Last time in the intro post, we interrogated the concept of the 3DO and looked at the pack-in launch title, Crash n' Burn.
This time, we begin our alphabetical trip through 1993 with Battle Chess, Crime Patrol, Dragon's Lair, and Escape From Monster Manor.
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Battle Chess
Developer: Krisalis Software
Publisher: Interplay Productions
Release Year: 1993
Time to Eaten By A Rook: 15 Minutes
Of course this is a fucking Amiga game. Not only that, but this is also an Amiga game from 1988, which I think is the oldest lineage we've yet to see on a fifth gen console. This was one of Interplay's first games as an independent publisher, and somehow produced by Brian Fargo. What an oddly significant game this is, for how little it has going on.
Battle Chess is a Chess game. You start it up and play chess. There aren't a ton of game options or specific rulesets like in the Chessmaster series, it's just chess. The main gimmick is that the game is rendered in sprite-based 3D, which would have been impressive back in '88. Each of the pieces are given a medieval fantasy makeover, and they have their own unique animations. What would have been the most impressive in the 80's are the detailed animations that play when pieces are captured, or in this case killed. There is an animation for each combination of attacking and defending piece…precisely one animation. When a knight takes a knight, there's a different fight scene than when a knight takes a pawn or anything else. Yet, because it's just the one fight scene, you're going to see that every time knight takes knight.
Digging a bit further into these animations because the game has almost nothing else going for it, they tend to take a while. When a piece moves, they casually saunter over to their new space. If a piece moves to an enemy space, the two pieces slowly walk to get lined up for the battle animation, which itself is liable to take like half a minute. Between that and the small delay every time the game has to load into or out of any animation, the whole thing winds-up with a leisurely pace. That ain't my speed, in part because the audio/visual experience is kinda boring and I'm not a fan of chess.
It's utterly insane to think that this was one of the first dozen or so games for the 3DO. This would have been nifty during the transition to 16-bit computing, but not on a 90’s 32-bit console. The sensibilities don't even match up. The watered-down references to Monty Python and Indiana Jones are kinda lame in a way that evokes the old-style pocket protector kind of nerd, which very well could have been the original target audience for an Amiga Chess game. This thing smells dusty and musty, like a computer room that hasn't been cleaned out since the early 90's.
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Crime Patrol
Developer: American Laser Games
Publisher: American Laser Games
Release Year: 1993
Time to Thrown Off The Force: 12 Minutes
Where do I even start with this thing.
American Laser Games, like Digital Pictures, only existed in the early 90's as part of the heyday of multimedia gaming. While Tom Zito and friends were going for weird Interactive Movies on consoles, this company was entirely specialized in making FMV Light Gun games on LaserDiscs for arcade consumption. You read that right, LaserDiscs. What a time to be alive. Anyway, they started with Mad Dog McCree in 1990 and went from there. From all of that, it should be no surprise that Crime Patrol was originally released in arcades in early '93 before being ported to the new-fangled 3DO.
So, this is a LaserDisc game compressed down onto a CD that is designed to be used with an honest-to-goodness light gun. That last point is where we run into trouble with emulating the thing decades after the fact; my PC isn't set-up with any kind of light gun. The game can be played with a gamepad, but the reticle movement is way too sluggish to reasonably expect a person to get it around the screen. This is tipped over into unplayable by the need to aim the reticule at the bottom corner of the screen to reload. Making the player drag the reticule away from the action to reload leaves no time whatsoever to aim at enemies. This is made worse by the one-hit-kill nature of the game. You would need to completely memorize each level in order to last more than a minute.
That inability to get literally anywhere with this thing led me to mess around with trying to emulate the 3DO mouse and light gun accessories using my own mouse. The calibration for those were so hilariously off, by as much as half a screen, that they actually made the game more unplayable. The impossibility of the task at hand was made very clear very quickly, so I bounced.
If I had been able play this game, I would have found a pre-Virtua Cop kind of Light Gun game using all live action footage. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the production values and performances are subpar, and the CD-quality video compression doesn't help. The premise is that you play as a cop, starting as a rookie and working your way up to military special forces for some reason. This progression is broken out into ranks, with each rank containing three levels that you can play in any order. The scale and severity of the criminals that you gun down scales up as the game progresses, with a different character ordering you around at each of the tiers. There might be 12 or 13 levels in total, plus a shooting range for practice. That's an adequate amount of content for one of these kinds of games, assuming you can play the damn thing.
Before moving on, I need to climb onto my soapbox for a minute. Crime Patrol is one of the most psychotic glorifications of police violence that I have seen. It portrays the job of a modern police officer as entirely consisting of gunning down dozens of thugs at a time in low-context gun battles. In the starting set of levels, you're called out to situations like a robbery and what seems like a fucking noise complaint, only to single-handedly take out scores of gleeful murderers. This game even has a whole fake-surrender gimmick. When looking at this shit, everyone reading this should find it chilling that the developers at American Laser Games had previously specialized in police training software before going into video games. There is a sense of this being a fantasy of what cops wanted to see themselves doing, which goes a long way to explain policing in the US. Technically, artistically, and politically, this game is accursed garbage.
One last point. You could make the argument that the developers were just taking the gameplay from Mad Dog McCree and applying it to a modern setting and that I should chill out. I would say that applying the myth of the Old West lawman to modern policing is what culturally fostered the inappropriate use of police violence that we're living with to this day. That's what makes shit like this so actively bad. You have a genre of games that in the 80's traded on engrained stereotypes of Wild West and Mobster violence, and you recontextualize that violence to modern randos robbing a Best Buy. Game players who had been inculcated with the idea that bandits and wiseguys should be gunned down with impunity (which is already problematic) then have that logic applied to contemporary crime. Having the progression in the game go from street crime all the up to guys who are smuggling WMDs or some shit only further reinforces to the player that common criminals are in the category of bad guys to be gunned down. Crime Patrol was by no means the only piece of media, past or present, to get up to this bullshit, but every small piece of the overall problem needs to be called out as such.
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Dragon's Lair
Developer: ReadySoft
Publisher: ReadySoft
Release Year: 1993
Time to First Game Over: 2 Minutes
Time to Second Game Over: 8 Minutes
Time to Giving Up: 20 Minutes
Scratch what I said earlier about Battle Chess. This has to be the oldest standalone release we're going to see on any fifth gen console, originally being released for arcades in the year of our lord Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Three. Dragon's Lair had existed for ten years before this port was released. That isn't saying too much in this day and age; as of writing, Grand Theft Auto V is still being sold and played ten years and two console generations after its launch. Yet, ten years now aren't like ten years back in the day. There were only ten years separating Pitfall from Sonic The Hedgehog 2, or Dragon Quest from Chrono Cross. That's why it's insane that one of the earliest 3DO games is something that came out alongside the original Mario Bro.’s.
Though, being a LaserDisc game, it wasn't really possible to accurately port this thing to consoles until this moment in time. Even then, being the first Interactive Movie, this is inherently less sophisticated than later games in the genre, which were readily available in '93. Zito and associates had already taken the ideas from Dragon's Lair in deeper and more involved directions by now. So, this release would have been little more than a minor curiosity in the scheme of things.
Really, the story around this game is much more interesting than the thing itself. It follows an intentionally cliché premise of a knight going through a castle to save a princess from a dragon, with some comedic allowances. There seems to be only 30-something minutes of animation total, and a successful run takes less than 15 minutes. The gameplay consists of watching short, animated clips and pressing the correct input at the correct moment of the clip to successfully move on. In other words, this is the first Quick Time Event game. As such, the input timing is completely fucked. This is made worse by having even one failed input result in player death, restarting you at either the current or previous clip. You get five lives per continue, so you really need to know what you’re doing.
I was inspired to do a little bit of math around this game. There are 26 unique scenes total, including the fixed first two scenes and the fixed final scene. All the intermediate scenes are randomized in each playthrough and can be repeated from two to four times. It looks like there are a total of about 40 scenes in a successful playthrough, which seems to average at around 12 minutes. The number of inputs per scene, which could either be Up, Down, Left, Right, or Action (B on the 3DO), can range from 2 to about 12. So, that leads to 100-something inputs in 700-something seconds of gameplay. I like round numbers, so let's say 150 inputs in 750 seconds for a playthrough. That averages to an input every 5 seconds, including load times and transitions. To beat this game, you need to be able to correctly perform a QTE every 5 or so seconds for 12 minutes straight. Now, keep in mind that the timing for these inputs is both highly demanding AND that in the early versions of this game there are no onscreen prompts for what you're supposed to do.
That was all a long-winded way to say that the play experience is completely fucked and I only made it four scenes into this thing. I need to also point out that this release of Dragon's Lair has no menus of any kind, you press start and jump right in. The upshot is that you absolutely need to have the game manual to get anywhere with this thing, which I figured out like two minutes into playing it. Funnily enough, the most easily accessible scan of the 3DO manual includes a hand-written note for an infinite lives code. Even using that, I never made it past the Snake Ceiling scene because that first Right input wouldn't work for me, no matter when I pushed the button.
This version of this game is largely unplayable, which is a shame. There's a lot that can be dug into and discussed regarding this thing. The opportunities and constraints of the LaserDisc format in the 80's, the career of Don Bluth and his place in animation history, and the design/portrayal of Daphne as an intersection of psychosexual manipulation and coin-op design are all interesting topics which have nothing to do with the 3DO. As such, we'll move on and leave that for other times and places.
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Escape From Monster Manor
Developer: Studio 3DO
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Year: 1993
Time to A Dull Jump Scare: 45 Minutes
Remember when I claimed that the 3DO Company didn't put out any first-party games in 1993? I lied…Or did I? Never forget that there is no truth regarding this system. Regardless, what we got here is a horror-themed FPS that probably coincided with the release of Doom. That's right, this isn't a Doom Clone, it's a Wolfenstein Clone!
Because this is a hastily thrown together FPS in the very early days of the genre, there's one gun, limited enemy types, and very basic maze design. And that's what the levels are: mazes. There's only a thin pretense of a plot, where you must fight your way through a haunted house in order to collect pieces of a magical talisman for reasons. You start in the attic, have only a single zap gun, and loads of spookies to shoot. You collect interchangeable keys to open doors and pick up ammo, health, and treasure for scoring. The entirety of the game is wandering through twisting hallways and rooms to find a McGuffin and exit in each level. Most enemies go down in one shot, though the hitboxes are weird and finicky. From what I saw, every level has a mini-boss guarding the exit, which is just an up-healthed regular enemy.
The experience was tedious enough that I had the attention span to home in on small specifics of the experience. For example, the zappy pistol holds exactly twenty shots, even though this is obfuscated by presenting it as an energy bar instead of a counter. Each ammo pickup gives you five shots. This led to me to eventually counting my shots and doing the math before entering new rooms. Health is also obfuscated, with no onscreen HUD; the character's arm gets ripped up as you take damage. There is a basic menu you can open that will give you character and inventory information, but you gotta make a point to stop and look at it. The enemy AI doesn't add much to this experience, being about as simple as you would imagine while also mostly using melee attacks. The only difficulty comes from the awkward controls. While the walking is quick and responsive, the turning is painfully slow, which makes it easy for enemies to get a swipe in during the frequent 90-degree turns you have to make. Though, to the credit of the developers, they figured out the utility of using the shoulder buttons to strafe, which would become the standard for first-person console games until Halo. Ultimately, the sum of this experience is quite boring, and I only made it to the third level before stopping.
Any interest garnered by this thing comes from the aesthetics. The game leans heavily into the haunted house setting. Other than the horror creatures that you shoot, there are random ghosts that pop up to say boo, randomly placed haunted furniture, and a soundtrack that frequently swerves into the demented. Let's dwell on that soundtrack a bit. The tracks tend to throw in spoken lines and random screaming or growling. This can be mildly obnoxious, as it takes a while to learn to differentiate those clips from legitimate sound effects. Good game music doesn't distract from important audio cues in the gameplay, and it seems like people hadn't fully thought that through in the early days of CD gaming. Still, the music is notable in its own right for being so over-the-top and bizarre. I personally recommend the "Long Title" track, which first shows up in the third level, for being insane and "Haunt Hop Two" for being a genuine jam.
If you couldn't tell, I don't take the frights in this game all that seriously. It's the digital equivalent of someone sticking your hand in a bowl of cold pasta and telling you it's intestines. Yet, as much as I want to point and laugh, this thing is kind of an achievement for its time. Wolfenstein 3D came out in '92 and Alone in the Dark came out in North America in early '93. The developers of this game were able to put those two concepts together in almost record time. Not only that, but this could be seen as the first console FPS ever released, whether it's first or second depends on your opinions about Faceball 2000. That all would be notable if it weren't for the fact that Doom came out either at or close to the same time as Escape From Monster Manor. In that comparison, this game is a complete joke in every way possible and it seems to have been treated that way by contemporary reviewers.
The scariest part is that this failure of a thing is the best 3DO game I've played so far.
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Well, this batch of games was cursed in every way possible. It's hard to imagine things getting worse from he- WHY DOES THAT MONKEY PAW KEEP CURLING ITS FINGERS?!? Oh well, to accompany the launch of this ill-fated series, I am doomed to announce the beginning of the worst thing I'm ever going to make, The Ranking Of All 3DO Games. With five games in the bag, we can start it off with the following:
1. Escape From Monster Manor
2. Battle Chess
3. Crash n' Burn
4. Dragon's Lair
5. Crime Patrol
Ranking those games made me physically ill. Let's get outta here.
Next week we'll pick back up with our regularly scheduled All PS1 Games In Order, with Striker '96, Alien Trilogy, Psychic Detective, and Brain Dead 13.
In two weeks' time we're going to finally learn something for once in our lives when we look at the Humongous second batch of 1993 3DO games: Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, Fatty Bear's Fun Pack, Lemmings, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, and Shelly Duvall's It's a Bird's Life.
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IF I DON'T WRITE ABOUT FATTY BEAR, THAN WHO WILL? HUH? YOU? THAT'S RIGHT. THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE WHERE YOU CAN FIND THE LATEST COMMENTARY ON FATTY BEAR AND HIS BOY PUTT-PUTT. YOU'RE GOING TO READ THE NEXT ENTRY, OR I SWEAR TO GOD I'LL TURN THIS BLOG AROUND.
YES, I KNOW GOING IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER WAS A MISTAKE. WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES SOMETIMES.
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