An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last week, we looked at the March 1996 Saturn releases of Winning Post, Revolution X, D, Criticom, Battle Arena Toshinden Remix, Magic Carpet, Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge, and Congo: The Movie: The Lost City of Zinj.
Last time in this series, we wrapped up the last batch of 3DO games in '93 with Star Wars: Rebel Assault, Stellar 7: Draxon's Revenge, The Life Stage: Virtual House, and Twisted: The Game Show.
Now, we're getting started with 1994 by looking at the first group of 3DO games for which I have release dates, Total Eclipse, Microcosm, The Horde, Iron Angel of the Apocalypse, and MegaRace.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Total Eclipse
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Crystal Dynamics
Release Date: 1/8/1994
Time to Needing A Hero: 51 Minutes*
We've now come full circle with Crystal Dynamics' short-lived and disastrous Eclipse franchise. This journey began way back in Part 004 of the PS1 series when we looked at the Turbo version of this game. The misadventure later picked back up when we saw the, uh, improved sequel, Solar Eclipse, in the Saturn series at the end of November '95. We're now winding all the way back to the original Total Eclipse, which was the first of these 1994 games which was part of the 3DO's initial ad campaign. Crystal D wasn't able to get it out in time for the 1993 holidays, but was it worth the wait? Kinda, not really.
It's immediately obvious that this thing and the Turbo re-release are almost entirely the same game. Any differences made in the 20 or so months between the two versions are almost below the line of perceptibility. This is a 3D Rail Shooter, and because we're in early '94 instead of late '95, it's probably just within the cut-off for the label 'Space Harrier Clone', which I personally like calling this game, 'cause fuck 'em. If it seems like I have a bad attitude towards this thing, it's because the boys at Crystal Dynamics hadn't gotten that much better at making games in the (probably) three months between this thing and their first game, Crash 'n Burn. The improvement in quality seen here was likely the result of extra dev-time more than anything else.
Yet, we're not here to rail against this blog's antagonist, we're here to look at bad video games. Total Eclipse starts off with a half-baked premise about a future conflict between humanity and tentacle-lipped aliens who like to blow up stars with their super weapon. Getting into the game, you play as a space fighter that has to travel across the surface of five different planets, which are split into four zones and a boss fight each. You shoot a few different sprite- and polygon-based enemies, dodge obstacles, burn through lives in awful tunnel sections, and hit a game over after getting stuck on the second boss. Other than your standard gun, which I've previously complained about, there are screen clearing bombs and power-ups which change your shot patterns and can be upgraded to three levels by picking up multiple of the same power-up. That's it.
For whatever reason, I came away with the impression that this feels better to play than the Turbo version, and that this was overall the better version of this game. It's a perverse idea that the 3DO version of something would be better than the later PS1 port, but this is Crystal Dynamics we're dealing with. There are enough polygonal objects and environmental features to justify itself as a 32-bit game, but it also looks crappy enough that it seems like it could have run on a Sega CD without cutting back on too much. It's a mediocre experience, and thus somehow in the top tier of 3DO games up to this point. I've played these Eclipse games too much over the last year of doing this, so let's move on with our lives.
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Microcosm
Developer: Psygnosis
Publisher: Psygnosis
Release Date: 3/14/1994
Time to Eww: 18 Minutes*
Hey kids, do you like low quality Silicon Graphics simulations? Yes? Good, because we're going to spend a few minutes considering the 3DO port of Psygnosis' 1993 Rail Shooter, Microcosm. You see Psygnosis and 1993 in the same sentence and you might be thinking that I'm about to launch into another tirade against the Amiga. As it turns out, not this time. For reasons that I have not yet wrapped my mind around, this game was originally released on the FM Towns family of Japanese PCs in early '93. Why a British publisher would debut a new IP on Japanese computers is something that eludes me, but this game was later ported to the Sega CD in late '93 and now the 3DO in early '94. So, I guess this was Psygnosis' big CD-ROM game from the time, and they were probably chasing the format across the globe.
Sadly, their investments in that SGI workstation and international business deals were for naught, because this thing is maybe one of the biggest pieces of shit I've had to deal with so far. The premise going into the game is a whole thing. I mean that literally, because the manual starts with a ~4,000-word short story setting up the fictional universe, characters, and conflict for the story. It's complete garbage, by the way, but see for yourself if you want to know. As a note, thanks to ZombiePie for pointing me towards this literary classic. Other than that, the game opens with a lengthy and kind of incomprehensible FMV cutscene that makes this this thing seem way weirder and more unhinged than it actually is. Long story short, you play as a guy doing a Fantastic Voyage through the meat tubes of some other guy for reasons. The meat tubes are filled with nonsense that you need to shoot, and the levels are rendered as uninteresting pre-rendered videos.
The gameplay is simultaneously bland and frustrating, with movement that never feels right for the combat, iffy environmental hitboxes, and haphazard enemy wave design. There don't seem to be any power ups or secondary weapons to spice up the experience, and the continue system is far less forgiving than it needs to be for the jankiness of the combat. In multiple attempts, I wasn't able to get through the first level, which is something I attribute to the wildly inept balancing of encounters, player resources, and level length. This game has all the hallmarks of a bad CG demo video with haphazard gameplay thrown on top. The worst part is that the pre-rendered video isn't even visually interesting. It's literally meat tubes designed like the cave from Rebel Assault with the occasional sphincter to fly through. This is all around a wrong-headed mistake, and not even in a funny kind of way.
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The Horde
Developer: Toys for Bob
Publisher: Crystal Dynamics
Release Date: 4/1/1994
Time to Avorde the Horde: 18 Minutes
We recently touched on this game on the Sega Saturn in February '96. In that instance, I had the idea of dropping that port after a few minutes and putting more time and effort into the original 3DO version. That decision made sense at the time, but I'm regretting it in retrospect. The inherent chaos of the universe has deemed for this game to run like rotten ass in emulation, and as such I wasn't even able to make it as far as I did on the Saturn. The FMV is completely boinked, and the combat sections are borderline unplayable. Which is a shame because this might be the first decent Crystal D published game. I say published because this was made by everyone's favorite licensed-game workhorse, Toys for Bob. Bob's Toys had a different reputation at the time then what modern players are used to, due to the critical acclaim they received for their Star Control games in the early 90's. Being the immediate follow-up to two highly successful Strategy games, The Horde would have been the only 3DO game in early '94 with any expectations around it.
If the game ran well, I would have to announce it as the best 3DO game so far. That's not saying it's particularly good or fun to play, but it would have been the highest quality game on offer. Anyway, this initial release seems to be structurally identical to the later port, though the interstitial FMV cutscenes seem to happen about half as often here. That FMV is probably some of the better live action direction you're likely to get from a game in the early 90's, even though the humor falls flat. On top of that, the basic concept for the gameplay is solid if not as original as it would want you to believe, remember that ActRaiser came out in 1990. The Action/Town Builder hybrid genre was probably ahead of its time for both The Horde and ActRaiser, as I have a hard time thinking of good examples for that type of game before the 2010's.
Even still, calling a creative work 'ahead of its time' is as much an insult as a compliment. If a work executes well on its novel ideas, then it will make its time the right moment for those ideas. There can be technical limitations, but genres are adaptable to available resources. If you're trying to kickstart a new genre, you do so with what you have on hand. That leaves us with the real question about this game, why doesn't The Horde matter? It reviewed well and got ported to other, more accessible platforms in the year after its release. Maybe it missed the boat by going on the Saturn instead of the Playstation, or maybe the aesthetic was too corny for the mid 90's, but I would put my money on the main reason being that the game isn't any fun.
Getting into it, the action kinda sucks. The player character doesn't move around that well, the spin attack has a weird feeling radius, and the isometric camera hurts the readability of the level. Maybe there was an old guy computer game mindset in the design which would have said that obscurity and clunky controls are what makes a game good, or maybe Toys for Bob had no idea how to handle a controller interface. The experience would have been better if the player had a say in the layout of the village as well as the defenses, though the game engine they were working with probably wouldn't have been able to handle that complexity. At the very least they could have rebalanced the in-game economy to allow for the player to place more structures earlier and reducing the need to memorize the spawn points of each enemy wave. This game just doesn't work as well as you would want, even when you can play it on hardware that doesn't shit itself to death.
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Iron Angel of the Apocalypse
Developer: Synergy, Inc.
Publisher: Synergy Interactive
Release Date: 4/9/1994
Time to Turning To Steel In The Great Magnetic Field: 45 Minutes*
Man, this is a sick title for a video game. Say the name out loud, Iron Angel of the Apocalypse, it's fuckin' metal. What isn't metal is the act of trying to play this damn thing. It's a corridor crawling FPS from a Japanese studio that I couldn't tell you a single thing about. It also never saw life outside of the 3DO, though its sequel eventually received a Japan-only PC release. Everything about this game is weird and enigmatic, though once you dig beneath the surface, you're not going to find much of anything.
If you wanted, you could think of this thing as a spiritual precursor to the Genki Shooters (Kileak, Robotica, BRAHMA Force) of the early PS1 and Saturn years. That alone would make this game guilty of innumerable crimes, but I want to be as fair as possible. The premise is simple, you play as a cyborg/android guy who has been created by a mad scientist in a non-descript dystopic future. Your mission is to make your way up a 31-floor building full of murderbots and vaguely industrial maze hallways. Your guy is referred to as Tetsujin, which is just Iron Man in Japanese, and he is supposed to be an ultimate weapon or something. There are like four cutscenes in this entire game, and even though they're all messed up and weird it's not enough to make up for the generic tedium of the combat.
Development on Iron Angel would have probably begun a few months before Doom became available on shareware, so this plays more like a Wolfenstein 3D knock-off than anything else. I'm looking forward to the point where we get to deal with Doom clones instead of Wolfenstein clones. In this case, though, playing as the titular metal man, you trudge through darkened hallways and with a gun, which I think can get upgraded at some point, and shoot robot enemies one by one. The game usually doesn't spawn more than one or two at a time, so the action comes down to smart resource management and exploration. The point is to find elevators in each level which take you to some number of higher levels. You can go back and forth between levels and some elevators will take you to dead ends, so the maze is a little bit more involved than in something like Escape From Monster Manor. That's all very straightforward, which would be serviceable if it ran even remotely well.
That brings us to the primary problem with this thing, the framerate. This is a game that maxes out at around 15 FPS, and despite the low draw distance, you can tell when you're approaching an enemy because the already chunky framerate will fall below 10 FPS. It doesn't help that the aiming doesn't allow you to cover all 360 degrees. I didn't count, but it feels like the game uses 16-way aiming, so turning the character can result in the reticule jumping past enemies, which is unideal. It shouldn't surprise you that this thing looks ugly and generic, though the sparse sound design does what it can to provide some facsimile of atmosphere. There isn't much of any reason to recommend this thing for any reason, but there also isn't really any reason to hate it either. It's just dull and would be easily forgotten without that cool title.
As a final note, this is the first game we've encountered on this system that came out in Japan before North America. Combining that fact with the iffy release date information, I have no clue when Iron Angel actually came out. Maybe 4/9/94 is the Japanese release date and it came out elsewhere in '95. Or maybe not. Maybe it doesn't even exist, there's no way to know anything. All belief is false belief and the 3DO is the result of a collective psychosis, if we all just stop believing it exists then it'll go away.
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MegaRace
Developer: Cryo Interactive
Publisher: Mindscape
Release Date: 5/1/1994
Time to Lancing My Boyle Or Whatever: 13 Minutes*
Since we're already having an existential crisis, let's briefly touch on MegaRace. This is an inconsiderable little hunk of crap, so I'd rather not spend too much effort on it.
The set-up is that we’re in a generic dystopic future, where the most popular TV show is a blood sport where ordinary people hop into a murder car and try to take out violent street gangs. This is done while driving closed circuit races, because reasons. All of the exposition and tutorialization is done by an FMV game show host, named Lance Boyle, who is played by a very put upon character actor. In each race you get three laps to blow up gang cars and finish first, with the last enemy car usually being a gang leader. You get the standard early Car Combat arsenal, but without any noticeable power-ups. There are F-Zero-esque speed pads, but they're finicky and poorly displayed. The game balance is, of course, screwed, so it's a real chore trying to get to the front in the limited amount of time given. This is further exacerbated by the fact that this is one of those games where you get spat out to the main menu after losing one race and have to start over again. There are apparently something like 16 courses in this thing, so that would end up being a real kick in the teeth for anyone who can make it past the first race.
That racing is also terrible. The game handles driving like the oldest-school Scaler Racers, which is a bad look in 1994. You also don't have much of an opportunity to just pass other cars without killing them, which would be nice since they tend to be damage sponges. This is because they can shoot you as easily as you shoot them, and you're gonna take too many hits before you get out of weapons range. On top of all this, the visual and audio design are bottom tier. I don't have much else to say about the game itself, it's just bad in every possible way.
As a note, the developer, Cryo Interactive, are the one thing that's worse than being a British studio: they're a French studio. They also seem to have crapped out a ton of bad PC Adventure games throughout the 90's before mercifully going bankrupt in the early 2000's. Though, I have it on good authority that their Adventure games are actually good and you should play them. Everyone remember to bug ZP about doing a write-up on Commander Blood.
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We've survived this batch, and I'll let you decide whether we're any worse for wear. I'm not happy with myself for this week's update of the Ranking Of All 3DO Games, so let's just get it done and get out of here.
1. Escape From Monster Manor
…
2. Iron Angel of the Apocalypse
3. Total Eclipse
8. The Horde
16. MegaRace
…
19. Microcosm
Next week, we're picking back up with the PS1 in April '96 when we look at Bottom of the Ninth, PO'ed, Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits, and Return Fire.
We'll meet back here again in two weeks to look at our hot and fresh second batch 3DO games in '94: Soccer Kid, Family Feud, John Madden Football, Jurassic Park Interactive, and Shock Wave.
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I streamed these games on my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. you can watch the archive below.
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