I've outlined what I'm trying to accomplish in an intro post so that I can just dive right into things.
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Air Combat
Release Date: 9/9/1995?
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Namco
Time to Completion: 2.5 hours
We start this quixotic quest with some immediate controversy: was Air Combat released in North America on 9/9/95 or 9/13/95? Since I was in daycare at the time, I have no memory of which date is true; and most importantly, I don't actually care that much. Giantbomb says 9/9, so that's what I'm going with. With that out of the way, Air Combat is now the canonical first PS1 game.
The premise is your basic arcade game set-up: terrorists are doing bad things and you have to single handedly stop them. Here, you do that by being a mercenary fighter pilot and shooting down dozens of planes in aerial combat. There's 17 levels, a variety of American and Russian jets to play as, and a basic overworld map. Each plane has slightly different handling characteristics and you unlock them over time using an in-game currency you get from completing levels; that currency is also used to hire a marginally useful wingman on most missions. This is a straightforward jet combat sim from the mid-90's. The only real notable quality being that it runs smoothly in 3D on a home console, which is probably an all-time first so that isn't nothing.
There's some fun that can be poked at the game's setting, such as "Who's giving these terrorists B-2 bombers?" and "Who knew that Mig-31s could tank multiple direct missile hits?". But this is a video-game-ass video game and it doesn't matter that the unnamed terrorists are using Nimitz class aircraft carriers, as-yet unproduced F-22s, or a literal airship. What matters is that you can shoot missiles at all of these things and a big "BINGO" pops up on screen when you hit. The gameplay loop is: tight turn into high speed run, target lock, double tap the circle button, simple explosion effect, repeat. Really, that's all you need to have a flying game as long as it doesn't overstay its welcome.
Which brings us to the awkward part, I ended up playing this game to completion and hitting end credits. The game is only about 2.5 hours long and the difficulty curve never got out of control. This game is pretty easy even on the normal difficulty, and some of the levels take less than 5 minutes to complete. I wouldn't say that it's worth $50 in Bill Clinton money, but it's a perfectly adequate time at the low price of free. That said, not getting pissed off or bored on the very first game in this series doesn't really test out the format very well, but I'm sure I will be given plenty of opportunities to suffer in the weeks ahead.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that this fucking thing is actually Ace Combat 1. It's wild to think about the series starting as an unassuming PS1 launch game and without the Strangereal, but here we are.
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Battle Arena Toshinden
Release Date: 9/9/1995
Developer: Tamsoft
Publisher: Sony
Time to pissed off: 5 minutes
Time to rage quit: 30 minutes
I couldn't even make it to an hour with this shit. I'm sure that a lot of the fighting game sickos on this site are already familiar with this game, but for everyone else: Battle Arena Toshinden is an early 3D fighting game that was apparently touted as a "Saturn killer" and is considered to be a spiritual predecessor to the Soucaliber series. The success that it was able to achieve came from coming out on home consoles slightly ahead of Virtua Fighter 2 and Tekken and thus cornered the market for a few months.
I'll be honest and admit that I'm not one of the aforementioned fighting game sickos, the closest I ever came was when I became almost competent in UMK3 and DoA4 as a teenager. I've messed with many fighting games over the years, but I've never gotten a hang of the advanced concepts in the genre. With that being said, I have almost nothing positive to say from my limited time with this game. I have a low tolerance for this crap.
The only thing I will give it credit for is that it has textures on its polygons, which I guess gives it a leg up on Virtua Fighter 1. I hated the way the characters controlled, I hated how finicky the special moves felt, and none of the characters were particularly interesting. These characters consist of Not Ryu, Not Ken, Russian Dominatrix, Big Guy, Creepy Old Guy, Ninja, Knight, and Sexualized Child™. The premise pulling these characters together is also uninteresting: there's a secret fighting tournament with some weirdos who have their own agendas which aren't actually that weird. Maybe the endings and unlockable characters get zany, but I don't care enough to look them up.
I hit escape pretty quickly on this one and I have no intention to ever touch this game again. I can already tell that I'm going to have a real time with the goddamned 3D fighting games on this system.
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This wraps up the first installment of my dive into the chronological canon of the original Playstation. If you read through this far, Thanks! I'm working on my ability to write about things coherently and I'm sure this will get better as it goes on. I hope you'll check in next week when I look at the sure-to-be-classic launch titles ESPN Extreme Games and Kileak: The DNA Imperative.
**Update 2/18/2023** I played these games on stream over at https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming, with the video archive below:
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