An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week's look at Theme Park, Cyber Sled, WWF Wrestlemania - The Arcade Game, and X-COM: UFO Defense can be found here.
This week, we'll look at Jumping Flash!, Novastorm, and Twisted Metal.
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Jumping Flash!
Release Date: 11/1/1995
Developer: Exact
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Time to Pulling Up a Guide: 35 Minutes
Time to I Think I Beat It?: 95 Minutes
Kicking off November '95 is the first 3D platformer we're encountering on this journey, which also happens to be widely considered as the first 3D platformer ever. That fact alone makes this thing an interesting historical curiosity if anything else.
There's a perfunctorily silly set-up where a mad scientist named Baron Aloha, which is an A+ villain name, has carved out chunks of a planet for his nefarious schemes. You play as a jumping robot with the very literal name of Robbit and you have to go through 18 levels across 6 zones to save the world. There's also a hidden bonus stage in each zone that only gives you some extra score. There's just enough whimsy in that set-up to be silly and distinctive but not so much as to annoy. That might not seem like a big deal, but few developers seem to have gotten the balance right. The game mechanics are just as straightforward, you need to hop around small to mid-sized polygonal levels to collect 4 things and then reach the exit. There are enemies, floating platforms, and obstacles that you need to deal with using an infinite ammo pea shooter, collectible weapons, and an odd feeling double jump. Apparently, this game was born out of a tech demo so the incredible thing is more that it works than the actual game design or personality going on in it.
Some of the visual design and music doesn't work. For example the second zone has really bad music and the amusement park themed third zone is a visual nightmare. There's a high ratio of boss fights to normal levels in this game, with each zone having the last of three levels just be a boss fight and the last zone having only one level and two boss fights. I'm generally not a fan of the concept of boss fights, but these bosses are pretty inoffensive and only noteworthy when the concept is weird. For example, the boss of the third zone is a nightmarish dismembered clown genie that pokes different limbs out of different spinning teacups that you have to deal with. There's also a Shadow Robbit fight towards the end of the game which I found conceptually hilarious, and the final boss is a giant robotic version of the main villain that shoots lasers out of its nipples. There's more than enough variety to keep your interest from level to level and difficulty is low enough that I didn't use any continues.
That all means that I got a pretty alright hour and a half out of this thing and that's it. It tries to add some replay value by unlocking a hard mode after beating it, but there isn't much reason to go through the whole thing again. It really feels like this game should have had twice as many levels or larger levels with more to do in them. I mean, there are exactly two corridor maze levels, one underwater level, and a space station level concept in the last zone that could at least have remained interesting for another level. But seeing as this was the first attempt at this entire genre, I can't give the game too much of a hard time for being sparse.
When playing this, I tried to think of an alternate universe where Mario 64 didn't happen and the design standards for the entire 3D platforming genre were based around this game instead. I had a really hard time trying to see what would iterate off of this in the way that collectathons iterated off of Mario 64. Maybe first person platforming could have been a thing this entire time? It's hard to think about how that would have gone with early polygonal processing, so maybe we're lucky that the world didn't go in that direction. Or, was Mario 64 a third-person riff on Jumping Flash? Maybe this actually is the progenitor of the entire genre and not a weird dead-end, but we just never think about it. Either way, this game is still shockingly playable and is worth checking out.
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Novastorm™
Release Date: 11/2/1995
Developer: Psygnosis
Publisher: Psygnosis
Time to Complete Apathy: 30 minutes
When I saw the name of this thing, I thought it would be a cool game. I mean just say Novastorm out loud, it sounds cool. Sadly, what I ended up with once I booted the thing is yet another ported rail shooter, though at least this time it was apparently ported from the Sega CD instead of the 3DO, so at least there's that. Fortunately, my disappointment was drowned out by the immediate need to answer a burning question: WHY THE HELL DOES THIS THING NEED TWO DISCS? We're not even out of 1995 and there are already random-ass games shipping on two CDs. That's just obscene. I started this thing determined to find the answer.
What I saw first after boot was a goofy, low-budget FMV opening that goes on for much longer than it should with way more lore than it needed. This gave me the idea that maybe this game was stuffed with FMV and that's why it needed so much space, I could have had a good time with that. I was partially right. This is very reminiscent of Total Eclipse Turbo except this has properly sized bullets and the enemy patterns are more aligned with standard shmup design standards. To make my point about that similarity, here's a brief description, stop me if you've heard this before: there are four worlds divided up into four levels each; there's a boss at the end of each level with the last level of each world having a bigger, more elaborate boss. That structure is so similar to the Crystal Dynamics games that I'm thinking there had to have been some kind of hardware limit to the number of levels that could be stuck in these games. Otherwise, the lives and continue system is as strict as you would expect and the levels aren't particularly long. None of that should have been a reason for this game to take up almost a Gb of disk space.
The only notable gimmick in this game is the thing that I think is eating up all that space. The environments for each level use pre-rendered CG with a degree of detail that couldn't otherwise be found on early-90's hardware. My guess is that each of those scrolling 3D renders are stored as uncompressed footage, thus needing the extra space. Not that the look entirely works, the way that low fidelity sprites interact with the background reminded me of Mr. Bones for some reason, maybe because that weird-ass game is my touchpoint for awkward interactions between pre-rendered CG and real-time polygons.
This game gave me the by now standard problems of the environment causing more damage than the enemies, dying immediately the first time I encountered most of the bosses, and running out of lives on the second world. The place where this game errs above the others is that the pre-rendered environmental obstacles are massive and almost impossible to dodge without fully memorizing the level paths. The main example for me are the enormous lava geysers in the second level that take up at least a third of the screen when you pass them and you can't tell which side they pass on until it's too late to react. Also, the hitboxes on all of these environmental hazards are wonky due to their pre-rendered nature, which is frustrating when trying to drag the ship across half the screen on a moment's notice. There's other stuff I could say about how pick-ups and special weapons work, but I really don't care at this point. It's another one of these cursed rail shooter and it's about as enjoyable as the others. I've barely gotten going on this series and I'm already done with a whole entire genre.
The last thing of note is the fact that this is a Psygnosis game. Even though this isn't an original release, it's still really odd that they would shit this turd out less than a month before self-publishing their big hit, Wipeout. Even considering that the original release was in '94, it's still weird to imagine the same studio that made such a classic and revered franchise as Wipeout dumping crap like this out just a year prior. The fact that Psygnosis released this port when it did makes me think that they just put in the minimal effort to get two games on this system during the holiday season just for the cash grab of it all. I would have hated to be the kid that ended up getting this game for Christmas.
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Twisted Metal
Release Date: 11/5/1995
Developer: SingleTrac
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Time to Dying in a Fiery Wreck: 40 Minutes
I had high hopes for this going in, seeing as how this is a famous old series that people loved back in the day and which spawned tons of sequels. I thought that there would be something of value here. What I'm hinting at is that I gave this piece of shit more of a chance than it deserves.
The set-up is that some mysterious entity has called for a car-based gladiatorial tournament for one night only in the streets of LA, with the winner getting a wish granted. An assortment of psychos, weirdos, and desperate poor have bolted together combat vehicles to kill each other across six rounds. As one of those aforementioned psychos, weirdos, or desperate poor you fight through each deathmatch with each one getting a progressively larger environment and more enemies. There's also a two-player mode which I imagine was the main point of this video game.
That's an entirely doable set-up for a game, if it played well enough. This thing is laboring under the limitations of the Playstation controller and a couple of poorly thought-out design choices. The biggest problem is that all of the vehicles drive like shit; each combatant has their own stats and differences in handling, but that only boils down to the cars handling like either drunken cows or drunken cows on amphetamines. This is exacerbated by having the gas and break mapped to the forward and back positions on the D-pad. This means that in order to turn while driving forward you have press both forward and to one side, which feels awkward when trying to shoot at a moving target, dodge shots coming at you, and avoid walls all at the same time. Those last three gameplays points are the entire loop for this whole Car Combat genre, which I've personally never had any fondness for, but the steering has to feel reliable and the levels need to be laid out well in order for that to work, which just isn't the case here.
My second gripe is that the AI cars in these matches don't seem to fight each other that much, so it's more of a 3, 5, 6, or 7 against 1 situation, which is the thing that eventually exhausted my patience. It's easy to constantly take damage in this game with all of those assholes driving around targeting you, and though there are health stations there aren't that many and they're kind of a pain in the ass to use. On top of that, the weapon pick-ups aren't that interesting and don't feel particularly great. For example, there's like three or four different kinds of mines but only two kinds of rockets, which doesn't lead to a fun time. All of the weapons also stack in your inventory, so you need to scroll through something like 5 useless weapons to get to one of the decent ones while in the middle of a fight. Other than all of my complaints, this is a car combat game and if you've ever seen one of those you'll get what's going on pretty quickly. Because I'm already not a fan of even the good games in this genre, I found the combat more annoying than anything else, which is why when confronted with 6 enemies at once in the fourth level I decided it wasn't worth the time or effort.
I also found the overall attitude of this game to be a big turn-off. This series famously goes for the whole 90's adolescent baditude, which ages like old milk left out in the sun. I know we're living in some kind of post-edgelord culture, but this aesthetic would have still sucked by any mature standard even back then. Lastly, the music is actively bad. I've heard the names Twisted Metal and Rob Zombie spoken in the same breath but I didn't hear that here, just boring ass-metal. The look and sound of this game was grating from start to finish. At least the 3D graphics work well by the standards of the time, so there's that.
I'm really down on this game because it was a miserable experience, but I'm trying to keep in mind that this is seemingly the first ever Car Combat game as we would think of the genre. That means the concept alone held a lot of appeal and this game obviously had plenty of room to grow. That and the prevailing tastes of teens at the time is how I'm able to figure the success of this piece of shit. Because there are a ton of sequels, I'm hoping that SingleTrac eventually figured out how to make a fun game at some point. Though that could only get these games so far since I'm pretty sure the personality never improves.
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Because I've cursed myself to get slapped around by fighting and sports games, next time we'll look at Tekken, NFL Gameday, Warhawk, and Primal Rage.
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