An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.
Earlier this week, we looked at the PS1 games Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed, Extreme Pinball, and Resident Evil.
Last time in this series, we looked at the second batch of titles that released on the 3DO in 1993, Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, Fatty Bear's Fun Pack, Lemmings, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, and Shelley Duvall's It's a Bird's Life.
This time we're closing out the 3DO releases for 1993 as we look at Star Wars: Rebel Assault, Stellar 7: Draxon's Revenge, The Life Stage: Virtual House, and Twisted: The Game Show.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Star Wars: Rebel Assault
Developer: LucasArt
Publisher: LucasArt
Release Year: 1993
Time to Dying of Frustration: 84 Minutes*
I'm going to try to be fair to this game. To do this, let's see if we can put ourselves into a 1993 mindset. The world is still shaky in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia is in the middle of ripping itself apart, the European Union is being formed, Jiang Zemin is starting to flex China's muscles, and ol' Billy C has become the American president after beating George Bush in a saxophone contest. In pop culture, this is the year where Spielberg showed the world that CG dinosaurs are cool and that the Holocaust was bad. The kids who think they're cool are listening to Smashing Pumpkins, the kids who know they're cool are listening to the Judgement Night soundtrack, and everyone else is listening to Whitney Houston. In video games, Fighting and FMV games are coming into their own, Doom is about to rip and tear its way across PCs, and congress has gotten itself into a full moral panic over Night Trap's PG horror antics.
Specifically, Star Wars is going through one of its cyclical upswings in the video game market. The Super Star Wars series is well underway on the SNES, Sega's Star Wars Arcade is doing well enough, and the first entry in the X-Wing series has just come out on PCs. But LucasArts' biggest game has only just now arrived, the much-hyped Rebel Assault. This thing carries the promise of fully utilizing the CD-ROM format to put you, dear reader, directly into the action of the beloved Star Wars trilogy with cinematic flourish. Even though that trilogy had wrapped up a full decade ago, you filthy fucking nerds have an insatiable appetite for Star Wars junk. As such, this game is one of the most anticipated releases of the year.
So, how is it? If you have no standards, it's great. You get to fly around Tatooine, Hoth, and the Death Star and take part in different 'realistic' events from the movies. If you have any standards whatsoever, it's unmitigated dogshit with no redeeming value. Rebel Assault is a Rail Shooter with cutscenes and a few environments that utilize FMV footage of real LucasArts models, kinda like a Star Wars version of Sewer Shark. In its 15 levels, the game pretends to have gameplay variety by switching your vehicle view from level to level. Sometimes it's a behind-the-back view that makes me think of the future Novastorm more than anything else, other times it's a basic cockpit view where you move the reticule around the screen and occasionally have a very little bit of navigation control, a couple of times it goes isometric for you to shoot at ground targets, and on one occasion it turns into a Hogan's Alley style shooting gallery. Regardless of what you're seeing, you move a reticule around the screen to shoot stuff while trying to dodge obstacles.
Being the 3DO release of a PC game, the d-pad controls for moving anything around are abjectly terrible. The framerate and overall stability changes from level to level, and on at least one occasion becomes borderline unplayable. You can take what would otherwise be a decent amount of damage and you have three extra lives. Playing this thing is fuckey enough that this will not be enough for most people to get through the game, even on easy. Though, because this game was marketed towards normies, the password for your furthest level is automatically stored so that you can pick up where you left off with only a score penalty; and since this isn't an arcade game, the score could not matter less. The relative humanism of the progression allowed me to get to level 13 or 14 before I rage quit. I cannot restate enough how miserable it is to play this thing. The levels are badly thought out, the obstacles are badly telegraphed, the lock on is weak, and nothing about the interaction is fun in any way.
Yet, this game wasn't made to be played, it was made to be watched. It seems like there was a concerted effort to incorporate movie stills, art assets, and even a few real models from the trilogy. It also uses typical Star Wars music and fully acted voice roles with the NEXT GEN power of the CD-ROM. Since the production was the main point of this thing, that part at least must be good, right? Not even a little bit. What FMV or rotoscoped objects that were used are so badly compressed that they are almost indistinguishable from the piss ugly rendered objects. The developers don't seem to have been able to fit actual movie clips, so they compromised by using still pictures with voice-over. Yet the absolute worst part is the mouths. Some cutscenes use still photos with a moving mouth animating on characters' motionless faces. It's not the same, but the effect reminded me of those old Quizznos commercials. Combined with how badly compressed everything is, those attempts at character animation are either hilarious or psychologically damaging depending on your tolerances. Overall, this entire game is an eyesore from beginning to end.
It's shocking that this era of LucasArts would crap out something so thoroughly abysmal. I haven't even gotten into the brain-dead stupidity of the plot, which would require unpacking the relationships between Lucasfilm, the Expanded Universe, and 90's Star Wars fans. Without writing a thesis, this thing is the worst kind of cloying fan service and I'm glad Disney paved over all this nonsense, to replace with their own nonsense. But hey, the PC version still sold seemingly over a million copies back in its day, so what do I know?
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Stellar 7: Draxon's Revenge
Developer: Dynamix
Publisher: Dynamix
Release Year: 1993
Time to Punished For My Foolish Resistance: 24 Minutes
Now we have this weird little piece of almost nothing. The opening cutscene tries to have cinematic flare with production credits and an extensive lore dump read out by Michael Dorn. Watching this gave me the impression that the game would be some kind of Space Sim or Rail Shooter. Instead, on starting the game we're dumped in a hover tank in the middle of a featureless desert with random enemies wandering around. You have infinite ammo, seven limited use abilities, score meter, radar, and a health bar. There's no direction or recognizable level design. You drive around shooting enemies and an area boss may or may not show up to fight you. If it does show up and you kill it, you get to move on to the next area, which has a different color palette and slightly harder enemies.
It seems like you're supposed to rinse and repeat that gameplay loop until you eventually reach the final boss. There are supposed to be health refill stations somewhere, but I never saw them on any of my runs. The aforementioned secondary abilities are cloak, overshield, jump, mines, "cat's eye," super-cannon, and boost. They each have three uses and enemies will occasionally drop a refill for a single unit of whatever you have equipped. That's it. This game has nothing else going on. There's a small tutorial codex that'll show different object models and kinda say what each does. There's nothing else to do.
This game feels like a job half done. This might have been enough to keep someone's attention in the early-80's, but by 1993 there needed to be a little bit more going on than this. If there were any kind of objectives, set connections between areas, or dialogue then we would have an honest-to-goodness video game on our hands. What we actually have feels inconsiderable, even for our already low standards with the 3DO.
I did a little bit of digging on the developer, Dynamix. It turns out this game is something like the fourth entry in the Stellar 7 series, which startied on PCs back in '83. Apparently, the gameplay didn't evolve much in the intervening decade. Dynamix also seems to have gone on to create the Incredible Machine and Tribes franchises. The studio eventually petered out at the turn of the century and their 20-year record is one of the more eclectic grab-bags I've seen. These guys apparently made the first MechWarrior game in 1989? I have no idea what to make of any of this.
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The Life Stage: Virtual House
Developer: Microcabin
Publisher: Panasonic
Release Year: 1993
Time to Failing My Interior Design Class: 35 Minutes*
Well, if it isn't our old enigmatic acquaintance, Microcabin. Their output in the 90's can charitably be classified as all over the place. They started the decade by wrapping up their JRPG series, Xak, and they would go on to fiddle around with the Riglord Saga of Tactical RPGs, some more one-off JRPGs, a 'Shmup, a Visual Novel, a Match Three Puzzle game, and then whatever in the hell this is supposed to be.
The Life Stage: Virtual House is a piece of clunky home design software released exclusively for the 3DO. You create the dimensions of rooms, connect them, decorate the interiors, and walk around in them. That's the entire crux of the game. There are a wide variety of textures you can put on the interior surfaces of the rooms, different outdoor environments to look at through the windows, and some variety in the objects you can use to decorate. The game also comes with eight preset houses that act as reference samples.
Having to interact with any facet of this thing is where the whole experience falls apart. First, the load times are egregious, even by 3DO standards. When using the first-person view mode, you move in what can only be described as seconds per frame, the input lag makes it feel like you're trying to remote control a moon rover from your living room. Then there's the design interface. 3D modeling interfaces are hard, simplifying them for general audiences is harder still, and using a 3DO pad for it makes the whole thing completely unmanageable. In the fiddling around I did with it, I was never able to find the option to place objects or doors. I probably should have looked up the manual, but it wasn't worth the effort.
I'm scratching my head thinking who this was for. I'm not finding much in the way of info for this thing, so I can only make assumptions. I remember in my teen years having a girlfriend who would fiddle around with a website that let people design their dream homes, and it of course had more options and a better interface than this thing. Maybe this was supposed to be daydream assistance tool targeted at an audience I know nothing about. The little girl game mascot is probably a clue to that one. It's still difficult to imagine how that target audience would have had access to a 3DO, especially in '93 or '94. I also have no idea why a JRPG studio of all places would have been the ones making this. Just a bizarre and forgettable thing.
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Twisted: The Game Show
Developer: Studio 3DO
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Year: 1993
Time to A Soft-Locked Twink: 37 Minutes*
Oof.
As can be seen from the title, Twisted: The Game Show is a Quiz-Board-Party game that you could charitably think of as a precursor to You Don't Know Jack and Mario Party. The idea is that you and up to five other unwilling victims share a controller to take turns playing the fictional game show Twisted, where make your way up a 100-step spiral game board by rolling a 'Cyber Die', playing minigames, answering trivia, and stomaching the very early-90's humor.
You choose to play as one of six exaggerated infomercial personalities, who are all unfortunately portrayed by FMV actors, and roll a random number to move to one of a few types of spaces. It uses the standard Lose a Turn, Roll Again, Lose Several Turns, and Challenge square types. The way it handles challenges is mildly interesting, a 3x3 game board pops up with randomized options, an opposing player chooses the row, and the challenged player chooses the column. The options on this board include different kinds of trivia, a variety of bad minigames, Extra Turn, Lose a Turn, and switching places with an opponent. The non-random and semi-adversarial nature of this board could lead to interesting multiplayer dynamics in a better game. Regardless, once you answer the trivia or play the minigame you either take another turn or the game moves on to the next player.
The minigames are different variations on simple matching puzzles. You're either matching pictures, sounds, unscrambling a video, or some other bullshit. It's really not worth getting into. The trivia breaks down into the expected Trivial Pursuits categories, but with the extra wrinkle of being 30 years out of date. How's your American sports trivia for the 60's, 70's, and 80's? Not great? Then you're going to have a bad time. Like any trivia game from any time period, it assumes that you've been around for the last 20 or 30 years before the publish date. That's why trivia game difficulty typically increases exponentially as it ages.
Now we have to address the main selling point of this thing: the humor. The writing feels like it came from rejected sketch show bits. I should give examples, but I really don't want to. It's bad. None of the jokes land, but at least It's not any more bigoted than most contemporary humor. There's something mesmerizing about a joke-a-minute comedy where every single joke fails. Maybe young men in the early-90's would have gotten chuckles out of it, which would explain why it reviewed well at the time. The only thing I saw that got a giggle out of me was the Host's name, Twink Fizzdale, and that's only funny because they had no idea what the future meaning would be. Though, I can't vouch for the quality of the ending, as the emulator will randomly soft-lock on Twink at some point in any playthrough.
The FMV is relatively well done by '93 standards and the CG works for what it is, but the audio quality for all the spoken humor is junky to the point of occasional incomprehensibility. This should be a forgettable piece of nonsense, but we need to stop and consider it a bit more closely. I've been trying to figure out if there were any minigame-heavy board games before this thing. I'm thinking in the vein of the Mario Party games. Is this the first one of these? Also, it seems like Game Show games were all based on existing properties before this point, so is this the first original Game Show video game? That would make this a predecessor to stuff like You Don't Know Jack. I'm very worried that this game is important, which is why I don't want to do the research to find out.
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That's a wrap for 1993. The 3DO managed 14 titles that could generously be called video games during its first three months on the market. There's more to be said about this launch and what comes ahead in '94, but that will need to wait. In two weeks, we're going to truly scrape the bottom of the barrel. We're going to hit rock bottom, really wallow in the dregs of what video games have to offer. That's because the 3DO wasn't the only next generation console that launched in 1993. That's right, in two weeks we’re trekking into the forgotten wastes with All Jaguar Games In Order! Because it's the Atari Jaguar, we'll only need one post to get through all the '93 games. YES THAT'S FORESHADOWING.
Let's get the Ranking Of All 3DO Games done and move on from this accursed nonsense.
1. Escape From Monster Manor
…
5. Twisted: The Game Show
9. Stellar 7: Draxon's Revenge
10. The Life Stage: Virtual House
13. Star Wars: Rebel Assault
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14. Crime Patrol
I'll be back on 3/22 to start our journey through the Saturn in 1996 with Wing Arms, NFL Quarterback Club '96, Mortal Kombat II, World Cup Golf: Professional Edition, Darius Gaiden, and Hang-On GP.
After that, we'll look at the four games released for the Jag in its launch year: Cybermorph, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, Evolution: Dino Dudes, and Raiden. Were those games worth the investment in a new console? You'll want to read the post even though you know the answer!
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I streamed these games over on my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. The archive can be watched below.
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