An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week we closed out our initial stint with the 3DO in 1994 by looking at Off-World Interceptor, Strahl, Shanghai Triple-Threat, Starblade, and AD&D: Slayer.
Last time we were with the Saturn, we looked at the April '96 classics X-Men: Children of the Atom, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, and Guardian Heroes.
Now we're charging through May '96 and its various multi-platform releases with wipEout, Iron Storm: World Advanced Strategy, Earthworm Jim 2, Slam 'n' Jam '96 Featuring Magic and Kareem, Rise 2: Resurrection, WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, and Striker '96.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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wipEout
Developer: Psygnosis
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 5/3/1996
Time to Failing To Qualify: 38 Minutes
In a month of ports, we kick the show off with a showstopper. We last saw Psygnosis' first good video game back in Part 010 of the PS1 series. Now, you might be wondering two things. First, Destruction Derby was inconvenient for my joke, so I ignored it. Second, yes, Psygnosis was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony in 1996 and no, I don't know why they were allowed to put wipEout on the Saturn. Regardless of the reason why, Psygnosis could have ported all of their PS1 games on a six-month delay and it wouldn't have changed anything in the end. The upshot is that we get to see how one of the Playstation's early marquee games handles on the Saturn.
Looking back at my initial impressions a year ago, the first release of this game fit into the same pattern of big name first-holiday releases for the PS1, a lot of earned technical hype coupled with largely miserable gameplay. wipEout survived that trap better than a lot of its peers through sheer force of style, which I will reiterate still holds up. The full experience is here warts and all in this version, though I felt like I had slightly better control over my hover car with the Saturn's d-pad than on the PS1, but that could just be in my head.
It still boggles the mind why anyone would design a racing game with a Mario Kart style tournament structure where you fail out of the whole race sequence when you don't get a podium. It's more egregious when the AI drivers accrue tournament points when they finish below third, but the player gets booted entirely. I don't recall the 16-bit Nintendo racers resorting to that shenanigan, so this restriction isn't solving any kind of intractable problem. If you only have 12 or 18 tracks in your game it's ok to let players continue after finishing last, they're gonna replay the damn thing regardless. The sad part is that even with the overly floaty controls and prohibitive structure, this game is still the best futuristic racer on any 32-bit system at this point.
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Iron Storm: World Advanced Strategy
Developer: Systemsoft Alpha
Publisher: Working Designs
Release Date: 5/8/1996
Time to Are We The Baddies: 58 Minutes
It took me about ten minutes after launching Iron Storm to realize I was playing a Daisenryaku game, which means we now have to unpack this whole thing. Gendai Daisenryaku was a strategy game released for PC-88 computers in 1985. The easiest way to think about it is to start with the later Famicom Wars, turn the square grid into a hex grid, and use modern day units and factions. It isn't particularly playable by our standards, and Famicom Wars would end up being a better video game in just about every way than most entries in the Daisenryaku franchise. When I call it a franchise, I'm underselling it a bit. There have been 75, and counting, releases of Daisenryaku games or off-shoots in the last 38 years. They tend to switch between modern and WWII settings and are cheap enough to produce that SystemSoft has been able to keep it going for this long relying on a niche but loyal fanbase. This might all be new to you, unless you're a meganerd, because approximately three total entries have received officially localized releases in North America. Iron Storm: World Advanced Strategy is the first of those.
Before discussing the gameplay or the audiovisual experience, we have to address the subject matter. This is a WWII strategy game, which even by the mid 90's was a well saturated genre. This even included games that suspiciously flirted with Axis apologia. The thing with the Daisenryaku games is that they don't really try to hide their Japanese nationalism. Expressing that through exuberance for the JDF is one thing, which the franchise also indulges in, but expressing it through an outright celebration of the worst parts of the Imperial Era is quite another. There's been a bit of whitewashing over the decades, so I'll put a reminder here: the Japanese Empire from the death of Meiji to Hiroshima killed tens of millions of people in a genocidal rampage through east Asia, and was a state that belongs in the highest category of historical villains along with Nazi Germany and the frickin' Mongol Empire. My opinions get progressively spicier from here, so let's leave it at that.
That goes a long way to explain the, let's say, limited appeal of the Daisenryaku franchise outside of Japan. So then, why did Working Designs decide to try their hand at importing one of these games, and why this one specifically? I have no idea, the overall game industry paid very little attention to this thing. What I do know is that they felt the need to donate $0.50 for every copy sold to the National Holocaust Museum. On one hand, that's admirable and certainly better than what SSI was doing, on the other hand that's a strong indicator of either some kind of pushback from some advocacy group or internal misgivings about the subject matter. If you're a company importing a video game with such content that you feel the need to pay off the Anti-Defamation people, maybe you shouldn't. That likely forms part of the reason why Working Designs didn't touch this franchise again. There's a lot with the content of this game that could be picked apart for its horrible imperial revisionism, but for the sake of time let's assume you know nothing about history and want to know how this thing is as a video game.
Without sociopolitical elements, it's fine. If anything, it plays better than Panzer General, with better designed menus and UI. Also, unlike Panzer General, the combat sequences are rendered in polygonal 3D that are kinda neat for twenty minutes before players inevitably them off. Most of the units make sense and the mission design didn't feel unfair. If you've played an Advanced Wars game, you could hop into this with minimal adjustment. Back to the polygonal sequences, those are the only interesting looking parts of the experience. I spent a decent chunk of my time with this thing thinking it was a lazy port of an MSX game or something. This is an original title for the Saturn, but it looks and sounds more primitive than the cross-gen Koei strategy games we've seen. The Daisenryaku games don't have much of anything to differentiate themselves outside of the right-wing nationalism, as far as I can tell.
I don't even want to rank this game, being tempted to just ignore its existence. Yet, I ranked Panzer General so I might as well stick it somewhere with an asterisk. At least the translation is largely competent, which is something Working Designs usually gets in trouble for, so there's that.
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Earthworm Jim 2
Developer: Screaming Pink
Publisher: Playmates Interactive
Release Date: 5/16/1996
Time to Ugh: 24 Minutes
While we're on the topic of games that look and feel like cross-gen releases, here's what is by far the most egregious cross-gen release we have yet seen. The Earthworm Jim games are Run-and-Gun Platformers for 16-bit consoles that mark a nadir of the early 90's preteen-targeted grossitude aesthetic. I have no desire to become a scholar of youth-oriented media in the 90's, so I don't have a better descriptor than that. The titular earthworm isn't quite a Poochy type of character, nor is he that close to a Gex or Bubsy. It feels like he was born from a similar mentality to the Nickelodeon slime, except more so. I have zero affinity for this series, so let's see where we end up.
There's an aggressively immature and "hello fellow children" vibe right from the start, which I'm guessing is a continuation of nonsense from the first game. We're thrown into the opening level without much fanfare to figure it out, which was standard for 16-bit games. I would call the gameplay standard, you run, jump, and shoot. If it weren't for the brazenly terrible level design choices effusing every screen of this thing. The first level features a buttload of silhouetted foreground elements obscuring most of the action, because I guess that's what the kids were into. There's also a pig carrying puzzle mechanic that is extremely mediocre, and I guess the joke is that the pigs are heavy because they're fat…and because they’re pigs, I guess. This is clearly supposed to be a comedic game, what with the snot rope grappling hook power-up and non-sequitur sight gags, but I don't know man. I don't think I would have been amused by this junk when I was the intended age, there's just nothing to thematically latch onto.
On top of everything else, the actual feel of the platforming and shooting kinda sucks. I made it as far as the over-extended gag about old ladies and stairlifts in the second level, which also served as a weirdly demanding platforming challenge, and checked out. The core gameplay loop, puzzles, and minigames are all basically miserable to interact with. I don't even want to address the artstyle, audio, or gags because I'm hoping they'll go away if I ignore them. None of it is actively offensive like the previous game, it just makes me tired. I can make it through an hour of average early tactics gameplay, but after only 15 minutes I was exhausted by the puerile mediocrity of Earthworm Jim 2.
Oddly enough, Earthworm Jim the brand saw more success than many contemporary also-ran video game mascots. This worm eventually wound up with four games, a comic tie-in, two season cartoon, guest appearances in other games, a toy line, and one of the more inexplicable followings I've ever seen. I can't identify what, if any, secret sauce there is in this series. Even cursory investigation shows that these things were made as explicitly cynical cash grabs by Playmates before the rights got sold around. On top of that, the series creator seems to be a massive pile of shit, the lead programmer looks like an ok guy and this could probably be left out of his resume without hurting anything, and of course Tommy Tallerico has his name on this thing. It also doesn't help that the two games after this are infamously terrible. Everything about Earthworm Jim 2 specifically and the Earthworm Jim property generally is deeply cursed.
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Slam 'n' Jam '96 Featuring Magic and Kareem
Developer: Left Field Productions
Publisher: Crystal Dynamics
Release Date: 5/22/1996
Time to Neither Slammed Nor Jammed: 10 Minutes
The first of our rapid-fire check-ins with the subpar multiplatform games which littered the back end of May. We start with the most mediocre game available, Magic and Kareem's Wild Ride. We saw this thing not too long ago in Part 023 of the PS1 series and this version is about as identical as possible. After giving it a second pass, I can say with greater confidence that this game is as terrible as I initially thought. The core act of playing basketball feels terrible, and the camera angle kills all sense of depth perception, which is kinda necessary. I would say I'm glad to never have to look at this game again, but the original Slam 'n' Jam for the 3DO is out there somewhere, waiting to pounce when I least expect it.
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Rise 2: Resurrection
Developer: Mirage Media
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Release Date: 5/24/1996
Time to Insane Wins Again: 10 Minutes
Now we get to revisit what might be the worst 2D Fighting game of the generation, which we last saw in Part 019 of the PS1 series. The mechanical problems which condemned that version are present here, do-nothing 00-23 difficulty selector and all. The Saturn version gets the added problem of being on a system that is specifically geared towards 2D Fighting games. That puts all of the visual and control issues in even more stark relief. I mean, this game looks worse the crisper the image gets and putting this thing on the Saturn's six-button controller accentuates how bad the combo system is. I'm going to say this once and move on: PC-based Fighting games were a mistake.
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WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game
Developer: Sculptured Software
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Release Date: 5/30/1996
Time to Getting Doinked: 10 Minutes
This was the most painful of the batch. We last went to Wrestlemania all the way back in Part 006 of the PS1 series. At the time, it was one of the first Fighting games I had looked at for this project, and it was a breath of basic competence after suffering through Battle Arena Toshinden and Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game. I thought so highly of it at the time that it had to be included in my mulligan a few weeks ago. Yet, after everything I've seen, this game just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. When it was the second 2D Fighting game released for either the PS1 or the Saturn it stood above its peers without question. Seven months and a boatload of CP System II conversions later, it doesn't stack up against most other available options. This was a real bummer of a discovery to make. Also, I think something went wrong with making the jump to the Saturn. Maybe I'm going crazy, but it felt off, like the AI had been messed with or something. Visually it's identical except for the lower quality shadows. I dunno, all these ports feel wrong somehow.
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Striker '96
Developer: Rage Software
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Release Date: 5/31/1996
Time to Goal Kick: 12 Minutes
Man, Acclaim was just projectile vomiting these things, huh? We last saw this budget Soccer title in Part 018 of the PS1 series. I was up and down on it at the time, but I've held a broadly favorable view of it before going into this version. Now is the point where I became convinced I had lost my mind, because this game is terrible. It looks worse, animates worse, and feels so much worse than what I remember. I think the camera spends more time zoomed out in this version? I don't know, maybe I just have standards now for whatever reason. Maybe something happened to the movement acceleration in the conversion? I'm so tired. This is the worst version of this game and that's a bummer.
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It's never a good sign when a console has a frickin' Daisenryaku game as the only exclusive for a month. We've also seen a month that saw only three games followed by a month consisting of soggy leftovers. Oof. Let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games.
1. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
…
9. wipEout
49. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game
52. Striker '96
57. Iron Storm: World Advanced Strategy
59. Earthworm Jim 2
64. Slam 'n' Jam '96 Featuring Magic and Kareem
67. Rise 2: Resurrection
…
79. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
June 1996 is going to be the most action-packed month since the previous November, with 15 whole games for our consideration. That's a lot, so we're going to split that into manageable chunks. That means next week we're looking at the first six games of June with Virtual Open Tennis, In The Hunt, NBA Action, Skeleton Warriors, Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball, and Primal Rage.
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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 tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
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