An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last week we looked at Cyberia, Revolution X, Philosoma, and Goal Storm.
This time we will close out January '96 and move into February with World Cup Golf: Professional Addition, The Chessmaster 3-D, Assault Rigs, and D.
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World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Release Date: 1/15/1996
Developer: Arc Developments
Publisher: U.S. Gold
Time to That's A Disastrous Hole: 35 Minutes
We start this week with Golf. There apparently was an endless appetite for Golf games in the 90's, and now it's our problem to deal with. This was ported to the PS1 seemingly from the 3DO, but it was hard to tell from my cursory inspection whether the original release was on the 32X or DOS before that. There's not a lot background for this thing, other than the obvious that it is a result of C-tier British game development. That C-tier classification is appropriate, since World Cup Golf is somehow a worse experience than T&E Soft excretions like Pebble Beach Golf Links. That's a damning thing to say about a game, so let's go over the justification.
Upon boot-up, it is immediately apparent that this is one of those single course kinds of Golf games, the course this time being the Dorado Beach golf course, which I guess was owned by Hyatt at the time. That isn't much of a guess, since the game is filthy with Hyatt branding. You have the standard array of tournament, single hole, and practice modes with a few fictional golfists to choose between. The sound design is barely anything and this thing is ugly enough to have been on the CD-I or something.
The pain and suffering come in when trying to interact with this thing in any way. First, the menuing is inconsistent with whether the Circle or the Cross buttons will proceed or go back. When trying to do the gameplay part of this game, we are immediately greeted with what is probably the worst aiming system I have yet seen in any Golf game. The camera is positioned behind the back of the golfer, as normal, but the ball is aimed using a reticule that you move around the screen. You have to aim at points on the low-quality prerendered environment in front of you and guess where the right spot is. The depth perception is screwed and moving the cursor by even one pixel can cause an aiming difference of up to 100 yards. There's a sub-menu that can be brought up where you can look at a map of the course and figure out distances from yourself to various points and a kind of ping that shows you where the hole is from your current position. Yet, the aiming is so absolutely fucked that these don't particularly help.
Trying to hit the damn ball is its own awkward convolution. From the default view, you need to press Cross to enter aiming mode, which is a nightmare, press Cross again to bring up the shot meter, which is a standard curved piece of shit, and apparently you can only change clubs after bringing up the shot meter. So, the instinct is to bring up the meter and start the shot, but if you have the wrong club, you screw yourself. That shot meter also sucks, because sometimes there's a red circle showing you the power needed to get to where you're aiming and sometimes you go fuck yourself. The aiming cursor will give you distance, and the club information will tell you the maximum range, but just doing the math on how much of the meter to use will only sometimes kinda have the intended result. That is because this game insists on attempting physics. Surface type and wind will play a role in modifying what kind of power or spin you need, but the game ain't gonna tell you to what extent.
Everything about playing golf in this Golf game is infuriating. Revisiting the look and feel for a moment, this thing runs like ass. When I started it up, I wasn't encouraged by the 5fps opening movie, but I can usually forgive those. Yet, as I went through this hunk of crap, I noticed several points that I'm just going to run through in no particular order:
- The sprites for the golfers have no discernable face, which is horrifying
- There is no music during gameplay, only low-quality bird sounds
- The commentator only seems to have about a dozen canned voice lines
- The environments look like they're from a 16-bit system
- The load times here are more significant than most other PS1 games
- Everything in the gameplay moves slowly
- There are only shot chase cameras for the initial drives, but it's a preset camera motion that won't follow the ball
- The greens have no elevation mapping
- The ball sprite is bad, and it doesn't change enough with distance
I could keep going forever with everything this game does wrong. I mean, the hole guides aren't even useful! The intro for hole 5 literally tells the player to hope for the best. There are no redeeming qualities to this thing. I even went back while writing this to look at it again, just to make sure that I wasn't just in a bad mood when I originally played it. On second viewing, it is exactly as bad as I remember.
This thing is like a budget PC title for Windows 98 that you buy for $10 at K-Mart and end up regretting. This is like a disc that would be packed in with a golf magazine as a promotion and end up getting thrown away by all the subscribers. This game should not have been released. We can only be thankful for the small mercy that Arc Developments never made another Golf game.
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The Chessmaster 3-D
Release Date: 1/17/1996
Developer: Mindscape
Publisher: Mindscape
Time to Checkmate: 21 Minutes
Speaking of budget PC titles, we now have to grapple with The Chessmaster. I have only recently learned that this series was a big player in the Chess sub-genre up until about 20 years ago. Starting with The Chessmaster 2000 in 1986, the franchise would see many iterations and changed ownership, with the last game released in 2007 by Ubisoft, of all companies. This specific game is kinda-sorta the seventh entry in the series, though in many ways it's a stripped-down console port of 1995's The Chessmaster 4000. This wasn't the first console Chessmaster either, with a version coming out for the NES in 1989, seemingly based on The Chessmaster 2100. That version was ported to most other 8- and 16-bit systems in the early '90's. Finally, this franchise seems to have been the most financially successful of all the old Chess game series; and yes, there was more than one Chess video game series, I have only now learned this as well.
So, with the history out of the way, how is the game? It's exactly what it says it is. You play chess against the computer AI. There are different, oddly defined, difficulty settings that all have a fictional persona attached to them. These range from 100% difficulty, which is the wizard on the box art, down to 20%, which is a creepy little girl. I don't know why 99%, 97%, 92%, and 89% are the levels they went with between 80 and 100, but oh well. Other than 12 opponents, there are a dizzying array of various game options crammed into three busy settings menus. I'm not a chesshead, so a lot of the game options made no sense to me. All I can say is that this is some technical, grognard-tier stuff.
The game is presented in 3D by default, as advertised, though the default view makes it kinda hard to tell where the pieces are on the board. Surprisingly, there's an option to adjust the viewing angle, which largely cleared up that complaint. There are a few different piece styles that you can use, though I wouldn't recommend it. The graphics and music are basic, but they do what they're supposed to. Also, I stumbled on a classic 2D view that can be used by people who thought video games peaked with the Apple II.
The controls are clunky, with the player needing to move a cursor around the screen to select pieces and options menus. The piece selection is finicky, but you could probably get adjusted to it before long. There's so little to say about this thing. I played one match against the 30% AI, who I guess is supposed to be an illiterate peasant(?) and won kinda easily. I couldn’t find a way to quit to the main menu or start a new game after winning, but that's kinda typical for budget titles on this system.
I can't imagine who this was supposed to be for. What kind of dorky kid in the late 90's would have simultaneously had access to a Playstation, not had access to a PC, and been way into chess? Maybe this was something parents would buy so that their kids wouldn't fully rot their brains on Twisted Metal. It's like, "see? Video games can be intellectually stimulating." Yet, I don't actually buy that reasoning. This is barely even a video game, it's more like chess software with the worst possible interface. I'm not sure what to do with this thing, so let's move on.
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Assault Rigs
Release Date: 2/1/1996
Developer: Psygnosis
Publisher: Psygnosis
Time to Entering Arener: 40 Minutes
Oh look, it's Psygnosis. There's no avoiding them, eh? What do they have for us this time? A mediocre Hover Tank game. Yay!
Assault Rigs is an Arener Combat game with hover tanks. It's broken out into dozens of levels, 40 as advertised, each of which is some variation on a constricted corridor maze. All of these levels have you collect some set number of floating gems and get to the exit. The design of the levels feels like a poor man's Doom, but this could just be me assigning that descriptor to every corridor game from the '90's.
Driving around in the hover tank doesn't feel great, I would describe the movement as 'floaty' if that wasn't such a terrible pun. And the combat, such as it is, packs no punch and serves as an annoyance more than anything else. Each level consists, to some degree, of wandering through a maze, figuring out pathways, shooting at generic enemies, collecting junk, and going to the exit. The enemies respawn very quickly, so exploration is discouraged while also being required. The AI isn't particularly advanced and doesn't need to be, the enemies exist to be speedbumps that chip away at your health. If you can't figure out where the collectibles are before getting your health chipped away, it's game over.
There doesn't seem to be any kind of save system, just level passwords. We're probably not going to get rid password systems anytime soon, since the PS1 didn't ship with a memory card, the cheap bastards. There's a continue system of some kind, but I imagine it resets when you password into a level. There's plenty of content in this game, I think I got about a quarter of the way through in my 40 minutes, but there isn't really a hook to hang onto. The gameplay isn't interesting, and there's no plot to speak of. It isn't particularly fun, but I went as far as I did because I wasn't hitting any kind of wall until I got to a level that wanted me to collect twice as much stuff as any of the previous ones. I died during my first two attempts at it and the game did not give me enough of a reason to buckle down and git gud.
This game also looks like ass. Even though the polygons largely behave themselves, there's something offensive about the environmental textures. The first of the four visual zones is a neon nightmare. It looks like the artist had seen Tron while on a bad batch of shrooms and mixed together their memory of the movie with the memory of vomiting their guts out after the movie. The second zone that I saw was like that, but less colorful and more industrial. The only memorable thing to take away from this package is the music. Not all of the music, mind you. Most of the tracks sound like kinda generic euro house music, but there's one in particular that stands out as the best worst most memorable piece of music, which I'll close this out with.
Oh, and the only announcer line in the game happens at the beginning of each level, where the guy says "Entering Arener". That’s the funnest thing going on here.
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D
Release Date: 2/1/1996
Developer: WARP
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Time to Stuck: 23 Minutes
Time to Looking Up ZP's Blog: 30 Minutes
Time to Learning A Valuable Lesson About Multi-Disk Emulation: 70 Minutes
Good lord.
Ok, so, before saying anything myself, I'll point you to Zombiepie's detailed breakdown of the puzzle design in this game, because that stuff is a real doozey and I'm not going to explain it better than they do. I could just leave you with that link and be done with it, but that would be a bit too lazy.
D is a Horror Adventure game that features limited player interaction and high quality, for the time, pre-rendered CG for everything. You play as Laura, whose father is a doctor that has apparently gone crazy and started killing people at his hospital. For some stupid-ass reason, she decides she must go to that hospital mid-massacre to find out why her father has gone off the deep end. Somehow getting past the police, she enters the creepy hospital only to be swallowed by an otherworldly portal and transported to a medieval torture castle. She spends the rest of the game wandering through that castle, solving puzzles and avoiding traps. The player also has a 2-hour time limit with no pausing or saving, for reasons. If that sounds weird, just remember that I only described the basic premise. Everything to do with the plot, pacing, puzzles, 'scares', writing, and voice acting are as bizarre as possible.
I'll walk you through my experience with the first area and we'll see if I can convey the fuckery. You start the game standing in a dining room where the only interactable points are two locked doors and a water basin on the table. You can also turn around from the starting position to see a weird bug and experience the first enigmatic LSD flashback. The only open path leads to a small hallway with a mirror, a door to a room with a large barrel, and some stairs. Looking at the barrel does nothing and trying to go anywhere else in that room triggers a spike trap that is almost fatal. Going up the stairs leads to a landing with two doors, one of which reveals a spooky scary spike room and the other a small sitting room. That sitting room features a key in the fireplace and the first puzzle.
As better described in ZP's blog, there's a chest of numbered drawers that give a piece of paper, which needs to be placed in the downstairs water basin in order to reveal a clue so that you can open the drawers in the correct order to magically reveal a crank. There's a cutscene after revealing the clue in which the face from James Cameron's The Abyss tells you to leave, which is literally not an option. Anyway, that crank is used on the barrel to deactivate the spike trap, leading to the second puzzle. That second puzzle involves going down some stairs past the spike trap, looking at a number above the locked door at the bottom, going back to the dining room to unlock one of the locked doors with the fireplace key, and solving an awful slot machine puzzle. This produces a pendant that is used to unlock the previously locked door. This leads to a cutscene where Laura is chased by a boulder down a staircase, and that's when Disc 1 ends.
That sounds like very little, and it's all done with node-to-node movement, such as in Myst, The Mansion of Hidden Souls, and Cyberia. Only, in this game you walk between nodes at the slowest pace possible. It can take a good minute to get from one end of the small starting area to the other. Additionally, because this is a console version, there is multi-second lag between an input and anything happening on screen. Extra Additionally, without a game manual it's a real bastard figuring out how to interact with objects and the inventory. Most of it is simple enough to figure out, L1 and R1 scroll through the inventory and Circle interacts with most objects…except that first chest of drawers.
Turns out you need to hold the Circle button to bring up the ability to interact with the individual drawers while looking at it. Just tapping Circle will back out to the previous screen. I was lost for a solid 15 minutes because I didn't initially figure that out. I had to reference the above linked blog (which I demand that you read) to confirm that I was even supposed to interact with the drawers. It took several more minutes of fucking around with it to figure out what was going on. Every bit of interaction with this thing is atrocious, which is not something you want in a game with a time limit.
As much as I hate to admit it, the environments and character model for Laura are very well done for the time. Comparing this to the pre-rendered graphics in the other stuff we've seen isn't a competition, for as little as that's worth. The sound design is also effective. There isn't really any music for most of the gameplay, but you are subjected to the constant, methodical ticking of a grandfather clock, which does a lot to raise tension. Even though the jump scares and morbid imagery are cheesy, I can appreciate that an attempt was made to create an oppressive atmosphere.
Now, this is where I admit why I stopped playing at the end of Disk 1. I was fully willing to play this thing until it killed me or timed out, but it turns out that I'm bad at game emulation. I had failed to double-check the way Retroarch handles disc-swapping before starting the game, which comes on three discs. Turns out, the old method of changing discs was deprecated a while ago in favor of creating .m3u files. After looking that up, I made the file and attempted to preserve my quicksave. That attempt failed. If I wanted to continue to Disc 2, I would need to restart the game, and fuck that. This game came out on everything in its day, so I will have two more opportunities to play this thing to completion before the end of 2023.
This is definitely one of the more bonkers experiences I've seen so far. The weird plot, demented game design, and off-kilter storytelling are all signs of the kind of gonzo Japanese auteurship that we all know and celebrate today; and that description seems to fit the game's director, Kenji Eno. Though 'celebrate' may or may not be the appropriate word to use, since, from a cursory glance at his biographical information, he seems to have been a troubled man who died prematurely in 2013. There will be plenty more opportunities in the coming months and years to explore Eno's life and works as we get to the other versions of D and its spiritual successor, Enemy Zero.
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We've just barely scraped through this batch of games, so let's close the book on them and see where they fit in the Ranking of All PS1 Games:
1. Air Combat
…
25. D
32. The Chessmaster 3-D
34. Assault Rigs
…
57. Agile Warrior F-111X
58. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Congratulations to World Cup Golf for finding a way to surpass Agile Warrior in awfulness. Whenever you think you've hit bottom, just remember that it can always get worse.
Now that everyone has been given the D, we're going to continue further into February '96 with Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior's Dream, College Slam, Johnny Bazookatone, and Krazy Ivan.
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