An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week's look at Jumping Flash!, Novastorm, and Twisted Metal can be found here.
This week, we'll look at Tekken, NFL GameDay, Warhawk, and Primal Rage.
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Tekken
Release Date: 11/8/1995
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Namco
Time to "Fuck it, I'm using cheats": 30 Minutes
Time to Admitting I Will Never Improve at Fighting Games: 2.5 Hours
I went on a bit of a personal journey with this one, which is entirely on me and not the game, so I'll start with an attempt at being objective and go from there.
It's Tekken, anyone on this site should know about it but if you don't: this is an early 3D fighting game that was created to compete with the first 3D fighting game, Virtua Fighter, and over the course of the 90's the Tekken series won that competition. It's unique feature is the 8 button layout of strong and weak attacks for each arm and leg. Other than that it has a distinctive cast of weirdos and the high visual and audio quality that I've come to expect from Namco games of this era. The modes are a single player ladder where you fight all of the other fighters plus a unique sub-boss and the main boss. Each of these bosses are unlocked after beating the ladder with the corresponding characters, which is pretty standard. The animations are smooth and the fighting is legible. In short, I think I can tell that this is one of the good fighting games of the time.
Because I was able to notice the quality, and due to the series' fame, I decided to make an effort to try and develop some amount of aptitude for this thing. That lasted for about 2 hours of gameplay before I burned out. The main issue was that from the first to the last run, I would make it to the fourth fight in the ladder and then hit a wall. That never improved. Because there is no practice mode in this thing, I turned on god mode and tried to figure out combos, timing, and specials with different characters to see if I gelled with any of them. This method got me to all but two of the endings and I still didn't get a particularly better feel for any one character over the others. At that point I turned off cheats and arbitrarily chose Yoshimitsu as a main because he had the coolest ending. I got back to the fourth fight easily enough and hit that wall. It's nice that there are infinite continues which allow you start back at the same fight, but I felt like I was losing my mind after being smacked around a half-dozen times. I won one round of that match once, that's the best I ever did.
I think I figured out a few things about the tactics. I noticed very early that getting knocked down is almost a death sentence because the inputs for getting up quick and doing an effective rising attack are beyond my ability. I learned over time the ways that the AI would dodge or block and counter, though when I tried repeating those tactics the AI had the correct break for it and beat my ass. Also, like always, I never quite got the hang of performing the special moves. This has been a problem for me my entire life. I figured out a couple of spammy attacks, but the AI was just as likely to punish me for it than not. I've been getting the sense that the single-player modes in this era of fighting games are for players to show off mastery gained from the two-player modes, rather than the more modern purpose of serving as a prolonged tutorial before going into two-player. It makes some amount of sense for the concept to be backwards, given that these were made for arcades where you were more likely to play two-player than single-player, while modern games are meant for consoles with online matches, which is a more solitary experience.
Because these old fighting games are removed from their original contexts, I don't know if I'll ever be able to get anywhere in them without tens of hours of repetitive practice. As I was coming to this realization, something unlocked in me that dredged up childhood experiences where I would consistently lose to others in various peer groups when playing these kinds of games, with the kind of mockery and derision you could expect from early adolescents. The old, suppressed feelings of humiliation and shame came flooding back unexpectedly while I was smashing my face against the fourth fucking match in this game. As you can imagine, that sent me to a bad place that I've spent years getting away from. So, like the old days, I did the only healthy thing I could do: which was to drop this fucker and move on, concluding that fighting games are for assholes.
I almost burned myself out on this one, and all I got out of it was some unearthed trauma to work through. Going forward I'm not going to put too much commitment into the fighting games I encounter, because fuck 'em.
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NFL Gameday
Release Date: 11/10/1995
Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Time to Completely Losing Patience: 25 minutes
Now for something that I have no previous context for, good or bad: football games! I've never played a football game before. Not even once. Ten years ago I won a copy of Madden in some contest and I never opened the damn thing. It's still sitting on my shelf for some reason (spoiler: hoarding) in its plastic wrap. So I went into NFL Gameday like a newborn babe, with predictable results.
Booting it up, there's a fun little animation of football helmets bumping into each other which then loads straight into team selection. There isn't really a main menu in this thing, just choose the P1 and P2 teams and go. Very straightforward. The issue with that arises if you don't already know how to play this type of game and need any kind of explanation or practice. So, I dive in expecting to figure it out as I go along. Friends, I did not figure it out. I eventually quit after 20 minutes of failing to figure out how to throw the goddamned ball. Apparently, it is extremely useful to be able to throw the ball in a football game. On top of that, I have no idea what the plays do or anything around the overall strategy of football.
Other than my own issues, the game looks ok and sounds the way you would expect. The real technical downside is in the load times, which were horrendous in the iso that I played to the point of causing a soft-lock. So either the versions floating around online are bad or the original game was jank or both.
I do find it odd that Madden didn't do a PS1 release in '95, thus ceding that entire holiday season to second-tier games like this. Or maybe Sony made this game after learning that EA wasn't going to cooperate? For whichever reason, a few minutes research gave me the impression that this was way more successful than it should have been.
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Warhawk
Release Date: 11/10/1995
Developer: SingleTrac
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Time to Low-Key Furious: 2.5 Hours
I generally like flight combat games, if that wasn't already clear from my opinion on Air Combat, so I came into this game with high hopes. That was a mistake.
This is a game where you pilot a futuristic VTOL jet across 6 relatively large and distinct levels, blow up a variety of things to collect canisters and usually fight a boss at the end. As usual, you have an infinite ammo pea shooter and a variety of weapon pickups. This game looks alright and runs pretty smoothly considering all the stuff that goes on in some levels. Yeah, the controls are a bit awkward but I've seen much worse at this point in my journey. It even has bad FMV cutscenes between each level! Now, the actual plot and characters conveyed in those cutscenes could not matter less (something something RED MERCURY) and the quality of the production is poor, but I really appreciate the effort of getting that many scenes in here. I was very hopeful by the time I started the second level.
Then I played the rest of the game. After you hit the halfway point, the game decides that the player should get fucked. The insane difficulty spike starting at the fourth boss caught me entirely off-guard. I'm not saying that it was easy or hard before that, the difficulty is surprisingly manageable in the first three levels. I say that even after needing a half-hour to duck and weave my way through the second boss and having to look at a guide for the third level. The basic gameplay feels good enough with the titular warhawk having a 4-sided recharging shield, a variety of weapons, and VTOL maneuverability that largely works well after a short adjustment period. Also, as can be expected of the time, you get three lives per level, which seemed very fair as the first three levels only really needed one or two lives to get through.
All of the good feelings went away when the fourth level came around and the relative damage output and demanded maneuverability of that fourth boss went through the roof. That fight took several tries and I eventually resorted to cheat codes in the end to beat it. Things don't improve after struggling through that fight, because the fifth level is a shitty tight-corridor obstacle course for some ungodly reason. It's at that point where I found out that there are no continues after running out of lives, causing me to get kicked out to the main screen to seemingly start the whole game over. The only way to restart back at a later level is to put in a passcode like a goddamned Famicom game, which causes you to miss out on the few persistent upgrades available from going through the early levels. This isn't a particularly short game either, so you're looking at about 3 or 4 hours for an end-to-end run. That means your options if you fail out of a level are to either go back in with a passcode using an under-powered craft or become a speedrunner. The whole set-up rubs me the wrong way and turned me sour on this thing.
This is now the second SingleTrac game in just as many weeks that feels to have a shitty design attitude. Maybe those guys were just assholes, because I got a bad vibe from the whole way both this game and Twisted Metal handle difficulty and player failure. Maybe I have some left-over irritation from Tekken, but I lost patience with this thing I don't intend to revisit it. I still feel a bit pissy about this game, actually. It Just ended up being a bad time.
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Primal Rage
Release Date: 11/14/1995
Developer: Probe Entertainment
Publisher: Time Warner Interactive
Time to Beating it a Couple of Times: 40 Minutes
When I realized that this is a fighting game, I said to myself, "Good lord, not this shit again". Fortunately, my apprehension was only partially misplaced.
I was immediately greeted at the start with a very corny intro cutscene that made me drop my guard a bit. The set-up is that the world has been fucked up and rearranged by asteroid strikes, which have wiped out most of the human race and awoken primordial dinosaur gods to rule over the primitive survivors. That's an extraordinarily dumb premise, which I love; but I remembered that silly opening cutscenes are a weakness of mine that have led me to some bad times, so my mental guard went back up. That quickly turned to disbelief when the main menu of this thing came up and I saw that there's more than one mode. It's a fighting game with a practice mode, multiple two-player modes, and a sound test in the options! There is even a 16 point difficulty selector that actually has an effect on the difficulty of the AI! I was less than 5 minutes in and already I was blown away. I hoped beyond hope that this could be some underappreciated gem…
Anyone who knows already might have gotten a chuckle at that last sentence. This is a trash-tier fighting game, but I had an ok time with it anyway. The main issue is that this thing looks and runs like crap, like an especially muddy Sega CD game. That this game was apparently ported to the SNES and Genesis a few months before the Playstation version makes complete sense, because it feels and sounds like a 16-bit era game.
Speaking of sound, the music is some generic tribal fantasy sounding shit. It kind of reminded me of the 90's Encarta opening theme, but worse. It sounds like John Williams' talentless second cousin tried to make the Jurassic Park score. It sounds like someone with no musical ability tried to recreate the Civilization 4 score from memory. What I'm trying to say is that my tone-deaf ass could have made this music with 15 minutes training in a midi synthesizer.
Which brings us to the point of actually playing this dumb game. There are 5 dinosaurs and 2 King Cesare looking motherfuckers to choose from and you fight all 7 (including yourself) in a ladder. This is spiced up a bit with loading screens between matches showing how much of the world map you've conquered and how many worshippers you have. There's also a little minigame after you get through the seven fights where you need to eat your worshippers to build up a second lifebar for the final match. Disappointingly, that final match is only a boss rush where you fight all 7 monsters again. The endings are just a paragraph of badly written text and a still frame, which was a bummer after the expectations raised by the opening cutscene. Even still, there's slightly more going on here in terms of world flavor than in any of the other fighting games I've looked at so far.
The downfall is that the actual fighting is bad. The control scheme feels odd and the specials are even worse to execute than usual to are wonky to try and figure out. The animations are choppy in a claymation kind of way, which after a little research turns out to be exactly what it is. I can respect the idea of making a Ray Harryhausen inspired fighting game, but it just doesn't move well in practice. There also isn't much in the way of tactical considerations, other than to use a monster with the longest reach and spam attacks. I'm really unequipped to be more specific about how the fighting is bad, but just go look at it in action and you'll know.
For an obvious cash grab trying to capitalize on the simultaneous successes of Mortal Kombat and Jurassic Park, there's more going on around the edges of this thing than it deserves. In my mind I envision this scenario: it's 1993 and some executive gets the bright idea to make a Mortal Kombat knock-off that is also a Jurassic Park knock-off so as to appeal to the kids these days, he calls up a game designer on staff and tells him to make that game however he sees fit; that designer just so happens to have been holding the ambition to make a game involving his stop-motion hobby (since he wanted to originally to do movie effects for a living) and he already has some clay figures laying around, everything else about the game design became an afterthought. I could go much deeper with my fanciful little scenario, but that really is what this game feels like. This is one of the few games I've run into so far that I would recommend as a historical curiosity and for the unintentional comedy.
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Next time we'll look at a truly random collection of games with Criticom, Discworld, Destruction Derby, and Doom.
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