An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week's look at Rayman, Ridge Racer, Street Fighter: The Movie, and Total Eclipse Turbo can be found here
My overview of the PS1 launch day line-up can be found here
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CyberSpeed™
Release Date: 9/15/1995
Developer: Mindscape
Publisher: Mindscape
Time to Equally Flummoxed and Infuriated: 40 Minutes
We start off this week with our first Playstation exclusive since Power Serve, and I'm afraid this one doesn't fare much better. I guess this thing is supposed to be a futuristic racing game, but the racing concept is damned bizarre. You choose from a few different drivers that have their own stats and there are a dozen or so tracks, but only two are unlocked at the beginning. You unlock those additional circuits through the main tournament mode where you race at each track in order. The catch is, if you don't finish in the top three in a race, you get a game over and have to start the whole thing over again. This isn't a great way to structure a racing game, and it's made worse by the actual racing mechanics.
This thing doesn't work like F-Zero or Wipeout. Here, all of the vehicles are attached to an energy wire floating down the middle of a half circle track. You can move forward and swing your vehicle to either side, if you swing too much you flip upside down. This has the practical effect of slot cars where all the cars are in the same slot. To pass an opponent, you need to make sure you are rotated at a different angle than the person you are passing. There are also two weapons, an infinite ammo blaster and a finite number of missiles, along with a limited number of boosts. There are pick-ups on the tracks that can add extra missiles or boosts. All of this practically means that in order to pass someone, you need to light them up with weapons so that they spin around the wire out of control while you boost by. The same also happens to you, and always at exactly the wrong moment. This game feels like it has some severe rubberbanding that makes Mario Kart 64 seem balanced.
While all of this sounds doable, the thing that I got stuck on was trying to figure out how to actually go fast in this racing game. I know that there is a way to have better and worse lap times even without the combat and boosts, but I didn't fully figure out the physics of the thing. The closest I got was that, because the vehicle naturally swings to the outside of turns, keeping speed probably has to do with keeping it pointed down as much as possible. That doesn't make the most physical sense, and the speed indicator fluctuates so much that it's hard to tell if keeping the vehicle straight through corners actually does anything. To make that worse, past the first level the game starts throwing long, winding corner sections at you hot and fast and the swinging controls are incredibly sensitive. This adds up to the game feeling almost impossible to control correctly. Because of the aforementioned rubberbanding, even when I wrestled the vehicle around corners and managed to get up to first position in a race, my ass would always get lit up half a lap from the finish line dropping me below third and causing a game over.
This is a long way of saying that I only ever saw the first two tracks, multiple times each. The game looks ok enough for the time while it's in motion and the music is pretty standard futuristic electronica. The last notable aspect of the game are the short in-world commercials that play in-between races, made with typical god-awful CG. These feel like they had more time and care put into them than the actual race design, which gets infuriating when you're banging your head against the same races over and over. They also give an air of presumption that the game was going to be well liked enough that people would care about the lore. In practice, these commercials are trying very hard to be funny and usually falling flat. The only gag that I liked was some meta-humor where there's a commercial for "Pierre's Window Repair", or something like that, that shows a window getting fixed and later on there's a commercial for "Pierre's Pizza Delivery" that shows the delivery vehicle breaking the same window that gets repaired in the first commercial. That's how low I set the bar for this thing.
I became mildly obsessed with understanding how or why this uniquely weird and forgotten game came together, so I dug a little bit into the developer. It seems like Mindscape was a port house that was trying break out with their own major console game. I can only guess that this product was a failure because Mindscape didn't last long after this release and a few of the devs went on to work on the Harry Potter games. Kind of a bummer of a story; and that was the most I found because I stopped myself from messaging one of the programmers on LinkedIn just to ask: "What was the deal with CyberSpeed™?". Anyway, this game might be an interesting topic for some kind of short-form documentary. This is the kind unique, largely forgotten failure that I started this series in order to root out, the problem is that these games are usually forgotten for a reason and I don't have the patience to play bad games for very long.
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PGA Tour 96
Release Date: 9/23/1995
Developer: Hitmen Productions
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Time to Uninvited From The Masters: 35 Minutes
Time to Making it to an Hour: 60 Minutes
I generally like golf games. I consider myself to be something of a tedious bastard, so this genre is a good fit. I've played the later PGA Tour games and most of the Mario Golf games so I thought I generally knew how these things worked. I still think I know how these things are supposed to work, but that didn't work well here. This is a golf game that uses a typical shot meter, but it seems like it doesn’t want to. Instead of having a vertical bar with a two-tap shot power/accuracy mechanic, this has a curved, 3D, semi-transparent shot bar that is supposed to work on the normal two-tap system. This extra visual flourish only serves to make it unnecessarily obnoxious to get the timing right for the button presses. I can see why they would want to do anything different after 10 years of golf games using the same fundamental mechanic, but this isn't an innovation and it doesn't improve the experience. EA Sports will eventually be able to get an analog swing mechanic into these games, but that's a long way off. This is my excuse for getting bogeys on most holes.
I spilled a lot of pixels on the shot meter because there isn't much else to say about this game. There are 2 courses, which feels like not enough, and several professional golfers that I did not in any way recognize. You can create a custom profile but there isn't any character customization going on here. There's practice, stroke play, and tournament modes. There are also video clips serving as short bios for the pro golfers, but this crashed my emulator so maybe don't look in that menu.
The only other notable thing are the FMV golfers, which feels like a bizarre choice. I'm saying FMV and not rotoscoped sprite because there's animation on the golfer that feels more like a video clip than sprite animation, but I could be wrong. It's initially jarring to see seemingly real guys inserted into a middling 3D environment, but I got used to it after the first half hour. Also, this is one of those games that sounds as stuffy as the menus look, and I can't blame the developers because that was probably just the vibe around golf in the 90's. Also, EA seems to like changing developers between each game in the early part of this franchise, so that probably didn't help with the development of this thing.
This game is pretty thin on content and it kinda sucks to play. I know that they turn this series around eventually, I just don't know if that will happen on this console.
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Off-World Interceptor Extreme
Release Date: 9/29/1995
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Crystal Dynamics
Time to Not Being Worth the Effort: 50 Minutes
Now we get our second Crystal Dynamics 3DO port in as many weeks. Here we have a semi-on-rails shooter with ugly graphics and a dumb story, but now you drive a futuristic truck instead of a spaceship so it's entirely different from Total Eclipse. The bullets are also a bit bigger in this one, which I guess is now my pet nit to pick with these games. There's multiple levels divided into zones, a robust-for-the-time upgrade system using money you collect as pick-ups in the levels, and there's a big boss encounter at the end of each level. You have the standard infinite ammo gun with limited missiles, boosts, and screen clearing bombs. My other gripe with Total Eclipse is resolved with the fact that you are mostly firing while moving along a single axis and the enemies blow up pretty easily. The controls feel wacky but largely manageable. If I sound positive, that's only in relation to Total Eclipse Turbo. This is still only microscopically fun, which while an improvement, is still kind of miserable.
Part of the lack of enjoyment comes from the almost nothing draw distance that you have at the high speeds you are supposed to drive at. This is a problem due to the copious amounts of random obstacles and mines that are scattered everywhere. Combining this with rapidly shifting terrain causes some sections to become almost incomprehensible and damaging, which is not something you want from a game with a strict lives system. On top of that the game is ugly in the way we should expect from 3DO ports and the music consists of butt metal.
I made it to the second boss fight before running out of continues the first time. Uncharacteristically, I gave the second level another shot but ran out of continues again banging my head against that boss. There's probably a specific upgrade/inventory route a player should take through the game, but there's no good reason for me to trial and error my way through that.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room: the goddamned FMV cutscenes. The premise of this game is that there is some kind of lawless dystopia and random bounty hunters are hired by some kind of semi-functional government to hunt down highly wanted Mad Max style gang leaders. I'm fuzzy on the details because the campy early-90's live action cutscenes are given the MST3K treatment by some C-list chucklefucks. The original footage is bad, but bad in a way that could have been somewhat charming in the way FMV of that era tends to be. Someone in a decision-making role seems to have lost his nerve at some point because there's a riff track layered over these scenes making the lamest possible attempts at jokes that just come off as gross in retrospect. Visually, this is signified by some, let's say evocative, silhouettes of some random assholes pantomiming the riffs. This added noise just drains any humor or narrative coherence that could be gotten from these scenes while also adding nothing value in return. Also, it was probably super disrespectful to the people who must've put in the time and effort to make those scenes in the first place, which is a real nasty way to run a creative project. This is the kind of complete and unforced creative faceplant that you just don't see too often these days.
I know that at some point Crystal Dynamics starts making good games, but I'm concerned by the possibility that I'm a far way away from that time.
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Mortal Kombat 3
Release Date: 10/7/1995
Developer: Midway
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Time to Crushed by an Arcade Machine: 30 Minutes
I generally like the Mortal Kombat series. I've played most of the post-Armageddon games in which I usually have an alright play experience and a great time with the dumb lore. As I mentioned in a previous post, I even got almost ok at UMK3 in my youth. This series also has a reputation for accessibility to the general game playing audience, so I went into this expecting to have an alright time. I was immediately stripped of that delusion.
This seems to be a straight port of the original arcade release of MK3, nothing more and nothing less. It has three fight ladders and the basic MK3 roster of characters. There are some settings to play around with, though I'm convinced that the difficulty setting does nothing. It looks like it has 1-to-1 accuracy in the graphics, animations, and audio to the arcade version, which I imagine was the original promise of the Playstation. There really isn't anything more to this package.
That's not necessarily a deal breaker, but the problem is that MK3 feels like it's meant for players who already have a strong grasp on what they're doing. While I was getting destroyed at record speed, I got the idea in my head that this would be a reasonable level of difficulty if I had put tens of hours into MK2. This line of thought takes me back to the idea of a skills arms race between arcade players and developers. My idea is: as players got more familiar with a series or genre of arcade games, they were able to do more in those games with fewer quarters, thus leading to less revenue for those games over time. So, developers needed to make their new arcade games more difficult/unfair than the previous ones in order to make at least as much money off of them. Until someone convinces me otherwise, I'm going to say that this was the dynamic going on with MK3. This game feels wildly inaccessible coming into it cold. I only ever won one match against the easiest CPU, and by the time I got the arcade machine dropped on me, I decided I was done.
How in the hell am I even supposed to git gud at this thing? Am I supposed to write down all the combos for a character and tape it to my monitor as reference? Am I supposed to spoof a second controller and practice combos against a dummy P2? Or am I just supposed to get destroyed by the CPU for hours upon hours until I've memorized the ideal strats? There is a straight vertical difficulty wall right at the outset of this thing, which I suppose is a great way to suck quarters out of pockets but is rotten for a console game. Also, the game over screens come with codes for UMK3, which came out in arcades a month after this released on consoles, so it was already known that this thing was obsolescent when it came out.
Finally, it needs to be mentioned that both this game and PGA Tour 96 are multi-platform games released first on the PS1. It looks like Sony was making deals whenever and wherever possible to give this console any kind of edge over the other systems. This makes Sony look extremely serious about, and successful at, making this console an immediate success in a way that doesn't really have a parallel in this day and age.
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That does it for this week of weirdness. Next time we have a truly eclectic mix of ports to close out October '95: Theme Park, Cyber Sled, WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, and X-COM: UFO Defense.
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