bit console. The context being that it's an extremely low bar to clear.
Let's go through this game topic by topic to justify my backhanded praise. First, the game modes are adequately robust with season, single match, home run derby, and practice modes. The options and menu design make sense and are easy enough to navigate. The sound design is completely decent, with above average stadium noise and inoffensively stitched together announcer lines. The graphics are fine, with nice big sprites that may or may not be digitized FMV guys. The animations are also pretty good for this type of game. The main graphical issue is that the stadiums are generally ugly with weird scaling between the crowd texture, players, and ball.
Then there's the gameplay. This thing eschews some of the more egregious design choices that we've seen in other games. Outfielding is automatically handled by the AI, which avoids the incoherent fuckery that is common in this genre, and the game doesn't try to do anything fancy with the batting or pitching. Batting is handled with a straightforward timed button press and the pitching options are displayed at all times during those sections. I wasn't able to figure out how to run a double, but that's on par with my past experiences and is probably on me. The one quirk I had trouble with was in trying to figure out the nuance with batting. I kept hitting either ground balls or fly balls, and it seems there's something to do with the specific frame timing or batter position that causes that to happen. I could have likely figured it out given enough time, so I'm not going to judge the experience too harshly for that. Overall, this is as fine an experience as you could get with a 32-bit Baseball game of the time.
That conclusion feels really weird to write considering where this came from. It should be obvious to everyone who was around in the 90's or who has been reading this, that Acclaim were notorious shitmongers. When you look at the output of their in-house development studios, Iguana and Probe, you end up looking at a list of bad licensed games and second-tier sports titles. Particularly, Iguana were the ones who ported NBA Jam to consoles and cobbled together developed that College Slam game I dunked on a while back (pun intended). I wouldn't have expected much from this studio, much less the first good Baseball game on the Playstation. I guess this went well enough that they transitioned the sequels away from the Frank Thomas license and into their own All-Star Baseball franchise, which was vital in keeping Acclaim in business right up to the point it went bankrupt in 2005.
Speaking of Frank Thomas, I had no idea who he was until I looked him up for this review. It shouldn't be surprising that he was one of the most successful batters of the 90's, or I guess of all time. baseball stats are hard to parse. More interestingly, he was a major figure in the anti-doping debate within the MLB during the late 90's and early 00's. It's always nice to be able to feel ok about the namesake of decent sports games. I found it particularly funny that he was a public foil for Barry Bonds, whose name is now synonymous with doping, because the first match I played in this game had Bonds on the opposing team and that mfer hit a home run in like his second at-bat. I guess even digital athletes can abuse steroids.
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We've made it through the Danger Zone and we're only somewhat hurt. Let's update the Ranking of All PS1 Games and get out of here.
1. Air Combat
…
31. Top Gun: Fire At Will!
43. Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
58. V-Tennis
63. A-Train
…
94. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Next time we're going to jump tracks and go off the rails when we look at the next batch of 1994 3DO games: Road Rash, Alone in the Dark, Trip'd, Way of the Warrior, Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed, and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. There's going to be a lot to process, I hope y'all got therapists.
After that we'll try to regain some sanity when we jump back to the PS1 with Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors, NAMCO Museum Vol. 1, Epidemic, and International Track & Field.
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As a reminder, send in any questions you have before 9/6 either through DM on Giantbomb or the contact form on the wordpress site. I'll put those into a Q&A section at the end of Part 027 to celebrate reaching the 100th PS1 game.
Also, I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and continuing my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.
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